“Yes, ma’am, a ghost,” repeated Fanny impressively; “and I’ll tell you why. I did find out something. I asked right and left—at all the shops, and even at the post-office for The Crossway—thinking perhaps it might be some out of the way place that was little known, though that wasn’t very likely in so small a town. But no one had ever heard of it, till at last an old man—quite an old man—who was smoking his pipe in the kitchen behind the greengrocer’s shop—that neat-looking little shop at the corner, where they have such nice fruit, you know, ma’am—called out that there had been such a street in Northsprings—right across where the market-hall stands now; it ran, he said, from Green Bank Terrace to the Bexley Road. He remembered when he was a boy—nigh upon sixty-five years ago, he said—he remembered them pulling down the last of the row of old houses that had been called ‘The Crossways.’—Nigh upon sixty-five years ago, he said, ma’am.”
A strange, giddy feeling came over me, and for a moment I could not answer Fanny. The face and figure of my old visitor seemed to rise before me. Could it be?—were such things possible? —had I seen, spoken to, touched—yes, I remember her gown had come in contact with mine as she passed me—a being no longer of this world of ours, a poor stray wanderer from some other state of existence, drawn back by heaven knows what mysterious attraction, what imperfectly severed ties, to the scenes of her earthly life? Poor old ghost, poor pathetic old face—how sad it seemed! My fear melted into a strange pity. “I wonder if I could have done anything to satisfy the troubled spirit, ?” I said to myself. “There was nothing evil in those sad old eyes—no unatoned-for crime. Why should she not be allowed to rest? Why should she thus revisit the haunts of her flesh-and-blood life?”
“Was that all you heard ?” I said at last.
“All,” said Fanny. “I did ask the old man if he remembered ever to have heard speak of a family called Kirtin in these parts; but he shook his head, and said his memory was not as good as it had been. But there had been a street, or a row of houses, called The Crossways—of that he was sure. So I thanked him, and said there must have been a mistake someway—I thought my mistress had found the name in an old book, or something of that sort, and that we hadn’t been long here. I didn’t want to make any story about it—it was better, wasn’t it?”
“Much better,” I said, “and thank you, Fanny, for all the trouble you have taken. I won’t say anything more about it to the other servants; just tell them you couldn’t find out anything, and that I think the old woman must have been some harmless old body, not quite right in the head. But it is very strange.”
“Very strange,” repeated Fanny. But she said nothing else. She seemed to understand that I preferred to discuss it no more. That was the seventh of July. I marked the date in my pocket-book, but after a while I began to forget about it, for my old visitor never came back again, and the yellow card never turned up. I felt a little nervous, just a very little, for a week or two, but the feeling passed off; and the following summer the seventh of July went by without my even recalling the date till some days after!
Only once again a circumstance brought my queer adventure back to my memory. “It was in the autumn of the following year; we were thinking of altering the approach to our house,—we have never done it by-the-by, for we found it would have been more troublesome and expensive than we had imagined, and would also have disturbed some of the finest of the fine old shrubs of which we are so proud,—we were thinking, I say, of altering the approach, and for this purpose we sent for some workmen to discuss the matter. Among them was an old man who had now and then done odd work for us, and seemed to think he had a sort of right about the place. He was very, very deaf, and stood by leaning on his spade while my husband talked to a clever young foreman mason, or whatever you call that kind of workman, about it all.
“We are thinking of enlarging the walk in the front of the house, making it wide enough for a carriage to drive up, and carrying it round to the left there,” etc. etc. , my husband was saying, when old Mike broke in:
“Werst you thinking o’ running th’ road whur werst afore?” he said suddenly.
