“Good-bye, Master Johnny.”
I answered back good night civilly, though he had been stealing. When he was out of sight, Maria Lease, her passion full upon her still, dashed off towards her mother’s cottage, a strange cry of despair breaking from her lips.
“Where have you been lingering, Johnny?” roared the Squire, who was sitting up for me. “You have been throwing at the owls, sir, that’s what you’ve been at; you have been scudding after the hares.”
I said I had waited for Mr. Cole, and had come back slower than I went; but I said no more, and went up to my room at once. And the Squire went to his.
I know I am only a muff; people tell me so, often: but I can’t help it; I did not make myself. I lay awake till nearly daylight, first wishing Daniel Ferrar could be screened, and then thinking it might perhaps be done. If he would only take the lesson to heart and go straight for the future, what a capital thing it would be. We had liked old Ferrar; he had done me and Tod many a good turn: and, for the matter of that, we liked Daniel. So I never said a word when morning came of the past night’s work.
“Is Daniel at home?” I asked, going to Ferrar’s the first thing before breakfast. I meant to tell him that if he would keep right, I would keep counsel.
“He went out at dawn, sir,” answered the old woman who did for him, and sold his poultry at market. “He’ll be in presently: he have had no breakfast yet.”
“Then tell him when he comes, to wait in, and see me: tell him it’s all right. Can you remember, Goody? ‘It is all right.’”
“I’ll remember, safe enough, Master Ludlow.”
Tod and I, being on our honour, went to church, and found about ten people in the pews. Harriet Roe was one, with her pink ribbons, the twisted gold chain showing outside a short-cut velvet jacket.
“No, sir; he has not been home yet; I can’t think where he can have got to,” was the old Goody’s reply when I went again to Ferrar’s. And so I wrote a word in pencil, and told her to give it him when he came in, for I could not go dodging there every hour of the day.
After luncheon, strolling by the back of the barn: a certain reminiscence I suppose taking me there, for it was not a frequented spot: I saw Maria Lease coming along.
Well, it was a change! The passionate woman of the previous night had subsided into a poor, wild-looking, sorrow-stricken thing, ready to die of remorse. Excessive passion had wrought its usual consequences; a reaction: a reaction in favour of Daniel Ferrar. She came up to me, clasping her hands in agony—beseeching that I would spare him; that I would not tell of him; that I would give him a chance for the future: and her lips quivered and trembled, and there were dark circles round her hollow eyes.
I said that I had not told and did not intend to tell. Upon which she was going to fall down on her knees, but I rushed off.
“Do you know where he is?” I asked, when she came to her sober senses.
“Oh, I wish I did know! Master Johnny, he is just the man to go and do something desperate. He would never face shame; and I was a mad, hard-hearted, wicked girl to do what I did last night. He might run away to sea; he might go and enlist for a soldier.”
“I dare say he is at home by this time. I have left a word for him there, and promised to go in and see him tonight. If he will undertake not to be up to wrong things again, no one shall ever know of this from me.”
She went away easier, and I sauntered on towards South Crabb. Eager as Tod and I had been for the day’s holiday, it did not seem to be turning out much of a boon. In going home again—there was nothing worth staying out for—I had come to the spot by the three-cornered grove where I saw Maria, when a galloping policeman overtook me. My heart stood still; for I thought he must have come after Daniel Ferrar.
“Can you tell me if I am near to Crabb Cot—Squire Todhetley’s?” he asked, reining-in his horse.
“You will reach it in a minute or two. I live there. Squire Todhetley is not at home. What do you want with him?”
“It’s only to give in an official paper, sir. I have to leave one personally upon all the county magistrates.”
He rode on. When I got in I saw the folded paper upon the hall-table; the man and horse had already gone onwards. It was worse indoors than out; less to be done. Tod had disappeared after church; the Squire was abroad; Mrs. Todhetley sat upstairs with Lena: and I strolled out again. It was only three o’clock then.
