The Haunted House

by Hilaire Belloc

  “Get it right, boy,” she said. “Pop’s not crazy for the house, but he’ll be guided. D’you get me?”

  “No,” said John Maple bluntly, “I don’t.”

  Bo sighed at the obtuseness of men: but it was a safeguard (she thought) all the same, so she went on patiently and contentedly:

  “The Proud Dame of Rackham can obtain of the Baron, my father, what boon she craves, fond youth. He’d refuse her nothing, wouldn’t Pop. Wait till you see him with her. ’Sides which, he’s told me.”

  “Good God!” said John again, but more emphatically and with troubled wonder.

  “Don’t pray too much the same,” commented the Damsel, “it takes the pep out.” And she looked at him benignly and in quiet triumph.

  John’s head whirled. Things were coming altogether too quickly. And how could Bo already know such things when he, the son of the house, had noticed nothing? It offended his pride.

  But if John were wise he would rejoice to learn so early in life what most men learn too late: that women know the secret workings of the mind; that men do not; that women are the informants of men, and that the wisest men are those who learn through women.

  “And what does Aunt Hilda say about it?” was John’s next question when he had recovered from his shock.

  “Not much yet,” said Bo. “Pop’s shy. He’s not said anything. But he will, and if he finds that buying the place at her price is a persuasive, why, he won’t look twice at her figure; I mean her demand, her estimate. Though I guess it’s hell-high.”

  A cataract of consequences was pouring before John Maple’s mind. Aunt Hilda as a mother-in-law was a formidable prospect. But then—a consoling recollection—Bo could stand up to six mothers-in-law of her weight.… But if Lord Hellup nourished such plans of belated re-mating, that would mean his living at Rackham.… No.… Perhaps Aunt Hilda would angle for the money first—and get it. Even so Lord Hellup was in the market, and how could he, John, compete with a man so wealthy and in such a mood? If the other millionaire was after it the thing was hopeless.”

  “You’re sure the Huggins’s are after it, Bo?” he said at length.

  “She is. Lady Mere de Beaurivage is—Amathea is. She doesn’t hide it. She’s talked of it all around. That’s how Aunt Hilda knows.”

  “Well, then,” said poor John, “it’s all up. The price will go to anything if they’re both after it, and I’m down and out,” and he leant back in despair.

  Bo smiled at him serenely.

  “You’ve got to be after it too,” she said. “Name your price.”

  “Do you mean …” John began incredulously, with a rising anger in him, “that you are offering me …?” He remembered—for the first time in weeks—the fortune her mother had left her.

  “Nope,” answered Bo imperturbably. “I’m not offering any damn thing. You’re offering, Jacko.”

  “But I’ve nothing,” said John.

  Bo sighed wearily.

  “I’ll tell the world,” she said, “that you’re Dumb Dorah’s little brother. Boobs buy before they sell. But this dazzling boy sells before he buys. Leastways, Isabeau Hellup does. Yes.”

  “I don’t understand,” said John.

  “So?” cooed Bo sympathetically. “Well, now, catch this: Buy with the money you’ve got, if you’ve got it, and you have to do without your money. But buy without money, and there’s no expense at all. All good. D’ye get me? What’s the Catchings worth?”

  “For heaven’s sake, Bo,” he exploded, “don’t call Rackham ‘the Catchings!’ … I don’t know what Rackham’s worth now they’ve spoilt it, and I don’t care. I shall pay twenty thousand when I’ve got twenty thousand; that’s the very most conceivable that anyone can say I owe Aunt Hilda—or rather my Uncle William, her dead husband—and I’ve a right to Rackham for ever when I’ve paid that back. I’ll pay that, and not a penny more—when I’ve got it.… God knows when—but when I’ve got it.…”

  “You’ve got it now, boy,” said Bo.

  “You mean …?” said John, frowning, suspicious again that she was hinting at helping him.

  “Naw, I don’t. I don’t mean me and I don’t mean Pop. I mean that any man that got Rackham Catchings—beg pardon, Rackham—for £20,000, has got all that and perhaps £10,000 more, perhaps another twenty more thousand. Got it in his lill’ wallet.” And then did Bo with hereditary talent explain to this child of an English squire how purchase is made without money, and how in the modern world we buy not with what we have but with the folly or the error or the precipitation of others. If he got his aunt to accept £20,000 for the house in Sussex, and if the option was firm, and in writing, not even the caution of the most cautious lawyer would boggle at finding the £20,000 for him on such security.

