“I want to go out,” said the spook, “I’m tired of this Church, and I’ve been alone for six hundred years. It’s a long time.”
“It does seem rather a long time,” said Caleb, “but why don’t you go if you want to? There’s three doors.”
“That’s just it,” said the spook, “They keep me in.”
“What?” said Caleb, “when they’re open.”
“Open or shut,” said the spook, “it’s all one.”
“Well, then,” said Caleb, “what about the windows?”
“Every bit as bad,” said the spook, “They’re all pointed.”
Caleb felt out of his depth. Open doors and windows that kept a person in—if it was a person—seemed to want a little understanding. And the flimsier the person, too, the easier it ought to be for him to go where he wanted. Also, what could it matter whether they were pointed or not?
The latter question was the one which Caleb asked first.
“Six hundred years ago,” said the spook, “all arches were made round, and when these pointed things came in I cursed them. I hate new-fangled things.”
“That wouldn’t hurt them much,” said Caleb.
“I said I would never go under one of them,” said the spook.
“That would matter more to you than to them,” said Caleb.
“It does,” said the spook, with another great sigh.
“But you could easily change your mind,” said Caleb.
“I was tied to it,” said the spook, “I was told that I never more should go under one of them, whether I would or not.”
“Some people will tell you anything,” answered Caleb.
“It was a Bishop,” explained the spook.
“Ah!” said Caleb, “that’s different, of course.”
The spook told Caleb how often he had tried to go under the pointed arches, sometimes of the doors, sometimes of the windows, and how a stream of wind always struck him from the point of the arch, and drifted him back into the Church. He had long given up trying.
“You should have been outside,” said Caleb, “before they built the last door.”
“It was my Church,” said the spook, “and I was too proud to leave.”
Caleb began to sympathise with the spook. He had a pride in the Church himself, and disliked even to hear another person say Amen before him. He also began to be a little jealous of this stranger who had been six hundred years in possession of the Church in which Caleb had believed himself, under the Vicar, to be master. And he began to plot.
“Why do you want to get out?” he asked.
“I’m no use here,” was the reply, “I don’t get enough to do to keep myself warm. And I know there are scores of Churches now without any kirk-spooks at all. I can hear their cheap little bells dinging every Sunday.”
“There’s very few bells hereabouts,” said Caleb.
“There’s no hereabouts for spooks,” said the other. “We can hear any distance you like.”
“But what good are you at all?” said Caleb.
“Good!” said the spook. “Don’t we secure proper respect for Churches, especially after dark? A Church would be like any other place if it wasn’t for us. You must know that.”
“Well, then,” said Caleb, “you’re no good here. This Church is all right. What will you give me to let you out?”
“Can you do it?” asked the spook.
“What will you give me?” said Caleb.
“I’ll say a good word for you amongst the spooks,” said the other.
“What good will that do me?” said Caleb.
“A good word never did anybody any harm yet,” answered the spook.
“Very well then, come along,” said Caleb.
“Gently then,” said the spook; “don’t make a draught.”
“Not yet,” said Caleb, and he drew the spook very carefully (as one takes a vessel quite full of water) from the seat.
“I can’t go under pointed arches,” cried the spook, as Caleb moved off.
“Nobody wants you to,” said Caleb. “Keep close to me.”
He led the spook down the aisle to the angle of the wall where a small iron shutter covered an opening into the flue. It was used by the chimney sweep alone, but Caleb had another use for it now. Calling to the spook to keep close, he suddenly removed the shutter.
The fires were by this time burning briskly. There was a strong up-draught as the shutter was removed. Caleb felt something rush across his face, and heard a cheerful laugh away up in the chimney. Then he knew that he was alone. He replaced the shutter, gave another look at his stoves, took the keys, and made his way home.
He found his wife asleep in her chair, sat down and took off his boots, and awakened her by throwing them across the kitchen.
“I’ve been wondering when you’d wake,” he said.
“What?” she said, “Have you been in long?”
“Look at the clock,” said Caleb. “Half after twelve.”
“My gracious,” said his wife. “Let’s be off to bed.”
“Did you tell her about the spook?” he was naturally asked.
“Not I,” said Caleb. “You know what she’d say. Same as she always does of a Saturday night.”
* * * *
This fable Mr. Batchel related with reluctance. His attitude towards it was wholly deprecatory. Psychic phenomena, he said, lay outside the province of the mere humourist, and the levity with which they had been treated was largely responsible for the presumptuous materialism of the age.
He said more, as he warmed to the subject, than can here be repeated. The reader of the foregoing tales, however, will be interested to know that Mr. Batchel’s own attitude was one of humble curiosity. He refused even to guess why the revenant was sometimes invisible, and at other times partly or wholly visible; sometimes capable of using physical force, and at other times powerless. He knew that they had their periods, and that was all.
There is room, he said, for the romancer in these matters; but for the humourist, none. Romance was the play of intelligence about the confines of truth. The invisible world, like the visible, must have its romancers, its explorers, and its interpreters; but the time of the last was not yet come.
