But this was not how it happened. While he waited, so intent that his whole frame seemed to be capable of hearing, he heard the closing of the door, boldly shut with a sound that rose in muffled echoes through the house, and Lindores himself appeared, ghastly indeed as a dead man, but walking upright and firmly, the lines of his face drawn, and his eyes staring. Lord Gowrie uttered a cry. He was more alarmed by this unexpected return than by the helpless prostration of the swoon which he had expected. He recoiled from his son as if he too had been a spirit. “Lindores!” he cried; was it Lindores, or some one else in his place? The boy seemed as if he did not see him. He went straight forward to where the water stood on the dusty table, and took a great draught, then turned to the door. “Lindores!” said his father, in miserable anxiety; “don’t you know me?” Even then the young man only half looked at him, and put out a hand almost as cold as the hand that had clutched himself in the Secret Chamber; a faint smile came upon his face. “Don’t stay here,” he whispered; “come! come!”
Lord Gowrie drew his son’s arm within his own, and felt the thrill through and through him of nerves strained beyond mortal strength. He could scarcely keep up with him as he stalked along the corridor to his room, stumbling as if he could not see, yet swift as an arrow. When they reached his room he turned and closed and locked the door, then laughed as he staggered to the bed. “That will not keep him out, will it?” he said.
“Lindores,” said his father, “I expected to find you unconscious. I am almost more frightened to find you like this. I need not ask if you have seen him—”
“Oh, I have seen him. The old liar! Father, promise to expose him, to turn him out—promise to clear out that accursed old nest! It is our own fault. Why have we left such a place shut out from the eye of day? Isn’t there something in the Bible about those who do evil hating the light?”
“Lindores! you don’t often quote the Bible.”
“No, I suppose not; but there is more truth in—many things than we thought.”
“Lie down,” said the anxious father. “Take some of this wine—try to sleep.”
“Take it away; give me no more of that devil’s drink. Talk to me—that’s better. Did you go through it all the same, poor papa?—and hold me fast. You are warm—you are honest!” he cried. He put forth his hands over his father’s, warming them with the contact. He put his cheek like a child against his father’s arm. He gave a faint laugh, with the tears in his eyes. “Warm and honest,” he repeated. “Kind flesh and blood! and did you go through it all the same?”
“My boy!” cried the father, feeling his heart glow and swell over the son who had been parted from him for years by that development of young manhood and ripening intellect which so often severs and loosens the ties of home. Lord Gowrie had felt that Lindores half despised his simple mind and duller imagination; but this childlike clinging overcame him, and tears stood in his eyes. “I fainted, I suppose. I never knew how it ended. They made what they liked of me. But you, my brave boy, you came out of your own will.”
Lindores shivered. “I fled!” he said. “No honour in that. I had not courage to face him longer. I will tell you by-and-by. But I want to know about you.”
What an ease it was to the father to speak! For years and years this had been shut up in his breast. It had made him lonely in the midst of his friends.
“Thank God,” he said, “that I can speak to you, Lindores. Often and often I have been tempted to tell your mother. But why should I make her miserable? She knows there is something; she knows when I see him, but she knows no more.”
“When you see him?” Lindores raised himself, with a return of his first ghastly look, in his bed. Then he raised his clenched fist wildly, and shook it in the air. “Vile devil, coward, deceiver!”
“Oh hush, hush, hush, Lindores! God help us! what troubles you may bring!”
“And God help me, whatever troubles I bring,” said the young man. “I defy him, father. An accursed being like that must be less, not more powerful, than we are—with God to back us. Only stand by me: stand by me—”
“Hush, Lindores! You don’t feel it yet—never to get out of hearing of him all your life! He will make you pay for it—if not now, after; when you remember he is there; whatever happens, knowing everything! But I hope it will not be so bad with you as with me, my poor boy. God help you indeed if it is, for you have more imagination and more mind. I am able to forget him sometimes when I am occupied—when in the hunting-field, going across country. But you are not a hunting man, my poor boy,” said Lord Gowrie, with a curious mixture of a regret, which was less serious than the other. Then he lowered his voice. “Lindores, this is what has happened to me since the moment I gave him my hand.”
“I did not give him my hand.”
“You did not give him your hand? God bless you, my boy! You stood out?” he cried, with tears again rushing to his eyes; “and they say—they say—but I don’t know if there is any truth in it.” Lord Gowrie got up from his son’s side, and walked up and down with excited steps. “If there should be truth in it! Many people think the whole thing is a fancy. If there should be truth in it, Lindores!”
“In what, father?”
“They say, if he is once resisted his power is broken—once refused. You could stand against him—you! Forgive me, my boy, as I hope God will forgive me, to have thought so little of His best gifts,” cried Lord Gowrie, coming back with wet eyes; and stooping, he kissed his son’s hand. “I thought you would be more shaken by being more mind than body,” he said, humbly. “I thought if I could but have saved you from the trial; and you are the conqueror!”
