The 7th Ghost Story

by Frank Belknap Long

  But he found his uncle as hospitable and his cousin more charming than ever, and the looks of one, and the requests of the other, soon precluded the possibility of refusing to lengthen the “few hours” into a few days, though the house was at the moment full of visitors.

  The Peterses were there from Ramsgate; and Mr, Mrs, and the two Miss Simpkinsons, from Bath, had come to pass a month with the family; and Tom Ingoldsby had brought down his college friend the Honourable Augustus Sucklethumbkin, with his groom and pointers, to take a fortnight’s shooting. And then there was Mrs Ogleton, the rich young widow, with her large black eyes, who, people did say, was setting her cap at the young squire, though Mrs Botherby did not believe it; and, above all, here was Mademoiselle Pauline, her femme de chambre, who “mon Dieu’d” everything and everybody, and cried, Quel horreur!” at Mrs Botherby’s cap. In short, to use the last-named and much-respected lady’s own expression, the house was “choke-full” to the very attics,—all, save the “oaken chamber,” which, as the lieutenant expressed a most magnanimous disregard of ghosts, was forthwith appropriated to his particular accommodation. Mr Maguire meanwhile was fain to share the apartment of Oliver Dobbs, the squire’s own man: a jocular proposal of joint occupancy having been first indignantly rejected by “Mademoiselle,” though preferred with the “laste taste in life” of Mr Barney’s most insinuating brogue.

  * * * *

  “Come, Charles, the urn is absolutely getting cold; your breakfast will be quite spoiled: what can have made you so idle?” Such was the morning salutation of Miss Ingoldsby to the militaire as he entered the breakfast-room half an hour after the latest of the party.

  “A pretty gentleman, truly, to make an appointment with,” chimed in Miss Frances. “What is become of our ramble to the rocks before breakfast?”

  “Oh! the young men never think of keeping a promise now,” said Mrs Peters, a little ferret-faced woman with underdone eyes.

  “When I was a young man,” said Mr Peters, “I remember I always made a point of—”

  “Pray how long ago was that?” asked Mr Simpkinson from Bath.

  “Why, sir, when I married Mrs Peters, I was—let me see—I was—”

  “Do pray hold your tongue, P., and eat your breakfast!” interrupted his better half, who had a mortal horror of chronological references; it’s very rude to tease people with your family-affairs.”

  The lieutenant had by this time taken his seat in silence—a good-humoured nod, and a glance, half-smiling, half-inquisitive, being the extent of his salutation. Smitten as he was, and in the immediate presence of her who had made so large a hole in his heart, his manner was evidently distrait, which the fair Caroline in her secret soul attributed to his being solely occupied by her agrémens,—how would she have bridled had she known that they only shared his meditations with a pair of breeches!

  Charles drank his coffee and spiked some half-dozen eggs, darting occasionally a penetrating glance at the ladies, in hope of detecting the supposed waggery by the evidence of some furtive smile or conscious look. But in vain; not dimple moved indicative of roguery, nor did the slightest elevation of eyebrow rise confirmative of his suspicions. Hints and insinuations passed unheeded,—more particular inquiries were out of the question—the subject was unapproachable.

  In the meantime, “patent cords” were just the thing for a morning’s ride; and, breakfast ended, away cantered the party over the downs, till, every faculty absorbed by the beauties, animate and inanimate, which surrounded him, Lieutenant Seaforth of the Bombay Fencibles bestowed no more thought upon his breeches than if he had been born the top of Ben Lomond.

  Another night had passed away; the sun rose brilliantly, forming with his level beams a splendid rainbow in the far off west, whither the heavy cloud, which for the last two hours had been pouring its waters on the earth, was now flying before him.

