“They’ll be for parting you and me, my dear,” said the poor creature one day, when society had proved more than usually cruel. “If ever I am let see you after your marriage, I suppose I shall have to creep in at the area-door, and make believe I am some faithful old nurse wanting to have a look at my dear child’s sweet face.”
“No one shall ever separate me from you, dear, silly aunt,” said my charmer, kissing first one of her relative’s high cheek-bones, and then the other.
“We’ll have to jog on, two old spinsters together, then, I am thinking,” replied Miss Blake.
“No,” was the answer, very distinctly spoken. “I am going to marry Mr. Henry Patterson, and he will not ask me to part from my ridiculous, foolish aunt.”
“Patterson! that conceited clerk of William Craven’s? Why, he has not darkened our doors for fifteen months and more.”
“Quite true,” agreed her niece; “but, nevertheless, I am going to marry him. I asked him to marry me a year ago.”
“You don’t mane that, Helena!” said poor Miss Blake. “You should not talk like an infant in arms.”
“We are only waiting for your consent,” went on my lady fair.
“Then that you will never have. While I retain my powers of speech you shall not marry a pauper who has only asked you for the sake of your money.”
“He did not ask me; I asked him,” said Helena, mischievously; “and he is not a beggar. His uncle has bought him a partnership, and is going to leave him his money; and he will be here himself tomorrow, to tell you all about his prospects.”
At first, Miss Blake refused to see me; but after a time she relented, and, thankful, perhaps, to have once again anyone over whom she could tyrannise, treated her niece’s future husband—as Helena declared—most shamefully.
“But you two must learn to agree, for there shall be no quarrelling in our house,” added the pretty autocrat.
“You needn’t trouble yourself about that, Helena,” said her aunt.
“He’ll be just like all the rest. If he’s civil to me before marriage, he won’t be after. He will soon find out there is no place in the house, or, for that matter, in the world, for Susan Blake”; and my enemy, for the first time in my memory, fairly broke down and began to whimper.
“Miss Blake,” I said, “how can I convince you that I never dreamt, never could dream of asking you and Helena to separate?”
“See that, now, and he calls you Helena already,” said the lady, reproachfully.
“Well, he must begin sometime. And that reminds me the sooner he begins to call you aunt, the better.”
I did not begin to do so then, of that the reader may be quite certain; but there came a day when the word fell quite naturally from my lips.
For a long period ours was a hollow truce, but, as time passed on, and I resolutely refused to quarrel with Miss Blake, she gradually ceased trying to pick quarrels with me.
Our home is very dear to her. All the household management Helena from the first hour took into her own hands; but in the nursery Miss Blake reigns supreme.
She has always a grievance, but she is thoroughly happy. She dresses now like other people, and wears over her gray hair caps of Helena’s selection.
Time has softened some of her prejudices, and age renders her eccentricities less noticeable; but she is still, after her fashion, unique, and we feel in our home, as we used to feel in the office—that we could better spare a better man.
The old house was pulled down, and not a square, but a fine terrace occupied its site. Munro lives in one of those desirable tenements, and is growing rich and famous day by day. Mr. Craven has retired from practice, and taken a place in the country, where he is bored to death though he professes himself charmed with the quiet.
Helena and I have always been town-dwellers. Though the Uninhabited House is never mentioned by either of us, she knows I have still a shuddering horror of lonely places.
My experiences in the Uninhabited House have made me somewhat nervous. Why, it was only the other night—
“What are you doing, making all that spluttering on your paper?” says an interrupting voice at this juncture, and, looking up, I see Miss Blake seated by the window, clothed and in her right mind.
“You had better put by that writing,” she proceeds, with the manner of one having authority, and I am so amazed, when I contrast Miss Blake as she is, with what she was, that I at once obey!
1 The wife of a celebrated Indian officer stated that she once, in the north of Ireland, heard Job’s utterance thus rendered—“Oh! that my words were wrutten, that they were prented in a buke.”