“Am I the conqueror? I think all my bones are broken, father—out of their sockets,” said the young man, in a low voice. “I think I shall go to sleep.”
“Yes, rest, my boy. It is the best thing for you,” said the father, though with a pang of momentary disappointment.
Lindores fell back upon the pillow. He was so pale that there were moments when the anxious watcher thought him not sleeping but dead. He put his hand out feebly, and grasped his father’s hand. “Warm—honest,” he said, with a feeble smile about his lips, and fell asleep.
The daylight was full in the room, breaking through shutters and curtains and mocking at the lamp that still flared on the table. It seemed an emblem of the disorders, mental and material, of this strange night; and, as such, it affected the plain imagination of Lord Gowrie, who would have fain got up to extinguish it, and whose mind returned again and again, in spite of him, to this symptom of disturbance. By-and-by, when Lindores’ grasp relaxed, and he got his hand free, he got up from his son’s bedside, and put out the lamp, putting it carefully out of the way. With equal care he put away the wine from the table, and gave the room its ordinary aspect, softly opening a window to let in the fresh air of the morning. The park lay fresh in the early sunshine, still, except for the twittering of the birds, refreshed with dews, and shining in that soft radiance of the morning which is over before mortal cares are stirring. Never, perhaps, had Gowrie looked out upon the beautiful world around his house without a thought of the weird existence which was going on so near to him, which had gone on for centuries, shut up out of sight of the sunshine. The Secret Chamber had been present with him since ever he saw it. He had never been able to get free of the spell of it. He had felt himself watched, surrounded, spied upon, day after day, since he was of the age of Lindores, and that was thirty years ago. He turned it all over in his mind, as he stood there and his son slept. It had been on his lips to tell it all to his boy, who had now come to inherit the enlightenment of his race. And it was a disappointment to him to have it all forced back again, and silence imposed upon him once more. Would he care to hear it when he woke? would he not rather, as Lord Gowrie remembered to have done himself, thrust the thought as far as he could away from him, and endeavour to forget for
the moment—until the time came when he would not be permitted to forget? He had been like that himself, he recollected now. He had not wished to hear his own father’s tale. “I remember,” he said to himself; “I remember”—turning over everything in his mind—if Lindores might only be willing to hear the story when he woke! But then he himself had not been willing when he was Lindores, and he could understand his son, and could not blame him; but it would be a disappointment. He was thinking this when he heard Lindores’ voice calling him. He went back hastily to his bedside. It was strange to see him in his evening dress with his worn face, in the fresh light of the morning, which poured in at every crevice. “Does my mother know?” said Lindores; “what will she think?”
“She knows something; she knows you have some trial to go through. Most likely she will be praying for us both; that’s the way of women,” said Lord Gowrie, with the tremulous tenderness which comes into a man’s voice sometimes when he speaks of a good wife. “I’ll go and ease her mind, and tell her all is well over—”
“Not yet. Tell me first,” said the young man, putting his hand upon his father’s arm.
What an ease it was! “I was not so good to my father,” he thought to himself, with sudden penitence for the long-past, long-forgotten fault, which, indeed, he had never realised as a fault before. And then he told his son what had been the story of his life—how he had scarcely ever sat alone without feeling, from some corner of the room, from behind some curtain, those eyes upon him; and how, in the difficulties of his life, that secret inhabitant of the house had been present, sitting by him and advising him. “Whenever there has been anything to do: when there has been a question between two ways, all in a moment I have seen him by me: I feel when he is coming. It does not matter where I am—here or anywhere—as soon as ever there is a question of family business; and always he persuades me to the wrong way, Lindores. Sometimes I yield to him, how can I help it? He makes everything so clear; he makes wrong seem right. If I have done unjust things in my day—”
“You have not, father.”
“I have: there were these Highland people I turned out. I did not mean to do it, Lindores; but he showed me that it would be better for the family. And my poor sister that married Tweedside and was wretched all her life. It was his doing, that marriage; he said she would be rich, and so she was, poor thing, poor thing! and died of it. And old Macalister’s lease— Lindores, Lindores! when there is any business it makes my heart sick. I know he will come, and advise wrong, and tell me—something I will repent after.”
“The thing to do is to decide beforehand, that, good or bad, you will not take his advice.”
Lord Gowrie shivered. “I am not strong like you, or clever; I cannot resist. Sometimes I repent in time and don’t do it; and then! But for your mother and you children, there is many a day I would not have given a farthing for my life.”
“Father,” said Lindores, springing from his bed. “two of us together can do many things. Give me your word to clear out this cursed den of darkness this very day.”
“Lindores, hush, hush, for the sake of heaven!”
“I will not, for the sake of heaven! Throw it open—let everybody who likes see it—make an end of the secret—pull down everything, curtains, walls. What do you say?—sprinkle holy water? Are you laughing at me?”
