Orth rose abruptly. “Perhaps you will take some further time to think it over,” he said. “You can stay a few weeks longer—the matter cannot be so pressing as that.”
The woman rose. “I’ve thought this,” she said; “let Blanche decide. I believe she knows more than any of us. I believe that whichever way she decided would be right. I won’t say anything to her, so you won’t think I’m working on her feelings; and I can trust you. But she’ll know.”
“Why do you think that?” asked Orth, sharply. “There is nothing uncanny about the child. She is not yet seven years old. Why should you place such a responsibility upon her?”
“Do you think she’s like other children?”
“I know nothing of other children.”
“I do, sir. I’ve raised six. And I’ve seen hundreds of others. I never was one to be a fool about my own, but Blanche isn’t like any other child living—I’m certain of it.”
“What do you think?”
And the woman answered, according to her lights: “I think she’s an angel, and came to us because we needed her.”
“And I think she is Blanche Mortlake working out the last of her salvation,” thought the author; but he made no reply, and was alone in a moment.
It was several days before he spoke to Blanche, and then, one morning, when she was sitting on her mat on the lawn with the light full upon her, he told her abruptly that her mother must return home.
To his surprise, but unutterable delight, she burst into tears and flung herself into his arms.
“You need not leave me,” he said, when he could find his own voice. “You can stay here always and be my little girl. It all rests with you.”
“I can’t stay,” she sobbed. “I can’t!”
“And that is what made you so sad once or twice?” he asked, with a double eagerness.
She made no reply.
“Oh!” he said, passionately, “give me your confidence, Blanche. You are the only breathing thing that I love.”
“If I could I would,” she said. “But I don’t know—not quite.”
“How much do you know?”
But she sobbed again and would not answer. He dared not risk too much. After all, the physical barrier between the past and the present was very young.
“Well, well, then, we will talk about the other matter. I will not pretend to disguise the fact that your mother is distressed at the idea of parting from you, and thinks it would be as sad for your brothers and sisters, whom she says you influence for their good. Do you think that you do?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know this?”
“Do you know why you know everything?”
“No, my dear, and I have great respect for your instincts. But your sisters and brothers are now old enough to take care of themselves. They must be of poor stuff if they cannot live properly without the aid of a child. Moreover, they will be marrying soon. That will also mean that your mother will have many little grandchildren to console her for your loss. I will be the one bereft, if you leave me. I am the only one who really needs you. I don’t say I will go to the bad, as you may have very foolishly persuaded yourself your family will do without you, but I trust to your instincts to make you realize how unhappy, how inconsolable I shall be. I shall be the loneliest man on earth!”
She rubbed her face deeper into his flannels, and tightened her embrace. “Can’t you come, too?” she asked.
“No; you must live with me wholly or not at all. Your people are not my people, their ways are not my ways. We should not get along. And if you lived with me over there you might as well stay here, for your influence over them would be quite as removed. Moreover, if they are of the right stuff, the memory of you will be quite as potent for good as your actual presence.”
“Not unless I died.”
Again something within him trembled. “Do you believe you are going to die young?” he blurted out.
But she would not answer.
He entered the nursery abruptly the next day and found her packing her dolls. When she saw him, she sat down and began to weep hopelessly. He knew then that his fate was sealed. And when, a year later, he received her last little scrawl, he was almost glad that she went when she did.
THE HAUNTING OF WHITE GATES, by G. M. Robins
I
In a Vault not far from this Tablet
Repose the mortal Remains of
two Protestant Gentlewomen,
Mrs. ANNA and Mrs. CLARA KENTON,
of White Gates, in this Parish.
For many Years they led a Life of
Virtuous Retirement, united in Sisterly Affection.
They lived to mourn the loss of amiable Parents,
of three Brothers, and two Sisters,
Whose names are duly recorded on a
Tablet in the Chancel,
and after presenting to the World
a shining Example of Christian Patience,
Fortitude, and Resignation, quitted this Life
for a better, in sure and certain
Expectation of future Glory.
Mrs. ANNA deceased Dec. 8, 18—,
Mrs. CLARA surviving her beloved Sister
only one month and three days.
This Monument is erected by the Piety
of their Nephew and sole Descendant,
JOSHUA KENYON HACKETT,
In Commemoration of Qualities in this life, Alas! too rare!
* * **
The soft, dark eyes of a young girl in a shady black hat and feathers perused with languid interest the information recorded on the square, ugly marble tablet, mounted upon slate, which adorned the wall just above the mouldering oak pew labelled “White Gates.” The piety of the sole descendant of the Kenyon family had limited itself to a very plain, not to say bald memorial of his maiden aunts. Not a carving, not a flourish, no death’s-head, nor dove, nor weeping willow, testified to the depth of his affection.
Muriel North, whose imagination was keen, found herself taking a definite dislike to the idea of Mr. Joshua Hackett’s personality, while she speculated as to the grammatical accuracy of his description of himself as the descendant of these irreproachable ladies.