THE PHANTOM HEARSE, by Mary Fortune
Many of my readers will have observed that many “Corner” shops, whatever their location, are known by the names of their owners.
The one I am going to introduce you to was literally a corner shop, and the individuality of the man who kept it had obscured the very name of the street. You never heard hip shop called the corner shop; it was “Jones’s” or “Old Jones’s,” and the corner at which it stood was, and is, “Jones’s Corner.”
I introduce Jones and his place of business to you on one sunny afternoon in March, when Lumsden, the new “bobby,” was airing his dignity in taking a survey of this particular part of a beat that was quite new to him. Indeed, all beats were new to the young man, who had only just been “called in,” though his name had been on the list of applicants for police employment for a good while. Lumsden was an especially raw recruit, and as full of an idea of his own importance as raw police recruits generally are.
He was standing on the pavement engaged in a condescending conversation with a sharp-looking resident named Jack Turner, a man of forty, perhaps, and of a small, wiry build. Turnder had been relating to Lumsden a legend of theneighbourhood, about which the policeman was disposed to air his superior knowledge.
“And do you tell me, now, that there are live people hereabouts so ignorant as to believe that kind of a yarn?” he asked, with a smile that puffed his fat cheeks out till they met the collar of his jumper.
“Plenty of ’em; why a man can’t help believin’ what he sees with his own eyes.”
“And have you seen it?”
“Yes, I have, and many more ’n me; but if you want to hear all about it just ask old Jones—he knows the story from the beginning.”
Perhaps Lumsden would not have condescended to exhibit his curiosity to old Jones or anyone else if he had not been provided with a convenient excuse. He was standing in front of Turner’s door, and the corner shop was obliquely opposite when a man came to the door of old Jones’s shop and, with his face turned back, indulged in some pretty strong language that was apparently addressed to old Jones himself.
“Who is that?” asked Lumsden of his new acquaintance.
“It’s a chap that lives down the lane behind here. Jerry Swipes they calls him; him and old Jones are always having rows.”
“What about?”
“Goodness knows. Jerry is in the old man’s debt I fancy, and it’s hard to get any money out of Swipes.”
“Jerry Swipes? Is that the man’s real names?”
“Blest if I can tell you, but it may be a nickname, for he is a regular swipe and no mistake.”
While Lumsden had been gaining this information, Jerry—a tall, slouching figure, with a sandy face and a long, sharp nose—had been roaring his uncomplimentary remarks to old Jones, who now came to the door of his shop with a red and anygry face, as Swipes edged up the street toward the lane.
“Don’t let me catch you inside my shop again!” shouted the old man, as he shook his fist after Jerry; “as sure as I do, I’ll give you in charge! You’re nothing but a sneaking thief—that’s what you are!”
“I’ll ram them words down your old throat one o’ these days!” shrieked Jerry, as he reached the end of his lane. “Police, is it? By gar, it’ll be police with yourself first! You’ll give me a glass of whiskey next time I call
? Eh, old man!” and the dirty unkempt-looking mortal disappeared into the mouth of the unsavory right-of-way.
Old Jones’s vituperation stopped as suddenly as Jerry disappeared, and such a look of fear came into the twinkling eyes under his penthouse, ragged eyebrows that even Lumsden observed it, and Turned had to turn away his face to hide the grin of enjoyment that over-spread his parchment-tried visage; but he controlled himself to remark ere he entered his door—
“Now is your time to go and ask old Jones about the phantom funeral, and you will be sure to hear all about this quarrel with Jerry.”
Lumsden took the hint, and marching across the narrow street, was a “Jones’s” almost as soon as the old man had got behind his counter again.
“Jones” has all the characteristics of a thriving corner shop, with a little extra dirt and untidiness into the bargain. It was so small that the counter on two sides left but little space for the use of customers, that small space behind further curtailed by “stock” in the form of boxes of soap, bags of potatoes, rice, oatmeal and sugar. The narrow shelves were laden with fly-marked packages, and boxes and bottles of great variety; and the space that ought to be empty under the ceiling was hung with brooms brushes clothes lines and tinware the original brightness of which was dimmed by age and smoke. Into this confined emporium Constable Lumsden stepped, meeting old Jones suspicious eyes as that worthy very unceremoniously resumed his usual seat behind the counter, placed his spectacles astride his nose, and with a sharp rustle shook out the morning paper on his knee.