Criticism, he observed in conclusion, was wholesome and necessary. But of the idle and mischievous remarks which were wont to pose as criticism, he held none in so much contempt as the cheap and irrational Pooh-Pooh.
THEY THAT MOURN, by Juliet Wilbor Tompkins
A woman in black, seeing Eleanor’s deep mourning, came and took the chair beside her, as though grief longed to be near grief. The business of the meeting had not yet begun, and after a moment she spoke, impetuously, yet with a tense composure, her eyes straining toward Eleanor’s grave, pale face.
“I lost my little girl,” she said. “It is just two months today. I had to do something, so I came here. I have two boys, but she was my only little girl.”
Eleanor’s instinct was to shrink from a grief so nakedly carried; but she made herself bend forward and murmur some word that meant comprehension.
The woman drew out a locket and showed a little face inside.
“She was ill only twelve hours,” she went on, with the same strained composure. “Every one loved her, high and low, wherever she went. I don’t believe—” The line of her lips broke, drawing down at one side on a sharp intake of breath, but her eyes remained brilliantly dry. The chairman of the meeting mounted the platform and rapped for order.
Eleanor paid little attention to the business that followed. The social demand for reticence seemed, all at once, too trivial to be remembered before this white-hot, world-filling sorrow. The woman had met something too big to be mastered: there was room for nothing else on her horizon. She had no cur
iosity as to the cause of Eleanor’s black garments. After the meeting. Eleanor saw her tell some one else the same simple, breathless tale. A person on whom the actual sky had fallen must have so carried his astounding experience. “That is pure grief—grief without remorse,” she decided, as she left the meeting. “She gave everything, she loved wholly; she has no cause for shame.” She shivered, and hurried out to her waiting motor. After she had gone, some one told the woman in black that that was Eleanor Searles, whose mother had been lost in the wreck of the Jessica last June.
“Ah, I wish I had known,” she said, but absently. “My little girl was nine on the 1st of June,” she added.
Eleanor’s house loomed big and empty that night. The door of the upstairs sitting-room was open, and it seemed as if her approaching step must be met by her mother’s welcoming, “Well, Nellie! Got home, dear? Kind o’ tired? Want to set a minute?”
She paused in the doorway, looking about the room that was as startling in that harmonious house as her mother’s presence had been between her father and herself. Then she went slowly in and threw herself down in the blue brocade armchair that had been her mother’s first excited purchase when all the dreams of fairyland had come true and the prince had married her.
The beauty that had driven young Searles to madness and marriage had faded before Eleanor could remember. It had been the temporary bloom of color and curve and joyous country youth; and for any beauty that might have developed later the irritated man had no eyes. But Eleanor, in spite of her slim Searles physique, had not taken her heritage solely from her father. She had gone with him, imitated him in his patient bored courtesy to the woman he had married, learned to scorn what he scorned as soon as the happy nursery warmth had begun to cool. Yet never in all those years had she been perfectly comfortable. And after her father’s death, when the charm of his personality was removed and the importance of his approval less compelling, she had reluctantly grown more and more conscious of this cheerful, untutored, busy-handed woman, so appallingly alone in her luxurious house. But she had given no sign, still justified by her father’s sanction, and youthfully afraid of committing herself to some bond that should hamper the perfect freedom of her own pursuits and pleasures. When her mother had suddenly decided to go to St. John’s and look up a married sister, she had seen her off with a hard, hurried little kiss and a relief that could scarcely await the boat’s sailing.
“You wouldn’t care to come, too, Nellie, just for the trip?” Mrs. Searles had suggested, but without expressed wistfulness. Eleanor had wished, even before the news came, that she had put her refusal less abruptly. Afterward—
She started up, running from memories. Yet after dinner she came back to the room. She very often sat there now. That young mother whose grief was so pure that it could be spoken of haunted and oppressed her. The wise book she was reading on the economic status of women seemed dusty and remote, and she finally turned to the little, warm-hearted books of her childhood, ranged in a dreadful veneered, glass-doored bookcase, which her mother had bought especially to hold them.
“I kind o’ like to see Dottie Dimple and Katy Did around,” she had explained, when she moved them to her sitting-room. Eleanor had missed the under-meaning of that longing. She did not care where the old volumes were kept.
She took down a handful of them, broken-backed and loose-leaved, all with “Nellie from Mamma” written in large, unfluent letters on the fly-leaf. Her mother’s voice echoed through the pages that she had read aloud so lovingly and laboriously before her child had learned to wince at her country speech. Only once had this difference between them been put into words. The little Eleanor, studying her mother with puzzled eyes, had suddenly asked:
“Mother, why do you say ‘doos’ when father says ‘does’?” She had been frightened by the tragic change in her mother’s face, the force of the hands that closed on her shoulders.
“Dearie, because I ain’t had education. It’s the only thing in life that matters, except bein’ good—and folks’ll forgive you for bein’ bad before they’ll forgive you for not knowin’ books. Don’t you miss it—don’t you let one chanst get by you! It’s too late when you’re grown up and kind o’ brain-stupid and don’t know how to learn. You got to get it little. Oh, my baby, don’t you miss it! Don’t you never shirk your lessons one day! There ain’t no happiness on earth without you got education.”