  “Ah! then, and it’s little good it’ll be the claning of ye,” apostrophised Mr Barney Maguire, as he deposited, in front of his master’s toilet, a pair of “bran-new” jockey boots, one of Hoby’s primeest fits, which the lieutenant had purchased in his way through town. On that very morning had they come for the first time under the valet’s depuriating hand, so little soiled, indeed, from the turfy ride of the preceding day, that a less scrupulous domestic might, perhaps, have considered the application of “Warren’s Matchless,” or oxalic acid, altogether superfluous. Not so Barney: with the nicest care had he removed the slightest impurity from each polished surface and there they stood, rejoicing in their sable radiance. No wonder a pang shot across Mr Maguire’s breast, as he thought on the work now cut out for them, so different from the light labours of the day before, no wonder he murmured with a sigh, as the scarce-dried window-panes disclosed a road now inch-deep in mud, “Ah! then, it’s little good the claning of ye!”—for well had he learned in the hall below that eight miles of a stiff clay soil lay between the Manor and Bolsover Abbey, whose picturesque ruins,

  “Like ancient Rome, majestic in decay,”

  the party had determined to explore. The master-had already commenced dressing, and the man was fitting straps upon a light pair of crane-necked spurs, when his hand was arrested by the old question, “Barney, where are the breeches?”

  They were nowhere to be found!

  * * * *

  Mr Seaforth descended that morning, whip in hand, and equipped in a handsome green riding-frock, but no “breeches and boots to match” were there: loose jean trowsers, surmounting a pair of diminutive Wellingtons, embraced, somewhat incongruously, his nether man, vice the “patent cords,” returned, like yesterday’s pantaloons, absent without leave. The “top-boots” had a holiday.

  “A fine morning after the rain,” said Mr Simpkinson from Bath.

  “Just the thing for the ’ops,” said Mr Peters. “I remember when I was a boy—”

  “Do hold your tongue, P.,” said Mrs Peters, advice which that exemplary matron was in the constant habit of administering to “her P.,” as she called him, whenever he prepared to vent his reminiscences. Her precise reason for this it would be difficult to determine, unless, indeed, the story be true which a little bird had whispered into Mrs Botherby’s ear,—Mr Peters, though now a wealthy man, had received a liberal education at a charity-school and was apt to recur to the days of his muffin cap and leathers. As usual, he took his wife’s hint in good part, and “paused in his reply.”

  “A glorious day for the ruins!” said young Ingoldsby. “But, Charles, what the deuce are you about?—you don’t mean to ride through our lanes in such toggey as that?”

  “Lassy me!” said Miss Julia Simpkinson, “won’t you be very wet?”

  “You had better take Tom’s cab,” quoth the squire.

  But this proposition was at once overruled; Mrs Ogleton had already nailed the cab, a vehicle of all others the best adapted for a snug flirtation.

  “Or drive Miss Julia in the phaeton?” No; that was the post of Mr Peters, who, indifferent as an equestrian, had acquired some fame as a whip while travelling through the midland counties for the firm of Bagshaw, Snivelby, and Ghrimes.

  “Thank you, I shall ride with my cousins,” said Charles, with as much nonchalance as he could assume,—and he did so; Mr Ingoldsby, Mrs Peters, Mr Simpkinson from Bath, and his eldest daughter with her album, following in the family coach. The gentleman-commoner “voted the affair damned slow, and declined the party altogether in favour of the gamekeeper and a cigar. “There was ‘no fun’ in looking at old houses!” Mrs Simpkinson preferred a short séjour in the still-room with Mrs Botherby, who had promised to initiate her in that grand arcanum, the transmutation of gooseberry jam into Guava jelly.

  * * * *

  “Did you ever see an old abbey before, Mr Peters?”

  “Yes, miss, a French one; we have got one at Ramsgate; he teaches the Miss Joneses to parley-voo, and is turned of sixty.�
��

  Miss Simpkinson closed her album with an air of ineffable disdain.

  Mr Simpkinson from Bath was a professed antiquary and one of the first water; he was master of Gwillim’s Heraldry, and Milles’s History of the Crusades; knew every plate the Monasticon; had written an essay on the origin and dignity of the office of overseer, and settled the date of a Queen Anne’s farthing. An influential member of the Antiquarian Society, to whose “Beauties of Bagnigge Wells” he had been a liberal subscriber, procured him a seat at the board of that learned body, since which happy epoch Sylvanus Urban had not a more indefatigable correspondent. His inaugural essay on the President’s cocked hat was considered a miracle of erudition: and his account of the earliest application of gilding to gingerbread, a masterpiece of antiquarian research. His eldest daughter was of a kindred spirit: if her father’s mantle had not fallen upon her, it was only because he had not thrown it off himself; she had caught hold of its tail, however, while it yet hung upon his honoured shoulders. To souls so congenial, what a sight was the magnificent ruin of Bolsover! its broken arches, its mouldering pinnacles, and the airy tracery of its half-demolished windows. The party were in raptures; Mr Simpkinson began to meditate an essay, and his daughter an ode: even Seaforth, as he gazed on these lonely relics of the olden time, was betrayed into a momentary forgetfulness of his love and losses; the widow’s eye-glass turned from her cicisbeo’s whiskers to the mantling ivy: Mrs Peters wiped her spectacles; and “her P.” supposed the central tower “had once been the county jail.” The squire was a philosopher, and had been there often before, so he ordered out the cold tongue and chickens.

