“Are you not a little imaginative, Davis?” asked his master, himself repressing a shudder.
“No, sir, I am not; no man can be that about which his own eyes have seen and his own ears have heard; and I have heard and seen what I can never forget, and what nothing could pay me for going through.”
“Nevertheless?” suggested Mr. Murray.
“I don’t know whether I am doing right in holding my tongue, in being so faithful, sir; but I can’t help it. I took to you from the first, and I wouldn’t bring harm on you if any act of mine could keep it from you. When one made the remark to me awhile ago it was a strange thing to see a gentleman attended by a pair of wet footprints, I said they were a sign in your family that some great event was about to happen.”
“Did you say so?”
“I did, sir, Lord forgive me!” answered Davis, with unblushing mendacity. “I have gone through more than will ever be known over this affair, which has shook me, Mr. Murray. I am not the man I was before ghosts took to following me, and getting into trains without paying any fare, and waking me in the middle of the night, and rousing me out of my warm bed to see sights I would not have believed I could have seen if anybody had sworn it to me. I have aged twenty-five years since last August—my nerves are destroyed; and so, sir, before you got married, I thought I would make bold to ask what I am to do with a constitution broken in your service and hardly a penny put by,” and, almost out of breath with his pathetic statement, Davis stopped and waited for an answer.
With a curiously hunted expression in them, Mr. Murray; raised his eyes and looked at Davis.
“You have thought over all this,” he said. “How much do you assess them at?”
“I scarcely comprehend, sir—assess what at?”
“Your broken constitution and the five-and-twenty years you say you have aged.”
His master’s face was so gravely serious that Davis could take the question neither as a jest nor a sneer. It was a request to fix a price, and he did so.
“Well, sir,” he answered, “I have thought it all over. In the night-watches, when I could get no rest, I lay and reflected what I ought to do. I want to act fair. I have no wish to drive a hard bargain with you, and, on the other hand, I don’t think I would be doing justice by a man that has worked hard if I let myself be sold for nothing. So, sir to cut a long story short, I am willing to take two thousand pounds.”
“And where do you imagine I am to get two thousand pounds?”
Mr. Davis modestly intimated he knew his place better than to presume to have any notion, but no doubt Mr. Murray could raise that sum easily enough.
“If I could raise such a sum for you, do you not think I should have raised it for myself long ago?”
Davis answered that he did; but, if he might make free to say so, times were changed.
“They are, they are indeed,” said Mr. Murray bitterly; and then there was silence.
Davis knocked the conversational ball the next time.
“I am in no particular hurry, sir,” he said. “So, long as we understand one another I can wait till you come back from Italy, and have got the handling of some cash of your own. I daresay even then you won’t be able to pay me off all at once; but if you would insure your life—”
“I can’t insure my life: I have tried, and been refused.”
Again there ensued a silence, which Davis broke once more.
“Well, sir,” he began, “I’ll chance that. If you will give me a line of writing about what you owe me, and make a sort of a will, saying I am to get two thousand, I’ll hold my tongue about what’s gone and past. And I would not be fretting, sir, if I was you: things are quiet now, and, please God, you might never have any more trouble.”
Mr. Davis, in view of his two thousand pounds, his widow, and his wayside public, felt disposed to take an optimistic view of even his master’s position; but Mr. Murray’s thoughts were of a different hue. “If I do have any more,” he considered, “I shall go mad;” a conclusion which seemed likely enough to follow upon even the memory of those phantom feet coming dabbling out of an unseen world to follow him with their accursed print in this.
Davis was not going abroad with the happy pair. For sufficient reason Mr. Murray had decided to leave him behind, and Mrs. Murray, ever alive to her own convenience, instantly engaged him to stay on with her as butler, her own being under notice to leave.
Thus, in a semi-official capacity, Davis witnessed the wedding, which people considered a splendid affair.
What Davis thought of it can never be known, because when he left Losdale Church his face was whiter than the bride’s dress; and after the newly-wedded couple started on the first stage of their life-journey he went to his room, and stayed in it till his services were required.
“There is no money would pay me for what I’ve seen,” he remarked to himself. “I went too cheap. But when once I handle the cash I’ll try never to come anigh him or them again.”
What was he referring to? Just this. As the bridal group moved to the vestry he saw, if no one else did, those wet, wet feet softly and swiftly threading their way round the bridesmaids and the groomsman, in front of the relations, before Mrs. Murray herself, and hurry on to keep step with the just wed pair.
For the last time the young wife signed her maiden name. Friends crowded around, uttering congratulations, and still through the throng those unnoticed feet kept walking in and out, round and round, backward and forward, as a dog threads its way through the people at a fair. Down the aisle, under the sweeping dresses of the ladies, past courtly gentlemen, Davis saw those awful feet running gleefully till they came up with bride and bridegroom.
“She is going abroad with them,” thought the man; and then for a moment he felt as if he could endure the ghastly vision no longer, but must faint dead away. “It is a vile shame,” he reflected, “to drag an innocent girl into such a whirlpool;” and all the time over the church step the feet were dancing merrily.
