Collected Ghost Stories

by M. R. James

  At intervals during his researches Mr. Somerton had been haunted by the recollection of the gossip about the hidden treasure, and, as he thought the matter over, it became more and more obvious to him that if the Abbot meant anything by the enigmatical answer which he gave to his questioners, he must have meant that the secret was to be found somewhere in the window he had placed in the abbey church. It was undeniable, furthermore, that the first of the curiously-selected texts on the scrolls in the window might be taken to have a reference to hidden treasure.

  Every feature, therefore, or mark which could possibly assist in elucidating the riddle which, he felt sure, the Abbot had set to posterity he noted with scrupulous care, and, returning to his Berkshire manor-house, consumed many a pint of the midnight oil over his tracings and sketches. After two or three weeks, a day came when Mr. Somerton announced to his man that he must pack his own and his master’s things for a short journey abroad, whither for the moment we will not follow him.

  II

  Mr. Gregory, the Rector of Parsbury,* had strolled out before breakfast, it being a fine autumn morning, as far as the gate of his carriage-drive, with intent to meet the postman and sniff the cool air. Nor was he disappointed of either purpose. Before he had had time to answer more than ten or eleven of the miscellaneous questions propounded to him in the lightness of their hearts by his young offspring, who had accompanied him, the postman was seen approaching; and among the morning’s budget was one letter bearing a foreign postmark and stamp (which became at once the objects of an eager competition among the youthful Gregorys), and was addressed in an uneducated, but plainly an English hand.

  When the Rector opened it, and turned to the signature, he realized that it came from the confidential valet of his friend and squire, Mr. Somerton. Thus it ran:

  HONOURD SIR,—

  Has I am in a great anxiety about Master I write at is Wish to Beg you Sir if you could be so good as Step over. Master Has add a Nastey Shock and keeps His Bedd. I never Have known Him like this but No wonder and Nothing will serve but you Sir. Master says would I mintion the Short Way Here is Drive to Cobblince* and take a Trap. Hopeing I Have maid all Plain, but am much Confused in Myself what with Anxiatey and Weakfulness at Night. If I might be so Bold Sir it will be a Pleasure to see a Honnest Brish Face among all These Forig ones.

  I am Sir

  Your obedt Servt

  WILLIAM BROWN.

  P.S.—The Villiage for Town I will not Turm It is name Steenfeld.

  The reader must be left to picture to himself in detail the surprise, confusion, and hurry of preparation into which the receipt of such a letter would be likely to plunge a quiet Berkshire parsonage in the year of grace 1859. It is enough for me to say that a train to town was caught in the course of the day, and that Mr. Gregory was able to secure a cabin in the Antwerp boat and a place in the Coblentz train. Nor was it difficult to manage the transit from that centre to Steinfeld.

  I labour under a grave disadvantage as narrator of this story in that I have never visited Steinfeld myself,* and that neither of the principal actors in the episode (from whom I derive my information) was able to give me anything but a vague and rather dismal idea of its appearance. I gather that it is a small place, with a large church despoiled of its ancient fittings; a number of rather ruinous great buildings, mostly of the seventeenth century, surround this church; for the abbey, in common with most of those on the Continent, was rebuilt in a luxurious fashion by its inhabitants at that period. It has not seemed to me worth while to lavish money on a visit to the place, for though it is probably far more attractive than either Mr. Somerton or Mr. Gregory thought it, there is evidently little, if anything, of first-rate interest to be seen—except, perhaps, one thing, which I should not care to see.

  The inn where the English gentleman and his servant were lodged is, or was, the only ‘possible’ one in the village. Mr. Gregory was taken to it at once by his driver, and found Mr. Brown waiting at the door. Mr. Brown, a model when in his Berkshire home of the impassive whiskered race who are known as confidential valets, was now egregiously out of his element, in a light tweed suit, anxious, almost irritable, and plainly anything but master of the situation. His relief at the sight of the ‘honest British face’ of his Rector was unmeasured, but words to describe it were denied him. He could only say:

  ‘Well, I ham pleased, I’m sure, sir, to see you. And so I’m sure, sir, will master.’

