The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories

by James D. Jenkins

  A tall, slim girl, Maisie Llewelyn, with rich black hair, and ethereal features, as became a descendant of Llewelyn ap Iorwerth­­—the sort of girl we none of us would have called anything more than “interesting” till Rossetti and Burne-Jones found eyes for us to see that the type is beautiful with a deeper beauty than that of your obvious pink-and-white prettiness. Her eyes, in particular, had a lustrous depth that was almost superhuman, and her fingers­ and nails were strangely transparent in their waxen softness.

  “You won’t mind my having put you in a ground-floor room in the new wing, my dear, will you?” Mrs. West inquired, as she led Maisie personally to the quarters chosen for her. “You see, we’re so unusually full, because of these tableaux!”

  Maisie gazed round the ground-floor room in the new wing with eyes of mute wonder. If this was the kind of lodging for which Mrs. West thought it necessary to apologise, Maisie wondered of what sort were those better rooms which she gave to the guests she delighted to honour. It was a large and exquisitely decorated chamber, with the softest and deepest Oriental carpet Maisie’s feet had ever felt, and the daintiest curtains her eyes had ever lighted upon. True, it opened by French windows on to what was nominally the ground in front; but as the Italian terrace, with its formal balustrade and its great stone balls, was raised several feet above the level of the sloping garden below, the room was really on the first floor for all practical purposes. Indeed, Maisie rather liked the unwonted sense of space and freedom which was given by this easy access to the world without; and, as the windows were secured by great shutters and fasteners, she had no counterbalancing fear lest a nightly burglar should attempt to carry off her little pearl necklet or her amethyst brooch, instead of directing his whole attention to Mrs. West’s famous diamond tiara.

  She moved naturally to the window. She was fond of nature. The view it disclosed over the Weald at her feet was wide and varied. Misty range lay behind misty range, in a faint December haze, receding and receding, till away to the south, half hidden by vapour, the Sussex downs loomed vague in the distance. The village church, as happens so often in the case of old lordly manors, stood within the grounds of the Hall, and close by the house. It had been built, her hostess said, in the days of the Edwards, but had portions of an older Saxon edifice still enclosed in the chancel. The one eyesore in the view was its new white tower, recently restored (or rather, rebuilt), which contrasted most painfully with the mellow grey stone and mouldering corbels of the nave and transept.

  “What a pity it’s been so spoiled!” Maisie exclaimed, looking across at the tower. Coming straight as she did from a Merioneth rectory, she took an ancestral interest in all that concerned churches.

  “Oh, my dear!” Mrs. West cried, “please don’t say that, I beg of you, to the Colonel. If you were to murmur ‘spoiled’ to him you’d wreck his digestion. He’s spent ever so much money over securing the foundations and reproducing the sculpture on the old tower we took down, and it breaks his dear heart when anybody disapproves of it. For some people, you know, are so absurdly opposed to reasonable restoration.”

  “Oh, but this isn’t even restoration, you know,” Maisie said; with the frankness of twenty, and the specialist interest of an antiquary’s daughter. “This is pure reconstruction.”

  “Perhaps so,” Mrs. West answered. “But if you think so, my dear, don’t breathe it at Wolverden.”

  A fire, of ostentatiously wealthy dimensions, and of the best glowing coal, burned bright on the hearth; but the day was mild, and hardly more than autumnal. Maisie found the room quite unpleasantly hot. She opened the windows and stepped out on the terrace. Mrs. West followed her. They paced up and down the broad gravelled platform for a while—Maisie had not yet taken off her travelling-cloak and hat—and then strolled half unconsciously towards the gate of the church. The churchyard, to hide the tombstones of which the parapet had been erected, was full of quaint old monuments, with broken-nosed cherubs, some of them dating from a comparatively early period. The porch, with its sculptured niches deprived of their saints by puritan hands, was still rich and beautiful in its carved detail. On the seat inside an old woman was sitting. She did not rise as the lady of the manor approached, but went on mumbling and muttering inarticulately to herself in a sulky undertone. Still, Maisie was aware, none the less, that the moment she came near a strange light gleamed suddenly in the old woman’s eyes, and that her glance was fixed upon her. A faint thrill of recognition seemed to pass like a flash through her palsied body. Maisie knew not why, but she was dimly afraid of the old woman’s gaze upon her.