“Where it was before? What does he mean?” I exclaimed; and my husband, who could better make himself heard by the deaf old man than I could, cross-questioned him. He explained clearly enough what he meant. Long ago, when he was a boy, he remembered his father talking of a piece of work he had had to do with at Eastedge, as our house is called, and that it had been rather a troublesome business—namely, the doing away with the gravel drive leading up to the house, and altering the principal entrance to suit the fancy of the then owner. Mike pointed out as near as he could the place where the former drive “had used to run;” and my husband, curious to find if “what he said were correct, made the workmen examine it. One or two of the smaller shrubs had to be displaced, and then their pickaxes soon struck on hard ground, and very little more research proved the truth of Mike’s statement: the former drive ran right up to what had then been the front door—right through the thick-growing belt of shrubs where my old woman had disappeared.
“Nay, more, it became evident,—and Mike’s memory again corroborated the fact—that the former entrance to the house, the front hall, had been round at the other side, and that our present dining-room had been this hall.
And—it was from the dining-room, if you remember, that the old woman had come out to meet me, exactly as if she and not I had been entering the house.
This is all I have to tell. Not worth telling, perhaps, but some wiser person than I may be able to answer the question that has often puzzled me—Was she a ghost?”
******
“What do you think?” we all exclaimed. “Aunt Anna, it is your story—you should tell. Was she a ghost?”
Aunt Anna shook her head, smiling.
“My dears,” she said. “I have told you all I know. I cannot say more.”
“But what do you think?” we persisted.
“Well, if you mean do I think the old woman was a ghost, I certainly do not think so. Still the adventure was a curious one, and not very easy to explain.”
“And nothing more was ever heard or o found out?”
“Nothing. It remains what it is called—Not exactly a ghost story.”
“It’s very queer,” said Leslie, who had been remarkably attentive. “It’s not so easy to say what it was, after all. Now, Honor, remember, you’re down for Monday on your own account.”
“And if we go by ages,” replied Honor, “as we have done hitherto, you, my dear brother, may consider yourself down for Tuesday.”
Upon this Leslie subsided.
A Strange Messenger
(A story from The Wrong Envelope and Other Stories)
Late in the afternoon of a dull autumn day a man was walking briskly along a hilly road in one of the northern Welsh counties. It was at all times a gloomy part of the world, yet not without a certain picturesqueness of its own, enhanced perhaps by its very grimness—grimness more the work of human hands than of nature, for it was a mining district.
The man, a fairly young man—my story dates back fully twenty years—stood still for a moment and looked about him. He was not a native of the place, and, comparatively speaking, a newcomer. But he was growing to feel at home in it, and he was grateful for the position he had come thither to hold, that of manager to the important mine not far from where he stood—a position which had enabled him to marry sooner than at one time he had dared to hope would be possible.
‘Yes,’ he thought, ‘it has turned out very well. Margaret is so sensible and adaptable. She never seems to feel it dull, as I feared she might. I remember how I felt like a fish out of water at first, scarcely understanding what the people said, nor their queer ways’; then a shadow crossed his face. ‘It is very sad about Brough,’ he went on thinking. ‘I wonder if I shall find him any better today. I fear not. He has been such a good steady fellow, and being an Englishman, made him enter into my difficulties, in his quiet wa
y,’ and with these thoughts he hurried on again, till he reached a row of small houses occupied by some of the many miners, at a short distance from the pit’s mouth. At the door of one of these he stopped and knocked. It was opened by a tidy-looking elderly woman, the wife of the man to whom the cottage belonged, and with whom Brough, unmarried and with no relations in the place, had lodged for several years.
She shook her head in reply to the manager’s unspoken inquiry.
‘No better, sir. Step in; he’ll be pleased to see you. It’s the master, Brough,’ she went on in a louder voice as she showed Mr. Heald into a small room opening out of the kitchen.
‘No better’ was plainly written on the worn thin face of the man who tried to raise himself on his pillows as the manager entered, and gently, very gently, shook the big hand, once brown and rough, now pathetically smooth and white, held out to him.
‘So good of you, sir,’ the sick man murmured. ‘Indeed, I don’t know how to thank you for coming so regular, and you so busy,’ a cough stopped him and he lay back exhausted.
‘I wish I could do more for you,’ said Mr. Heald very kindly, with a sigh.