  “But she won’t fall for it,” went on Bo, shaking her head. “We’re all fools, and Aunt Hilda’s a large one; but not that out-size. No, boy! That kind’s got to be made to contract.”

  John saw daylight.

  “I shall offer Aunt Hilda £20,000,” he said firmly, “and somehow or other I’ll see that she gets it—and not a penny more. And I’ll see that I get Rackham when that’s done.”

  “Bold Babe,” said Bo gently. “Don’t I wish I could bite off a bit of the under-write!”

  But John knew nothing of such jargon.

  Then did that businesslike young person get up without a word, go across to the writing-table and come back with a wad of large blank paper, an ink-pot and a pen.

  “It isn’t headed,” she said—she thought of everything. Then she began to write and murmured the words for his enlightenment.

  “THE HOTEL SPLENDIDE.

  “That’s where you’re writing from, Jacko. You’re getting on.

  ‘DEAR AUNT HILDA,

  ‘We have often spoken of this matter and I am afraid it wounds you …’ (It does wound her, doesn’t it, Jacko? Poor old thing then!) ‘I’m afraid it wounds you. But you know my own feeling and I cannot be silent further upon the matter. That is why I write this. I want to get it down in black-and-white. You know, when I first offered you £20,000 for Rackham you only laughed at me. She did, didn’t she, Dog-Man?”

  “I should rather have called it Scorn than laughter,” said the Master of six Hounds. “Hot, withering scorn. She said I hadn’t got twenty-thousand pence.”

  “That’s a lie, anyway,” answered Bo. “Why, the ring you gave me was worth more ’n that.” She made a rapid calculation of the pounds in twenty thousand pence on the blotter and then shook her head. “No, not a quarter. Anyway, you’re worth more than twenty thousand pence, Jacko?”

  He nodded.

  “But no £20,000 pounds yet awhile. No matter. On with the dance. Let joy be unconfined,” and she continued writing.

  “‘I now make you a firm offer of £20,000 for Rackham. Ten per cent. on acceptance, the balance on completion; or alternatively an immediate three months’ bill for same on signing enclosed.

  “Your affectionate nephew.’”

  She looked up triumphantly.

  “That’s what’s called the Covering Letter, Jacko.”

  John Maple gazed at her in awe.

  “At your age!” he said.

  “It’s all straight, Jacko. I got it out of a book—oh, I forgot—” and she wrote the word “Enclosure” on the top left-hand corner of the document, “and it’s best,” she added, “to get a little star of red paper, gummed, with the word “Enclosure” and stick it outside the envelope. They all do it.”

  John Maple’s awe increased.

  “Now for that enclosure, Jacko. Oh! It’s dead easy!”

  She wrote on another sheet, again murmuring her words:

  “MY DEAR JOHN,

  “I have your letter. After full consideration of your offer of £20,000 for Rackham I have decided to accept it and hereby do so.

  “Your affectionate Aunt.”

  “Then, Jacko, she shall sign on the dotted line.”

  “Bo,” said John
Maple honestly, “I’m frightened of you.”

  “Which is as should be. Now, Jacko, you take these papers, and when you get out go straight down and get ’em in triplicate and mail the top copy to Aunt Hilda—with the enclosure. Keep the two others. She’ll get that letter and that enclosure before you reach there. She’ll get it first mail tomorrow—and then you can take her first reactions. It’s always useful. We come in the next day; and then the plot thickens. Will you obey, Dog-Man?”

  “Oh, yes,” said John Maple in a whirl, “I’ll do what I’m told, but why should Aunt Hilda accept?—with all that other money before her?”

  Isabeau Hellup leant back in her chair gazing away from the papers before her through the club window at the park with folded hands. Her face had changed and taken on religion.

  “I hope the Almighty won’t be hard on me,” she sighed. “Rackham’s yours morally, isn’t it, Jacko?”

