Standing at the farther end of it, almost opposite to the grate, and reflected in the mirror by the ruddy light, was a woman: a woman I had never seen before. That she had not been there five minutes back when I awoke I could almost have sworn; for I had looked all round the room; and dim as the light was, I could see well enough that there was no one else in it, and that the door was closed. It was closed now, and how she could have opened and shut it again without my hearing her, unless during the moment that I was poking the fire, I could not imagine. The curious thing was that she did not look at or speak to me even now; but stood perfectly still, her face turned towards the door as if in the attitude of listening, and with all the appearance of a person belonging to the house, seeing that she was not dressed for walking, but in a loose sort of morning gown of white cambric, with deep ruffles down the front and at the wrists, and wore her hair loosely plaited down her back. I noticed this at the first glance as adding to the strangeness of her presence there at all; but in the same moment the fire shot up in a brilliant flame throwing a bright light on her face, and almost nailing me to the ground as my eyes read the expression on it. In all the years I have lived, in all the years I may yet have before me, I never have seen, I trust I never may see, such an expression on any human being’s face again! For it was a young face, that of a girl, almost a child; and would have been pretty but for the awful, corpse-like pallor which overshadowed the brow and cheeks, and the hopeless, unutterable depth of misery and fear, of utter despair, and ghastly, speechless, livid horror, all blended in one single effort, an intensity of listening, which seemed to absorb every nerve and power: listening to something outside the door, something which seemed from her starting eyeballs and the hopeless quiver in her lower jaw to be drawing nearer and nearer; for her slender, feeble body seemed to shrink with each breath, and draw itself farther and farther back, as though from some loathsome, terrible animal which she could see in act to spring, or as though—— It was all visible in the sudden leaping up of that flame. The next moment it died down again, and I turned round sharply!
The woman was gone!
How I felt I cannot tell you. It has taken many words to write all this, but it did not require the space of one minute to see it. It must have taken you many seconds to read, but it did not take a dozen heart-beats to feel it in all its ghastly, inexplicable mystery. I was still breathless with the surprise of seeing her there, there in my room, which only a moment before had been empty save of myself; and she was gone—disappeared! The door had not opened. There was no sound, no cry, not even the lightest footfall. The house seemed wrapped in the most impenetrable silence. Even the noises in the street were hushed; and I was there alone in the firelight with the unlit spill in my hand. I suppose I rang the bell violently; for I remember listening to the sound of it jingling far away in the basement regions, and then ringing again and again, and waiting, with my heart beating like an alarm-clock, and my hands quite cold and damp, for Mrs. Cathers to answer it.
She made her appearance at last. It may not have been as long as it seemed. One does not tell time accurately at such moments; but it was long enough to give me time to recover myself a little, and to feel annoyed with the woman for the marked sullenness and unwillingness in her whole manner as she entered with the conventional query: “Did you ring, ma’am?” She was carrying a large kerosene lamp, and the sudden glare of light, as well as the sound of her voice, surly as it was, restored me further.
“I should think you heard me ring several times,” I answered. “Did you meet anyone on the stairs just now? I have been asleep longer than I intended, and I did not hear the door open; but——”
“Yes, ma’am, you ’ave been asleep,” Mrs. Cathers interrupted me in a tone of greater injury than before. “And if I didn’t answer of your bell the minnit it ringed, it was in cause of my bein’ that tired of waitin’ up I’d dropt into a doze myself a-sittin’ in my cheer. P’r’aps, ma’am, you don’t know as it’s twelve o’clock?”
“Twelve o’clock!” I repeated. Had I really slept as long? “Why did you not wake me when you brought up the tea?” I added, looking at the woman in surprise.
“Why, m’m,” she said peevishly, “I would have done so, in course, if you ’adn’t said at dinner as you were tired; an’ when I come up you were sleepin’ so sound I didn’t like. Dreamin’, I should think you was too, by your ’air,” the woman put in with a sudden furtive glance at me.
I had not been able to catch her eyes once before. She kept them rigidly fixed on the lamp she carried, never even looking about her; and, indeed, there was something now so unpleasant in her glance, that I felt almost unwilling to go on speaking to her. Still, if anyone had got into the house without my knowledge—anyone of feeble mind, or in great terror! Writing this as though I were in the witness-box, I can solemnly aver that so free was my mind from any morbid or romantic fancies that, even then, I could not think of my visitor as having any supernatural element.
“Have you let anyone into the house without my knowing?” I asked, rather sharply. “Or is the hall-door open? If you have been asleep yourself, you might not hear anyone come in at it; but I believe someone did just now—a woman. She was in this room a few minutes ago.”
Mrs. Cathers looked at me again, this time with barely veiled contempt.
“You ’ave been dreamin’, ma’am,” she said coolly. “The ’all door! Why, it ’ave been shut an’ locked ever since dusk, an’ as to me lettin’ anyone in, I’d not think of such a thing. There ain’t no one in this ’ouse but you and me, nor there hasn’t been, man or woman either. Lor, to think what queer dreams some folks ’ave! But I thought as you were give that way, when I ’eard you mumbling to yourself in your sleep.”
