by Grant Allen
PALLINGHURST BARROW.
I.
Rudolph Reeve sat by himself on the Old Long Barrow on Pallinghurst Common. It was a September evening, and the sun was setting. The west was all aglow with a mysterious red light, very strange and lurid — a light that reflected itself in glowing purple on the dark brown heather and the dying bracken. Rudolph Reeve was a journalist and a man of science; but he had a poet’s soul for all that, in spite of his avocations, neither of which is usually thought to tend towards the spontaneous development of a poetic temperament. He sat there long, watching the livid hues that incarnadined the sky — redder and fiercer than anything he ever remembered to have seen since the famous year of the Krakatoa sunsets — though he knew it was getting late, and he ought to have gone back long since to the manor-house to dress for dinner. Mrs. Bouverie-Barton, his hostess, the famous Woman’s Rights woman, was always such a stickler for punctuality and dispatch, and all the other unfeminine virtues! But, in spite of Mrs. Bouverie-Barton, Rudolph Reeve sat on. There was something about that sunset and the lights on the bracken — something weird and unearthly — that positively fascinated him.
The view over the common, which stands high and exposed, a veritable waste of heath and gorse, is strikingly wide and expansive. Pallinghurst Ring, or the “Old Long Barrow,” a well-known landmark, familiar by that name from time immemorial to all the country-side, crowns its actual summit, and commands from its top the surrounding hills far into the shadowy heart of Hampshire. On its terraced slope Rudolph sat and gazed out, with all the artistic pleasure of a poet or a painter (for he was a little of both) in the exquisite flush of the dying reflections from the dying sun upon the dying heather. He sat and wondered to himself why death is always so much more beautiful, so much more poetical, so much calmer than life — and why you invariably enjoy things so very much better when you know you ought to be dressing for dinner.
He was just going to rise, however, dreading the lasting wrath of Mrs. Bouverie-Barton, when of a sudden a very weird yet definite feeling caused him for one moment to pause and hesitate. Why he felt it he knew not; but even as he sat there on the grassy tumulus, covered close with short sward of subterranean clover, that curious, cunning plant that buries its own seeds by automatic action, he was aware, through no external sense, but by pure internal consciousness, of something or other living and moving within the barrow. He shut his eyes and listened. No; fancy, pure fancy! Not a sound broke the stillness of early evening, save the drone of insects — those dying insects, now beginning to fail fast before the first chill breath of approaching autumn. Rudolph opened his eyes again and looked down on the ground. In the little boggy hollow by his feet innumerable plants of sundew spread their murderous rosettes of sticky red leaves, all bedewed with viscid gum, to catch and roll round the struggling flies that wrenched their tiny limbs in vain efforts to free themselves. But that was all. Nothing else was astir. In spite of sight and sound, however, he was still deeply thrilled by this strange consciousness as of something living and moving in the barrow underneath; something living and moving — or was it moving and dead? Something crawling and creeping, as the long arms of the sundews crawled and crept around the helpless flies, whose juices they sucked out. A weird and awful feeling, yet strangely fascinating! He hated the vulgar necessity for going back to dinner. Why do people dine at all? So material! so commonplace! And the universe all teeming with strange secrets to unfold! He knew not why, but a fierce desire possessed his soul to stop and give way to this overpowering sense of the mysterious and the marvellous in the dark depths of the barrow.
With an effort he roused himself, and put on his hat, which he had been holding in his hand, for his forehead was burning. The sun had now long set, and Mrs. Bouverie-Barton dined at 7.30 punctually. He must rise and go home. Something unknown pulled him down to detain him. Once more he paused and hesitated. He was not a superstitious man, yet it seemed to him as if many strange shapes stood by unseen, and watched with great eagerness to see whether he would rise and go away, or yield to the temptation of stopping and indulging his curious fancy. Strange! — he saw and heard absolutely nobody and nothing; yet he dimly realized that unseen figures were watching him close with bated breath, and anxiously observing his every movement, as if intent to know whether he would rise and move on, or remain to investigate this causeless sensation.