“Good day to you,” said the young policeman as he looked curiously around him.
“Good day it is; what can I serve you with?”
“Serve? Oh, nothing. I heard some strong language at your door just now and came in to see what it was all about.”
Old Jones gave his paper an angry rustle as he answered—“If you come in here to know what’s the matter every time I get cheek from a customer you’ll not be able to do much in the other parts of your beat.”
“The cheek wasn’t all on the customer’s side this time. I heard you calling the man a thief, and in the open street. That’s something in my line, you’ll allow?”
“And so be is a thief,” cried old Jones angrily; “he’s the biggest loafer in Melbourne. He only comes near the shop when he wants to shake a plug of tobacco or a pipe.”
“What did he shake today?”
“When I want to lay a charge against him, I’ll take it up to the sergeant,” said old Jones, expecting that it would shut up the officious young trap But it had very little effect on Constable Lumsden, who was, fortunately for himself, not very thin-skinned.
“Ah! Two might play at visiting the sergeant. If Jerry Swipes went up himself, he has a very good charge against you, and me for a witness It’s again’ the laws to call a man a thief in the open street.”
“I can prove it.”
“If you could prove it twice over, all the same the law won’t allow you to do it; and I’d advise you to give him that glass of whiskey he seems to expect from you the next time you get the chance.”
At this second allusion to the whiskey, old Jones once more grew white under Lumsden’s observing eyes, and his knobby, hard hands shook so that they rustled the paper he held. Seeing this repeated agitation at the allusion to spirits, Lumsden took it into his head that drink was sold “on the sly” at Jones’s, and he determined to keep a close watch on the place in future.
The old man made no immediate reply to Lunisden’s advioe about the treatment of his enemy, Jerry. He was considering within himself that it would, perhaps, be better for his own interests that he should take a different tone with the new police man. The independent sharpness of Lumsden was a new experience at the Corner, the last man on the beat having been an old, steady-going policeman who duly considered Mr. Jones’s status in the neighbourhood, and was friendly accordingly. Old Jones would have liked to twist the impertinent young constable’s neck, but he tried to do the amiable instead—a very difficult matter for the crusty old man.
“The fact is my temper’s wore out with them sort of customers,” he said with a sigh at his amiability. “It’s a very low neighbourhood, especially down Long’s Lane, and it’s getting lower every day. They get a few things from you, then they get into your books somehow, in spite of you, and they wind up with dropping in to steal when they think your back’s turned.”
“A bad business,” returned Lumsden, but without the least intonation of sympathy. “What does that fellow you were jawing to do for a living?”
“Jerry Swipes? Ah! He’d be a puzzled to tell you. He hires a truck, and pretends to attend to the markets and that. I’ve heard of him rag and bottle gathering, but it’s all a blind.”
“You’ve been a long time in the neighbourhood, I suppose?” asked Lumsden, as failing anything else in view, he took a pinch out of the oatmeal bag and began to munch it.
“I’ve been nigh on thirty year in this house and this shop, and if anyone knows the neighbourhood I ought to.”
“Ye-es, I suppose so,” was the slow and evidently absent reply; “and that reminds me; I’ve been told some ridiculous yarn about the ghost of a hearse that appears about here. Can you tell me anything about it?”
“There’s nothing ridiculous about it, young man; it’s only too true that the Phantom Funeral, as people have got to call it, is often seen in S—— and O—— street. I’ve seen it often, and I know how it began. There isn’t a man in C—— can tell you as much as I can about it.”