  “Yes,” answered John Maple doggedly.

  “Then I guess I’m doing right—we ‘re doing right, I mean.… You remember when you told me you’d acted the ventriloquist? You remember how you made the chimney talk that night at the Bakehams’?”

  “Yes,” said John.

  Bo leant forward and spoke in a lower voice.

  “You remember Aunt Hilda wanting a ghost at Rackham, and how you told me and how angry you were? This winter? Jest after you’d left her?”

  “Yes,” said John, “I can’t bear to think of it.”

  Bo lowered her voice almost to a whisper.

  “We’ll haunt ’em!” she said to him. “We’ll haunt ’em good and hard—and then, Jacko,” she leant back again with a conquering smile on her face, “then Rackham’s yours for the asking.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “You will,” she nodded.

  She looked at the watch on her wrist, which was of a most extraordinary shape, six-sided and set round with an enormous number of very small diamonds; its dial also was far too small. She rose with abruptness and tugged Lovey-Lad to his feet. They went out together.

  “Well, Jacko,” she said by way of delicate leave-taking in the street, “we meet again in the Khyber Pass.” It was a phrase she had learned from a book. She did not know that it dated. And off she sailed.

  As for John Maple, he did just what he was told. He went to the Splendide. He bagged a wad of their paper. He dictated both documents to the goddess of that roof who transcribes upon her typewriter the correspondence of guests. He signed the letter and posted it with its enclosure to Aunt Hilda. That was the Thursday. On the morrow afternoon he was due to go down to Sussex. But Aunt Hilda would already have had his letter before he came. She would get it by the first post.

  He would have time “to take her reactions” before the morrow should bring the three lords, the two millionaires and the light of his own eyes to what he was more than ever determined should be their home.

  Of Lord Hambourne John did know something, for one of his boyhood’s English friends whom he had made in Switzerland and who had gone to Oriel was always laughing at him. It seemed that they called him “Hambone”—not a very subtle jest, but sufficient for a victim of that calibre. It also seemed that they did not like him. They thought he was a cad. They thought he spied upon them. His stammer they forgave, for that went with his profession. But what they did not forgive were sundry paragraphs in the Yellow Press of London concerning the university, which came—as they had got to know in a round-about manner—from that distinguished professor. They were not fond of his charlatanism either. There is charlatanism and charlatanism; and a Professorship of Psychology was more than the ingenuous undergraduate soul could stomach. The youth of Oxford suspected that it was impossible to profess Psychology—it was enormously right. They did not know that even in that department of humbug Lord Hambourne had not read a tithe of what his continental colleagues would have read. But they had a vague feeling that there was something wrong. And there was: as there is with the history, the philosophy, and a good many other things connected with that ancient seat of learning.

  He puzzled a little over why Aunt Hilda should have asked so poor a man for that decisive week-end. But Bo could have told him. Aunt Hilda had two reasons. First, a lord was a lord, and lords more lordly are not easily lured to such houses as Rackham. Next, Lord Hambourne had lineage—of a sort—and the other lords would be impressed.

  And who was Lord Mere de Beaurivage? John Maple, in the ignorance and folly of youth, had jumped—as youth in its ignorance and folly does jump—to absurd conclusions. He had got his distorted picture from the conversations of others almost as young as himself. How different it was from the truth my reader shall soon learn. John had a vulgar foolish caricature in his mind of innumerable new peers shamelessly, forcing themselves into their rank by bribery during the end of the war. There are none such. It is an illusion. John saw, in that imaginary host of vulgarians one vulgarian in no way distinguished from the rest called “Old Bruvvish.” He was wildly wrong. George, First Baron Mere de Beaurivage (pronounced “Bruvvish”) was unique.

  John had heard just enough gossip to have told you that remarkable man’s family name before his elevation to the peerage, or barony—if you will. It was, as we have heard, Huggins. No doubt John Maple, proud of his three or four generations of declining squire’s wealth (himself, remember, sprung from the cattle-dealer) would have sneered at the origins of George Adolphus Huggins, First Baron Mere de Beaurivage—and that, I think, is a very good example of how little men know themselves and their antecedents. For George Adolphus Huggins, as my reader will learn in a moment, well merited the great position which he had taken step by step with a few hundreds of others in the social leadership of Britain.