For a minute or two he stood irresolute; and all the time he so stood the unseen bystanders held their breath and looked on in an agony of expectation. He could feel their outstretched necks; he could picture their strained attention. At last he broke away. “This is nonsense,” he said aloud to himself, and turned slowly homeward. As he did so, a deep sigh, as of suspense relieved, but relieved in the wrong direction, seemed to rise — unheard, impalpable, spiritual — from the invisible crowd that gathered around him immaterial. Clutched hands seemed to stretch after him and try to pull him back. An unreal throng of angry and disappointed creatures seemed to follow him over the moor, uttering speechless imprecations on his head, in some unknown tongue — ineffable, inaudible. This horrid sense of being followed by unearthly foes took absolute possession of Rudolph’s mind. It might have been merely the lurid redness of the afterglow, or the loneliness of the moor, or the necessity for being back not one minute late for Mrs. Bouverie-Barton’s dinner-hour; but, at any rate, he lost all self-control for the moment, and ran — ran wildly, at the very top of his speed, all the way from the barrow to the door of the manor-house garden. There he stopped and looked round with a painful sense of his own stupid cowardice. This was positively childish: he had seen nothing, heard nothing, had nothing definite to frighten him; yet he had run from his own mental shadow, like the veriest schoolgirl, and was trembling still from the profundity of his sense that somebody unseen was pursuing and following him. “What a precious fool I am,” he said to himself, half angrily, “to be so terrified at nothing! I’ll go round there by-and-by, just to recover my self-respect, and to show, at least, I’m not really frightened.”
And even as he said it he was internally aware that his baffled foes, standing grinning their disappointment with gnashed teeth at the garden gate, gave a chuckle of surprise, delight, and satisfaction at his altered intention.
II.
There’s nothing like light for dispelling superstitious terrors. Pallinghurst Manor-house was fortunately supplied with electric light; for Mrs. Bouverie-Barton was nothing if not intensely modern. Long before Rudolph had finished dressing for dinner, he was smiling once more to himself at his foolish conduct. Never in his life before — at least, since he was twenty — had he done such a thing; and he knew why he’d done it now. It was a nervous breakdown. He had been overworking his brain in town with those elaborate calculations for his Fortnightly article on “The Present State of Chinese Finances”; and Sir Arthur Boyd, the famous specialist on diseases of the nervous system, had earned three honest guineas cheap by recommending him “a week or two’s rest and change in the country.” That was why he had accepted Mrs. Bouverie-Barton’s invitation to form part of her brilliant autumn party at Pallinghurst Manor; and that was also doubtless why he had been so absurdly frightened at nothing at all just now on the common. Memorandum: Never to overwork his brain in future; it doesn’t pay. And yet, in these days, how earn bread and cheese at literature without overworking it?
He went down to dinner, however, in very good spirits. His hostess was kind; she permitted him to take in that pretty American. Conversation with the soup turned at once on the sunset. Conversation with the soup is always on the lowest and most casual plane; it improves with the fish, and reaches its culmination with the sweets and the cheese; after which it declines again to the fruity level. “You were on the barrow about seven, Mr. Reeve,” Mrs. Bouverie-Barton observed severely, when he spoke of the after-glow. “You watched that sunset close. How fast you must have walked home! I was almost half afraid you were going to be late for dinner.”
Rudolph coloured up slightly; �
�twas a girlish trick, unworthy of a journalist; but still he had it. “Oh dear, no, Mrs. Bouverie-Barton,” he answered gravely. “I may be foolish, but not, I hope, criminal. I know better than to do anything so weak and wicked as that at Pallinghurst Manor. I do walk rather fast, and the sunset — well, the sunset was just too lovely.”
“Elegant,” the pretty American interposed, in her language.
“It always is, this night every year,” little Joyce said quietly, with the air of one who retails a well-known scientific fact. “It’s the night, you know, when the light burns bright on the Old Long Barrow.”
Joyce was Mrs. Bouverie-Barton’s only child — a frail and pretty little creature, just twelve years old, very light and fairylike, but with a strange cowed look which, nevertheless, somehow curiously became her.
“What nonsense you talk, my child!” her mother exclaimed, darting a look at Joyce which made her relapse forthwith into instant silence. “I’m ashamed of her, Mr. Reeve; they pick up such nonsense as this from their nurses.” For Mrs. Bouverie-Barton was modern, and disbelieved in everything. ’Tis a simple creed; one clause concludes it.
But the child’s words, though lightly whispered, had caught the quick ear of Archie Cameron, the distinguished electrician. He made a spring upon them at once; for the merest suspicion of the supernatural was to Cameron irresistible. “What’s that, Joyce?” he cried, leaning forward across the table. “No, Mrs. Bouverie-Barton, I really must hear it. What day is this to-day, and what’s that you just said about the sunset and the light on the Old Long Barrow?”