Old Jones’s air had quite undergone a change when his favourite topic came to be dwelt on; the paper was cast aside, and he rose from the old arm-chair. He took off his old, greasy felt hat, and ran his fingers through his stubbly grey hair until it stood nearly straight up, and then he replaced the hat and “ahem”ed as he looked inquiringly towards Lumsden.
“I’d like to hear the story,” said the latter, as he looked out of the door to see there was no “duty” staring him in the face, and then leaned easily against the heap of bags, as he listened to old Jones.
“It’s getting on for twelve years ago now since that hearse was first seen, and people always said it was because Sam Brown was carried out of No 9 in the dead of the night and taken to the morgue, without common decency, in a dray. Sam was murdered or committed suioide—it was never actually decided which—and from that day to this the hearse haunts the place as a sort of revenge on the neighbours that they didn’t pay more respect to his remains.”
“But that’s trash,” said Lumsden. “How could a dead man set a hearse to haunt a neighbourhood? I don’t believe a word of it.”
“I’ve heard a many say that, as grew white to hear the hearse mentioned within less than a year after,” returned old Jones solemnly. “It’s the scoffers as see it, and it’s not lucky to see it.”
“Not lucky?”
“No. If a man sees it—as you may when you’re on night duty—the best thing he can do is to turn his back and walk away from it. There has never been a man foolhardy enough to watch it but he died within the year.”
“But you’ve seen it, you say?”
“Aye, by chance. One night a woman was very bad down Long’s Lane there, and she wasn’t expected to live over the night. I got quite nervous like, and couldn’t sleep. It was a bright moonlight, and about two o clock in the morning I saw a slow shadow cross the blind of my window there. Before I had time to think, I was out on the floor and had the curtain in my hand, for I thought it was the ‘Phantom Hearse.’ It was. I saw it for a moment moving slowly past, and I dropped the blind quick, and got into bed again.”
“What was it like?” asked Lumsden.
“Like a plain, low, box-hearse, all black and with one black horse in it. Sometimes there is a driver, and sometimes a man in black walks at the horse’s head. It makes no sound, and is like a dream.”
“By George, I’d make a nightmare of it!” cried the young trap. “Do you mean to tell
me that no man has ever had the courage to walk up to the thing and grip it?”
“No man has ever been foolhardy enough to go straight to his deathbed that way,” was the serious answer.
But the unbelieving policeman laughed aloud as he raised himself and went toward the door, saying lightly—
“Well, here’s one man that’ll take the first chance of feeling what that ghostly machine is made of, at all events. Good gracious! To think people believe such yarns as that!”
As soon as Lumsden had left the shop, Jones’s face fell, and he muttered uneasily to himself as he stood by the counter, with his hands upon it, and an anxious look in his scowling face. He was not at any time a pleasant picture, that old Jones of the corner shop, but he looked absolutely repellant as he stood muttering to himself, with his ragged eyebrows almost met in an anxious scowl.
A few minutes later the old man, dashing the old greasy hat under the counter, began to divest himself of his rag of a coat, leaving the shop by the back as he did so. He went through a very slovenly kitchen, and to the verandah at the back of it, where an old, meanly-attired woman was washing in a wooden tub that seemed almost as old as herself. She looked up with a frightened air as Jones shouted at her—
“Margery!”
“Yes, master.”
“Leave that washing and get on a clean apron I’m going out; you’ll have to mind the shop.”
“Yes, master,” and the thi, trembling arms were being hastily wiped in her wet apron as she was hurrying away.
“Stop. I want to speak to you.”
She stopped instantly, and humbly turned an apparently vacant face towards him.
“You’ve got to watch that boy—that’s your business, you know. Don’t you go trying to serve, or you’ll poison someone, but keep your eyes sharp on Con. You hear?”
It would be queer if she didn’t hear, for the man was roaring at the top of his voice, and at every emphasized word the poor old creature jumped.
“I hear. I’ll watch him well.”
“I’ll leave nothing in the till; and mind, see that there’s something in it when I come back Give no credit. Do you hear?”
The Occult Detective Megapack: 29 Classic Stories Page 31