An hour, or more, was got through somehow; meeting one, talking to another, throwing at the ducks and geese; anything. Mrs. Lease had her head, smothered in a yellow shawl, stretched out over the palings as I passed her cottage.
“Don’t catch cold, mother.”
“I am looking for Maria, sir. I can’t think what has come to her today, Master Johnny,” she added, dropping her voice to a confidential tone. “The girl seems demented: she has been going in and out ever since daylight like a dog in a fair.”
“If I meet her I will send her home.”
And in another minute I did meet her. For she was coming out of Daniel Ferrar’s yard. I supposed he was at home again.
“No,” she said looking more wild, worn, haggard than before; “that’s what I have been to ask. I am just out of my senses, sir. He has gone for certain. Gone!”
I did not think it. He would not be likely to go away without clothes.
“Well, I know he is, Master Johnny; something tells me. I’ve been all about everywhere. There’s a great dread upon me, sir; I never felt anything like it.”
“Wait until night, Maria; I dare say he will go home then. Your mother is looking out for you; I said if I met you I’d send you in.”
Mechanically she turned towards the cottage, and I went on. Presently, as I was sitting on a gate watching the sunset, Harriet Roe passed towards the withy walk, and gave me a nod in her free but good-natured way.
“Are you going there to look out for the ghosts this evening?” I asked: and I wished not long afterwards I had not said it. “It will soon be dark.”
“So it will,” she said, turning to the red sky in the west. “But I have no time to give to the ghosts tonight.”
“Have you seen Ferrar today?” I cried, an idea occurring to me.
“No. And I can’t think where he has got to; unless he is off to Worcester. He told me he should have to go there some day this week.”
She evidently knew nothing about him, and went on her way with another free-and-easy nod. I sat on the gate till the sun had gone down, and then thought it was time to be getting homewards.
Close against the yellow barn, the scene of last night’s trouble, whom should I come upon but Maria Lease. She was standing still, and turned quickly at the sound of my footsteps. Her face was bright again, but had a puzzled look upon it.
“I have just seen him: he has not gone,” she said in a happy whisper. “You were right, Master Johnny, and I was wrong.”
“Where did you see him?”
“Here; not a minute ago. I saw him twice. He is angry, very, and will not let me speak to him; both times he got away before I could reach him. He is close by somewhere.”
I looked round, naturally; but Ferrar was nowhere to be seen. There was nothing to conceal him except the barn, and that was locked up. The account she gave was this—and her face grew puzzled again as she related it.
Unable to rest indoors, she had wandered up here again, and saw Ferrar standing at the corner of the barn, looking very hard at her. She thought he was waiting for her to come up, but before she got close to him he had disappeared, and she did not see which way. She hastened past the front of the barn, ran round to the back, and there he was. He stood near the steps looking out for her; waiting for her, as it again seemed; and was gazing at her with the same fixed stare. But again she missed him before she could get quite up; and it was at that m
oment that I arrived on the scene.
I went all round the barn, but could see nothing of Ferrar. It was an extraordinary thing where he could have got to. Inside the barn he could not be: it was securely locked; and there was no appearance of him in the open country. It was, so to say, broad daylight yet, or at least not far short of it; the red light was still in the west. Beyond the field at the back of the barn, was a grove of trees in the form of a triangle; and this grove was flanked by Crabb Ravine, which ran right and left. Crabb Ravine had the reputation of being haunted; for a light was sometimes seen dodging about its deep descending banks at night that no one could account for. A lively spot altogether for those who liked gloom.
“Are you sure it was Ferrar, Maria?”
“Sure!” she returned in surprise. “You don’t think I could mistake him Master Johnny, do you? He wore that ugly seal-skin winter-cap of his tied over his ears, and his thick grey coat. The coat was buttoned closely round him. I have not seen him wear either since last winter.”