Joyce glanced pleadingly at her mother, and then again at Cameron. A very faint nod gave her grudging leave to proceed with her tale, under maternal disapprobation; for Mrs. Bouverie-Barton didn’t carry her belief in Woman’s Rights quite so far as to apply them to the case of her own daughter. We must draw a line somewhere. Joyce hesitated and began. “Well, this is the night, you know,” she said, “when the sun turns, or stands still, or crosses the tropic, or goes back again, or something.”
Mrs. Bouverie-Barton gave a dry little cough. “The autumnal equinox,” she interposed severely, “at which, of course, the sun does nothing of the sort you suppose. We shall have to have your astronomy looked after, Joyce; such ignorance is exhaustive. But go on with your myth, please, and get it over quickly.”
“The autumnal equinox; that’s just it,” Joyce went on, unabashed. “I remember that’s the word, for old Rachel, the gipsy, told me so. Well, on this day every year, a sort of glow comes up on the moor; oh! I know it does, mother, for I’ve seen it myself; and the rhyme about it goes —
‘Every year on Michael’s night
Pallinghurst Barrow burneth bright.’
Only the gipsy told me it was Baal’s night before it was St. Michael’s; and it was somebody else’s night, whose name I forget, before it was Baal’s. And the somebody was a god to whom you must never sacrifice anything with iron, but always with flint or with a stone hatchet.”
Cameron leaned back in his chair and surveyed the child critically. “Now, this is interesting,” he said; “profoundly interesting. For here we get, what is always so much wanted, firsthand evidence. And you’re quite sure, Joyce, you’ve really seen it?”
“Oh! Mr. Cameron, how can you?” Mrs. Bouverie-Barton cried, quite pettishly; for even advanced ladies are still feminine enough at times to be distinctly pettish. “I take the greatest trouble to keep all such rubbish out of Joyce’s way; and then you men of science come down here and talk like this to her, and undo all the good I’ve taken months in doing.”
“Well, whether Joyce has ever seen it not,” Rudolph Reeve said gravely, “I can answer for it myself that I saw a very curious light on the Long Barrow to-night; and, furthermore, I felt a most peculiar sensation.”
“What was that?” Cameron asked, bending over towards him eagerly. For all the world knows that Cameron, though a disbeliever in most things (except the Brush light), still retains a quaint tinge of Highland Scotch belief in a good ghost story.
“Why, as I was sitting on the barrow,” Rudolph began, “just after sunset, I was dimly conscious of something stirring inside, not visible or audible, but — —”
“Oh, I know, I know!” Joyce put in, leaning forward, with her eyes staring curiously; “a sort of a feeling that there was somebody somewhere, very faint and dim, though you couldn’t see or hear them; they tried to pull you down, clutching at you like this: and when you ran away, frightened, they seemed to follow you and jeer at you. Great gibbering creatures! Oh, I know what all that is! I’ve been there, and felt it.”
“Joyce!” Mrs. Bouverie-Barton put in, with a warning frown, “what nonsense you talk! You’re really too ridiculous. How can you suppose Mr. Reeve ran away — a man of science like him — from an imaginary terror?”
“Well, I won’t quite say I ran away,” Rudolph answered, somewhat sheepishly. “We never do admit these things, I suppose, after twenty. But I certainly did hurry home at the very top of my speed — not to be late for dinner, you know, Mrs. Bouverie-Barton; and I will admit, Joyce, between you and me only, I was conscious by the way of something very much like your grinning followers behind me.”
Mrs. Bouverie-Barton darted him another look of intense displeasure. “I think,” she said, in that chilly voice that has iced whole committees, “at a table like this, and with such thinkers around, we might surely find something rather better to discuss than such worn-out superstitions. Professor Spence, did you light upon any fresh palæoliths in the gravel-pit this morning?”
III.
In the drawing-room, a little later, a small group collected by the corner bay, remotest from Mrs. Bouverie-Barton’s own presidential chair, to hear Rudolph and Joyce compare experiences on the light above the barrow. When the two dreamers of dreams and seers of visions had finished, Mrs. Bruce, the esoteric Buddhist and hostess of Mahatmas (they often dropped in on her, it was said, quite informally, for afternoon tea), opened the flood-gates of her torrent speech with triumphant vehemence. “This is just what I should have expected,” she said, looking round for a sceptic, that she might turn and rend him. “Novalis was right. Children are early men. They are freshest from the truth. They come straight to us from the Infinite. Little souls just let loose from the free expanse of God’s sky see more than we adults do — at least, except a few of us. We ourselves, what are we but accumulated layers of phantasmata? Spirit-light rarely breaks in upon our grimed charnel of flesh. The dust of years overlies us. But the child, bursting new upon the dim world of Karma, trails clouds of glory from the beatific vision. So Wordsworth held; so the Masters of Tibet taught us, long ages before Wordsworth.”