‘Nay, sir,’ Brough went on again, and his honest blue eyes gazed into his friend’s face with the indescribable, mysterious intentness of the dying, ‘Nay, sir, if I could but have done something in return—you and the lady too—sending me soup and fruit and the best of everything—if I could have done something for you, I feel as if I’d die easier.’
Mr. Heald gently touched the thin hand again.
‘Don’t speak that way, my dear fellow,’ he said. ‘If we have been able to cheer you a little, we are only too glad.’
But Brough’s expression did not change. He murmured something inaudible, and lay still. The manager did not stay long; he saw that the patient was very weak. He just waited to tell the poor fellow that a few details as to his little possessions—the sending some money that the miner had saved, to a sister in Australia, and so on, were all carefully noted and should be attended to, and then with a ‘I’ll come again tomorrow,’ he left, the blue eyes, faithful and devoted, following him to the door.
And when, true to his promise, he came again next day, Brough was dead.
******
Time passed. The winter—a very severe one that year—came on, and now and then, when the thought of Brough crossed his mind, the manager would say to his wife that he was glad the poor fellow had not lingered; ‘it would have been terribly trying for him in that cottage in such weather.’
Then slowly and half reluctantly, as it were, followed the spring. The snowdrops, and, later on, the primroses and violets— faithful little friends as ever—began to peep out in the lanes and copses among the valleys between the great grim hills—for there were still green oases even in that black country. Then a short but glowing summer, and ‘again,’ said Margaret Heald to herself, with a little sigh, as she stood one dull morning looking after her husband as he set off to his day’s work, ‘again it is autumn and the long winter before us.’
But the sigh was quietly replaced by a smile. ‘We are so happy,’ she murmured, ‘so very happy. What do outside things like the weather matter?’
That very afternoon, as the doctor of the district returned to his own house after a long round, he was met at the door by an unexpected summons. He was tired and hungry, and, being no longer a young man, these sensations were less easy to bear with philosophy than formerly. And his work was arduous, for he was the only medical man within a circuit of five miles, and, excepting for the cluster of dwellings in the neighbourhood of the mine, his patients were scattered at considerable distances, in that sparsely-populated corner of the world.
‘I really think I shall have to get a partner, or at least a thoroughly efficient assistant,’ he was saying to himself, as he got down from his dog-cart at the gate, and his ‘Well, what’s the matter, Eliza?’ to the servant who opened the door before he had time to take out his latch-key, was perhaps, excusably, a little irritable. Eliza was a newcomer—a capable and intelligent girl, for she came from a suburb of London and was not without ‘cockney’ acuteness, but as yet unaccustomed to the conditions of a doctor’s house and scarcely acclimatised to the place.
‘What’s the matter now? ’ said her master, for the girl looked startled and anxious.
‘Oh, if you please, sir, will you go at once, at once,’ with emphasis, ‘to the manager’s house, Mr. Heald’s. I’ve been watching to catch you before the horse was taken out. The messenger’s not been gone five minutes.”
Dr. Warden’s face lengthened.
‘Did he not say what was wrong ? Who brought the message?’ he inquired, sharply.
‘Oh yes, sir. It’s an accident—very bad he seemed to think— to the manager himself. He was one of the workmen, the miners, I mean. He said his name was——,’ but by this time she was speaking to the air, for the doctor had rushed to the stable-yard, calling to his man that he must have the trap again at once—yes, at once— Eliza’s emphasis on the words seemed to have pressed them on to his brain.
He had a most hearty and sincere regard—affection indeed, one might say—for both Heald and his sweet wife, but as he drove along, his anxiety had time to cool a little, for his destination was between two and three miles away.
‘I daresay that girl has exaggerated,’ he thought. ‘She’s nervous and excitable, though sharp enough. It was a fad of the missus’s to have a servant from such a distance, because the girls hereabouts are rough and clumsy—however, this air will put some colour into Eliza’s cheeks. I daresay there’s not much wrong with Heald—it may be all a mistake, and they will laugh at me for coming.’