  “Bolsover Priory,” said Mr Simpkinson, with the air of a connoisseur,—“Bolsover Priory was founded in the reign of Henry the Sixth, about the beginning of the eleventh century. Hugh de Bolsover had accompanied that monarch to the Holy Land, in the expedition undertaken by way of penance for the murder of his young nephews in the Tower. Upon the dissolution of the monasteries, the veteran was enfeoffed in the lands and manor, to which he gave his own name of Bowlsover, or Bee-owls-over (by corruption Bolsover),—a Bee in chief, over three Owls, all proper, being the armorial ensigns borne by this distinguished crusader at the siege of Acre.”

  “Ah! that was Sir Sidney Smith,” said Mr Peters; “I’ve heard tell of him, and all about Mrs Partington, and—”

  “P., be quiet, and don’t expose yourself!” sharply interrupted his lady. P. was silenced, and betook himself to the bottled stout.

  “These lands,” continued the antiquary, “were held in grand serjeantry by the presentation of three white owls and a pot of honey—”

  “Lassy me! how nice!” said Miss Julia. Mr Peters licked his lips.

  “Pray give me leave, my dear—owls and honey, whenever the king should come a rat-catching into this part of the country.”

  “Rat-catching!” ejaculated the squire, pausing abruptly in the mastication of a drumstick.

  “To be sure, my dear sir: don’t you remember that rats once came under the forest law—a minor species of venison? ‘Rats and mice, and such small deer,’ eh?—Shakspear, you know. Our ancestors ate rats (“The nasty fellows!” shuddered Miss Julia in a parenthesis); and owls, you now, are capital mousers—”

  “I’ve seen a howl,” said Mr Peters; “there’s one in the Sohological Gardens,—a little hook-nosed chap in a wig,—only its feathers and—”

  Poor P. was destined never to finish a speech.

  “Do be quiet!” cried the authoritative voice, and the would-be naturalist shrank into his shell, like a snail in the “Sohological Gardens.”

  “You should read Blount’s ‘Jocular Tenures,’ Mr Ingoldsby,” pursued Simpkinson. “A learned man was Blount! Why, sir, his Royal Highness the Duke of York once paid a silver horse-shoe to Lord Ferrers—”

  “I’ve heard of him,” broke in the incorrigible Peters; “he was hanged at the old Bailey in a silk rope for shooting Dr Johnson.”

  The antiquary vouchsafed no notice of the interruption; but, taking a pinch of snuff, continued his harangue.

  “A silver horse-shoe, sir, which is due from every scion of royalty who rides across one of his manors; and if you look into the penny county histories, now publishing by an eminent friend of mine, you will find that Langhale in Co. Norf. was held by one Baldwin per saltum sufflatum, et pettem; that is, he was to come every Christmas into Westminster Hall, there to take a leap, cry hem! and—”

  “Mr Simpkinson, a glass of sherry?” cried Tom Ingoldsby, hastily.

  “Not any, thank you, sir. This Baldwin, surnamed Le—”

  “Mrs Ogleton challenges you, sir; she insists upon it,” said Tom, still more rapidly; at the same time filling a glass, and forcing it on the sçavant, who, thus arrested in the very crisis of his narrative, received and swallowed the potation as if it had been physic.

  “What on earth has Miss Simpkinson discovered there?” continued Tom; “something of interest. See how fast she is writing.”

  The diversion was effectual: every one looked towards Miss Simpkinson, who, far too ethereal for “creature comforts,” was seated apart on the dilapidated remains of an altar-tomb, committing eagerly to paper something that had strongly impressed her: the air,—the eye “in a fine frenzy rolling,”—all betokened that the divine afflatus was come. Her father rose, and stole silently towards her.

  “What an old boar!” muttered young Ingoldsby; alluding, perhaps, to a slice of brawn which he had just begun to operate upon, but which, from the celerity with which it disappeared, did not seem so very difficult of mastication.