“I did not speak,” said Earl Gowrie, growing very pale, and grasping his son’s arm with both his hands. “Hush, boy; do you think he does not hear?”
And then there was a low laugh close to them—so close that both shrank; a laugh no louder than a breath.
“Did you laugh—father?”
“No, Lindores.” Lord Gowrie had his eyes fixed. He was as pale as the dead. He held his son tight for a moment; then his gaze and his grasp relaxed, and he fell back feebly in a chair.
“You see!” he said; “whatever we do it will be the same; we are under his power.”
And then there ensued the blank pause with which baffled men confront a hopeless situation. But at that moment the first faint stirrings of the house—a window being opened, a bar undone, a movement of feet, and subdued voices—became audible in the stillness of the morning. Lord Gowrie roused himself at once. “We must not be found like this,” he said; “we must not show how we have spent the night. It is over, thank God! and oh, my boy, forgive me! I am thankful there are two of us to bear it; it makes the burden lighter—though I ask your pardon humbly for saying so. I would have saved you if I could, Lindores.”
“I don’t wish to have been saved; but I will not bear it. I will end it,” the young man said, with an oath out of which his emotion took all profanity. His father said, “Hush, hush.” With a look of terror and pain, he left him; and yet there was a thrill of tender pride in his mind. How brave the boy was! even after he had been there. Could it be that this would all come to nothing, as every other attempt to resist had done before?
“I suppose you know all about it now, Lindores,” said his friend Ffarrington, after breakfast; “luckily for us who are going over the house. What a glorious old place it is!”
“I don’t think that Lindores enjoys the glorious old place today,” said another of the guests under his breath. “How pale he is! He doesn’t look as if he had slept.”
“I will take you over every nook where I have ever been,” said Lindores. He looked at his father with almost command in his eyes. “Come with me, all of you. We shall have no more secrets here.”
“Are you mad?” said his father in his ear.
“Never mind,” cried the young man. “0h, trust me; I will do it with judgment. Is everybody ready?” There was an excitement about him that half frightened, half roused the party. They all rose, eager, yet doubtful. His mother came to him and took his arm.
“Lindores! you will do nothing to vex your father; don’t make him unhappy. I don’t know your secrets, you two; but look, he has enough to bear.”
“I want you to know our secrets, mother. Why should we have secrets from you?”
“Why, indeed?” she said, with tears in her eyes. “But, Lindores, my dearest boy, don’t make it worse for him.”
“I give you my word, I will be wary,” he said; and she left him to go to his father, who followed the party, with an anxious look upon his face.
“Are you coming, too?” he asked.
“I? No; I will not go: but trust him—trust the boy, John.”
“He can do nothing; he will not be able to do anything,” he said.
And thus the guests set out on their round—the son in advance, excited and tremulous, the father anxious and watchful behind. They began in the usual way, with the old state-rooms and picture-gallery; and in a short time the party had half forgotten that there was anything unusual in the inspection. When, however, they were half-way down the gallery, Lindores stopped short with an air of wonder. “You have had it put back then?” he said. He was standing in front of the vacant space where Earl Robert’s portrait ought to have been. “What is it?” they all cried, crowding upon him, ready for any marvel. But as there was nothing to be seen, the strangers smiled among themselves. “Yes, to be sure, there is nothing so suggestive as a vacant place,” said a lady who was of the party. “Whose portrait ought to be there, Lord Lindores?”
He looked at his father, who made a slight assenting gesture, then shook his head drearily.
“Who put it there?” Lindores said, in a whisper.
“It is not there; but you and I see it,” said Lord Gowrie, with a sigh.
Then the strangers perceived that something had moved the father and the son, and, notwithstanding their eager curiosity, obeyed the dictates of politeness, and dispersed into groups looking at the other pictures. Lindores set his teeth and clenched his hands. Fury was growing upon him—not the awe that filled his father’s mind. “We will leave the rest o
f this to another time,” he cried, turning to the others, almost fiercely. “Come, I will show you something more striking now.” He made no further pretence of going systematically over the house. He turned and went straight up-stairs, and along the corridor. “Are we going over the bedrooms?” some one said. Lindores led the way straight to the old lumber-room, a strange place for such a gay party. The ladies drew their dresses about them. There was not room for half of them. Those who could get in began to handle the strange things that lay about, touching them with dainty fingers, exclaiming how dusty they were. The window was half blocked up by old armour and rusty weapons; but this did not hinder the full summer daylight from penetrating in a flood of light. Lindores went in with fiery determination on his face. He went straight to the wall, as if he would go through, then paused with a blank gaze. “Where is the door?” he said.
“You are forgetting yourself,” said Lord Gowrie, speaking over the heads of the others. “Lindores! you know very well there never was any door there; the wall is very thick; you can see by the depth of the window. There is no door there.”
The Third Ghost Story Megapack: 26 Classic Ghost Stories Page 46