That Ferrar must have gone into hiding somewhere seemed quite evident; and yet there was nothing but the ground to receive him. Maria said she lost sight of him the last time in a moment; both times in fact; and it was absolutely impossible that he could have made off to the triangle or elsewhere, as she must have seen him cross the open land. For that matter I must have seen him also.
On the whole, not two minutes had elapsed since I came up, though it seems to have been longer in telling it: when, before we could look further, voices were heard approaching from the direction of Crabb Cot; and Maria, not caring to be seen, went away quickly. I was still puzzling about Ferrar’s hiding-place, when they reached me—the Squire, Tod, and two or three men. Tod came slowly up, his face dark and grave.
“I say, Johnny, what a shocking thing this is!”
“What is a shocking thing?”
“You have not heard of it?—But I don’t see how you could hear it.”
I had heard nothing. I did not know what there was to hear. Tod told me in a whisper.
“Daniel Ferrar’s dead, lad.”
“What?”
“He has destroyed himself Not more than half-an-hour ago. Hung himself in the grove.”
I turned sick, taking one thing with another, comparing this recollection with that; which I dare say you will think no one but a muff would do.
Ferrar was indeed dead. He had been hiding all day in the three-cornered grove: perhaps waiting for night to get away—perhaps only waiting for night to go home again. Who can tell? About half-past two, Luke Macintosh, a man who sometimes worked for us, sometimes for old Coney happening to go through the grove, saw him there, and talked with him. The same man, passing back a little before sunset, found him hanging from a tree, dead. Macintosh ran with the news to Crabb Cot, and they were now flocking to the scene. When facts came to be examined there appeared only too much reason to think that the unfortunate appearance of the galloping policeman had terrified Ferrar into the act; perhaps—we all hoped it!—had scared his senses quite away. Look at it as we would, it was very dreadful.
But what of the appearance Maria Lease saw? At that time, Ferrar had been dead at least half-an-hour. Was it reality or delusion? That is (as the Squire put it), did her eyes see a real, spectral Daniel Ferrar; or were they deceived by some imagination of the brain? Opinions were divided. Nothing can shake her own steadfast belief in its reality; to her it remains an awful certainty, true and sure as heaven.
If I say that I believe in it too, I shall be called a muff and a double muff. But there is no stumbling-block difficult to be got over. Ferrar, when found, was wearing the seal-skin cap tied over the ears and the thick grey coat buttoned up round him, just as Maria Lease had described to me; and he had never worn them since the previous winter, or taken them out of the chest where they were kept. The old woman at his home did not know he had done it then. When told that he had died in these things, she protested that they were in the chest, and ran up to look for them. But the things were gone.
FISHER’S GHOST, by John Lang
In the colony of New South Wales, at a place called Penrith, distant from Sydney about thirty-seven miles, lived a farmer named Fisher. He had been, originally, transported, but had become free by servitude. Unceasing toil, and great steadiness of character, had acquired for him a considerable property, for a person in his station of life. His lands and stock were not worth less than four thousand pounds. He was unmarried and was about forty-five years old.
Suddenly Fisher disappeared; and one of his neighbours—a man named Smith—gave out that he had gone to England, but would return in two or three years. Smith produced a document, purporting to be executed by Fisher; and, according to this document, Fisher had appointed Smith to act as his agent during his absence. Fisher was a man of very singular habits and eccentric character and his silence about his departure, instead of creating surprise, was declared to be “exactly like him.”
About six months after Fisher’s disappearance, an old man called Ben Weir, who had a small farm near Penrith and who always drove his own cart to market, was returning from Sydney one night when he beheld, seated on a rail which bounded the road—Fisher. The night was very dark and the distance of the fence from the middle of the road was, at least, twelve yards. Weir, nevertheless, saw Fisher’s figure seated on the rail. He pulled his old mare up, and called out, “Fisher, is that you?” No answer was returned; but there, still on the rail, sat the form of the man with whom he had been on the most intimate terms. Weir—who was not drunk, though he had taken several glasses of strong liquor on the road—jumped off his cart and approached the rail. To his surprise, the form vanished.
