But this look, and the emotion which writhed beneath it, exhausted her strength; she had not another word, or even another change of countenance, for any one on earth; the planning’s, pleadings, and fightings of her feverish life were over. There was an air and almost a movement of sinking, and as it were flattening, into the calmness of dissolution. Expression slid from her lips; the waxen yellow of her skin turned ashy; the tremulous hands stiffened into peace;—she was gone.
The husband, already accustomed to such scenes, was the only one of the three spectators who instantly recognized the great change. He laid his ear upon the body, listened awhile for breathing, slowly raised his neglected head, shook it solemnly rather than sadly, and exhaled a profound sigh. The expression in his face, like that in the face of his wife, was mainly “long disquiet merged in rest.” It seemed as if he were glad that the struggle was over, as if he were soothingly conscious of relief from oppression, as if he breathed freer because her breath had ceased.
Divining from his manner the presence of death, Marian Turner shuddered slightly and drew a pace backward. Then she stood like a statue, looking at the corpse askant and with slightly contracted eyes, as one sometimes watches an object of aversion while desiring to turn away from it. Her mien was that of distaste, and little less than disgust. Like her uncle, she did not utter a syllable.
Underhill was the only one who spoke; and his words were but a commonplace of announcement and surprise: She is—she is dead—good heavens!” This was the only utterance of emotion over the body of one who had just gasped out a life of passionate hatred and love. The child for whom this mother had plotted and throbbed was not even in the village, having been sent the day before on a visit to one of his half-sisters. So far as concerned the presence of affection and mourning, she died alone.
Underhill retired from the scene with exceedingly painful impressions. What struck him most disagreeably was, not the fact of dissolution, but the coldness with which it had been regarded. Not that he wondered and groaned over the widower: it seemed natural that the decease of a third wife should be endured with equanimity; moreover, the departed had been a wretched invalid, and the survivor was a man; finally, what did Underhill care for Joshua Turner?
But that Marian should firmly carry her dislikes up to the verge of the grave was a circumstance which filled him with alarm and almost with horror. A woman, and not a relenting tear; almost a child, and not a start of pity! He called up, over and over again, the sidelong gaze of aversion which she had bent upon the helpless corpse, itself at peace with all the world. “What sort of a wife will she make?” was the selfish but natural question of the young man as he strolled alone at midnight by the sluggish stream of the Wampoosue, as black, silent, and funereal as if it were a gigantic grave. He walked there at that hour because he could not sleep; and he groaned aloud over his doubt, without being able to solve it.
Death, however, brought one relieving change in this drama; from the time that he entered the household, the drummer left it. Not another ghostly reveille or tattoo or long roll gladdened the ears of the gossips and wonder-lovers who had hitherto delighted in such uproars. During the funeral, the dwelling was filled and surrounded by a dense crowd, attracted by the belief that extraordinary manifestations would mingle with the burial rites, and so regardless of decorum in its curiosity that not a room was left unvisited by stealthy feet and peering faces. At times the whisper and buzz of discussion rose so loudly as to drown the voice of the clergyman. At other moments a suspense of expectation seemed to settle upon every one, producing a sudden, universal, profound silence which was inexpressibly sombre. But amid all the debate, and through all the agony of listening, not a note came from the mysterious visitant whose advent was so desired. Probably the prevailing feeling at the funeral of Mrs. Turner was extreme disappointment.
During the following week Underhill did not see any of the Turners. He was afraid to meet Marian, lest he should be fascinated by her presence, and should offer himself as her husband, only to repent of it for life. While he admitted that the girl had had great provocations, and was still suffering under grievous injustice, he could not clear her of a suspicion of cruelty. If she were really the author of the mysterious noises, she might be charged with having hastened the death of her aunt, and that with the full knowledge of what she was doing. No one could have watched the wild excitement of the consumptive during the last three weeks, without perceiving that it was lessening her hold on life. On the other hand, the drumming had ceased with her death. That looked like compunction; in that there was some mercy of womanliness, and from it he drew a hope.