  ‘How is your master, Brown?’ Mr. Gregory eagerly put in.

  ‘I think he’s better, sir, thank you; but he’s had a dreadful time of it. I’ope he’s gettin’ some sleep now, but——’

  ‘What has been the matter—I couldn’t make out from your letter? Was it an accident of any kind?’

  ‘Well, sir, I’ardly know whether I’d better speak about it. Master was very partickler he should be the one to tell you. But there’s no bones broke—that’s one thing I’m sure we ought to be thankful——’

  ‘What does the doctor say?’ asked Mr. Gregory.

  They were by this time outside Mr. Somerton’s bedroom door, and speaking in low tones. Mr. Gregory, who happened to be in front, was feeling for the handle, and chanced to run his fingers over the panels. Before Brown could answer, there was a terrible cry from within the room.

  ‘In God’s name, who is that?’ were the first words they heard. ‘Brown, is it?’

  ‘Yes, sir—me, sir, and Mr. Gregory,’ Brown hastened to answer, and there was an audible groan of relief in reply.

  They entered the room, which was darkened against the afternoon sun, and Mr. Gregory saw, with a shock of pity, how drawn, how damp with drops of fear, was the usually calm face of his friend, who, sitting up in the curtained bed, stretched out a shaking hand to welcome him.

  ‘Better for seeing you, my dear Gregory,’ was the reply to the Rector’s first question, and it was palpably true.

  After five minutes of conversation Mr. Somerton was more his own man, Brown afterwards reported, than he had been for days. He was able to eat a more than respectable dinner, and talked confidently of being fit to stand a journey to Coblentz within twenty-four hours.

  ‘But there’s one thing,’ he said, with a return of agitation which Mr. Gregory did not like to see, ‘which I must beg you to do for me, my dear Gregory. Don’t,’ he went on, laying his hand on Gregory’s to forestall any interruption—‘don’t ask me what it is, or why I want it done. I’m not up to explaining it yet; it would throw me back—undo all the good you have done me by coming. The only word I will say about it is that you run no risk whatever by doing it, and that Brown can and will show you to-morrow what it is. It’s merely to put back—to keep—something——No; I can’t speak of it yet. Do you mind calling Brown?’

  ‘Well, Somerton,’ said Mr. Gregory, as he crossed the room to the door, ‘I won’t ask for any explanations till you see fit to give them. And if this bit of business is as easy as you represent it to be, I will very gladly undertake it for you the first thing in the morning.’

  ‘Ah, I was sure you would, my dear Gregory; I was certain I could rely on you. I shall owe you more thanks than I can tell. Now, here is Brown. Brown, one word with you.’

  ‘Shall I go?’ interjected Mr. Gregory.

  ‘Not at all. Dear me, no. Brown, the first thing to-morrow morning—(you don’t mind early hours, I know, Gregory)—you must take the Rector to—there, you know’ (a nod from Brown, who looked grave and anxious), ‘and he and you will put that back. You needn’t be in the least alarmed; it’s perfectly safe in the daytime. You know what I mean. It lies on the step, you know, where—where we put it.’ (Brown swallowed dryly once or twice, and, failing to speak, bowed.) ‘And—yes, that’s all. Only this one other word, my dear Gregory. If you can manage to keep from questioning Brown about this matter, I shall be still more bound to you. To-morrow evening, at latest, if all goes well, I shall be able, I believe, to tell you the whole story from start to finish. And now I’ll wish
you good night. Brown will be with me—he sleeps here—and if I were you, I should lock my door. Yes, be particular to do that. They—they like it, the people here, and it’s better. Good night, good night.’

  They parted upon this, and if Mr. Gregory woke once or twice in the small hours and fancied he heard a fumbling about the lower part of his locked door, it was, perhaps, no more than what a quiet man, suddenly plunged into a strange bed and the heart of a mystery, might reasonably expect. Certainly he thought, to the end of his days, that he had heard such a sound twice or three times between midnight and dawn.