“It’s curious,” Professor Spence put in, with a scientific smile, restrained at the corners, “that all this should have happened to Joyce and to our friend Reeve at a long barrow. For you’ve seen MacRitchie’s last work, I suppose? No? Well, he’s shown conclusively that long barrows, which are the graves of the small, squat people who preceded the inroad of Aryan invaders, are the real originals of all the fairy hills and subterranean palaces of popular legend. You know the old story of how Childe Roland to the dark tower came, of course, Cameron? Well, that dark tower was nothing more or less than a long barrow; perhaps Pallinghurst Barrow itself, perhaps some other; and Childe Roland went into it to rescue his sister, Burd Ellen, who had been stolen by the fairy king, after the fashion of his kind, for a human sacrifice. The Picts, you recollect, were a deeply religious people, who believed in human sacrifice. They felt they derived from it high spiritual benefit. And the queerest part of it all is that in order to see the fairies you must go round the barrow widershins — that is to say, Miss Quackenboss, as Cameron will explain to you, the opposite way from the way of the sun — on this very night of all the year, Michaelmas Eve, which was the accepted old date of the autumnal equinox.”
“All long barrows have a chamber of great stones in the centre, I believe,” Cameron suggested tent
atively.
“Yes, all or nearly all; megalithic, you know; unwrought; and that chamber’s the subterranean palace, lit up with the fairy light that’s so constantly found in old stories of the dead, and which Joyce and you, alone among moderns, have been permitted to see, Reeve.”
“It’s a very odd fact,” Dr. Porter, the materialist, interposed musingly, “that the only ghosts people ever see are the ghosts of a generation very, very close to them. One hears of lots of ghosts in eighteenth-century costumes, because everybody has a clear idea of wigs and small-clothes from pictures and fancy dresses. One hears of far fewer in Elizabethan dress, because the class most given to beholding ghosts are seldom acquainted with ruffs and farthingales; and one meets with none at all in Anglo-Saxon or Ancient British or Roman costumes, because those are only known to a comparatively small class of learned people; and ghosts, as a rule, avoid the learned — except you, Mrs. Bruce — as they would avoid prussic acid. Millions of ghosts of remote antiquity must swarm about the world, though, after a hundred years or thereabouts, they retire into obscurity and cease to annoy people with their nasty cold shivers. But the queer thing about these long-barrow ghosts is that they must be the spirits of men and women who died thousands and thousands of years ago, which is exceptional longevity for a spiritual being; don’t you think so, Cameron?”
“Europe must be chock-full of them!” the pretty American assented, smiling; “though Amurrica hasn’t had time, so far, to collect any considerable population of spirits.”
But Mrs. Bruce was up in arms at once against such covert levity, and took the field in full force for her beloved spectres. “No, no,” she said, “Dr. Porter, there you mistake your subject. You should read what I have written in ‘The Mirror of Trismegistus.’ Man is the focus of the glass of his own senses. There are other landscapes in the fifth and sixth dimensions of space than the one presented to him. As Carlyle said truly, each eye sees in all things just what each eye brings with it the power of seeing. And this is true spiritually as well as physically. To Newton and Newton’s dog Diamond what a different universe! One saw the great vision of universal gravitation, the other saw — a little mouse under a chair, as the wise old nursery rhyme so philosophically puts it. Nursery rhymes summarize for us the gain of centuries. Nothing was ever destroyed, nothing was ever changed, and nothing now is ever created. All the spirits of all that is, or was, or ever will be, people the universe everywhere, unseen, around us; and each of us sees of them those only he himself is adapted to seeing. The rustic or the clown meets no ghosts of any sort save the ghosts of the persons he knows about otherwise; if a man like yourself saw a ghost at all — which isn’t likely — for you starve your spiritual side by blindly shutting your eyes to one whole aspect of nature — you’d be just as likely to see the ghost of a Stone Age chief as the ghost of a Georgian or Elizabethan exquisite.”
