by A. C. Benson
I felt that I had perhaps better not listen to more of these tales. I did not know how much was fact and how much fiction. But it was clear that the Squire was a man suspected of unspeakable things, and not without some reason. I began to feel that the best course would be to forget all about them. But then, why was Bendyshe so hot on the scent; and suddenly, like a flash of lightning, the truth, or what seemed the truth, dawned upon me. The evil was not dead; it was alive and active; and Bendyshe was trying to drag it to the light. Evil, of course, was anywhere and everywhere. But had something been done, did something remain in the house, that formed as it were a guarded stronghold of evil? Was there a core of malignant influence which needed to be extirpated? And if so, by what hideous personal agency, what bodiless ministers of fear was it perpetuated?
And then it dawned upon me that if there was any truth in my thoughts, Bendyshe must be exposed to dangers of a kind that defied precaution, and the more courageous he was, the nearer he got to the goal, the more appalling was the danger. I could not quite understand what part the Vicar was playing in all this. He was standing by Bendyshe – that was clear; but I thought that his kindly and generous nature might perhaps blind him to the danger, by leading him to believe that things had never been so bad as were supposed. In any case my duty was clear: I must stand by Bendyshe at any risk, and share the danger with him. It was a contest of wills, perhaps; and I could possibly, by throwing my own will into the scale, turn the current against our adversaries. And in any case I felt that I must not be left any longer in the dark, but must know exactly what had happened, and what had induced Bendyshe to embark on the quest.
I wandered on in the grip of these thoughts, hardly knowing where I went; I felt for a moment that I ought to return at once to the house – that I was like a sentinel deserting his post; but, on the other hand, I felt that it might be simply foolhardy and reckless to go back and wait in solitude until Bendyshe and the Vicar returned, and that some experience might befall me which would mar or damage such effectiveness as I might possess.
I got a cup of tea at an inn which proved to be about five miles from Hebden; and then I strolled quietly back, arriving about seven. To my relief the car caught me up about half a mile out of the village. Both Bendyshe and the Vicar looked tired, and were very grave. I talked vaguely about my wanderings, and they gave me but scanty attention.
When we got to the house, I said to Bendyshe, ‘If the Vicar is not too tired, would he come back to dinner? – I have a special reason for asking this. I have something to tell you and some further questions to ask.’ The Vicar assented, and Bendyshe and I entered the house together, while the Vicar pledged himself to return at eight.
Bendyshe went to the smoking-room, and flung himself down in a deep chair. ‘Any the worse for yesterday?’ I said.
‘Oh, I’m stiff as a board, and dog-tired,’ he said rather impatiently, ‘and just when I had need of all my strength; but we have found what we wanted to know, and it is all as I expected, only worse; and now the whole business is in such a tangle that I hardly know what to do!’ Then he added, ‘Why were you so keen that the Vicar should come back? He has had a shock, and seems to me done up.’
‘I couldn’t help it,’ I said; ‘today I have thought it all out, and I’ll stick to you through thick and thin; but I feel that I must know all, and know at once. If I am to share a danger, I must know what the danger is; I can’t be of any use if I am still groping in the dark.’
‘Yes, you’re right,’ said Bendyshe wearily. ‘I have been feeling that too – but I wanted you to form your own opinion.’
When we went up to dress, Bendyshe said, looking round, ‘I don’t like the feel of the house tonight, old man. There’s mischief brewing of a bad kind – but we’ll weather it out!’ I was conscious too myself of a sort of heavy and brooding stillness everywhere; but I saw and heard nothing.
At dinner, while the servants were in the room, we did our best to talk of indifferent matters. It was like a bad play, I thought. When we adjourned to the smoking-room, Bendyshe said to the Vicar, ‘Here, Vicar, Hartley says that he thinks he had better have the whole story, and I agree with him. He won’t be taken by surprise; and it’s no use pretending now that it is a mild sort of investigation; it’s a battle of a bad kind, and we must be forearmed, if we can. I made a mistake last night by taking the offensive – and now hell’s loose— But I’ll go ahead.
‘It was about three years ago that the thing began,’ said Bendyshe. ‘I don’t know why it didn’t begin before – perhaps it had begun; but I had been getting more and more interested in my problem, and I had been, I suppose, training my perceptions without knowing it; and the curtain went up with a run. I ought to say that when I first settled in here, I had taken the unfurnished room for my study. But I could never work there in any peace. There seemed to be something on the move there, and if I sat at the table, I used to feel there was someone behind me; and there were odd noises overhead too. I had the roof examined – the only way in was through a little trap-door in the ceiling, in the corner where the plaster came down – but above, there was only a long, low loft, lit by a window looking out on the tiles and gutters, with a cistern in it and waterpipes, and the builder said that the noises came from the pipes.