  But what had become of Seaforth and his fair Caroline all this while? Why, it so happened that they had been simultaneously stricken with the picturesque appearance of one of those high and pointed arches, which that eminent antiquary, Mr Horseley Curties, has described in his “Ancient Records” as “a Gothic window of the Saxon order;”—and then the ivy clustered so thickly and so beautifully on the other side, that they went round to look at that;—and then their proximity deprived it of half its effect, and so they walked across to a little knoll, a hundred yards off, and in crossing a small ravine, they came to what in Ireland they call a “bad step,” and Charles had to carry his cousin over it,—and then, when they had to come back, she would not give him the trouble again for the world, so they followed a better but more circuitous route and there were hedges and ditches in the way, and stiles to get over, and gates to get through; so that an hour or more had elapsed before they were able to rejoin the party.

  “Lassy me!” said Miss Julia Simpkinson, “how long you have been gone!”

  And so they had. The remark was a very just as well as a very natural one. They were gone a long while, and a nice cosey chat they had; and what do you think it was all about, my dear miss?

  “O, lassy me! love, no doubt, and the moon, and eyes, and nightingales, and—”

  Stay, stay, my sweet young lady; do not let the fervour of your feelings run away with you! I do not pretend to say, indeed, that one or more of these pretty subjects might not have been introduced; but the most important and leading topic of the conference was—Lieutenant Seaforth’s breeches.

  “Caroline,” said Charles, “I have had some very odd dreams since I have been at Tappington.”

  “Dreams, have you?” smiled the young lady, arching her taper neck like a swan in pluming. “Dreams, have you?”

  “Ay, dreams,—or dream, perhaps, I should say; for, though repeated, it was still the same. And what do you imagine was its subject?”

  “It is impossible for me to divine,” said the tongue;—“I have not the least difficulty in guessing,” said the eye, as plainly as ever eye spoke.

  “I dreamt—of your great grandfather!”

  There was a change in the glance—“My great grandfather?”

  “Yes, the old Sir Giles, or Sir John, you told
me about the other day: he walked into my bedroom in his short, cloak of murrey-coloured velvet, his long rapier, and his Raleigh-looking hat and feather, just as the picture represents him: but with one exception.”

  “And what was that?”

  “Why, his lower extremities, which were visible, were—those of a skeleton.”

  “Well.”

  “Well, after taking a turn or two about the room, and looking round him with a wistful air, he came to the bed’s foot, stared at me in a manner impossible to describe,—and then he—he laid hold of my pantaloons; whipped his long bony legs into them in a twinkling; and strutting up to the glass, seemed to view himself in it with great complacency. I tried to speak, but in vain. The effort, however, seemed to excite his attention; for, wheeling about, he showed me the grimmest-looking death’s head you can well imagine, and with an indescribable grin strutted out of the room.”

  “Absurd! Charles. How can you talk such nonsense?”

  “But, Caroline,—the breeches are really gone.”

  * * * *

  On the following morning, contrary to his usual custom, Seaforth was the first person in the breakfast parlour. As no one else was present, he did precisely what nine young men out of ten so situated would have done; he walked up to the mantel-piece, established himself upon the rug, and subducting his coat-tails one under each arm, turned towards the fire that portion of the human frame which it is considered equally indecorous to present to a friend or enemy. A serious, not to say anxious, expression was visible upon his good-humoured countenance, and his mouth was fast buttoning itself up for an incipient whistle when little Flo, a tiny spaniel of the Blenheim breed,—the-: pet object of Miss Julia Simpkinson’s affections, bounced from beneath a sofa, and began to bark at—his pantaloons.

  They were cleverly “built,” of a light grey mixture, a broad stripe of the most vivid scarlet traversing each seam in a perpendicular direction from hip to ankle,—in short, the regimental costume of the Royal Bombay Fencibles. The animal, educated in the country, had never seen such a pair of breeches in her life—Omne ignotum pro magnifico! The scarlet streak, inflamed as it was by the reflection of the fire, seemed to act on Flora’s nerves as the same colour does on those of bulls and turkeys; she advanced at the pas de charge, and her vociferation, like her amazement, was unbounded. A sound kick from the disgusted officer changed its character, and induced a retreat at the very moment when the mistress of the pugnacious quadruped entered to the rescue.