In the midst of his indecisions he received a message requesting him to call upon Mr. Turner. He found the widower much changed—no longer wild in manner and language, as during the whole course of the “manifestations”; with something, indeed, of his native excitability in the tones of his voice, but, on the whole, languid, melancholy, and meek.
“Mr. Underhill,” he said, pointing to writing materials on the table, “I wish to make a new will. Can you do it here?”
The young man sat down, and prepared to write.
“Begin it thus,” said the widower, bending his shaggy head low, as if in humiliation: “The last will and testament of Joshua Turner, the chief of sinners.”
“Let us avoid expressions which may lead to doubts of sanity,” remarked the lawyer. “There have been singular circumstances of late in your life. If your will is to be anywise unusual—”
“Leave it out then,” interrupted Turner, with the abrupt pettishness of a sickly man. “So I must not even confess?”
After a moment, during which he bent his head almost to his lean knees, he resumed: “Here it is. Ten thousand dollars to my son, James Pettengill Turner. All the rest of my estate, real and personal, to my niece, Marian Turner, to her and to her heirs and assigns. That is all.”
It was written; two neighbors were called in as witnesses; the testator affixed his signature. As soon as he was once more alone with Underhill, he walked feebly to the door, and called in a hoarse voice for his niece. Presently the girl entered, bowed gravely to the lawyer, and seated herself at a distance from her uncle, not even looking at him.
“Marian,” said Turner, rising, and handing her the will, “read this through, and speak to me.”
She read it, gradually flushing with emotion, and when it was finished, she raised her eyes to his face, but still without uttering a word. Evidently she was oppressed by surprise, and hampered by the presence of Underhill.
“The whole estate is sixty thousand dollars. Are you willing that James should have ten thousand?” asked the uncle, with an affecting humility. “If not, I will cross him out.”
“I am willing,” she replied.
“If you wish it,” he continued, “I will give up the property at once, though I am dying.”
“I do not wish it.”
“And you can’t say more?” he implored. “You can’t forgive?”
Some hard barrier in the girl’s heart gave way at once, and she threw herself into her uncle’s arms, crying upon his neck. The outburst astonished the man who had called it forth; never before, probably, had any adult member of his family met him with tears and kisses; it was not thus that the Turners expressed themselves. His words were, “Marian, I thank you; Marian, you are a very strange girl”; and then he let her leave him. Underhill, differently educated in the language of emotion, was unspeakably delighted with the sight of this gush of tenderness, and stole away from the room with a haze of moisture across his eyelashes.
The very next day he heard that Joshua Turner was ill. He offered his services as a nurse, and for a fortnight was almost hourly in the house, watching the progress of an evidently hopeless malady. Through the clouds of a brain fever the invalid heard, and at times beheld, his old tormentor. He continually complained of the
drummer; through the windows and down the chimney came the drummer; the street rang and the house trembled with the infernal music of the drummer; at the judgment-seat, ready to bear witness against him, stood the drummer.
The bemoanings and adjurations of the haunted man were horrible. “Has the demon come again?” he shouted, in a high, hard scream. “See him there, stepping through the wall. My nephew? Have I devils for nephews? How is that? Ah! I belong to him; I must go to him. O, hear him! Can nobody stop his beating? Is there no mercy for me?”
During a lucid interval, Underhill said to him, “You have been a little out of your head.”
“I have been out of my head for months, for years,” he returned, in the husky whisper which was now his only voice. “I have done only one sane thing in five years. Restitution! Restitution!”
“Do you still believe in the manifestations?” the young man ventured to add.
“Thank God that I did believe in them! That madness led me back to sanity.”
When Underhill returned to the house on the following morning, Marian said to him, in a trembling whisper, “My poor uncle is dead.”