‘However, one day I was coming down the corridor, I saw a man standing by the door of the room – the same man, Hartley, I will tell you at once, that you saw up there, the same dress, the same sort of expression. I thought it must be a plumber for a moment; when it suddenly came upon me with a rush that the wall, so to speak, was broken down, and I had seen something that a normal healthy man has no business to see. I said out loud, “What are you doing there? – who are you?” but he took no notice of me whatever, and continued to stand by the door, like a man who wanted something badly, and had been trying for a long time to get it, but all in vain. I didn’t think of it as being in any definite and actual way connected with the place – I thought it was an hallucination produced by overtasking my nerves in one direction. I went along to the door, my eyes fixed on the man, and suddenly he was gone. I wasn’t exactly frightened, but I felt uneasy about myself. I went up to town and saw a doctor, a friend of mine. He sounded me and questioned me up and down; then he declared me perfectly well in every way. I told him about my studies, and he asked me if I had ever seen any such figure in real life, in childhood, or had any fright or shock connected with such a figure. But I couldn’t think of anything. He told me at last that he was frankly puzzled, but that he had little doubt that it was an hallucination, and did in some way result from my thinking so much about such phenomena. He gave me the advice to turn to other occupations for a bit, limit my work, have more company in the house – all very sensible.
‘I did just what he advised, and had a succession of guests here, who bored me to death; and I took up constitutional history, as the least exciting subject I could find. But a fortnight later I saw the thing again, this time in my study, looking up at the trap-door. I got up, and walked straight up to him – and the same thing happened; he took no notice of me whatever, and when I was within a foot of him, disappeared.
‘Then I did what I ought to have done before; I went to the Vicar and told him the whole story – and then it came out. The Vicar told me, with a good deal of hesitation, that the figure I described was beyond all doubt the figure of Hugh Faulkner himself, just as he looked in his later years. Wasn’t that so?’
The Vicar nodded. ‘It was unmistakable, your description! And it gave me a dreadful shock, though I can’t say I was exactly surprised.’ Then the Vicar turned to me and said, ‘Of course, Mr Hartley, I am a firm believer in the immortality of the spirit; and I believe that we preserve identity and intelligence, and are not much affected or altered by death; but the spirit is, of course, a bodiless thing – a conscious and intelligent influence. I want to make this clear. There was nothing material there to see; but I realized that Bendyshe had somehow or other got within the range
of Faulkner’s thought, and that the figure was evolved out of this thought acting on Bendyshe’s mind, just as we evolve figures in our dreams.’
‘Yes,’ said Bendyshe, ‘but I was also aware that Faulkner was not consciously influencing me – in fact, I think he was wholly unaware of my existence then; and this was a great relief to me – I was simply a spectator of what was going on, just as you were when you saw him. In fact, if I may say so, I doubt if it was his mind acting on yours which made you see him. I think it was my mind. And then,’ he went on, ‘I saw the figure pretty often. But never in the presence of anyone else – that seemed an absolute bar, I don’t know why. I lost all fear of it, and just accepted it as a fact. Once or twice I saw it in the garden, and once or twice downstairs, but almost always in the corridor upstairs, or in the empty room. But I didn’t want to run any risks. So I had the trap-door plastered up, moved the furniture out, and locked the place up.
‘Meanwhile I speculated about it, and discussed it with the Vicar; and we came to the conclusion that there was some particular thing that Faulkner was – I won’t say looking for exactly, but trying to trace, some book, perhaps, or manuscript – I couldn’t make it out – but we decided at last that it was something which someone else had hidden; but was it in the house at all? Or if so, why couldn’t he see it? or if he could see it, what could he do with it? I don’t believe that these spirits have any material powers at all – they can only act through living brains.’
I turned to the Vicar. ‘Did you ever see the figure?’ I said.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I did not – I don’t know why. I was nearer to Faulkner than anyone living, except his servant. But I have thought that perhaps Faulkner wished to conceal the very existence of the thing, whatever it is, from me, and was careful not to bring me in.’
‘But why then did Bendyshe see him?’ I asked.
‘Oh,’ said Bendyshe, ‘I stumbled into it by accident, I believe – it was just a question of my power of perception being heightened.’
‘But let me ask one other thing,’ I said: ‘How do you account for your seeing it only occasionally? If the thing is always in Faulkner’s mind, you ought to see it constantly.’
‘Well,’ said Bendyshe, ‘we don’t know what his mental occupations may be – I daresay he has other things to think of.’
‘Yes, indeed,’ said the Vicar, shaking his head; ‘he was a very self-willed and perverse man – he has much to learn.’
Bendyshe gave a grim smile, and went on, ‘What I believe is this – that at times the spirit of Faulkner remembers this thing, whatever it is, and believes it to be still in this house. The result is that for a time his thought is occupied with the house and the familiar rooms; and being an abstract essence, it ranges about the well-known scene; and if one comes within the reach of it, one sees the figure automatically.’
‘But why, then, does the figure disappear when you come close to it?’
‘Ah, I don’t know everything,’ said Bendyshe; ‘indeed, there is much that quite baffles me. But I have thought that it may be in some way obliterated by the proximity of my own consciousness, as the moon obliterates the light of the surrounding stars – but that is only my idea.
