by Simon Stern
She was evidently not disposed to be communicative to me, the only answer she vouchsafed to my earnest inquiries was “Sae ye have seen the mist village, have ye? Aye, aye, be thankfu’ ye cam’ oot o’ it sound o’ limb, nae seek tae enter it again: ’tis dead—dead—I tell ye, sure ’twas a gruesome tale—now Nance, shut thy mouth, child, and tend the lavender yonder.” And Nance only managed to elude the pointed exhortation of the rake by a nimble spring over the watering can.
I have often since pondered over my strange experience that day on the Mendip Hills.
Was it but a wraith after all—or “mist village,” as old Sarah had called it?
I cannot tell, but next year I must search again for the village which seemed so suddenly and utterly to have vanished from human ken.
OLD SIMONS’ GHOST! by Anonymous
Old Simons was the meanest and shabbiest old man alive, and living alone on the second floor, the general idea was he had heaps of money. He never showed any; he never spent any; he never paid what he owed until pressure was put upon him, and very frequently he did not pay even then. Earls Court was not at any time inclined to be dressy, but, at the sight of old Simons’ squalor, the other tenants rose as one man and cried shame on him.
You who have travelled often up and down by Five Points in Bowery, may have noticed Earls Court,—a small collection of shabby little tenements, over which reigned a gentle melancholy few but the residents therein—for the turning leading to it led nowhere else—cared to disturb.
Sometimes a stray dog tempted by the promise of grateful shade, turned from the noonday sun, strolled in, and stretched himself out for a sleep. One of these wandering mongrels—who had seen better days, perhaps, and mixed with good company—took dire umbrage at Simons’ rags one day, and shook them for him vigorously, until the keeper came to the old man’s rescue, and forcibly expelled the breaker of the peace.
When he got his breath again, old Simons turned upon his benefactor.
“How came you to let the dog in?”
“I didn’t, sir; he came in by himself.”
“It was your place to see he didn’t come in, then. What do you suppose I pay you for?”
“You don’t pay me, sir.”
“What do you suppose I owe it for you, then?”
“I don’t know, sir; it puts me to a deal of inconvenience.”
“You think that’s smart, perhaps; but I shall make you pay for my coat.”
“As long as you don’t make me wear it, sir.”
“Don’t be impudent. It’s my opinion you set the dog on to bite me.”
“I’m sure I didn’t do that, sir. For my part, I can’t think however he could have made his mind up to do it.”
With which remark the dialogue terminated rather abruptly, and old Simons retired to his rooms to think it over.
Except that old Simons lived upon the second floor, and kept a clerk, very little was known of him, except, again, that the clerk was a highly objectionable member of the Earls Court community.
The nature of Simons’ business was anything but clear to those whose business it hardly was to inquire; and a misty vagueness enveloped his clerk’s duties not easily fathomable by the outer world. Except that he sat on a stool, in a sort of little cage, under a skylight, as though he were some sort of choice but ugly plant in process of forcing, but little was known of him.
Except that he made lots of blots. And wondrous was the way in which he squirted ink upon surrounding objects, and carefully shut up blots in day-books and ledgers, and systematically entered smears of all shapes and sizes in various volumes under his care, indexing the same with smeared references to other pages full of scattered ink.
To rectify, to some extent, an obscurity naturally attendant upon this wholesome blotting, it was the habit of this clerk to use his “scratcher” with praiseworthy assiduity, so that a sort of nibbling sound, resembling the gnawing of a rat, frequently struck upon the ear of passers-by upon the stairs, when Simons’ outer door stood ajar, and set them wondering what on earth could be the occupation of the Simons minion, partly visible by an artful side view through the keyhole of the inner door.
As may be presumed, from the fact of so slight a noise reaching the passers-by, a profound silence prevailed in Earls Court, even in the busiest hours of the day; but at midnight the stillness of the place had something almost awful in it.
Left alone by himself, the friendless old man must have had a dreary time of it,—and for that reason was it, perhaps, that he had engaged the services of the clerk to keep him company, under a pretence of business.
The clerk, called Bruff, and distinguishable by the fancy name of Artful, was by nature of a sociable and even rollicking turn, with much inmate playfulness of disposition, manifested in harmless pleasantries at the expense of other residents in the Court, though more especially the man in charge of the gate.
The relation of “them antics of that there Artful,” formed no mean portion of the discourse of the laundress who had charge of the block to which Simons’ set belonged; whilst the phrase of “Oh, that there’s Simons’ Artful,” accounted fully for anything having gone wrong without the trouble of lengthy explanation.
To while away those of his business hours that hung heaviest on his hands, Artful would invoke undecided snatches of music from an instrument of his own invention, fashioned, with much cunning, out of broken nibs of steel pens imbedded in the wood of his desk. From this a little twanging sort of tune could be extracted with some labour, resembling in jerkiness the uncertain results deliverable from a musical toy-omnibus; and he also practised upon a tin whistle with a perseverance that would have been praise-worthy, had not the neighbours found it such a nuisance.
