The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories

by Simon Stern

  “I’d like to see anyone get a horse up the turret stairs,” snorted Sir Hugo. “Let us go to the gap and see how they’re getting on. The girl daren’t look round; she doesn’t know which is the nearer.”

  Lady Follett began to breathe hoarsely as the wind rushed through her spectral ribs.

  “Don’t,” said Sir Hugo, somewhat roughly. “Have you no sense of decorum?”

  “I—I—ca-can’t hel-ll-p it,” sobbed Lady Follett. “That long-­legged fair man is creeping in advance of the other. Look at his teeth in the moonlight.”

  “I don’t want to look at his teeth,” growled Sir Hugo; “I want to smash his skull in with a battle-axe.”

  “Hugo,” said Lady Follett suddenly, as Miss Follett flew round, Fairfax fifteen yards behind her, “I can’t help it. I can’t help it. At the risk of being thought unladylike, I—I’m going to interfere.”

  “What’s the good of interfering? We can’t do anything. That dark fellow’s getting pumped. No wonder, if he sat up half last night listening to old Follett’s stories. It would put anyone at a disadvantage. It isn’t fair, I say. Silly young ass! He’ll lose the girl! Bravo! Bravo! He’s spurting like one—I mean he’s gaining a little.”

  Lady Follett groaned. “Oh, no, he’s falling behind again. The girl is tired. Hugo, Hugo, at the risk of incurring your displeasure I—I’m going to interfere.”

  She waited until Fairfax rushed by, sprang lightly on the step of the bicycle, and began to blow with chilly emphasis right down his spine.

  A deadly chill shot through Fairfax. He faltered, then continued to hold the bar of his bicycle with one hand, and turned up his coat-collar.

  Lady Follett dropped off with a groan. “I’ve disgraced myself by catching hold of a strange man,” she whispered. “And he’s going faster than ever.”

  “Now it’s my turn,” growled Sir Hugo. “Another five seconds, and we shall be too late. Holy St. Wencelaus, I’ve always behaved myself as a ghost since you sent me to purgatory to expiate my sins. I know I was a tolerably bad lot when alive; but I’ve never done anything since. Think of the draughty, mouldy time I’ve had all these years! Let me materialise just for ten seconds. That’s all I ask. Ten seconds.”

  Holy St. Wencelaus, the patron saint of all true lovers, was moved to pity by Sir Hugo’s prayer. “So be it,” a voice said softly, as Pennell plodded by, with aching calves and a desperate look in his dark eyes. “So be it; but it means an extra hundred years of this.”

  The knight groaned. “Oh, very well. I’m not going to see her marry that beast,” he said. “My dear, do you consent? Another hundred years? Think of the misery of it, the dull, damp, mouldy misery of it! Quick, or I shall be too late. The girl’s nearly pumped.”

  “I consent,” said Lady Follett. “Rather than that dear girl should be sacrificed to this Fairfax man I’d—I’d marry him myself.”

  Sir Hugo pressed her fleshless hand. “Move on a bit, my dear, and give me room,” he said tenderly.

  Miss Follett dashed by, with a strained anxious look in her eyes. The victorious Fairfax was within ten yards of her, Pennell a long way behind.

  Suddenly a giant grisly form, clad in a rusty armour, and holding a long two-handed sword, stepped from behind the chimney-stack as Miss Follett dashed round, put the two-handed sword between the wheels of Fairfax’s bicycle, and heaved it over the battlements. Then it stepped back, and the victorious Pennell, panting up behind, laid his hand upon Clare Follett’s shoulder.

  An oath sounded a few feet below from the gnarled and clustering ivy which spread over the scanty tree tops. Then a head gradually appeared above the battlement, and Fairfax climbed up, grinning with rage. “You hired that brute to upset me,” he shouted at Pennell. “I’ll be even with you some day.”

  “What brute?” asked Pennell. “There’s no one here.”

  “I distinctly saw a tall man in armour come from behind that chimney-stack and upset me with his infernal sword.”

  They rushed to the chimney-stack, but there was no one there.

  Clare gave a little shriek of delight. “It must have been dear Sir Hugo’s ghost. The battlements belong to him. Dear, dear Sir Hugo!”