The clerk and the verger noticed them at last.
“I wonder who has been here with wet feet?” said the clerk; and the verger wonderingly answered he did not know.
Davis could have told him, had he been willing to speak or capable of speech.
Conclusion
He’d Have Seen Me Righted
It was August once again—August, fine, warm, and sunshiny—just one year after that damp afternoon on which Paul Murray and his friend stood in front of the Ship at Lower Halliford. No lack of visitors that season. Hotels were full, and furnished houses at a premium. The hearts of lodging-house keepers were glad. Ladies arrayed in rainbow hues flashed about the quiet village streets; boatmen reaped a golden harvest; all sorts of crafts swarmed on the river. Men in flannels gallantly towed their feminine belongings up against a languidly flowing stream. Pater and materfamilias, and all the olive branches, big and little, were to be met on the Thames, and on the banks of Thames, from Richmond to Staines, and even higher still. The lilies growing around Dockett Point floated with their pure cups wide open to the sun; no close folding of the white wax-leaves around the golden centre that season. Beside the water purple loosestrife grew in great clumps of brilliant colour dazzling to the sight. It was, in fact, a glorious August, in which pleasure-seekers could idle and sun themselves and get tanned to an almost perfect brown without the slightest trouble.
During the past twelvemonth local tradition had tried hard to add another ghost at Dumsey Deep to that already established in the adjoining Stabbery; but the unshrinking brightness of that glorious summer checked belief in it for the time. No doubts when the dull autumn days came again, and the long winter nights, full of awful possibilities, folded water and land in fog and darkness, a figure dressed in grey silk and black velvet fichu, with a natty grey hat trimmed with black and white feathers on its phantom h
ead, with small feet covered by the thinnest of openwork stockings, from which the shoes, so much too large, had dropped long ago, would reappear once more, to the terror of all who heard, but for the time being, snugly tucked up in holy ground the girl whose heart had rejoiced in her beauty, her youth, her admirers, and her finery, was lying quite still and quiet, with closed eyes and ears, that heard neither the church bells nor the splash of oars nor the murmur of human voices.
Others, too, were missing from—though not missed by—Shepperton (the Thames villages miss no human being so long as other human beings, with plenty of money, come down by rail, boat, or carriage to supply his place). Paul Murray, Dick Savill, and Walter Grantley were absent. Mrs. Heath, too, had gone, a tottering, heartbroken woman, to Mr. Pointer’s, where she was most miserable, but where she and her small possessions were taken remarkably good care of.
“Only a year agone,” she said one day, “my girl was with me. In the morning she wore her pretty cambric with pink spots; and in the afternoon, that grey silk in which she was buried—for we durst not change a thread, but just wrapped a winding-sheet round what was left. O! Lucy, Lucy, Lucy! to think I bore you for that!” and then she wept softly, and nobody heeded or tried to console her, for “what,” as Mrs. Pointer wisely said, “was the use of fretting over a daughter dead a twelvemonth, and never much of a comfort neither?”
Mr. Richard Savill was still “grinding away,” to quote his expression. Walter Grantley had departed, so reported his friends, for the diamond-fields; his enemies improved on this by carelessly answering,—
“Grantley! O, he’s gone to the devil;” which latter statement could not have been quite true, since he has been back in England for a long time, and is now quite well to do and reconciled to his family.
As for Paul Murray, there had been all sorts of rumours floating about concerning him.
The honeymoon had been unduly protracted; from place to place the married pair wandered—never resting, never staying; alas! For him there was no rest—there could be none here.
It mattered not where he went—east, west, south, or north—those noiseless wet feet followed; no train was swift enough to outstrip them; no boat could cut the water fast enough to leave them behind; they tracked him with dogged persistence; they were with him sleeping, walking, eating, drinking, praying—for Paul Murray in those days often prayed after a desperate heathenish fashion—and yet the plague was not stayed; the accursed thing still dogged him like a Fate.
After a while people began to be shy of him, because the footsteps were no more intermittent; they were always where he was. Did he enter a cathedral, they accompanied him; did he walk solitary through the woods or pace the lakeside, or wander by the sea, they were ever and always with the unhappy man.
They were worse than any evil conscience, because conscience often sleeps, and they from the day of his marriage never did. They had waited for that—waited till he should raise the cup of happiness to his lips, in order to fill it with gall—waited till his wife’s dream of bliss was perfect, and then wake her to the knowledge of some horror more agonizing than death.
There were times when he left his young wife for days and days, and went, like those possessed of old, into the wilderness, seeking rest and finding none; for no legion of demons could have cursed a man’s life more than those wet feet, which printed marks on Paul Murray’s heart that might have been branded by red-hot irons.
All that had gone before was as nothing to the trouble of having involved another in the horrible mystery of his own life—and that other a gentle, innocent, loving creature he might just as well have killed as married.
He did not know what to do. His brain was on fire; he had lost all hold upon himself, all grip over his mind. On the sea of life he tossed like a ship without a rudder, one minute taking a resolve to shoot himself, the next turning his steps to seek some priest, and confess the whole matter fully and freely, and, before he had walked a dozen yards, determining to go away into some savage and desolate land, where those horrible feet might, if they pleased, follow him to his grave.
