“I know a room,” said Arne, “thronged with acts that elbow me from my work and fill me with unrest.”
I looked at him in mute surprise.
“I suppose,” he went on, “such things do not interest you.”
“No—yes,” I stammered. “I have marked in traveling how lonely houses change their expression as you come near, pass, and leave them. Some frown, others smile. The Bible buildings had life of their own and human diseases; the priests cursed or blessed them as men.”
“Houses seem to remember,” said he. “Some rooms oppress us with a sense of lives that have been lived in them.”
“That,” I said, “is like Draper’s theory of shadows on walls always staying.XLVIII He shows how after a breath passes over a coinor key, its spectral outline remains for months after the substance is removed. But can the mist of circumstance sweeping over us make our vacant places hold any trace of us?”
“Why not? Who can deny it? Why do you look at me so?” he asked.
I could not tell him the sad tale. I hesitated; then said: “I was thinking of Volz, a friend I had, who not only believed in what Bulwer calls ‘a power akin to mesmerism and superior to it, once called Magic, and that it might reach over the dead, so far as their experience on earth,’XLIX but also in animal magnetism from any distance.”
Arne grew queerly excited. “If Time and Space exist but in our thoughts, why should it not be true?” said he. “Macdonald’s lover cries, ‘That which has been is, and the Past can never cease. She is mine, and I shall find her—what matters it when, or where, or how?’ ”L He sighed, “In Acapulco, a year ago, I saw a woman who has been before me ever since—the centre of the circling, changing, crude fancies that trouble me.”
“Did you know her?” I asked.
“No, nor anything about her, not even her name. It is like a spell. I must paint her before anything else, but I cannot yet decide how. I feel sure she has played a—tragic part in some life-drama.”
“Swinburne’s queen of panthers,”LI I hinted.
“Yes. But I was not in love. Love I must forego. I am not a man with an income.”
“I know you are not a nincompoop!” I said, always trying to change such themes by a jest. I could not tell him I knew a place which had the influence he talked of. I could not re-visit that house.
Soon after he told me he had begun his picture, but would not show it. He complained that one figure kept its back toward him. He worked on it till he fell ill. Even then he hid it. “Only a layer of passionography,” he said.
I grew restless. I thought his mood affected mine. It was a torment as well as a puzzle to me that his whole talk should be of the influence of houses, rooms, even personal property that had known other owners. Once I asked him if he had anything like the brown coat Sheridan swore drew ill-luck to him.LII
“Sometimes I think,” he answered, “it is this special brown paint artists prize which affects me. It is made from the best asphaltum, and that can be got only from Egyptian mummy-cloths.LIII Very likely dust of the mummies is ground in it. I ought to feel their ill-will.”
One day I went to Saucelito. In the still woods I forgot my unrest till coming to the stream where, as I suddenly remembered, Anson was found dead, a dread took me which I tried to lose by putting into rhyme. Turning out my pockets at night, I crumpled the page I had written on, and threw it on the floor.
In uneasy sleep I dreamed I was again in Paris, not where I liked to recall being, but at “Bullier’s,”LIV and in war-time. The bald, spectacled leader of the orchestra, leaning back, shamming sleep, while a dancing, stamping, screaming crowd wave tri-colored flags, and call for the “Chant du Depart.”LV Three thousand voices in a rushing roar that makes the twenty thousand lights waver, in spasmodic but steady chorus:
“Les departs—parts—parts!
Les departs—parts—parts!
Les departs—parts—parts!”
Roused, I supposed by passing rioters, I did not try to sleep again, but rose to write a letter for the early mail. As I struck a light I saw, smoothed out on the table, the wrinkled page I had cast aside. The ink was yet wet on two lines added to each verse. A chill crept over me as I read:
FOREST MURMURS
Across the woodland bridge I pass,
And sway its three long, narrow planks,
To mark how gliding waters glass
Bright blossoms doubled ranks on ranks;
And how through tangle of the ferns
Floats incense from veiled flower-urns,
What would the babbling brook reveal?
What may these trembling depths conceal?
Dread secret of the dense woods, held
With restless shudders horror-spelled!
How shift the shadows of the wood,
As if it tossed in troubled sleep!
Strange whispers, vaguely understood,
Above, below, around me creep;
While in the sombre-shadowed stream
Great scarlet splashes far down gleam,
The odd-reflected, stately shapes
Of cardinals in crimson capes;
Not those—but spectral pools of blood
That stain these sands through strongest flood!
Like blare of trumpets through black nights—
Or sunset clouds before a storm—
Are these red phantom water-sprites
That mock me with fantastic form;
With flitting of the last year’s bird
Fled ripples that its low flight stirred—
How should these rushing waters learn
Aught but the bend of this year’s fern?
The lonesome wood, with bated breath,
Hints of a hidden blow—and death!