  He was up with the sun, and out in company with Brown soon after. Perplexing as was the service he had been asked to perform for Mr. Somerton, it was not a difficult or an alarming one, and within half an hour from his leaving the inn it was over. What it was I shall not as yet divulge.

  Later in the morning Mr. Somerton, now almost himself again, was able to make a start from Steinfeld; and that same evening, whether at Coblentz or at some intermediate stage on the journey I am not certain, he settled down to the promised explanation. Brown was present, but how much of the matter was ever really made plain to his comprehension he would never say, and I am unable to conjecture.

  III

  This was Mr. Somerton’s story:

  ‘You know roughly, both of you, that this expedition of mine was undertaken with the object of tracing something in connection with some old painted glass in Lord D——’s private chapel. Well, the starting-point of the whole matter lies in this passage from an old printed book, to which I will ask your attention.’

  And at this point Mr. Somerton went carefully over some ground with which we are already familiar.

  ‘On my second visit to the chapel,’ he went on, ‘my purpose was to take every note I could of figures, lettering, diamond-scratchings on the glass, and even apparently accidental markings. The first point which I tackled was that of the inscribed scrolls. I could not doubt that the first of these, that of Job—“There is a place for the gold where it is hidden”—with its intentional alteration, must refer to the treasure; so I applied myself with some confidence to the next, that of St. John—“They have on their vestures a writing which no man knoweth.” The natural question will have occurred to you: Was there an inscription on the robes of the figures? I could see none; each of the three had a broad black border to his mantle, which made a conspicuous and rather ugly feature in the window. I was nonplussed, I will own, and but for a curious bit of luck I think I should have left the search where the Canons of Steinfeld had left it before me. But it so happened that there was a good deal of dust on the surface of the glass, and Lord D——, happening to come in, noticed my blackened hands, and kindly insisted on sending for a Turk’s head broom* to clean down the window. There must, I suppose, have been a rough piece in the broom; anyhow, as it passed over the border of one of the mantles, I noticed that it left a long scratch, and that some yellow stain instantly showed up. I asked the man to stop his work for a moment, and ran up the ladder to examine the place. The yellow stain was there, sure enough, and what had come away was a thick black pigment, which had evidently been laid on with the brush after the glass had been burnt, and could therefore be easily scraped off without doing any harm. I scraped, accordingly, and you will hardly believe—no, I do you an injustice; you will have guessed already—that I found under this black pigment two or three clearly-formed capital letters in yellow stain on a clear ground. Of course, I could hardly contain my delight.

  ‘I told Lord D——that I had detected an inscription which I thought might be very interesting, and begged to be allowed to uncover the whole of it. He made no difficulty about it whatever, told me to do exactly as I pleased, and then, having an engagement, was obliged—rather to my relief, I must say—to leave me. I set to work at once, and found the task a fairly easy one. The pigment, disintegrated, of course, by time, came off almost at a touch, and I don’t think that it took me a couple of hours, all told, to clean the whole of the black borders in all three lights. Each of the figures had, as the inscription said, “a writing on their vestures which nobody knew.”

  ‘This discovery, of course, made it absolutely certain to my mind that I was on the right track. And, now, what was the inscription? While I was cleaning the glass I almost took pains not to read the lettering, saving up the treat until I had got the whole thing clear. And when that was done, my dear Gregory, I assure you I could almost have cried from sheer disappointment. What I read was only the most hopeless jumble of letters that was ever shaken up in a hat. Here it is:

  ‘Blank as I felt and must have looked for the first few minutes, my disappointment didn’t last long. I realized almost at once that I was dealing with a cipher or cryptogram; and I reflected that it was likely to be of a pretty simple kind, considering its early date. So I copied the letters with the most anxious care. Another little point, I may tell you. turned up in the process which confirmed my belief in the cipher. After copying the letters on Job’s robe I counted them, to make sure that I had them right. There were thirty-eight; and, just as I finished going through them, my eye fell on a scratching made with a sharp point on the edge of the border. It was simply the number xxxviii in Roman numerals. To cut the matter short, there was a similar note, as I may call it, in each of the other lights; and that made it plain to me that the glass-painter had had very strict orders from Abbot Thomas about the inscription, and had taken pains to get it correct.