He hailed the tone of sorrow and tenderness with such joy that he forgot the solemnity of the moment, and kissed her hand.
We must pass over six months; during their flight the hand was kissed many times again. Underhill and Marian Turner were engaged. She was greatly changed from what she was when he first knew her. Either prosperity, or penitence for some evil done, had divested her of her old bitterness, and even made her exceptionally gentle. She had taken her little cousin James to her heart, and was doing by him the part of a mother. In deep mourning for her brother, uncle, and aunt, she usually had a pensive gravity which befitted the garb, and she was handsomer than any one had ever before known her.
At last she was Mrs. Underhill. Among the many confessions which she doubtless made to her husband, did she admit a connection with the mystery of the drummings? No; not a word on that subject; not a response when it was mentioned. Nor did Underhill question her; he did not care to open old sorrows.
But one day he discovered, inside the lath and plaster casing of the parlor, a square tin pipe, four inches deep by seven or eight broad, the remnant of some ancient heating apparatus. The opening by which it had once communicated with the room was simply covered over with wall paper, while the upper extremity terminated in the closet of a chamber which, in the time of the manifestations, had been occupied by Marian Turner.
It struck him that a drum beaten in this closet might have sounded below as if in the parlor, and, beaten gently outside of a window, might have produced an illusion that it was coming down the street. A perturbed conscience, the imagination of a sickly man, and the epidemic power of popular credulity, might have completed the delusion. The mystery was as simple as a conundrum after you know it.
But he discovered no drum, and he put no queries concerning the drummer, so that we have a margin for charitable doubt as to Marian, and also a pleasing chance for faith in mysteries.
MISS JÉROMETTE AND THE CLERGYMAN, by Wilkie Collins
I
My brother, the clergyman, looked over my shoulder before I was aware of him, and discovered that the volume which completely absorbed my attention was a collection of famous Trials, published in a new edition and in a popular form.
He laid his finger on the Trial which I happened to be reading at the moment. I looked up at him; his face startled me. He had turned pale. His eyes were fixed on the open page of the book with an expression which puzzled and alarmed me.
“My dear fellow,” I said, “what in the world is the matter with you?”
He answered in an odd absent manner, still keeping his finger on the open page.
“I had almost forgotten,” he said. “And this reminds me.”
“Reminds you of what?” I asked. “You don’t mean to say you know anything about the Trial?”
“I know this,” he said. “The prisoner was guilty.”
“Guilty?” I repeated. “Why, the man was acquitted by the jury, with the full approval of the judge! What call you possibly mean?”
“There are circumstances connected with that Trial,” my brother answered, “which were never communicated to the judge or the jury—which were never so much as hinted or whispered in court. I know them—of my own knowledge, by my own personal experience. They are very sad, very strange, very terrible. I have mentioned them to no mortal creature. I have done my best to forget them. You—quite innocently—have brought them back to my mind. They oppress, they distress me. I wish I had found you reading any book in your library, except that book!”
My curiosity was now strongly excited. I spoke out plainly.
“Surely,” I suggested, “you might tell your brother what you are unwilling to mention to persons less nearly related to you. We have followed different professions, and have lived in different countries, since we were boys at school. But you know you can trust me.”
He considered a little with himself.
“Yes,” he said. “I know I can trust you.” He waited a moment, and then he surprised me by a strange question.
“Do you believe,” he asked, “that the spirits of the dead can return to earth, and show themselves to the living?”
I answered cautiously—adopting as my own the words of a great English writer, touching the subject of ghosts.
“You ask me a question,” I said, “which, after five thousand years, is yet undecided. On that account alone, it is a question not to be trifled with.”
My reply seemed to satisfy him.
“Promise me,” he resumed, “that you will keep what I tell you a secret as long as I live. After my death I care little what happens. Let the story of my strange experience be added to the published experience of those other men who have seen what I have seen, and who believe what I believe. The world will not be the worse, and may be the better, for knowing one day what I am now about to trust to your ear alone.”