The date of the tablet was twenty years earlier than the dull November Sunday upon which Miss North formed, for the first time, a part of the scanty congregation in the ramshackle village church.
“Why doesn’t he live at White Gates himself, instead of letting it?” she idly mused, as the Litany came to an end, and the aged clerk, pulling himself to his feet with an effort, gave out a hymn.
Terrible groans in the west gallery announced the preliminary spasms of the harmonium; and then the shrill quavering voices of the schoolchildren broke out into song.
The place, the ritual, were survivals such as are yet to be found in the remoter agricultural districts of England. Muriel had never been in such a church, never assisted at such a function before; and it added to a curious sense of remoteness from the world she knew, which had assailed her as soon as she arrived at White Gates yesterday.
The chambers which, in London, she shared with two girl friends, and the city office in which her daily lot was cast, with a typewriter, were things alien, far removed from the moaning, desolate wolds, the silent, depopulated waste which surrounded the village of Longstreet Parva.
Coming at last out of church, from the oppression of mustiness and dry-rot, and the suggestion of wet vaults and gaping coffins under the uneven stone slabs of the floor, there encompassed her a heaving expanse of country sown with the graves of a race that had ceased to be, before the armed tread of Caesar’s legions shook the land. Even in summer a wind always moaned about the hill where the church stood; now, in the dreary November, the gusts whistled and screamed, and sprinkled Muriel’s dainty
hat and feathers with the first drops of the water they had drawn as they scudded over the cold bosom of the Atlantic.
Below her a creeping mist hid the village—rent here and there by a desultory wind that had no heart to persevere. The contorted chimneys of White Gates showed against black fir-trees.
“No wonder they let it cheap,” reflected Muriel, as she descended the hill. The few worshippers dispersed in silence.
Nobody spoke to the girl. The natives of the Wolds are not a friendly race. Perhaps in their blood still lurks the memory of a time when they dwelt in pile-raised villages in the marshes to escape their foes.
“It may have been bearable in summer,” Miss North was thinking, as she pushed open one of the white gates and walked among the yellow leaves to the unpretentious house door, “but in winter—rather they than I!”
“They” were Muriel’s father and his second wife. Being very poor and in weak health, it was but natural that Major North should marry again; and still more natural that he should become the property of the most impecunious of the ladies who showed him special attention at the boarding-houses frequented by him and his daughters. Two of these daughters, Evie and Constance, married; Muriel, the youngest, chose to be independent. But the chronic ill-health of the major had now developed into positive disease; and Mrs. North had implored Muriel to come and relieve her for a time of a portion of her heavy nursing duties.
The firm in whose employ the girl worked well knew her value, and readily agreed to keep her post for her during her father’s illness; so she repaired, as in duty bound, to the remote village where the couple resided in a house of some pretensions, which they had procured ridiculously cheap.
“Oh, he’s better today,” said Mrs. North, as she and her step-daughter sat down to their Sunday roast beef and apple tart. “I think your coming cheered him up. The church is rather depressing, isn’t it?”
“The whole place seems to me a little depressing,” said Muriel with a shiver, thinking of her terribly cold drive from the station the previous day, eleven miles across the wold in a cart. “I dare say it’s better in summer.”
“It’s very pretty,” said Mrs. North eagerly, “and such a nice house! Stables, you know, and the rent so low, owing to the distance from the railway; your father is able to keep his horse, his great pleasure. He was so counting upon the hunting this winter.” She sighed regretfully.
“He may get some yet,” said Muriel hopefully. “He is not nearly so ill as I expected to find him.”
“He’s been so well all the autumn, and taking such an interest in the place,” regretted his wife. “Really it is so far beyond anything we thought our means would allow, and yet not a big house, not expensive to keep up. And the garden so well stocked! Mr. Hackett had it all attended to in spite of the house being empty for so long.”
“Was the house long empty?”
“Oh, dear yes. People don’t care for remote places nowadays. Every one is for railways and telephones and automobiles. The house-agent told us he had only to say, ‘In the Cotswolds,’ and intending tenants fled!”
“I wonder Mr. Hackett should let it, if it is his family place,” mused Muriel. “One’s own place never seems remote—at least, so I should have fancied.”
“He did live here for a time,” was the reply, “but I don’t think he was popular in the neighbourhood; anyhow, he left, and all kinds of people have had it since. But it suits us admirably. Not a large neighbourhood, but everyone has called; your father’s position, you know.” And the poor soul, whose life’s ambition had been fulfilled when she married an “army man,” smiled in satisfaction.
Muriel would not for worlds have damped Agnes’s simple pride, so she said nothing; but she felt that, personally, she did not consider the house comfortable.
It was not old enough to be picturesque or quaint. The rooms were square, with early Victorian sash windows. A horrible green iron verandah made dark the interior of the dining-and drawing-rooms. It was hard to believe that, at any season of the year, the Cotswolds would feel themselves in harmony with that flimsy erection.