She had cried, and they had never spoken of it again; but Eleanor had not forgotten. Her father had been proud of her standing in school and college, of her intelligent reading, quite unaware that the real impetus had not come from his side of the family.
Behind Dottie Dimple lay an old copybook. Supposing that it held her own childish work, Eleanor drew it out; then shrank away from its pages in pain and shame. For they were filled with her mother’s slow, difficult writing. Spelling lessons, writing exercises, awkward little compositions; stern grammatical warnings, such as, “She and I done it, not Her and me done it,” repeated twenty times; and across the end a despairing “It’s no use. You can’t teach an old dog.”
Eleanor thrust back the book, locked the glass doors on it, and tried to get away from it by running to her own quarters. But she might as well have stayed. No chair could hold her still that evening. She longed to go to that woman who had lost her little girl and put fierce, rough questions to her:
“Suppose you had neglected your child, avoided her love, starved her with loneliness—how would you bear that?” But the woman would only have answered that that was an impossible supposition. Other people knew how to love before it was too late.
At last she went to bed; but the dawn found her still wide-eyed and tense. “If I could have her back for just one week!” she said to the creeping light. “I would take anything on earth after that. One week, just to comfort her, to give her something real and warm and rightfully hers! One week—I could make it all up to her.” She sat up in bed, stretching out her arms. “Are there no miracles any more? Do we never get a second chance? Just one week?”
* * * *
The woman’s name, Mrs. Gannon, was unfamiliar, but hearing that she was dressed in mourning, Eleanor went hurriedly to the drawing-room. Her thoughts had hovered persistently about the mother who had lost her little girl, and could see nothing else in the universe. But it was a person of another class who rose respectfully when Eleanor came in.
“I’m very bold in coming to you, miss,” she began, and her pleasant English voice, crisp and honest, was reassuring. Her shabby black had roused fear of some whining tale. “But I’m a good seamstress, and I thought as ’ow, under the circumstances, you might be willing to ’elp me to some work.”
“Under the circumstances?” Eleanor repeated. She saw that the woman was not going to cry, and so settled down willingly enough to hear her tale.
“I’m coming to that, miss.” Mrs. Gannon returned to her chair and folded her hands self-respectingly at her belt. “You’ll forgive me for touching on it, but my ’usband was a sailor, miss, and ’e was lost in the Jessica disaster. And so I thought you might be a little interested in ’elping me to get a start. There’s three children, and I ’aven’t lived ’ere long, so it’s not so easy, is it, now?”
Eleanor had started and paled. “In the Jessica disaster?”
“Yes, miss.” Mrs. Gannon maintained a cheerful, practical impersonality. “’E was a good ’usband, and I ’adn’t ’ad to do nothing outside the ’ouse since we was merried—”
“Oh, but that is hard,” Eleanor broke in.
“Well, yes, miss, it is. With three children. But I’m good with the needle—”
“Tell me, did they—was his body found?” The question forced itself past Eleanor’s lips. In the first horror of the news she had been tortured by the thought of helpless voyagers going on and on with the restless tides.
“Oh no, miss. I me
an to say, ’e was picked up by a fishing-boat and taken to a village, but ’e died of the hexposure three days later. I ’ave the letter ’ere that told me, so you can know it was all just like I say.”
Mrs. Gannon was palpably honest. Eleanor had lifted her hand to motion away the letter, when her eyes fell on its handwriting. She bent nearer to it, clutching the woman’s wrist in a grip that hurt. Then, with a cry, she crumpled down on the floor.
Her eyes opened before Mrs. Gannon could run for help. She motioned her back and sat up, dizzily, supported in the other’s arm.
“Let me see it again,” she whispered, and, with the letter in her hands, began to shake and sob. “It’s my mother’s writing! Oh, what does it mean? What does it mean?”
“Did she perish from the hexposure, too, miss?”
“But if she could write this letter, why didn’t she write to me? Why did I not have one word or sign? Oh, am I mad?” She strained her hands against her throbbing head. “Wait till I get a piece of her writing,” she commanded.
She came back with the old copybook, careless now of everything but the truth that layback of that letter; but she scarcely needed the literal confirmation. Though the page was unsigned, through every phrase she heard her mother’s voice. Had a letter miscarried? Had she died up there later, in the little fishing-village? Had she died at all?
Faintness came over Eleanor again, but she fought it off. “I will start tomorrow—tonight,” she said. “Stay and help me get ready. I must go and see for myself—my mother may be living.”
Mrs. Gannon drew off her gloves and folded them with business-like alacrity. “Well, miss, I ’ope you’ll find ’er well and ’earty,” she said, cheerfully.
The journey was a nightmare of delays and difficulties. The little village on the southern coast of Newfoundland was so obscure that neither maps nor steamships knew of its existence; and when at last, in a red, cold sunset, she stood among the fishing-boats that lined the beach, facing the straggling white hamlet, the hope that had brought her seemed clear madness.
The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK: 25 Classic Haunts! Page 53
