The Phantom Coach

by Michael Sims

  The knocking ceased suddenly, although the echoes of it were still in the house. He heard the chair drawn back and the door opened. A cold wind rushed up the staircase, and a long loud wail of disappointment and misery from his wife gave him courage to run down to her side, and then to the gate beyond. The street lamp flickering opposite shone on a quiet and deserted road.

  Mary E. Wilkins Freeman

  1852–1930

  Mary Eleanor Wilkins was born in Massachusetts. After winning a prize for her own writing as a teenager, she first wrote for children. Her first story for adults appeared in Harper’s Bazaar. Early in her life she lost both a sister and her parents, and throughout her adult writing she demonstrates a melancholy compassion for lost and hurt children. Her distaste for the suffocating strictures of religious doctrine can be traced to her own Congregationalist upbringing. Poverty throughout her childhood gave her intimate familiarity with the difficult lives of working-class Americans, lives that she would portray with great sympathy in her stories. Misfortune dogged her heels. She didn’t marry Charles Freeman until she was forty-nine, but afterward her alcoholic husband wound up in an institution.

  Early in her life, she worked for decades as private secretary to Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., and during her spare time she wrote. Gradually her writing attracted renown. “It is natural to suppose that any reader of current English literature would know Miss Wilkins,” proclaimed a magazine article at the dawn of the twentieth century. Although her star faded during the middle of the century, Freeman received distinguished admiration in her day. Mark Twain was a fan. When the American Academy of Arts and Letters created the William Dean Howells Medal for Distinction in Fiction, its first recipient was Freeman. In 1903 the book Women Authors of Our Day in Their Homes nicely described her as “the most delicate and appreciative delineator of rural New England characters who has written within a generation.”

  In Freeman’s fiction you will find no haunted mansions, no tormented aristocrats or monks. She wrote about ordinary people living ordinary lives, in which the supernatural sneaks up on them through everyday activities. In one story, “The Vacant Lot,” a woman goes out to hang laundry and finds the shadow of another woman hanging the shadows of laundry, but no one is there—only shadows. She wrote especially well, with sensitivity but not sentimentality, about the lives of women and children. She is best known for her stories of lost, abandoned, even spectral children—as in “The Wind in the Rose-Bush,” which is sweet and sad but somewhat predictable, and “The Lost Ghost.” She explored dreams, with powerful sexual subtexts beyond her era, in stories such as “The Hall Bedroom” and “A Symphony in Lavender.” Freeman was a disciple of the innovative mystery writer Anna Katharine Green, whose 1878 novel The Leavenworth Case was the first serious detective novel written by a woman. Freeman wrote to Green and emulated some of her techniques in stories such as “The Long Arm.” Her disarmingly casual story of a small-town psychic vampire, “Luella Miller,” appears in the Connoisseur’s Collection volume Dracula’s Guest.

  No story of Freeman’s better demonstrates her masterful light touch, or her thoughtful exploration of gender and domesticity, than “The Southwest Chamber.” It appeared in 1903 as the fourth story of six in her collection The Wind in the Rose-Bush and Other Stories of the Supernatural, a superb volume originally illustrated by the innovative Peter Newell, creator of The Hole Book.

  The Southwest Chamber

  That school-teacher from Acton is coming to-day,” said the elder Miss Gill, Sophia.

  “So she is,” assented the younger Miss Gill, Amanda.

  “I have decided to put her in the southwest chamber,” said Sophia.

  Amanda looked at her sister with an expression of mingled doubt and terror. “You don’t suppose she would—” she began hesitatingly.

  “Would what?” demanded Sophia, sharply. She was more incisive than her sister. Both were below the medium height, and stout, but Sophia was firm where Amanda was flabby. Amanda wore a baggy old muslin (it was a hot day), and Sophia was uncompromisingly hooked up in a starched and boned cambric over her high shelving figure.

  “I didn’t know but she would object to sleeping in that room, as long as Aunt Harriet died there such a little time ago,” faltered Amanda.

  “Well!” said Sophia, “of all the silly notions! If you are going to pick out rooms in this house where nobody has died, for the boarders, you’ll have your hands full. Grandfather Ackley had seven children; four of them died here to my certain knowledge, besides grandfather and grandmother. I think Great-grandmother Ackley, grandfather’s mother, died here, too; she must have; and Great-grandfather Ackley, and grandfather’s unmarried sister, Great-aunt Fanny Ackley. I don’t believe there’s a room nor a bed in this house that somebody hasn’t passed away in.”

  “Well, I suppose I am silly to think of it, and she had better go in there,” said Amanda.

  “I know she had. The northeast room is small and hot, and she’s stout and likely to feel the heat, and she’s saved money and is able to board out summers, and maybe she’ll come here another year if she’s well accommodated,” said Sophia. “Now I guess you’d better go in there and see if any dust has settled on anything since it was cleaned, and open the west windows and let the sun in, while I see to that cake.”

  Amanda went to her task in the southwest chamber while her sister stepped heavily down the back stairs on her way to the kitchen.

  “It seems to me you had better open the bed while you air and dust, then make it up again,” she called back.

  “Yes, sister,” Amanda answered, shudderingly.