My brother never again alluded to the narrative which he had confided to me, until the later time when I was sitting by his deathbed. He asked if I still remembered the story of Jéromette. “Tell it to others,” he said, “as I have told it to you.”
I repeat it after his death—as nearly as I can in his own words.
II
On a fine summer evening, many years since, I left my chambers in the Temple, to meet a fellow-student, who had proposed to me a night’s amusement in the public gardens at Cremorne.
You were then on your way to India; and I had taken my degree at Oxford. I had sadly disappointed my father by choosing the Law as my profession, in preference to the Church. At that time, to own the truth, I had no serious intention of following any special vocation. I simply wanted an excuse for enjoying the pleasures of a London life. The study of the Law supplied me with that excuse. And I chose the Law as my profession accordingly.
On reaching the place at which we had arranged to meet, I found that my friend had not kept his appointment. After waiting vainly for ten minutes, my patience gave way and I went into the Gardens by myself.
I took two or three turns round the platform devoted to the dancers without discovering my fellow-student, and without seeing any other person with whom I happened to be acquainted at that time.
For some reason which I cannot now remember, I was not in my usual good spirits that evening. The noisy music jarred on my nerves, the sight of the gaping crowd round the platform irritated me, the blandishments of the painted ladies of the profession of pleasure saddened and disgusted me. I opened my cigar-case, and turned aside into one of the quiet by-walks of the Gardens.
A man who is habitually careful in choosing his cigar has this advantage over a man who is habitually careless. He can always count on smoking the best cigar in his case, down to the last. I wa
s still absorbed in choosing my cigar, when I heard these words behind me—spoken in a foreign accent and in a woman’s voice:
“Leave me directly, sir! I wish to have nothing to say to you.”
I turned round and discovered a little lady very simply and tastefully dressed, who looked both angry and alarmed as she rapidly passed me on her way to the more frequented part of the Gardens. A man (evidently the worse for the wine he had drunk in the course of the evening) was following her, and was pressing his tipsy attentions on her with the coarsest insolence of speech and manner. She was young and pretty, and she cast one entreating look at me as she went by, which it was not in manhood—perhaps I ought to say, in young-manhood—to resist.
I instantly stepped forward to protect her, careless whether I involved myself in a discreditable quarrel with a blackguard or not. As a matter of course, the fellow resented my interference, and my temper gave way. Fortunately for me, just as I lifted my hand to knock him down, at policeman appeared who had noticed that he was drunk, and who settled the dispute officially by turning him out of the Gardens.
I led her away from the crowd that had collected. She was evidently frightened—I felt her hand trembling on my arm—but she had one great merit; she made no fuss about it.
“If I can sit down for a few minutes,” she said in her pretty foreign accent, “I shall soon be myself again, and I shall not trespass any further on your kindness. I thank you very much, sir, for taking care of me.”
We sat down on a bench in a retired part of the Gardens, near a little fountain. A row of lighted lamps ran round the outer rim of the basin. I could see her plainly.
I have said that she was “a little lady.” I could not have described her more correctly in three words.
Her figure was slight and small: she was a well-made miniature of a woman from head to foot. Her hair and her eyes were both dark. The hair curled naturally; the expression of the eyes was quiet, and rather sad; the complexion, as I then saw it, very pale; the little mouth perfectly charming. I was especially attracted, I remembered, by the carriage of her head; it was strikingly graceful and spirited; it distinguished her, little as she was and quiet as she was, among the thousands of other women in the Gardens, as a creature apart. Even the one marked defect in her—a slight “cast” in the left eye—seemed to add, in some strange way, to the quaint attractiveness of her face. I have already spoken of the tasteful simplicity of her dress. I ought now to add that it was not made of any costly material, and that she wore no jewels or ornaments of any sort. My little lady was not rich; even a man’s eye could see that.
The Ghost Story Megapack Page 19
