Susan wrote to her old friend that very afternoon, telling him what she had seen, and begging him to write and set her mind at ease. After all, it was very consoling to hear what she had heard from her husband, and she tried to convince herself that the thing she had seen was only a trick of her imagination.
Another month went by, and again in the twilight the same figure appeared to her. It was standing this time, with one arm leaning on the high mantlepiece; standing facing her as she came back to the room, after having quitted it for a few minutes for some slight household duty.
There was a better fire and more light in the room than there had been before. The logs were burning with a steady blaze that lit up the well-known figure and unforgotten face. John Granger was looking at her with an expression that seemed half reproachful, half beseeching. He was very pale, much paler than she had ever seen him in life; and as he looked, she standing just within the threshold of the door, she saw him lift his hand slowly and point to his forehead. The firelight showed her a dark red stain upon the left temple, like the mark of a contused wound.
She covered her face with her hands, shuddering and uttering a little cry of terror, and then dropped half fainting upon a chair. When she uncovered her face the room was empty, the firelight shining cheerily upon the walls, no trace of that ghostly visitant. Again when her husband came in she told him of what she had seen for the first time that night. He heard her very gravely. This repetition of the business made it serious. If it were, as Robert Ashley fully believed it was, a delusion of his wife’s, it was a dangerous delusion, and he knew not how to charm it away from her mind. She had conjured up a new fancy now, this notion of a bloodstained temple; the ghastly evidence of some foul play that had been done to John Granger.
And the man was alive and well in America all the time; but how convince a woman of that fact when she preferred to trust her own sick fancies?
This time Susan Ashley brooded over the thoughts of the thing she had seen, firmly believing that she had looked upon the shadow of the dead, and that there was some purpose to be fulfilled by that awful vision. In the day, however busy she might be with her daily work, the thought of this was almost always in her mind; in the dead silence of the night, when her husband was sleeping by her side, she would often lie awake for hours thinking of John Granger.
No answer had come to her letter, though there had been more than time for her to receive one.
“Robert,” she said to her husband one day, “I do not believe that John Granger ever went to America.”
“Oh, Susy, Susy, I wish you could get John Granger out of your head. Who is it that writes for his money, if it isn’t he?”
“Anybody might know of the money—people know everything about their neighbours’ affairs in Hillborough—and anybody that knew John Granger’s hand might be able to forge a letter. I don’t believe he ever went to America, Robert. I believe some accident—some fatal accident—happened to him on the night he was to leave Hillborough.”
“Why, Susy, what should happen to him, and we not hear of it?”
“He might have been waylaid and murdered. He had a good deal of money about him, I know, that night; he was to sail from London by the Washington, and his luggage was all sent to an inn near the Docks. I wish you’d write to the people, Robert, and ask if he arrived there at the time he was expected; and I wish you’d find out at the station whether anyone saw him go away by the train that night.”
“It’s easy enough to do as much as that to please you, Susy. But I wish you wouldn’t dwell upon these fancies about Granger; it’s all nonsense, as you’ll find out sooner or later.”
He wrote the letter which his wife wanted written, asking the landlord of the Victoria Hotel, London Docks, whether a certain Mr. John Granger, whose travelling chests had been forwarded from Hillborough, had arrived at his house on the 24th of July last, and when and how he had quitted it. He also took the trouble to go to the Hillborough Station, in order to question the station master and his subordinates about John Granger’s departure.
Neither the station master nor the porters were able to give Robert Ashley any satisfactory information on this point. One or two of the men were not quite clear that they knew John Granger by sight; another knew him very well indeed, but could not swear to having seen him that night. The station master was quite clear that he had not seen him.
“I’m generally pretty busy with the mail bags at that time,” he said, “and a passenger might very well escape my notice. But it would only have been civil in Granger to bid me goodbye; I’ve known him ever since he was a lad.”
This was not a satisfactory account to carry back to Susan; nor was the letter that came from London in a day or two much more satisfactory. The landlord of the Victoria Hotel begged to inform Mr. Ashley that the owner of the trunks from Hillborough had not arrived at his house until the middle of August. He was not quite sure about the date; but he knew the luggage had been lying in his place for something over three weeks, and he was thinking of advertising it, when the owner appeared.
Three weeks! and John Granger had left Susan Lorton that July night, intending to go straight to London. Where could he have been? What could he have been doing in the interval?
Robert Ashley tried to make light of the matter. Granger might have changed his mind at the last moment—at the railway station, perhaps—and might have gone off to visit friends in some other part of the country. But Susan told her husband that John Granger had no friends except at Hillborough, and that he was not given to changing his mind upon any occasion. She had now a settled conviction that some untimely fate had befallen her old friend, and that the letters from America were forgeries.
Ashley told his friend Simmons the story of the ghost rather reluctantly, but it was necessary to tell it in explaining how the letter to the London hotel keeper came to be written. Of course Mr. Simmons was quite ready to agree with him that the ghostly part of the business was no more than a delusion of Susan’s; but he was a good deal puzzled, not to say disturbed, by the hotel keeper’s letter. He had talked over John Granger’s plans with him on that last day, and he remembered that John had been perfectly decided in his intention of going straight to London. The three weeks interval between his departure from Hillborough and his arrival in that city was a mystery not easily to be explained.