I did not believe her, for I knew that I had not been dreaming; and there was something in the woman’s whole manner which made me distrustful of her, and more especially of her almost impertinent determination to force a ready-made solution of my query on me. Why should she be so anxious to persuade me that I had been dreaming, when, as a matter of fact, she could have no idea of my grounds for speaking as I did? On second thoughts, I decided to say no more on the subject at present; but, simply observing that she ought to have woke me sooner, told her to light me up to bed, and make haste to her own. I could not have stayed longer just then in that drawing-room by myself, and I am perfectly willing to own that until I was safely in bed, with my room door locked, I avoided looking about me as carefully as Mrs. Cathers had done. I was honestly frightened and bewildered, and my mind was in a whirl. It was a comfort to me when three, striking from a church-clock hard-by, and followed by the crowing of an over-wakeful cock, showed me that the actual night was past, and gave me confidence enough to let me sleep.
The following day, the 17th of November, was bright and sunny; and I awoke, feeling more cheerful, and able to reason with myself quite calmly as to the last night’s occurrence. Looking back upon it thus, through the medium of sunlight and a refreshing sleep, I could only conclude that, however unlikely and foreign to all my previous experience, I had simply been the victim of some strange optical delusion, though how produced, and whence arising, I could not tell. Against any other idea, that, for instance, which had already presented itself to me, of some mad or imbecile girl being concealed in the house with Mrs. Cathers’s connivance, I guarded by looking into every room and cupboard immediately after breakfast, and, after locking up those which I did not require for present occupation, depositing the keys in my desk.
I spent the greater part of that day like the last at the British Museum, and afterwards called on some old friends in Russell Place, and stayed to dinner with them. I had been half in hopes of carrying off one of the girls to sleep and spend a few days with me, for the strange vividness and reality of the last night’s vision, and the ghastly sense of horror and mystery encompassing it, had left a sufficiently strong impression on me still to make me wishful for some other company than my own. I was not exactly
afraid to be alone, but my nerves had received an unpleasant shock, and I wished to assist myself to recover from it. I was disappointed, however, both the daughters being away on a visit in the country; but their father, one of the kindest and most genial men living, insisted on seeing me home at night, and even came in and sat for half an hour or so talking to me, greatly, as I judged from her face, to the discontent of Mrs. Cathers. Indeed, the sourness of her expression, when she saw me return accompanied by a clergyman, even attracted the old gentleman’s attention, and caused him to observe laughingly to me:
“Why, Mary, my dear, one would think you were a jealous wife, with a husband partial to pretty servant girls, and had chosen the most repellent you could find accordingly. Does your Abigail always present such an unamiable appearance?”
She was to have her amiability further tried. My kind friend, to whom I had half jestingly mentioned the previous night’s fright, insisted on looking over the house with me before he left, so as to “set my mind at rest,” he said; and Mrs. Cathers resented the proceeding so much that she came up to me in the middle of it, and, without taking any notice of Mr. L——’s presence, asked me, in her strongest tone of ill usage, whether I objected to her going to bed: “seeing as how it were past twelve before she got to rest last night, and just on eleven now, and having been hard at work since——”
I told her shortly that she might go to bed as soon as she pleased. When you are used to nice old family servants with gentle, respectful ways, this sort of coarse incivility grates on you, and as I bid my kind old friend good night, a few minutes later, I told him, smiling:
“Well, I think I shall take your advice in one respect before Tom and Hester come, although she is rather a jealous wife. I shall look out for a pleasanter maid.”
I said this, with the hall-door in my hand—he will bear witness now, how cheerfully, and how little the thought that I should never require another maid in that house, or sleep another night there, had occurred to me. Indeed, I can safely say that such an idea had never been further from my mind. I went back to the dining-room quite cheerfully too. Originally, I had intended going to bed very early, and had even, by an impulse which I was ashamed to put into words, re-covered the mirror with its hideous yellow veil; but the evening with my cheery-hearted friends had so restored my natural spirits that I felt divided between laughter and blushes at my own folly in so doing, and finding a little pile of letters and proofs which had come for me by the last post lying on the side-table, I sat down to look over them, and speedily got so absorbed in the task as to forget altogether how time was passing.
I was aroused from it quite suddenly by a feeling which I cannot explain, but yet which was strong enough to make me lift my head with a start, and look sharply around: a feeling that someone was in the same room with me!
CHAPTER II
I said at the end of the first part of this statement that I was aroused from my occupation by the sudden sensation that someone was in the room with me. It was not so in fact. One glance round the formal gas-lit apartment, with its rather skimpy curtains looped flatly against the wall, and its utter absence of anything like dark corners or ghostly recesses, was enough to assure me of my error; but the feeling remained with me all the same, and grew stronger instead of passing away. It almost seemed as though someone were seated at the same table with me, breathing near me, occupying the very next chair; and then gradually there stole over me the same sensation I had had before with regard to this room, as if some crime, some deadly, sickening sin which appalled me even while I was utterly ignorant of its nature, were being plotted and worked out in it—something too hideous to be rendered into words, but to which I, by the very fact of my presence there, was being made a party. It was then, at that moment, that the thought of what I had seen in the mirror last night came into my mind. I was exactly under the drawing-room floor where it had stood—the vision-woman with that awful, unspoken mystery of horror and despair in her livid cheeks and dim, dilated eyes. Was this unknown, unguessed-at wickedness being woven and worked out against her? Was she up there now, waiting?