  ‘Well, after that discovery you may imagine how minutely I went over the whole surface of the glass in search of further light. Of course, I did not neglect the inscription on the scroll of Zechariah—“Upon one stone are seven eyes,” but I very quickly concluded that this must refer to some mark on a stone which could only be found in situ, where the treasure was concealed. To be short, I made all possible notes and sketches and tracings, and then came back to Parsbury to work out the cipher at leisure. Oh, the agonies I went through! I thought myself very clever at first, for I made sure that the key would be found in some of the old books on secret writing. The “Steganographia” of Joachim Trithemius, who was an earlier contemporary of Abbot Thomas, seemed particularly promising; so I got that, and Selenius’s “Cryptographia” and Bacon “de Augmentis Scientiarum,”* and some more. But I could hit upon nothing. Then I tried the principle of the “most frequent letter,” taking first Latin and then German as a basis. That didn’t help, either; whether it ought to have done so, I am not clear. And then I came back to the window itself, and read over my notes, hoping almost against hope that the Abbot might himself have somewhere supplied the key I wanted. I could make nothing out of the colour or pattern of the robes. There were no landscape backgrounds with subsidiary objects; there was nothing in the canopies. The only resource possible seemed to be in the attitudes of the figures. “Job,” I read: “scroll in left hand, forefinger of right hand extended upwards. John: holds inscribed book in left hand; with right hand blesses, with two fingers. Zechariah: scroll in left hand; right hand extended upwards, as Job, but with three fingers pointing up.” In other words, I reflected, Job has one finger extended, John has two, Zechariah has three. May not there be a numeral key concealed in that? My dear Gregory,’ said Mr. Somerton, laying his hand on his friend’s knee, ‘that was the key. I didn’t get it to fit at first, but after two or three trials I saw what was meant. After the first letter of the inscription you skip one letter, after the next you skip two, and after that skip three. Now look at the result I got. I’ve underlined the letters which form words:

  ‘Do you see it? “Decem millia auri reposita sunt in puteo in at …” (Ten thousand [pieces] of gold are laid up in a well in …), followed by an incomplete word beginning at. So far so good. I tried the same plan with the remaining letters; but it wouldn’t work, and I fancied that perhaps the placing of dots after the three last letters might indicate some difference of procedure. Then I thought to myself, “Wasn’t there some allusion to a well in the accou
nt of Abbot Thomas in that book the ‘Sertum’?” Yes, there was: he built a puteus in atrio (a well in the court). There, of course, was my word atrio. The next step was to copy out the remaining letters of the inscription, omitting those I had already used. That gave what you will see on this slip:

  RVIIOPDOOSMVVISCAVBSBTAOTDIEAMLSIVSPDEER

  SETAEGIANRFEEALQDVAIMLEATTHOOVMCA.H.Q.E.

  ‘Now, I knew what the three first letters I wanted were,—namely, rio—to complete the word atrio; and, as you will see, these are all to be found in the first five letters. I was a little confused at first by the occurrence of two i’s, but very soon I saw that every alternate letter must be taken in the remainder of the inscription. You can work it out for yourself; the result, continuing where the first “round” left off, is this:

  “rio domus abbatialis de Steinfeld a me, Thoma, qui posui custodem super ea. Gare à qui la touche.”

  ‘So the whole secret was out:

  “Ten thousand pieces of gold are laid up in the well in the court of the Abbot’s house of Steinfeld by me, Thomas, who have set a guardian over them. Gare à qui la touche.”*

  ‘The last words, I ought to say, are a device which Abbot Thomas had adopted. I found it with his arms in another piece of glass at Lord D——’s, and he drafted it bodily into his cipher, though it doesn’t quite fit in point of grammar.