  Sir Hugo offered his arm to Lady Follett, and strutted round the battlements with a smile upon his grim lips. She said, “Dear Sir Hugo.”

  “Then it must have been his hag of a wife who blew down my throat and paralysed me,” said Fairfax, with a scowl.

  “If you must insult the memory of that lady, I’ll throw you right over the battlements,” said Pennell hotly. “So beautiful a woman as she was when alive must be exquisite, even as a ghost. Heaven rest the souls of both of them and give them peace.”

  “Hugo! Hugo! Where are you? I—I’m going,” cried Lady Follett.

  “I am with you,” said a tender voice in her ear. “Holy St. Wencelaus has heard our prayer.”

  WALNUT-TREE HOUSE by Mrs. J. H. Riddell

  A Ghost Story

  CHAPTER I

  THE NEW OWNER

  Many years ago there stood at the corner of a street leading out of Upper Kennington-lane a great red brick mansion, which one very wet evening, in an autumn the leaves of which have been long dead and gone, looked more than ordinarily desolate and deserted.

  There was not a sign of life about it. For seven years no one had been found to live in it; for seven years it had remained empty, while its owner wore out existence in fits of moody dejection or of wild frenzy in the madhouse close at hand; and now that owner was dead and buried and forgotten, and the new owner was returning to take possession. This new owner had written to his lawyers, or rather he had written to the lawyers of his late relative, begging them to request the person in charge of the house to have rooms prepared for his arrival; and, when the train drew into the station, he was met by one of Messrs. Timpson and Co.’s clerks, who, picking out Mr. Stainton, delivered to that gentleman a letter from the firm, and said he would wait to hear if there were any message in reply.

  Mr. Stainton read the letter—looked at the blank flyleaf—and then, turning back to the first words, read what his solicitors had to say all through once again.

  “Humph,” said the new owner, after he had finished. “I’ll go and take a look at the place, anyhow. Is it far from here, do you know?” he asked, turning to the young man from Timpson’s.

  “No, Sir; not very far.”

  “Can you spare time to go over there with me?” inquired Mr. Stainton.

  The young man believed that he could, adding, “If you want to go into the house we had better call for the key. It is at an estate agent’s in the Westminster Bridge-road.”

  “I cannot say I have any great passion for hotels,” remarked the new owner, as he took his seat in the cab.

  “Indeed, Sir.”

  “No; either they don’t suit me, or I don’t suit them. I have led a wild sort of life; not much civilisation in the bush, or at the gold-fields, I can tell you. Then, I have not been well, and I can’t stand noise and the trampling of feet. I had enough of that on board ship; and I used to lie awake at nights and think how pleasant it would be to have a big house all to myself, to do as I liked in.”

  “Yes, Sir,” agreed the clerk.

  “You see, I have been accustomed to roughing it, and I can get along very well for a night without servants.”

  “No doubt, Sir.”

  “I suppose the house is in substantial repair—roof tight, and all that sort of thing?”

  “I can’t say, I am sure, Sir.”

  “Well, if there is a dry corner where I can spread a rug, I shall sleep there to-night.”

  The clerk coughed. He looked out of the window, and then he looked at Messrs. Timpson’s client.

  “I do not think——” he began apologetically, and then stopped.

  “You don’t think what?” asked the other.

  “You’ll excuse me, Sir, but I don’t think—I really do not think, if I were you, I’d stay in that ho
use to-night.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, it has not been slept in for nearly seven years, and it must be blue mouldy with damp; and if you have been ill, that is all the more reason you should not run such a risk. And besides——”

  “Besides——” suggested Mr. Stainton; “Out with it! No doubt, that ‘besides’ holds the marrow of the argument.”

  “The house has stood empty for years, Sir, because—there is no use in making any secret of it—the place has a bad name.”

  “What sort of a bad name—unhealthy?”

  “Oh, no!”

  “Haunted?”

  The clerk inclined his head. “You have hit it, Sir,” he said.

  “And that is the reason no one has lived there?”

  “We have been quite unable to let the house on that account.”