  “It’s a lovely old church!” Maisie said, looking up at the trefoil finials on the porch—“all, except the tower.”

  “We had to reconstruct it,” Mrs. West answered apologetically—Mrs. West’s general attitude in life was apologetic, as though she felt she had no right to so much more money than her fellow-creatures. “It would have fallen if we hadn’t done something to buttress it up. It was really in a most dangerous and critical condition.”

  “Lies! lies! lies!” the old woman burst out suddenly, though in a strange, low tone, as if speaking to herself. “It would not have fallen—they knew it would not. It could not have fallen. It would never have fallen if they had not destroyed it. And even then—I was there when they pulled it down—each stone clung to each, with arms and legs and hands and claws, till they burst them asunder by main force with their new-fangled stuff—I don’t know what they call it—dynamite, or something. It was all of it done for one man’s vainglory!”

  “Come away, dear,” Mrs. West whispered. But Maisie loitered.

  “Wolverden Tower was fasted thrice,” the old woman continued, in a sing-song quaver. “It was fasted thrice with souls of maids against every assault of man or devil. It was fasted at the foundation against earthquake and ruin. It was fasted at the top against thunder and lightning. It was fasted in the middle against storm and battle. And there it would have stood for a thousand years if a wicked man had not raised a vainglorious hand against it. For that’s what the rhyme says—

  “Fasted thrice with souls of men,

  Stands the tower of Wolverden;

  Fasted thrice with maidens’ blood,

  A thousand years of fire and flood

  Shall see it stand as erst it stood.”

  She paused a moment, then, raising one skinny hand towards the brand-new stone, she went on in the same voice, but with malignant fervour—

  “A thousand years the tower shall stand

  Till ill assailed by evil hand;

  By evil hand in evil hour,

  Fasted thrice with warlock’s power,

  Shall fall the stanes of Wulfhere’s tower.”

  She tottered off as she ended, and took her seat on the edge of a depressed vault in the churchyard close by, still eyeing Maisie Llewelyn with a weird and curious glance, almost like the look which a famishing man casts upon the food in a shop-window.

  “Who is she?” Maisie asked, shrinking away in undefined terror.

  “Oh, old Bessie,” Mrs. West answered, looking more apologetic (for the parish) than ever. “She’s always hanging about here. She has nothing else to do, and she’s an outdoor pauper. You see, that’s the worst of having the church in one’s grounds, which is otherwise picturesque and romantic and baronial; the road to it’s public; you must admit all the world; and old Bessie will come here. The servants are afraid of her. They say she’s a witch. She has the evil eye, and she drives girls to suicide. But they cross her hand with silver all the same, and she tells them their fortunes—gives them each a butler. She’s full of dreadful stories about Wolverden Church—stories to make your blood run cold, my dear, compact with old superstitions and murders, and so forth. And they’re true, too, that’s the worst of them. She’s quite a character. Mr. Blaydes, the antiquary, is really attached to her; he says she’s now the sole living repository of the traditional folklore and history of the parish. But I don’t care for it myself. It ‘
gars one greet,’ as we say in Scotland. Too much burying alive in it, don’t you know, my dear, to quite suit my fancy.”

  They turned back as she spoke towards the carved wooden lych-gate, one of the oldest and most exquisite of its class in England. When they reached the vault by whose doors old Bessie was seated, Maisie turned once more to gaze at the pointed lancet windows of the Early English choir, and the still more ancient dog-tooth ornament of the ruined Norman Lady Chapel.

  “How solidly it’s built!” she exclaimed, looking up at the arches which alone survived the fury of the Puritan. “It really looks as if it would last for ever.”

  Old Bessie had bent her head, and seemed to be whispering something at the door of the vault. But at the sound she raised her eyes, and, turning her wizened face towards the lady of the manor, mumbled through her few remaining fang-like teeth an old local saying, “Bradbury for length, Wolverden for strength, and Church Hatton for beauty!

  “Three brothers builded churches three;

  And fasted thrice each church shall be:

  Fasted thrice with maidens’ blood,

  To make them safe from fire and flood;

  Fasted thrice with souls of men,

  Hatton, Bradbury, Wolverden!”