‘And now,’ he went on, ‘we come to the more serious part of the story. Some weeks ago I became suddenly aware that the spirit of Faulkner had become aware of mine. I suppose I had begun to speculate more closely as to where the lost thing was, and what it might be. And then, too, it had occurred to me that the old sergeant might still be alive – the Vicar had told me that he thought he was dead – and I had begun to make some enquiries, and had employed a detective to try to trace the man. We now know that he was alive all the time. Faulkner had given him some money at various times, and after Faulkner’s death the sergeant had rented a farm in Hampshire, a little bit of a place; but he had taken to drink, and was in a bad way, nearly at the end of his resources. He became aware that he was being tracked, and I daresay there were plenty of other things about which he might have got into trouble. Anyhow, he was frightened. He sold his farm, which was mortgaged, so he only got a few pounds out of it; and he went off on the tramp. The money was spent at last, and he took cold by sleeping in the open air; he was taken to the workhouse at Pentlow, near Horsham, and went to the infirmary with rheumatic fever.
‘But I must go back for a moment. While all this was going on, I became aware, as I told you, that I had for some reason or other come within Faulkner’s consciousness, and that he realised someone was on the same scent as himself. His expression seemed to me to change when I saw him, he looked angry and defiant, and as though he was guarding the approach to something. But even so he was not apparently at first conscious of my physical presence. Then he assumed a menacing air, and made gestures of anger and rage. It was at this time that I asked you to join me here, because I began to feel that I must have someone with me – that I could not be sure of my nerves not failing me; moreover, his appearances became much more frequent.
‘And then you came, but instead of telling you everything at once, which would have been by far the best course, I waited, in order to see whether you had any perception of his presence; and when you began to notice certain phenomena, I made excuses and gave explanations – it was all very stupid – in order that you might have your own experiences and draw your own conclusions.
‘And then quite a new development occurred. The old sergeant died in the workhouse, and the first intimation of it that I got was the appearance of a new figure at the window, which you also saw. I did not know what to make of this, though I had a strong suspicion; but it happened that they found on the man a letter from someone in the village – one of his old acquaintances – which seemed to show that he had lived here; and then they wired to the Vicar to say that an unknown man had died in the workhouse – they gave a brief description of him – who seemed to have once lived at Hebden. The Vicar sent the wire on to me, as you know, and I was sure who it was; we went off together to identify him, and the Vicar recognised him at once. That is the position of affairs.’
‘But,’ I said, ‘in what way is he connected with these papers, or whatever they are?’
‘Do you remember,’ said Bendyshe, ‘that the Vicar said something about a despatch-box that was missing after Faulkner’s death?’
The Vicar turned to me. ‘I ought to have been more explicit,’ he said. ‘For some time before his death, I noticed that Faulkner was always writing when I saw him, and that when I came in, he always slipped the papers into an old despatch-box on the table, and locked them up. I remember once asking him what he was writing. “My memoirs,” he said with an ugly kind of smile – “an interesting book, don’t you think?” When he died, I am nearly certain that the box was by his bedside, though I could not swear to it; and we thought – the lawyer who came down to see about the property and I – that there might be papers of importance in it; but when we questioned the sergeant, who knew the box perfectly well, he stuck to it that he hadn’t seen the box for the day or two preceding Faulkner’s death, and that he was quite certain that Faulkner had hidden it somewhere – and I couldn’t be sure that he was not right.’
‘Yes,’ said Bendyshe, ‘and what I conjecture happened was that the sergeant, thinking that the contents of the box might be valuable, or indeed might incriminate himself in some way, had secured it himself, meaning later to remove it. That would explain everything – it would explain why Faulkner did not seem to know where it was, and further it would explain what happened to me there last night.’
‘What exactly did happen?’ I asked.
‘I’ll tell you,’ said Bendyshe, looking up at me, ‘just how it was. I had had a ladder brought up here. Whether the fall of the plaster was purely accidental, I don’t know, but anyhow, it gave me the idea that the papers had been hidden up in the loft. I didn’t ask you to join me, Hartley, but I did a very rash and idiotic thing. In the afternoon, I took the ladder into the room, and when the house was
all quiet, I went in with a lantern and up into the loft. At first all was quiet, and I hunted about everywhere, but found nothing. Then suddenly I became aware that I was not alone, and I saw two figures standing together in the far corner of the loft looking down at the boarded floor. And then I felt no doubt at all that I had got near the hiding-place. I had better have gone away at once, and bided my time; but instead, I was fool enough to go to the place. I don’t quite know what happened. They flew at me like two wild beasts. It was not a case of any physical violence – it was just a contest of will and brain; but I had all the terror of being attacked, without the possibility of offering any physical resistance. I simply felt that my mind would give way. I ran down the loft, and tried to get on to the ladder; but I slipped when I was half through the hole, cut my neck, I suppose, on the jagged edges of the broken laths; and you heard my fall!’
‘What an appalling business!’ I said – and there was a silence for a moment. Then I said, ‘But why did the sergeant not remove the box after Faulkner’s death?’
‘Ah! I can explain that,’ said the Vicar. ‘He had not the time. We had moved Faulkner’s body into another room, and we had some talk with the sergeant, Mr Hartley, and I suppose he was frightened. He had got hold of a certain amount of money, as it was; and I imagine he never dared to come back.’