But even Artful’s natural buoyancy of spirits was not proof against the dreariness of Simons’ set, which became an irksome prison-house, wherein the bloom of Artful’s youth seemed seriously threatened. Bottled up here in a horrible little box of an office, part of the roof of which was a skylight, and part the bottom of a cistern, Artful, when he had booked his daily blots, began sometimes to find his official life a burthen to him, and stole out upon the landing to commune with his kind, or into old Simons’ room, next door, to gaze out from the window into the little court below, or take deadly aim at the gate-keeper with a catapult, which he kept for that purpose.
At other times, leaning back with his office stool at a dangerous angle, he would gaze drearily upwards at a forest of chimney-pots, the crookedness of which was exaggerated by the distorting properties of the skylight, its every other pane containing a flaw.
But the dreariness of these daylight hours was as nothing when compared to the solitude of night, should old Simons chance to go out, and leave him to his own resources. Upon such occasions he would steal out too, and if he had no money to spend in refreshment, walk the street until he was quite tired out, and hurry into bed, dragging the bed-clothes over his head for safety.
“I wonder how old Simons stood it all by himself before I came?” he used to think. “I wonder how the deuce I should stand it without old Simons?”
And then another reflection would presently occur to him.
“If I had Simons’ money, I should precious soon cut this dead-and-alive old shop, and spend the rest of my life in a reasonable manner.”
His notions with regard to a manner that was more reasonable might have appeared a little unreasonable to an unprejudiced third person. The summit of his ambition at this early period was to wear clothes “built proper,” as he would have termed it, with all the newest “fakements,” and he would have liked to have taken the chair at a “select harmonic,” or been a regular in the lounge of a music hall, on “pally terms” with the comic “talent.”
But these views of his underwent some slight change as time rolled on, and gradually a sort of idea crept into Artful’s mind that the old set in Earls Court might be made endurable if he had Simons’ money to spend in it. Where was Simons’ money, tho
ugh? Ah! that was a question to be answered only by Simons himself, and would he ever answer it? And would Artful ever have any of it? Who could say? Not Artful, certainly!
The way that Artful had come to live with old Simons was this:—
Simons had said one day, suddenly entering the office for the purpose of asking the question, and surprising Artful tilted at an amazing angle, with his gaze fixed on the chimney-pots,—
“Is the money I give you enough to keep you!”
“It keeps me alive,” responded Artful.
“You don’t have enough to eat?”
“Not nearly.”
“How much does your lodging cost you?”
“One dollar a week.”
“You can save that, if you like, by sleeping here. I’ve got a bedstead in the loft that you can have.”
Half an hour later old Simons appeared again, with equal suddenness, to ask another question.
“Stop a bit, though: you’re an orphan, aren’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve no relations living, have you?”
“No.”
“No more have I,” said old Simons; “but perhaps you won’t be able to sleep on a straw mattress.”
When old Simons had spoken about a bedstead, he had said a bedstead, but had made no mention of bedding beyond the mattress particularized.
The mattress in question proved to be of the thinnest, so that after the first night Artful arose severely scored by the wooden framework, from the sharp edges of which it afforded no material protection, while the one thin blanket Simons had given him could hardly be called a sufficient provision against the chilliness of a November night. It was not, indeed, until more than a month had elapsed, that Artful slept with anything like comfort.
But he got accustomed to the hardness of his bed as he grew used to the dreariness of the old Court, and as years crept slowly past, and he still occupied the stool beneath the skylight, one fixed idea took possession of his mind, which, put into words, meant something very like this:—
“Here am I, young and active, worth double my wages, and yet wasting my life away in the service of a selfish old wretch, who will some day kick me out into the street, when he takes a fancy to do so, and I shall have nothing to show for all the long years I have lost working for him. On the other hand, there is a selfish old wretch, whose life is a burthen to himself, and a drawback to the comfort to others, who has money that is no good to him, and who hasn’t a soul in the world to leave it to. Why doesn’t he give a little of it to me while he lives? He’d never miss it. Or, if he won’t do that, why doesn’t he die and leave it me, which would be much the best thing he could do?”
One night, when the clerk was thus reflecting seated at a table opposite to the old man, who, bending over a book of accounts, rested his head upon his hand, and shaded his eyes from the light, old Simons leant back and fixed him with a steadfast gaze.
“I don’t suppose,” said he, “that I shall last much longer.”
The colour faded suddenly from his companion’s cheeks, and his eyes drooped beneath the other’s eyes.
“Who says you are going to die?” he asked, with a nervous twitching of the lips. “Who wants you to die, I’d like to know? What do you mean?”
“I don’t know who should wish me dead,” said old Simons, after a few moments’ silence. “Not any one that I owe money to, I should think; and no one can have any expectations from me, for no one has any claim on my consideration.”
“No one,” thought the clerk to himself. “Not even me, who have wasted my life for him.”
But he said nothing. Only waited and watched, and cudgelled his brains. “Did any one exist who could lay claim to the old man’s money when he was gone? Was he likely to go soon? Where was the money?”
To have found an answer to any one of these three questions was no easy task. To answer them all, a seeming impossibility. But one answered itself the very next night.