  Nobody knew how this elderly woman with the untrammeled imagination of a child dreaded to enter the southwest chamber, and yet she could not have told why she had the dread. She had entered and occupied rooms which had been once tenanted by persons now dead. The room which had been hers in the little house in which she and her sister had lived before coming here had been her dead mother’s. She had never reflected upon the fact with anything but loving awe and reverence. There had never been any fear. But this was different. She entered and her heart beat thickly in her ears. Her hands were cold. The room was a very large one. The four windows, two facing south, two west, were closed, the blinds also. The room was in a film of green gloom. The furniture loomed out vaguely. The gilt frame of a blurred old engraving on the wall caught a little light. The white counterpane on the bed showed like a blank page.

  Amanda crossed the room, opened with a straining motion of her thin back and shoulders one of the west windows, and threw back the blind. Then the room revealed itself an apartment full of an aged and worn but no less valid state. Pieces of old mahogany swelled forth; a peacock-patterned chintz draped the bedstead. This chintz also covered a great easy chair which had been the favourite seat of the former occupant of the room. The closet door stood ajar. Amanda noticed that with wonder. There was a glimpse of purple drapery floating from a peg inside the closet. Amanda went across and took down the garment hanging there. She wondered how her sister had happened to leave it when she cleaned the room. It was an old loose gown which had belonged to her aunt. She took it down, shuddering, and closed the closet door after a fearful glance into its dark depths. It was a long closet with a strong odour of lovage. Aunt Harriet had had a habit of eating lovage and had carried it constantly in her pocket. There was very likely some of the pleasant root in the pocket of the musty purple gown which Amanda threw over the easy chair.

  Amanda perceived the odour with a start as if before an actual presence. Odour seems in a sense a vital part of a personality. It can survive the flesh to which it has clung like a persistent shadow, seeming to have in itself something of the substance of that to which it pertained. Amanda was always conscious of this fragrance of lovage as she tidied the room. She dusted the heavy mahogany pieces punctiliously after she had opened the bed as her sister had directed. She spread fresh towels over the wash-stand and the bureau; she made the bed. Then sh
e thought to take the purple gown from the easy chair and carry it to the garret and put it in the trunk with the other articles of the dead woman’s wardrobe which had been packed away there; but the purple gown was not on the chair!

  Amanda Gill was not a woman of strong convictions even as to her own actions. She directly thought that possibly she had been mistaken and had not removed it from the closet. She glanced at the closet door and saw with surprise that it was open, and she had thought she had closed it, but she instantly was not sure of that. So she entered the closet and looked for the purple gown. it was not there!

  Amanda Gill went feebly out of the closet and looked at the easy chair again. The purple gown was not there! She looked wildly around the room. She went down on her trembling knees and peered under the bed, she opened the bureau drawers, she looked again in the closet. Then she stood in the middle of the floor and fairly wrung her hands.

  “What does it mean?” she said in a shocked whisper.

  She had certainly seen that loose purple gown of her dead Aunt Harriet’s.

  There is a limit at which self-refutation must stop in any sane person. Amanda Gill had reached it. She knew that she had seen that purple gown in that closet; she knew that she had removed it and put it on the easy chair. She also knew that she had not taken it out of the room. She felt a curious sense of being inverted mentally. It was as if all her traditions and laws of life were on their heads. Never in her simple record had any garment not remained where she had placed it unless removed by some palpable human agency.

  Then the thought occurred to her that possibly her sister Sophia might have entered the room unobserved while her back was turned and removed the dress. A sensation of relief came over her. Her blood seemed to flow back into its usual channels; the tension of her nerves relaxed.

  “How silly I am,” she said aloud.

  She hurried out and downstairs into the kitchen where Sophia was making cake, stirring with splendid circular sweeps of a wooden spoon a creamy yellow mass. She looked up as her sister entered.

  “Have you got it done?” said she.

  “Yes,” replied Amanda. Then she hesitated. A sudden terror overcame her. It did not seem as if it were at all probable that Sophia had left that foamy cake mixture a second to go to Aunt Harriet’s chamber and remove that purple gown.

  “Well,” said Sophia, “if you have got that done I wish you would take hold and string those beans. The first thing we know there won’t be time to boil them for dinner.”

  Amanda moved toward the pan of beans on the table, then she looked at her sister.

  “Did you come up in Aunt Harriet’s room while I was there?” she asked weakly.

  She knew while she asked what the answer would be.

  “Up in Aunt Harriet’s room? Of course I didn’t. I couldn’t leave this cake without having it fall. You know that well enough. Why?”

  “Nothing,” replied Amanda.

  Suddenly she realized that she could not tell her sister what had happened, for before the utter absurdity of the whole thing her belief in her own reason quailed. She knew what Sophia would say if she told her. She could hear her.

  “Amanda Gill, have you gone stark staring mad?”

  She resolved that she would never tell Sophia. She dropped into a chair and began shelling the beans with nerveless fingers. Sophia looked at her curiously.

  “Amanda Gill, what on earth ails you?” she asked.

  “Nothing,” replied Amanda. She bent her head very low over the green pods.