By degrees this was the plan which took firm root in his dazed brain; and accordingly one morning he started for England, leaving a note in which he asked his wife to follow him. He never meant to see her sweet face again, and he never did. He had determined to go to his father-in-law and confess to him; and accordingly, on the anniversary of Lucy’s death, he found himself at Losdale Court, where vague rumours of some unaccountable trouble had preceded him.
Mr. Ketterick was brooding over these rumours in his library, when, as if in answer to his thoughts, the servant announced Mr. Murray.
“Good God!” exclaimed the older man, shocked by the white, haggard face before him, “what is wrong?”
“I have been ill,” was the reply.
“Where is your wife?”
“She is following me. She will be here in a day or so.”
“Why did you not travel together?”
“That is what I have come to tell you.”
Then he suddenly stopped and put his hand to his heart. He had voluntarily come up for execution, and now his courage failed him. His manhood was gone, his nerves unstrung. He was but a poor, weak, wasted creature, worn out by the ceaseless torment of those haunting feet, which, however, since he turned his steps to England had never followed him. Why had he travelled to Losdale Court? Might he not have crossed the ocean and effaced himself in the Far West, without telling his story at all?
Just as he had laid down the revolver, just as he had turned from the priest’s door, so now he felt he could not say that which he had come determined to say.
“I have walked too far,” he said, after a pause. “I cannot talk just yet. Will you leave me for half an hour? No; I don’t want anything, thank you—except to be quiet.” Quiet!—ah, heavens!
After a little he rose and passed out on to the terrace. Around there was beauty and peace and sunshine. He—he—was the only jarring element, and even on him there seemed falling a numbed sensation which for the time being simulated rest.
He left the terrace and crossed the lawn till he came to a great cedar tree, under which there was a seat, where he could sit a short time before leaving the Court.
Yes, he would go away and make no sign. Dreamily he thought of the wild lone lands beyond the sea, where there would be none to ask whence he came or marvel about the curse which followed him. Over the boundless prairie, up the mountain heights, let those feet pursue him if they would. Away from his fellows he could bear his burden. He would confess to no man—only to God, who knew his sin and sorrow; only to his Maker, who might have pity on the work of his hands, and some day bid that relentless avenger be still.
No, he would take no man into his confidence; and even as he so decided, the brightness of the day seemed to be clouded over, warmth was exchanged for a deadly chill, a horror of darkness seemed thrown like a pall over him, and a rushing sound as of many waters filled his ears.
An hour later, when Mr. Ketterick sought his son-in-law, he found him lying on the ground, which was wet and trampled, as though by hundreds of little feet.
His shouts brought help, and Paul Murray was carried into the house, where they laid him on a couch and piled rugs and blankets over his shivering body.
“Fetch a doctor at once,” said Mr. Ketterick.
“And a clergyman,” added the housekeeper.
“No, a magistrate,” cried the sick man, in a loud voice.
They had thought him insensible, and, startled, looked at each other. After that he spoke no more, but turned his head away from them and lay quiet.
The doctor was the first to arrive. With quick alertness he stepped across the room, pulled aside the coverings, and took the patient’s hand; then after gently moving the averted face, he said solemnly, like a man whose occu
pation has gone,—
“I can do nothing here; he is dead.”
It was true. Whatever his secret, Paul Murray carried it with him to a country further distant than the lone land where he had thought to hide his misery.
* * * *
“It is of no use talking to me,” said Mr. Davis, when subsequently telling his story. “If Mr. Murray had been a gentleman as was a gentleman, he’d have seen me righted, dead or not. She was able to come back—at least, her feet were; and he could have done the same if he’d liked. It was as bad as swindling not making a fresh will after he was married. How was I to know that will would turn out so much waste paper? And then when I asked for my own, Mrs. Murray dismissed me without a character, and Mr. Ketterick’s lawyers won’t give me anything either; so a lot I’ve made by being a faithful servant, and I’d have all servants take warning by me.”
Mr. Davis is his own servant now, and a very bad master he finds himself.
THE LADY’S MAID’S BELL, by Edith Wharton
Originally published in Scribner’s Magazine, Nov. 1902.
I
It was the autumn after I had the typhoid. I’d been three months in hospital, and when I came out I looked so weak and tottery that the two or three ladies I applied to were afraid to engage me. Most of my money was gone, and after I’d boarded for two months, hanging about the employment agencies, and answering any advertisement that looked any way respectable, I pretty nearly lost heart, for fretting hadn’t made me fatter, and I didn’t see why my luck should ever turn. It did though—or I thought so at the time. A Mrs. Railton, a friend of the lady that first brought me out to the States, met me one day and stopped to speak to me: she was one that had always a friendly way with her. She asked me what ailed me to look so white, and when I told her, “Why, Hartley,” says she, “I believe I’ve got the very place for you. Come in tomorrow and we’ll talk about it.”
The Sixth Ghost Story Megapack: 25 Classic Ghost Stories Page 10