“Well,” exclaimed old Weir, “this is very curious, anyhow;” and, breaking several branches of a sapling so as to mark the exact spot, he remounted his cart, put his old mare into a jog-trot and soon reached his home.
Ben was not likely to keep this vision a secret from his old woman. All that he had seen he faithfully related to her.
“Hold our nonsense, Ben!” was old Betty’s reply. “You know you have been a drinking and disturbing of your imagination. Ain’t Fisher agone to England? And if he had a come back, do you think we shouldn’t a heard on it?”
“Ay, Betty!” said old Ben, “but he’d a cruel gash in his forehead and the blood was all fresh like. Faith, it makes me shudder to think on’t. It were his ghost.”
“How can you talk so foolish, Ben?” said the old woman. “You must be drunk sure-ly to get on about ghosteses.”
“I tell thee I am not drunk,” rejoined old Ben, angrily. “There’s been foul play, Betty; I’m sure on’t. There sat Fisher on the rail—not more than a matter of two mile from this. Egad, it were on his own fence that he sat. There he was, in his shirt-sleeves, with his arms a folded; just as he used to sit when he was a waiting for anybody coming up the road. Bless you, Betty, I seed ’im till I was as close as I am to thee; when, all on a sudden, he vanished, like smoke.”
“Nonsense, Ben: don’t talk of it,” said old Betty, “or the neighbours will only laugh at you. Come to bed and you’ll forget all about it before tomorrow morning.”
Old Ben went to bed; but he did not next morning forget all about what he had seen on the previous night: on the contrary, he was more positive than before. However, at the earnest and often repeated request of the old woman, he promised not to mention having seen Fisher’s ghost, for fear that it might expose him to ridicule.
On the following Thursday night, when old Ben was returning from market—again in his cart—he saw, seated upon the same rail, the identical apparition. He had purposely abstained from drinking that day and was in the full possession of all his senses. On this occasion old Ben was too much alarmed to stop. He urged the old mare on and got home as speedily as possible. As soon as he had unharnessed and fed the mare and taken his pur
chases out of the cart, he entered his cottage, lighted his pipe, sat over the fire with his better half and gave her an account of how he had disposed of his produce and what he had brought back from Sydney in return. After this he said to her, “Well, Betty, I’m not drunk tonight, anyhow, am I?”
“No,” said Betty. “You are quite sober, sensible like, tonight, Ben; and therefore you have come home without any ghost in your head. Ghosts! Don’t believe there is such things.”
“Well, you are satisfied I am not drunk; but perfectly sober,” said the old man.
“Yes, Ben,” said Betty.
“Well, then,” said Ben, “I tell thee what, Betty. I saw Fisher tonight agin!”
“Stuff!” cried old Betty.
“You may say stuff” said the old farmer; “but I tell you what—I saw him as plainly as I did last Thursday night. Smith is a bad ’un! Do you think Fisher would ever have left this country without coming to bid you and me goodbye?”
“It’s all fancy!” said old Betty. “Now drink your grog and smoke your pipe and think no more about the ghost. I won’t hear on’t.”
“I’m as fond of my grog and my pipe as most men,” said old Ben; “but I’m not going to drink anything tonight. It may be all fancy, as you call it, but I am now going to tell Mr Grafton all I saw, and what I think;” and with these words he got up and left the house.
* * * *
Mr Grafton was a gentleman who lived about a mile from old Weir’s farm. He had been formerly a lieutenant in the navy, but was now on half-pay and was a settler in the new colony; he was, moreover, in the commission of the peace.
When old Ben arrived at Mr Grafton’s house, Mr Grafton was about to retire to bed; but he requested old Ben might be shown in. He desired the farmer to take a seat by the fire and then enquired what was the latest news in Sydney.
The Ghost Story Megapack Page 44