* * * *
This girl was quick to feel local influences. Her own mother had been a Celt, pure-blooded, the descendant of a race of Irish kings; and Muriel had inherited, with her clear skin and wonderful eyes, the sensitive temperament which is so curiously alive to the pressure of the unseen through nature’s visible order.
More than one curious experience, of a nature almost too elusive to be chronicled, had fallen to her lot; and once, as quite a small child, she had declined to sleep in a certain house where lodgings had been taken by the family, and had sobbed without reason, refusing to be left alone, and next day it was discovered that a corpse lay that night in the room next that in which the child slept.
Her thoughts, as that afternoon she sat by her father’s bed, were of the two old Protestant gentlewomen whose bones had lain somewhere not far from the soles of her boots as she sat in the melancholy church that morning.
What kind of lives had they really led, concealed in that Virtuous Retirement which figured so well upon their tombstone? Had they quarrelled? Or had they clung together the closer, as Fate tore from them, one by one, all those who had formerly played and romped with them through the gardens of White Gates? Had their hearts broken, under the stroke of some forsaking lover, keener even than the death of brother or sister? Or had they been content to vegetate and make up their lives out of servants’ shortcomings, fruit preserving, and the gossip of a scanty neighbourhood? Food for much conjecture floated in the brain of Muriel, sitting where they might have sat, beside a sickbed—perhaps the very same bed which had held the pining, dying limbs of many Kenyons. It was a mahogany four-poster, upholstered in gay new chintz, according to the taste of Mrs. North. Muriel wished it still wore the green damask hangings and woollen fringe which formed, she was certain, its original garment.
This room looked to the front of the house, and had a communicating dressing-room. The two best bedrooms were at the back, over the dining-and drawing-rooms, and these also had a communicating door. Muriel felt certain that it was these two latter rooms which had watched over the virgin slumbers of the Protestant gentlewomen.
On the other side of the landing was a bachelor’s room, now assigned to her own use, as it was possible, even in this weather, to warm it with a fire. Here she felt certain that Joshua had slept, when he came on a visit to his maiden aunts.
It was a bitterly cold night. Muriel passed it on a sofa at the foot of her father’s bed, Mrs North occupying the bachelor’s room, that she might get a sound night’s rest for the first time in many weeks.
All through the dark hours the girl’s dreams were confused. The thoughts she had cherished during the gloomy day, of death and dissolution, in that house, that bed, filled her brain with curious imaginings. The light tread of watchers, the slow shuffling step of undertaker’s men, the murmur of voices round a bed, and of deep groaning breaths, woke her again and again, but always to find the room quiet and her father sleeping peacefully. Yet, as soon as her eyes, still weary with her long cold journey of yesterday, closed again, the weird procession passed before her brain, the ceaseless out-going of the dead from White Gates! The tolling of the bell in the crazy church tower smote her ear, every room contained a corpse, watched with candles. People moved to and fro, doing the last sad offices. The very smell of death was in her nostrils as she struggled awake again. The night-light burned beside her watch; it was half-past five.
Rising noiselessly she put fresh billets on the dying fire, and kindled it afresh, listened with satisfaction to the major’s even breathing, and was just about to lie down again when she heard a door softly close.
In the absolute stillness the sound seemed all the more audible because it was manifestly made with extreme caution, by one not desiring to be heard.
/> “How vexing of Agnes to be awake and on the fidget when she might be having a good night,” she thought; and, hurrying swiftly to the door, she peeped across the passage with the design of assuring her step-mother that all was well. A lamp was burning upon a small table on the landing, as the two women thought it quite possible that communication between them during the night might be necessary.
Just outside the door of the room in which Mrs. North was sleeping, and immediately opposite Muriel, a young woman stood, her hand still on the latch of the door. She was tall, fair, pale, with a look of great determination, and a rigid line of jaw which was especially noticeable. Her eyes gave the impression of being artificially darkened beneath, and her fair hair was elaborately puffed and waved.
As Muriel peeped out, she was in the act of turning quickly away from the door which she bad just closed; her face was hut for a moment visible, then she turned round and walked swiftly along the passage leading to the other end of the house, where the servants’ rooms were.
This passage was considerably to the right of where Muriel stood, beyond the stair-head; and the woman was thus completely lost to view the moment she reached it.
Two things in her appearance struck the gazing girl as odd. One was the expression—as of a mind tensely nerved to some special effort—which appeared on her strong face—the thin lips compressed, the eyes narrowed; the other was a small point, but curious. As she turned her back, it could be seen that her conspicuous-looking hair was arranged in a large ball behind, and that this ball was encircled by a string of beads, apparently tied beneath with ribbon streamers, which hung down her dress to the waist.
The Third Ghost Story Megapack: 26 Classic Ghost Stories Page 33