But as he entered the village—for village of a kind had grown up near the mine—his fears returned. For, grouped round the gate of the manager’s pretty little house at the far end of the street, stood a number of men—miners of course, with grave faces and apprehensive looks. They would have spoken to the doctor, but he, springing from his cart with the alacrity of twenty years ago, pushed his way through them, eager to get to headquarters at once.
The door was closed, but almost before his knock had ceased sounding, it was opened, and at the same moment Margaret Heald came out into the little hall. Her face was deadly pale, her eyes full of anguish, but at the sight of the newcomer a look of intense relief overspread her whole countenance; she almost smiled.
‘Oh Dr. Warden, oh dear doctor,’ she exclaimed. ‘What a mercy! Thank God, what a blessed chance! Come in at once. You may, you must be in time. He is scarcely conscious; he is bleeding to death. We have done all we could, but we cannot stop it. Oh come.’
She caught hold of the doctor’s sleeve and pulled him into the room, where, on a couch, for they had not dared to take him upstairs, lay poor Robert Heald—more dead than alive, for in fact it was getting to be a question of minutes for him. And yet the actual accident had not been a very serious one. He had caught his foot somehow when examining some new tools or machinery just being unpacked, and had fallen, cutting his wrist on a piece of sharp jagged iron lying about, and all but completely severing the artery. But had medical skill been instantly available, he need scarcely have run any risk. As it was, the more experienced as to wounds and injuries, among the miners, had done their best, and temporarily stopped the bleeding, which had, however, burst out again as they carried him to his home, fortunately close at hand.
It took but a short time for Dr. Warden’s clever surgery to save the situation, and with an ejaculation of profoundest thankfulness, Margaret saw her husband open his eyes and try to smile at her, while a little colour came back into his face.
‘He will do now,’ said the doctor,’ give him what I have ordered from time to time,’ referring to certain restoratives, ‘and keep him absolutely quiet and still, till I look in again this evening. He will probably sleep a good deal. Don’t talk to him more than you can help.’
Margaret followed the doctor out into the hall. Her eyes were
full of tears, yet shining with happiness.
‘You have saved his life,’ she said. ‘But oh, how unspeakably grateful we should be that you happened to be passing ! I suppose you saw the men at the gate. Collins’—the Healds’ groom—‘was just starting on the pony to fetch you. But,’ and she shivered, ‘it would have been too late, I feel certain.’
‘Yes,’ was the reply,’ there was assuredly terrible risk. I was only just in time, but—’ and he looked puzzled. ‘How do you mean that I happened to be passing ? I came all the way from home—as soon as I got your message, of course?’
The puzzled expression moved on to Margaret’s face and intensified there.
‘I did not send for you,’ she exclaimed. ‘There had not been time. Robert had not been five minutes in the house when you came.’
‘Then one of the men must have gone straight from the mine the moment it happened,’ the doctor replied, but Mrs. Heald still shook her head.
‘No, no, impossible,’ she maintained. ‘For you to have got a message to bring you here so soon, you must have heard of the accident almost simultaneously with its occurring. It must have been a brain-wave, doctor,’ and she smiled.
‘A very substantial one,’ he said. ‘It was one of the men, sent, I understood, by you. Still,’ he added, reflectively, ‘you wouldn’t have sent on foot. Ah well,’ as he went off, ‘I’ll inquire about it and tell you this evening.’
He returned within a few hours, and much to Margaret’s delight volunteered to stay all night, ‘just in case of anything going wrong.’
But nothing did go wrong, though both doctor and wife sat up; in turn watching by the patient, who slept fairly quietly.
And at breakfast the next morning Dr. Warden told his hostess a strange story.
‘I waited till the night was over—not to excite or startle you, my dear,’ he began, ‘to tell you the result of my cross-questioning of Eliza, my servant. I had not misunderstood what she said. It was one of the miners—a workman, she called him, who summoned me, and by putting things together, he must have been at my door almost, as you said, simultaneously with Heald’s accident——’
The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Mrs Molesworth Page 29