They sat alone again, master and clerk. The clerk was eating a frugal supper of bread and butter. Old Simons, with the same account-book he had been studying the previous evening spread open before him, sat in much the same attitude, his head resting on his hand.
He sat in such a way that his upraised hand shaded his face, and the clerk more than once stole a stealthy glance at him, to see that old Simons was not watching him covertly.
“What’s he thinking of, I wonder?” the younger man thought. “Is he counting up those figures? No, he’s too long about that. There’s something on his mind, and he’s not well. Why shouldn’t I put it to him? He’s a bit shaken just now, and can be managed all the easier, with a little care.”
And so he presently spoke aloud, drooping his own eyes though, as he did so, for he felt that old Simons was looking at him fixedly.
“I’ve been thinking over what you said, sir, last night, and I hope you won’t take it as a liberty if I say a few words.”
Here he paused, but Simons made no reply, and he continued:
“Of course, sir, I hope you had no reason for saying what you did say about not lasting long, for I don’t think I ever saw you look heartier.”
He paused again here, but still there was no answer.
“However, sir, as you put it that way, and as you know the best of us are only mortal, as it were, I thought I would make so bold as to ask if you would at any time, when most convenient to you, give me a few instructions I might act up to, in case—of—in case of anything——”
He felt that he was turning the phrase awkwardly, and stammered and stopped, expecting that Simons at last must make some rejoinder.
But he was still silent. Was he offended? Was he thinking what reply to make? He was slow enough sometimes in making a response. A minute passed—two minutes, and yet he had not spoken.
“Mr. Simons!”
No answer.
“Mr. Simons!”
Was he asleep?
The clerk, with a strange terror creeping over him, raised the candle, and threw its rays upon his master’s face. The eyes, as he had thought, were fixed upon him, but with a meaningless stare.
For he was dead!
One of the three questions thus settled in favour of Artful Bruff, there yet remained two others for which he looked for an answer. Would any one put in a claim for the old man’s money? and where was the money?
The latter question seemed to the cold-hearted knave the foremost for consideration, as, after the first frantic rush of wild terror, he had run out upon the stairs, calling for help. As it occurred to him, he came to a sudden standstill, and ceased his cry.
No one had heard him. Yes, a window was thrown open upon the opposite side of the court, and a head appearing there, seemed to listen for a while. Then the window was shut to again. All else was silent.
He paused to collect his thoughts and regain his lost courage.
Should he venture back again, and have a look round, before any one came? Yes, he would creep noiselessly back, and when he had made all safe, raise the alarm.
He paused again, however, upon the threshold of the room, and peered in with a sort of sickening dread that something might have changed its place while he had been away.
But nothing had stirred; and drooping over one side of the arm-chair, where he had left it, he found the body still, with the breast-pocket of the coat he had torn open a while ago invitingly agape.
With the conviction strong upon him that possession was nine points of the law, Artful Bruff waited for nobody’s permission, but buried the old man in the cheapest possible manner, and seized upon his goods and chattels. These he found, for the most part, of very little value, though good enough for use. There were also a couple of sacks of coal in the cellar, and them, as it was bitter December weather, he found a very pleasant acquisition.
But as to money, when the funeral expenses were paid, there remained little over twenty shillings in hard cash. What had become of it all?
Many long h
ours Artful Bruff sat alone, cudgelling his brains, much as he had done during the old man’s life, for a solution to this difficult problem. Where was the money locked up? How was it to be got at?
There must be papers and documents somewhere that would throw some light upon the subject. Was there no banker’s book? No. And the book of accounts that the old man studied so frequently? Incomprehensible. And the books that Artful Bruff himself had kept so zealously during his clerkship in the box?
He turned these pages over and over, now that he had, as he considered, acquired a sort of hereditary right to their contents, and searched for a happy result among the multitudinous blots and smears he found there. But if the truth must be told, this fellow was, at best, but a shallow rogue and thief, and, like most rogues and thieves, a great fool withal, at anything outside the small trade of petty larceny.
He had floundered for years among these pages of figures without being able to understand their principle; and now, when it was all in all to him to solve the mystery of their meaning, he could make nothing of it.
Yet how was this? Was there any intended mystery? Not at all. The mystification arose out of Artful Bruff’s stupidity. He had entertained a vague idea that old Simons was carrying on a large business of some sort or other, with the exact whereabouts of which he was unacquainted, but which he supposed it would be easy enough, whenever he thought fit to take the trouble, to obtain all particulars. Now, however, when the time had come, he failed.
Here, sure enough, were payments and receipts in plenty; but where was the business, and of what nature?
Who were the Harringtons and Robinsons referred to? How was it something was left over, and what was the nature of the “old account?”
During his life, old Simons’ behaviour had always been very mysterious. No one had, at any time, to Artful’s knowledge, called on the old man. His own duties as a clerk, dispassionately considered, were, to a great extent, vague and unsatisfactory, and, at the beginning of his servitude, he had more than once wondered to himself why Simons kept a clerk at all.