I could not stay alone. I ran to Arne’s room. As I knocked, the falling of some light thing within made me think he was stirring. I went in. He sat in the moonlight, back to me before his easel. The picture on it might be the one he kept secret. I would not look. I went to his side and touched him. He had been dead for hours! I turned the unseen canvas to the wall.
Next day I packed and planned to go East. I paid the landlady not to send Arne’s body to the morgue, and watched it that night, when a sudden memory swept over me like a tidal wave. There was a likeness in the room to one where I had before watched the dead. Yes—there were the windows, there the doors—just here stood the bed, in the same spot I sat. What wildness was in the air of San Francisco!
To put such crazy thoughts to flight I would look at Arne’s last work. Yet I wavered, and more than once turned away after laying my hand on it. At last I snatched it, placed it on the easel and lighted the nearest gas-burner before looking at it. Then—great heavens! How had this vision come to Arne? It was the scene where Felipa cursed us. Every detail of the room reproduced, even the gay birds on the wall-paper, and her flower-pots. The figures and faces of Dering and Volz were true as hers, and in the figure with averted face which Arne had said kept its back to him, I knew—myself! What strange insight had he gained by looking at Felipa? It was like the man who trembled before the unknown portrait of the Marquise de Brinvilliers.LVI
How long I gazed at the picture I do not know. I heard, without heeding, the door-bell ring and steps along the hall. Voices. Some one looking at rooms. The landlady, saying this room was to let, but unwilling to show it, forced to own its last tenant lay there dead. This seemed no shock to the stranger.
“Well,” said her shrill tones, “poor as he was he’s better dead than alive!”
The door opened as a well-known voice cried: “My God! say not that! The nerve which hears is last to die—”
Volz stood before me! Awe-struck, we looked at each other in silence. Then he waved his hand to and fro before his eyes.
“Is this a dream?” he said. “There,” pointing to the bed; “you”—to me; “the same words—the very room! Is it our fate?”
I pointed to the picture and to Arne. “The last work of
this man, who thought it a fancy sketch?”
While Volz stood dumb and motionless before it, the landlady spoke:
“Then you know the place. Can you tell what ails it? There have been suicides in this room. No one prospers in the house. My cousin, who is a house-mover, warned me against taking it. He says before the store was put under it here it stood on Bush Street, and before that on Telegraph Hill.”
Volz clutched my arm. “It is ‘The Flying Dutchman’LVII of a house!” he cried, and drew me fast down stairs and out into a dense fog which made the world seem a tale that was told, blotting out all but our two slanting forms, bent as by what poor Wynne would have called “a blast from hell,” hurrying blindly away. I heard the voice of Volz as if from afar: “The magnetic man is a spirit!”
Mrs. J. H. (Charlotte) Riddell (1832–1906) was an influential Irish-born writer who was widely popular during her lifetime. Born of an Irish father and English mother, she lived most of her life in England. She penned 56 works, including short stories and novels, and was part-owner and editor of St. James’s Magazine in London in the 1860s. Riddell wrote many ghost stories, including five novels. The following, noteworthy also for its description of a thoroughly independent woman, first appeared in 1882 in her collection Weird Stories. It shares many of the finer characteristics of the picturesque, mysterious atmosphere of tales by a contemporary of hers, Sheridan LeFanu, whose principal work appeared in the two decades preceding this story.
Nut Bush Farm by Mrs. J. H. (Charlotte) Riddell
I
When I entered upon the tenancy of Nut Bush Farm almost the first piece of news which met me, in the shape of a whispered rumour, was that “something” had been seen in the “long field.”
Pressed closely as to what he meant, my informant reluctantly stated that the “some thing” took the “form of a man,” and that the wood and the path leading thereto from Whittleby were supposed to be haunted.
Now, all this annoyed me exceedingly. I do not know when I was more put out than by the intelligence. It is unnecessary to say I did not believe in ghosts or anything of that kind, but my wife being a very nervous, impressionable woman, and our only child, a delicate weakling, in the habit of crying himself into fits if left alone at night without a candle, I really felt at my wit’s end to imagine what I should do if a story of this sort reached their ears.
And reach them I knew it must if they came to Nut Bush Farm, so the first thing I did when I heard people did not care to venture down the Beech Walk or through the copse, or across the long field after dark, or indeed by day, was to write to say I thought they had both better remain on at my father-in-law’s till I could get the house thoroughly to rights.
After that I lit my pipe and went out for a stroll; when I knocked the ashes out of my pipe and re-entered the sitting room I had made up my mind. I could not afford to be frightened away from my tenancy. For weal or for woeI I must stick to Nut Bush Farm.
It was quite by chance I happened to know anything of the place at first. When I met with that accident in my employers’ service, which they rated far too highly and recompensed with a liberality I never can feel sufficiently grateful for, the doctors told me plainly if I could not give up office work and leave London altogether, they would not give a year’s purchase for my life.
Life seemed very sweet to me then—it always has done—but just at that period I felt the pleasant hopes of convalescence, and with that thousand pounds safely banked, I could not let it slip away from me.