  “The sooner it gets unhaunted, then, the better,” retorted Mr. Stainton. “I shall certainly stop there to-night. You are not disposed to stay and keep me company, I suppose?”

  With a little gesture of dismay the clerk drew back. Certainly, this was one of the most unconventional of clients. The young man from Timpson’s did not at all know what to make of him.

  “A rough sort of fellow,” he said afterwards, when describing the new owner; “boorish; never mixed with good society, that sort of thing.”

  He did not in the least understand this rich man, who treated him as an equal, who objected to hotels, who did not mind taking up his abode in a house where not even a drunken charwoman could be induced to stop, and who calmly asked a stranger on whom he had never set eyes before—a clerk in the respectable office of Timpson and Co., a young fellow anxious to rise in the world, careful as to his associates, particular about the whiteness of his shirts and the set of his collar and the cut of his coats—to “rough” things with him in that dreadful old dungeon, where perhaps he might even be expected to light a fire.

  Still, he did not wish to offend the new owner. Messrs. Timpson anticipated he would be a profitable client; and to that impartial firm the money of a boor would, he knew, seem as good as the money of a Count.

  “I am very sorry,” he stammered; “should only have felt too much honoured; but the fact is—previous engagement——”

  Mr. Stainton laughed.

  “I understand,” he said. “Adventures are quite as much out of your line as ghosts. And now tell me about this apparition. Does the ‘old man’ walk?”

  “Not that I ever heard of,” answered the other.

  “Is it, then, the miserable beggar who tried to do for himself?”

  “It is not the late Mr. Stainton, I believe,” said the young man, in a tone which mildly suggested that reference to a client of Timpson’s as a “miserable beggar” might be considered bad taste.

  “Then who on earth is it?” persisted Mr. Stainton.

  “If you must know, Sir, it is a child—a child who has driven every tenant in succession out of the house.”

  The new owner burst into a hearty laugh—a laugh which gave serious offence to Timpson’s clerk.

  “That is too good a joke,” said Mr. Stainton. “I do not know when I heard anything so delicious.”

  “It is a fact, whether it be delicious or not,” retorted the young man, driven out of all his former propriety of voice and demeanour by the contemptuous ridicule this “digger” thought fit to cast on his story; “and I, for one, would not, after all I have heard about your house, pass a night in it—no, not if anybody offered me fifty pounds down.”

  “Make your mind easy, my friend,” said the new owner, quietly. “I am not going to bid for your company. The child and I can manage, I’ll be bound, to get on very comfortably by ourselves.”

  CHAPTER II

  THE CHILD

  It was later on in the same evening; Mr. Stainton had an hour previously taken possession of Walnut-Tree House, bidden Timpson’s clerk good-evening, and, having ordered in wood and coals from the nearest greengrocer, he now stood by the front gate waiting the coming of the goods purchased.

  As he waited, he looked up at the house, which in the uncertain light of the street lamps appeared gloomier and darker than had been the case even in the gathering twilight.

  “It has an ‘uncanny’ look, certainly,” he considered; “but once I can get a good fire up I shall be all right. Now, I wonder when those coals are coming!”

  As he turned once again towards the road, he beheld on its way the sack of fuel with which the nearest greengrocer said he thought he could—indeed, said he would—“oblige” him. A ton—half a ton—quarter of a ton, the greengrocer affirmed would be impossible until the next day; but a sack—yes—he would promise that. Bill should bring it round; and Bill was told to put his burden on the truck, and twelve bundles of wood, “and we’ll make up the rest to-morrow,” added Bill’s master, with the air of one who has conferred a favour.

  In the distance Mr. Stainton descried a very grimy Bill, and a very small boy, coming along with the truck leisurely, as though the load had been Herculean.

  Through the rain he watched the pair advancing, and greeted Bill with a glad voice of welcome.

  “So you’ve come at last; that’s right. Better late than never. Bring them this way, I’ll have this small lot shot in the kitchen for the night.”

  “Begging your pardon, Sir,” answered Bill, “I don’t think you will—that is to say, not by me. As I told our governor, I’ll take ’em to the house as you’ve sold ’em to the house, but I won’t set a foot inside it.”