  “Come away,” Maisie said, shuddering. “I’m afraid of that woman. Why was she whispering at the doors of the vault down there? I don’t like the look of her.”

  “My dear,” Mrs. West answered, in no less terrified a tone, “I will confess I don’t like the look of her myself. I wish she’d leave the place. I’ve tried to make her. The Colonel offered her fifty pounds down and a nice cottage in Surrey if only she’d go—she frightens me so much; but she wouldn’t hear of it. She said she must stop by the bodies of her dead—that’s her style, don’t you see: a sort of modern ghoul, a degenerate vampire—and from the bodies of her dead in Wolverden Church no living soul should ever move her.”

  II

  For dinner Maisie wore her white satin Empire dress, high-waisted, low-necked, and cut in the bodice with a certain baby-like simplicity of style which exactly suited her strange and uncanny type of beauty. She was very much admired. She felt it, and it pleased her. The young man who took her in, a subaltern of engineers, had no eyes for any one else; while old Admiral Wade, who sat opposite her with a plain and skinny dowager, made her positively uncomfortable by the persistent way in which he stared at her simple pearl necklet.

  After dinner, the tableaux. They had been designed and managed by a famous Royal Academician, and were mostly got up by the members of the house-party. But two or three actresses from London had been specially invited to help in a few of the more mythological scenes; for, indeed, Mrs. West had prepared the entire entertainment with that topsy-turvy conscientiousness and scrupulous sense of responsibility to society which pervaded her view of millionaire morality. Having once decided to offer the county a set of tableaux, she felt that millionaire morality absolutely demanded of her the sacrifice of three weeks’ time and several hundred pounds money in order to discharge her obligations to the county with becoming magnificence.

  The first tableau, Maisie learned from the gorgeous programme, was “Jephthah’s Daughter.” The subject was represented at the pathetic moment when the doomed virgin goes forth from her father’s house with her attendant maidens to bewail her virginity for two months upon the mountains, before the fulfilment of the awful vow which bound her father to offer her up for a burnt offering. Maisie thought it too solemn and tragic a scene for a festive occasion. But the famous R.A. had a taste for such themes, and his grouping was certainly most effectively dramatic.

  “A perfect symphony in white and grey,” said Mr. Wills, the art critic.

  “How awfully affecting!” said most of the young girls.

  “Reminds me a little too much, my dear, of old Bessie’s stories,” Mrs. West whispered low, leaning from her seat across two rows to Maisie.

  A piano stood a little on one side of the platform, just in front of the curtain. The intervals between the pieces were filled up with songs, which, however, had been evidently arranged in keeping with the solemn and half-mystical tone of the tableaux. It is the habit of amateurs to take a long time in getting their scenes in order, so the interposition of the music was a happy thought as far as its prime intention went. But Maisie wondered they could not have chosen some livelier song for Christmas Eve than “Oh, Mary, go and call the cattle home, and call the cattle home, and call the cattle home, across the sands of Dee.” Her own name was Mary when she signed it officially, and the sad lilt of the last line, “But never home came she,” rang unpleasantly in her ear through the rest of the evening.

  The second tableau was the “Sacrifice of Iphigenia.” It was admirably rendered. The cold and dignified father, standing, apparently unmoved, by the pyre; the cruel faces of the attendant priests; the shrinking form of the immolated princess; the mere blank curiosity and inquiring interest of the helmeted heroes looking on, to whom this slaughter of a virgin victim was but an ordinary incident of the Achæan religion—all these had been arranged by the Academical director with consummate skill and pictorial cleverness. But the group that attracted Maisie most among the components of the scene was that of the attendant maidens, more conspicuous here in their flowing white chitons than even they had been when posed as companions of the beautiful and ill-fated Hebrew victim. Two in particular excited her close attention—two very graceful and spiritual-looking girls, in long white robes of no particular age or country, who stood at the very end near the right edge of the picture. “How lovely they are, the two last on the right!” Maisie whispered to her neighbour—an Oxford undergraduate with a budding moustache. “I do so admire them!”