  “Yes, there is, too! You are as white as a sheet, and your hands are shaking so you can hardly string those beans. I did think you had more sense, Amanda Gill.”

  “I don’t know what you mean, Sophia.”

  “Yes, you do know what I mean, too; you needn’t pretend you don’t. Why did you ask me if I had been in that room, and why do you act so queer?”

  Amanda hesitated. She had been trained to truth. Then she lied.

  “I wondered if you’d noticed how it had leaked in on the paper over by the bureau, that last rain,” said she.

  “What makes you look so pale then?”

  “I don’t know. I guess the heat sort of overcame me.”

  “I shouldn’t think it could have been very hot in that room when it had been shut up so long,” said Sophia.

  She was evidently not satisfied, but then the grocer came to the door and the matter dropped.

  For the next hour the two women were very busy. They kept no servant. When they had come into possession of this fine old place by the death of their aunt it had seemed a doubtful blessing. There was not a cent with which to pay for repairs and taxes and insurance, except the twelve hundred dollars which they had obtained from the sale of the little house in which they had been born and lived all their lives. There had been a division in the old Ackley family years before. One of the daughters had married against her mother’s wish and had been disinherited. She had married a poor man by the name of Gill, and shared his humble lot in sight of her former home and her sister and mother living in prosperity, until she had borne three daughters; then she died, worn out with overwork and worry.

  The mother and the elder sister had been pitiless to the last. Neither had ever spoken to her since she left her home the night of her marriage. They were hard women.

  The three daughters of the disinherited sister had lived quiet and poor, but not actually needy lives. Jane, the middle daughter, had married, and died in less than a year. Amanda and Sophia had taken the girl baby she left when the father married again. Sophia had taught a primary school for many years; she had saved enough to buy the little house in which they lived. Amanda had crocheted lace, and embroidered flannel, and made tidies and pincushions, and had earned enough for her clothes and the child’s, little Flora Scott.

  Their father, William Gill, had died before they were thirty, and now in their late middle life had come the death of the aunt to whom they had never spoken, although they had often seen her, who had lived in solitary state in the old Ackley mansion until she was more than eighty. There had been no will, and they were the only heirs with the exception of young Flora Scott, the daughter of the dead sister.

  Sophia and Amanda thought directly of Flora when they knew of the inheritance.

  “It will be a splendid thing for her; she will have enough to live on when we are gone,” Sophia said.

  She had promptly decided what was to be done. The small house was to be sold, and they were to move into the old Ackley house and take boarders to pay for its keeping. She scouted the idea of selling it. She had an enormous family pride. She had always held her head high when she had walked past that fine old mansion, the cradle of her race, which she was forbidden to enter. She was unmoved when the lawyer who was advising her disclosed to her the fact that Harriet Ackley had used every cent of the Ackley money.

  “I realize that we have to work,” said she, “but my sister and I have determined to keep the place.”

  That was the end of the discussion. Sophia and Amanda Gill had been living in the old Ackley house a fortnight, and they had three boarders: an elderly widow with a comfortable income, a young congregationalist clergyman, and the middle-aged single woman who had charge of the village library. Now the school-teacher from Acton, Miss Louisa Stark, was expected for the summer, and would make four.

  Sophia considered that they were comfortably provided for. Her wants and her sister’s were very few, and even the niece, although a young girl, had small expenses, since her wardrobe was supplied for years to come from that of the deceased aunt. There were stored away in the garret of the Ackley house enough voluminous black silks and satins and bombazines to keep her clad in somber richness for years to come.

  Flora was a very gentle girl, with large, serious blue eyes, a seldom-smiling, pretty mouth, and smooth flaxen hair. She was delicate and very young—sixteen on her next birthday. She came home soon now with her parcels of sugar and tea from the grocer’s. She
entered the kitchen gravely and deposited them on the table by which her Aunt Amanda was seated, stringing beans. Flora wore an obsolete turban-shaped hat of black straw which had belonged to the dead aunt; it set high like a crown, revealing her forehead. Her dress was an ancient purple-and-white print, too long and too large except over the chest, where it held her like a straight waistcoat.

  “You had better take off your hat, Flora,” said Sophia. She turned suddenly to Amanda. “Did you fill the water-pitcher in that chamber for the school-teacher?” she asked severely. She was quite sure that Amanda had not filled the water-pitcher.

  Amanda blushed and started guiltily. “I declare, I don’t believe I did,” said she.

  “I didn’t think you had,” said her sister with sarcastic emphasis.

  “Flora, you go up to the room that was your Great-aunt Harriet’s, and take the water-pitcher off the wash-stand and fill it with water. Be real careful, and don’t break the pitcher, and don’t spill the water.”

  “In that chamber?” asked Flora. She spoke very quietly, but her face changed a little.

  “Yes, in that chamber,” returned her Aunt Sophia sharply. “Go right along.”

  Flora went, and her light footstep was heard on the stairs. Very soon she returned with the blue-and-white water-pitcher and filled it carefully at the kitchen sink.

  “Now be careful and not spill it,” said Sophia as she went out of the room, carrying it gingerly.

  Amanda gave a timidly curious glance at her; she wondered if she had seen the purple gown.