  “Do you mean to say you are going to leave them out on the pavement,” asked Mr. Stainton.

  “Well, Sir, I don’t mind taking them to the front door if it’ll be a convenience.”

  “That will do. You are a brave lot of people in these parts I must say.”

  “As for that,” retorted Bill, with sack on back and head bent forward, “I dare say we’re as brave about here as where you come from.”

  “It is not impossible,” retorted Mr. Stainton; “there are plenty of cowards over there too.”

  After he had shot his coals on the margin of the steps, Bill retreated from the door, which stood partly open, and when the boy who brought up the wood was again out with the truck, said, putting his knuckles to his eyebrows—

  “Beg pardon, Sir, but I suppose you wouldn’t give me a drop of beer. Very wet night, Sir.”

  “No, I would not,” answered Mr. Stainton, very decidedly. “I shall have to shovel these coals into the house myself; and as for the night, it is as wet for me as it is for you.”

  Nevertheless, as Bill shuffled along the short drive—shuffling wearily—like a man who, having nearly finished one day’s hard work, was looking forward to beginning another hard day in the morning, the new owner relented.

  “Here,” he said, picking out a sixpence to give him, “it isn’t your fault, I suppose, that you believe in old women’s tales.”

  “Thank you kindly, Sir,” Bill answered; “I am sure I am extremely obliged; but if I was in your shoes I wouldn’t stop in that house—you’ll excuse me, Sir, meaning no offence—but I wouldn’t; indeed I wouldn’t.”

  “It seems to have got a good name, at any rate,” thought Mr. Stainton, while retracing his steps to the banned tenement. “Let us see what effect a fire will have in routing the shadows.”

  He entered the house, and, striking a match, lighted some candles he had brought in with him from a neighbouring oil-shop.

  After an inspection of the ground-floor rooms he decided to take up his quarters for the night in one which had evidently served as a library.

  In the centre of the apartment there was the table covered with leather. Around the walls were bookcases. In one corner stood a bureau, where the man who for so many years had been dead even while living kept his letters and papers.

  He ate his frugal supper, and then, pushing aside the table on which the remains of his repast were spread, began walking slowly up and down the room, thinking ove
r the past and forming plans for the future. Buried in reflection, the fire began to die down without his noticing the fact; but a feeling of chilliness at length causing him instinctively to look towards the hearth, he threw wood into the grate, and, while the flames went blazing up the wide chimney, piled on coals as though he desired to set the house alight.

  While he was so engaged there came a knock at the door of the room—a feeble, hesitating knock, which was repeated more than once before it attracted Mr. Stainton’s attention.

  When it did, being still busy with the fire, and forgetting he was alone in the house, he called out, “Come in.”

  Along the panels there stole a rustling sort of touch, as if someone were feeling uncertainly for the handle—a curious noise, as of a weak hand fumbling about the door in the dark; then, in similar manner, the person seeking admittance tried to turn the lock.

  “Come in, can’t you?” repeated Mr. Stainton; but even as he spoke he remembered he was, or ought to be, the sole occupant of the mansion. He was not alarmed, he was too much accustomed to solitude and danger for that; but he rose from his stooping position and instinctively seized his revolver, which he had chanced, while unpacking some of his effects, to place on the top of the bureau.

  “Come in, whoever you are,” he cried; but seeing the door still remained closed, though the intruder was evidently making futile efforts to open it, he strode half way across the room, and then stopped amazed.

  For suddenly the door opened, and there entered, shyly and timidly a little child—a child with the saddest face mortal ever beheld; a child with wistful eyes and long, ill-kept hair; a child poorly dressed, wasted and worn, and with the mournfullest expression on its countenance that face of child ever wore.

  “What a hungry-looking little beggar,” thought Mr. Stainton. “Well, young one, and what do you want here?” he added aloud.

  The boy never answered, never took the slightest notice of his questioner, but simply walked slowly round the room, peering into all the corners, as if looking for something. Searching the embrasures of the windows, examining the recesses beside the fire-place, pausing on the hearth to glance under the library table, and finally, when the doorway was reached once more, turning round to survey the contents of the apartment with an eager and yet hopeless scrutiny.