  From first feeling of Rackham as an ideal Lady de Beaurivage had come to dwell on it as it was in real bricks and timber. She heard rumours that Hilda might conceivably sell—but Hilda had seen that those rumours should be mixed with accounts of her passionate attachment to the place and her reluctance to leave it. And Hilda had heard rumours that Amathea was in the market. She had not laboured in vain—but time pressed.

  Anyhow, John was in for it. He was to go down to Rackham that week-end, and he was to meet with what I suppose I may call, for the purposes of my narrative, The Three Peers.

  (They were all Barons, by the way. Since the American invasion even English gentlemen have begun to distinguish between Barons, Earls, Viscounts and Marquesses. They always did distinguish Dukes: but to return to my black sheep.)

  The Three Peers … Lord Hellup was, after all, Bo’s father, and what’s more, he had snap. John both admired and got on with him—in spite of too much quotation from Motley’s Dutch Republic, which that well-read man perpetually carried in his pocket in a cheap edition, now one volume, now another, feasting his mind upon the heroic conduct of commercial men in their resistance to mere soldiers.

  Lord Hambourne he knew all about at secondhand. Lord Mere de Beaurivage, as I have said, he misjudged. But after all, the boy was less to blame than those who had taught him this disrespectful way of regarding so great a man.

  Well, he would play up to them all.

  But it is time that I dissipated in my reader’s mind John’s misapprehension of Lord Mere de Beaurivage, and, if she will excuse me, I will now proceed to give her a true estimate of that considerable English peer.

  Chapter VI

  George Adolphus Huggins was born in a small street off the Old Kent-Road early in the 60’s of the last century. His first introduction to commercial life was made at the age of twelve as assistant to his father Jack, or, as one tradition has it, Jim Huggins, who sold fruit and vegetables from a barrow in that neighbourhood.

  Upon the early demise of both his parents young Mr. Huggins took over the business, which remained undeveloped to close upon his fortieth year. Long before that he had married Matilda, or, as she was later called, Amathea, the daughter of another gentleman and lady in the same branch of commerce:
a strong, full-bodied, upstanding young woman of whom he was very proud, and whose advice in all matters not connected with barter and exchange he was ready to follow. They were contented enough with their lot, suffered no more than the average number of conflicts with their neighbours, and but rarely allowed these to develop into physical violence.

  So late, therefore, as the beginning of King Edward’s reign there was nothing to distinguish the genius of George Adolphus Huggins. He seemed to be but one costermonger among so many in the great business life of London. But shortly after the end of the Boer War and King Edward’s Coronation appeared those manifestations of the exceptional power which is latent in every great man, and is bound to express itself at last, however tardily.

  Mr. Huggins, having been chosen for unpaid secretary of a Goose Club which enjoyed a large membership, found himself in the decline of the year 1902 possessed of a very considerable capital in trust. Indeed, it was far more than all his own stock-in-trade was worth, and it is a great tribute to his sterling qualities that he should have been entrusted thus by his neighbours with so responsible a task.

  Rightly judging that it was imprudent to keep so much money loose, he took the advice of a friend somewhat superior in social position, a pawnbroker from Kipling Street (late Nelson Street), and through his introduction deposited the money in a bank until that expenditure or division among the members of the club—known in the Old Kent Road as “share-out”—should fall due at Christmas.

  At this point took place an episode on which I have found it very difficult to get exact information, for there are contradictory versions.

  There is no doubt that the account at the bank had been opened in the joint names of Mr. Huggins himself and his friend, Mr. Lawson, the pawnbroker of the neighbourhood. Mr. Lawson for many years complained in his own circle that he had been defrauded, nor did the complaints cease until some arrangement was made by the lawyers of Sir George Huggins (as he had then become) long after the date of the transaction I am about to describe. We have Mr. Lawson’s own vigorous and repeated statement that it was by his advice the speculation was made, as how could that poor fellow Huggins have known anything about it? While he, Lawson, had had the tip straight from his cousin, who was clerk in a broker’s office and had obtained early inside information upon the approaching amalgamation of Paley’s Brewery with Gatton’s.