“Take a farm,” advised my father-in-law, “though people say a farmer’s is a bad trade, I know many a man who is making money out of it. Take a farm, and if you want a helping hand to enable you to stand the racket for a year or two, why you know I am always ready.”
I had been bred and born on a farm. My father held something like fifteen hundred acres under the principal landowner in his county, and though it so happened, I could not content myself at home, but must needs come up to London to see the lions and seek my fortune, still I had never forgotten the meadows and the cornfields, and the cattle, and the orchards, and the woods and the streams, amongst which my happy boyhood had been spent. Yes, I thought I should like a farm—one not too far from London; and “not too big,” advised my wife’s father.
“The error people make now-a-days,” he went on, “is spreading their butter over too large a surface. It is the same in business as in land—they stretch their arms out too far—they will try to wade in deep waters—and the consequence is they never know a day’s peace, and end mostly in the bankruptcy court.”
He spoke as one having authority, and I knew what he said was quite right. He had made his money by a very different course of procedure, and I felt I could not follow a better example.
I knew something about farming, though not very much. Still, agriculture is like arithmetic, when once one knows the multiplication table the rest is not so difficult. I had learned unconsciously the alphabet of soils and crops and stock when I was an idle young dog, and liked nothing better than talking to the labourers, and accompanying the woodman when he went out felling trees; and so I did not feel much afraid of what the result would be, more especially as I had a good business head on my shoulders, and enough money to “stand the racket,” as my father-in-law put it, till the land began to bring in her increase.
When I got strong and well again after my long illness—I mean strong and well enough to go about—I went down to look at a farm which was advertised as to let in Kent.
According to the statement in the newspaper, there was no charm that farm lacked; when I saw it I discovered the place did not possess one virtue, unless, indeed, an old Tudor house fast falling to ruins, which would have proved invaluable to an artist, could be so considered. Far from a railway, having no advantages of water carriage, remote from a market, apparently destitute of society. Nor could these drawbacks be accounted the worst against it. The land, poor originally, seemed to have been totally exhausted. There were fields on which I do not think a goose could have found subsistence—nothing grew luxuriantly save weeds; it would have taken all my capital to get the ground clean. Then I saw the fences were dilapidated, the hedges in a deplorable condition, and the farm buildings in such a state of decay I would not have stabled a donkey in one of them.
Clearly, the King’s Manor, which was the modest name of the place, would not do at any price, and yet I felt sorry, for the country around was beautiful, and already the sweet pure air seemed to have braced up my nerves and given me fresh energy. Talking to mine host at the “Bunch of Hops,” in Whittleby, he advised me to look over the local paper before returning to London.
“There be a many farms vacant,” he said, “mayhap you’ll light on one to suit.”
To cut a long story short, I did look in the local paper and found many farms to let, but not one to suit. There was a drawback to each—a drawback at least so far as I was concerned. I felt determined I would not take a large farm. My conviction was then what my conviction still remains, that it is better to cultivate fifty acres thoroughly, than to crop, stock, clean, and manure a hundred insufficiently. Besides, I did not want to spend my strength on wages, or take a place so large I could not oversee the workmen on foot. For all these reasons and many more I came reluctantly to the conclusion that there was nothing in that part of the country to suit a poor unspeculative plodder like myself.
It was a lovely afternoon in May when I turned my face towards Whittleby, as I thought, for the last time. In the morning I had taken train for a farm some ten miles distant and worked my way back on foot to a “small cottage with land” a local agent thought might suit me. But neither the big place nor the little answered my requirements, much to the disgust of the auctioneer, who had himself accompanied us to the cottage under the impression I would immediately purchase it and so secure his commission.
Somewhat sulkily he told me a short cut back to Whittleby, and added as a sort of rider to all previous statements
, the remark:
“You had best look out for what you want in Middlesex. You’ll find nothing of that sort hereabouts.”
As to the last part of the foregoing sentence I was quite of his opinion, but I felt so oppressed with the result of all my wanderings that I thought upon the whole I had better abandon my search altogether, or else pursue it in some county very far away indeed—perhaps in the land of dreams for that matter!
As has been said, it was a lovely afternoon in May—the hedges were snowy with hawthorn blossom, the chestnuts were bursting into flower, the birds were singing fit to split their little throats, the lambs were dotting the hillsides, and I—ah! well, I was a boy again, able to relish all the rich banquet God spreads out day by day for the delight and nourishment of His too often thankless children.
When I came to a point half way up some rising ground where four lanes met and then wound off each on some picturesque diverse way, I paused to look around regretfully.
As I did so—some distance below me—along a long and never-before-traversed lane, I saw the gleam of white letters on a black board.
“Come,” I thought, “I’ll see what this is at all events,” and bent my steps towards the place, which might, for all I knew about it, have been a ducal mansion or a cockney’s country villa.
The board appeared modestly conspicuous in the foreground of a young fir plantation, and simply bore this legend-
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