I had been sitting down, holding my letters in my hand, trying honestly and hard to think of them and nothing else. I could not do so any longer. I stood up abruptly. There was a trembling in my limbs and hands, and my forehead felt cold and moist. All the while I was putting up my papers my eyes would keep wandering by a sort of fascination to the mirror. I could see nothing in it. The gauze prevented me; yet it seemed to me more than once as if the reflection of something—some moving figure, not mine, had passed across it; as if, but for the veil—— I could not bear it, and went out quickly from the room, shutting and locking the door behind me. There was no light in the hall or upon the stairs, except the candle I carried. After putting that ready for me, Mrs. Cathers had turned out the gas. I went upstairs with swift steps; swiftest in passing the drawing-room door.
I have said the staircase took a bend here and crossed a long window, which in daylight lighted it from top to bottom. This window gave on the dead wall of a neighbouring house about eight feet distant. There was no blind to it. As on the first night, it frowned on me in black, unsheltered nakedness when I turned the corner. As on the first night, I saw myself reflected at full length in it, the candle in my hand, the buttons and fringes of my dress, the—— My God! but who, who or what was that behind me, that crouching figure which froze me to the spot, actually paralysed with dread—a dread which was all the more overmastering because I had heard no faintest rustle or sound to give me warning of it.
Believe me or not; but just below me, creeping slowly with soft, gliding, noiseless steps, was the figure of a man!
At the moment he was not on the same angle of the stairs with me. The banisters separated us, and at first the light only fell on his head: the head of an old man, bald, with tufts of greyish-white hair hanging in coarse, shaggy locks over the large, red, wrinkly ears, and a short, stubbly beard, white too—an old man with stooping shoulders and heavily corrugated brow. The face beneath was inexpressibly evil and repulsive: evil and repulsive in the loose, hanging, sensual lips; evil and repulsive in the cruel, vindictive eyes almost hidden under their overhanging brows; so evil and repulsive in every line and curve of the hoary head and brutal, wolfish jaws, that even if met by daylight in a crowded street one would instinctively have shuddered and shrunk away from contact with him. How much more so now when illumined by an expression of such deadly, sinister determination that the very sight of it seemed to chill one’s heart and limbs, and deprive one even of the power of a cry for help.
In that moment of mortal, agonised terror, longer in seeming than all the years of my past life, I felt as though in the presence of some ferocious animal; some creature without pity, without conscience, without soul, whose very glance must foul and destroy if it once fell on one.
For that was the strangest part of it, adding in one way to the mystery and horror of his presence. This creature, man or devil, never looked at me; seemed, if it were possible to believe such a thing, unconscious even of my presence. Like the vision-woman of last night, its eyes were fixed straight before it. Like the vision-woman of last night, they never blinked or wandered once, but seemed concentrated in one fixed, deadly stare; a stare which had for its object the drawing-room door! Could it be—was it possible, or was this some horrible, fevered dream?—that she was there now, cowering behind that door; a woman, young, almost a child, alone in the night, utterly friendless, utterly helpless, waiting and listening in an anguish of fear beyond words, beyond hope, beyond even prayer, for the approach of this very man who, step by step, was gradually drawing nearer to her—the man whose unseen presence had made the room below horrible with meditated crime, whom I had thought to leave behind me there!
I could see the whole of him now. Inch by inch with a stealthy, crawling movement, as though he were raising himself by the wrinkled, sinewy hand, which grasped the rail of the banisters so close to me that it almos
t touched my dress, rather than by the use of his feet. He had gained the landing outside the drawing-room door; and I saw that he was clad only in trousers and shirt—the latter open at the throat so as to show the wrinkled, hairy skin; also that he carried in his left hand an ordinary table-knife with a black horn handle, the blade of which, worn to a point like a dagger, had evidently been recently sharpened. I saw, too, for the first time, that he was not alone. Close to his side, and alternately rubbing herself against his legs and the knuckles of his left hand, was a big, yellow, gaunt-bodied cat, with an unusually large head, and one eye bleeding and sore from some recent wound. There was something peculiarly horrible about this cat, horrible even in the almost obtrusive way in which she lavished her caresses on her sinister companion, and then, leaping forward, crouched down at the door, smelling at it and turning her sound eye on her master as if aware of his object and inviting him to hurry with it. Still without a word, and seeming indeed to hold his breath between his clenched teeth, he struck at her with the knife to drive her off; and then, gliding closer to the door, gave one furtive glance around him, and tightening his hold of the weapon, laid his hand upon the lock.
The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories Page 6