  “Do you?” he answered, fondling the moustache with one dubious finger. “Well, now, do you know, I don’t think I do. They’re rather coarse-looking. And besides, I don’t quite like the way they’ve got their hair done up in bunches; too fashionable, isn’t it?—too much of the present day? I don’t care to see a girl in a Greek costume, with her coiffure so evidently turned out by Truefitt’s!”

  “Oh, I don’t mean those two,” Maisie answered, a little shocked he should think she had picked out such meretricious faces; “I mean the two beyond them again—the two with their hair so simply and sweetly done—the ethereal-looking dark girls.”

  The undergraduate opened his mouth, and stared at her in blank amazement for a moment. “Well, I don’t see——” he began, and broke off suddenly. Something in Maisie’s eye seemed to give him pause. He fondled his moustache, hesitated, and was silent.

  “How nice to have read the Greek and know what it all means!” Maisie went on, after a minute. “It’s a human sacrifice, of course; but, please, what is the story?”

  The undergraduate hummed and hawed. “Well, it’s in Eurip­ides, you know,” he said, trying to look impressive, “and—er—and I haven’t taken up Euripides for my next examination. But I think it’s like this. Iphigenia was a daughter of Agamemnon’s, don’t you know, and he had offended Artemis or somebody—some other goddess; and he vowed to offer up to her the most beautiful thing that should be born that year, by way of reparation—just like Jephthah. Well, Iphigenia was considered the most beautiful product of the particular twelvemonth—don’t look at me like that, please! you—you make me nervous—and so, when the young woman grew up—well, I don’t quite recollect the ins and outs of the details, but it’s a human sacrifice business, don’t you see; and they’re just going to kill her, though I believe a hind was finally substituted for the girl, like the ram for Isaac; but I must confess I’ve a very vague recollection of it.” He rose from his seat uneasily. “I’m afraid,” he went on, shuffling about for an excuse to move, “these chairs are too close. I seem to be incommoding you.”

  He moved away with a furtive air. At the end of the tableau one or two of the characters who were not needed in succeeding pieces came down from the stage and joined the body of spectators, as th
ey often do, in their character-dresses—a good opportunity, in point of fact, for retaining through the evening the advantages conferred by theatrical costume, rouge, and pearl-powder. Among them the two girls Maisie had admired so much glided quietly toward her and took the two vacant seats on either side, one of which had just been quitted by the awkward undergraduate. They were not only beautiful in face and figure, on a closer view, but Maisie found them from the first extremely sympathetic. They burst into talk with her, frankly and at once, with charming ease and grace of manner. They were ladies in the grain, in instinct and breeding. The taller of the two, whom the other addressed as Yolande, seemed particularly pleasing. The very name charmed Maisie. She was friends with them at once. They both possessed a certain nameless attraction that constitutes in itself the best possible introduction. Maisie hesitated to ask them whence they came, but it was clear from their talk they knew Wolverden intimately.

  After a minute the piano struck up once more. A famous Scotch vocalist, in a diamond necklet and a dress to match, took her place on the stage, just in front of the footlights. As chance would have it, she began singing the song Maisie most of all hated. It was Scott’s ballad of “Proud Maisie,” set to music by Carlo Ludovici—

  “Proud Maisie is in the wood,

  Walking so early;

  Sweet Robin sits on the bush,

  Singing so rarely.

  ‘Tell me, thou bonny bird,

  When shall I marry me?’

  ‘When six braw gentlemen

  Kirkward shall carry ye.’

  ‘Who makes the bridal bed,

  Birdie, say truly?’

  ‘The grey-headed sexton

  That delves the grave duly.

  ‘The glow-worm o’er grave and stone

  Shall light thee steady;

  The owl from the steeple sing,

  “Welcome, proud lady.” ’ ”

  Maisie listened to the song with grave discomfort. She had never liked it, and to-night it appalled her. She did not know that just at that moment Mrs. West was whispering in a perfect fever of apology to a lady by her side, “Oh dear! oh dear! what a dreadful thing of me ever to have permitted that song to be sung here to-night! It was horribly thoughtless! Why, now I remember, Miss Llewelyn’s name, you know, is Maisie!—and there she is listening to it with a face like a sheet! I shall never forgive myself!”