Mr. Simmons referred to the letters from New York, and compared the signatures of them with previous signatures of John Granger’s. If they were forgeries, they were very clever forgeries; but Granger’s was a plain commercial hand by no means difficult to imitate. There was one thing noticeable in the signatures to the American letters—they were all exactly alike, line for line and curve for curve. This rather discomposed Mr. Simmons; for it is a notorious fact that a man rarely signs his name twice in exactly the same manner. There is almost always some difference.
“I’m going up to London in a month,” said the cashier; “I’ll call at the Victoria Hotel when I’m there, and make a few enquiries about John Granger. We can make some excuse for keeping back the money in the meantime, if there should be any more written for.”
Before the month was out, John Granger’s ghost appeared for the third time to Susan Ashley. She had been to Hillborough alone to make some little purchases in the way of linen drapery, and came home through Hawley Wood in the tender May twilight. She was thinking of her old friend as she walked along the shadowy winding footpath. It was just such a still, peaceful evening as that upon which he had stood on the edge of the common looking back at her, and waving his hand, upon that last well remembered night.
He was so much in her thoughts, and the conviction that he had come from among the dead to visit her was so rooted in her mind, that she was scarcely surprised when she looked up presently, and saw a tall familiar figure moving slowly among the trees a little way before her. There seemed to be an
awful stillness in the wood all at once, but there was nothing awful in that well-known figure.
She tried to overtake it; but it kept always in advance of her, and at a sudden turn in the path she lost it altogether. The trees grew thicker, and there was a solemn darkness at the spot where the path took this sharp turn, and on one side of the narrow footpath there was a steep declivity and a great hollow, made by a disused gravel pit.
She went home quietly enough, with a subdued sadness upon her, and told her husband what had happened to her. Nor did she rest until there had been a search made in Hawley Wood for the body of John Granger.
They searched, and found him lying at the bottom of the gravel pit, half buried in loose sand and gravel, and quite hidden by a mass of furze and bramble that grew over the spot. There was an inquest, of course. The tailor who had made the clothes found upon the body identified them, and swore to them as those he had made for John Granger. The pockets were all empty. There could be little doubt that John Granger had been waylaid and murdered for the sake of the money he carried upon him that night. His skull had been shattered by a blow from a jagged stick on the left temple. The stick was found lying at the bottom of the pit a little way from the body, with human hair and stains of blood upon it.
John Granger had never left Hillborough; and the person who had contrived to procure so much of his money, by sending the deposit receipts and forged letters from America, was, in all probability, his murderer. There was a large reward offered for the discovery of the guilty party; the police were hard at work; and the inquest was adjourned several times, in the hope that new facts might be elicited.
* * * *
Susan Ashley and her father were examined closely as to the events of that fatal evening of July the 24th. Susan told everything: her cousin Stephen Price dropping in while they were at tea, the questions and answers about the money John Granger carried upon him—to the most minute particular.
“Then Price knew of the money Granger had about him?” suggested the coroner.
“He did, sir.”
“And did he know that he had money on deposit in Hillborough Bank?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Did Price leave your father’s house after Granger, or before him?”
“Before him, sir: nearly an hour before him.”
The inquest was adjourned; and, within a week of this examination, Matthew Lorton received an application from the police, asking for a photograph of his nephew Stephen Price, if he happened to possess such a thing.
He did possess one, and sent it to London by return of post.
The landlord of the Victoria Hotel identified this portrait as that of the person who represented himself to be John Granger, and who carried away John Granger’s luggage.
After this the work was easy. Little links in the chain were picked up one by one. A labouring man turned up who had seen Stephen Price sitting on a stile hard by Hawley Wood, hacking at a thick jagged looking stake with his clasp knife, on the night of the 24th of July. The woman at whose house Price lodged gave evidence that he broke an appointment to play billiards with a friend of his on that night; the friend had called at his lodgings for him twice, and had been angry about the breaking of the appointment; and Stephen Price came in about half past ten o’clock, looking very white and strange. The lad who was his fellow clerk was ready to swear to his having been disturbed and strange in his manner during the two or three weeks before he left Hillborough; but the boy had thought very little of this, he said, knowing how deeply Stephen was in debt.
The final examination resulted in a verdict of wilful murder; and a police officer started for New York by the next steamer, carrying a warrant for the apprehension of Stephen Price.
He was not found very easily, but was ultimately apprehended, with some of John Granger’s property still in his possession. He was brought home, tried, found guilty, and hung, much to the satisfaction of Hillborough. Shortly afterwards, Mr. Vollair produced a will, which John Granger had executed a few days before his intended departure, bequeathing all he possessed to Susan Lorton—the interest for her sole use and benefit, the principal to revert to her eldest son after her death, the son to take the name of Granger. The bank had to make good the money drawn from them by Stephen Price. The boy came in due course, and was christened after the dead man, above whose remains a fair white monument has been erected in the rustic churchyard near Hawley Wood, at the expense of Robert and Susan Ashley; a handsomer tomb than is usually given to a man of John Granger’s class, but it was the only thing Susan could do to show how much she had valued him who had loved her so dearly.
She often sits beside that quiet resting place in the spring twilight, with her children busy making daisy chains at her knee; but she has never seen John Granger’s ghost since that evening in the wood, and she knows she will never see it again.
AN ITINERANT HOUSE, by Emma Frances Dawson
Originally published in An Itinerant House, and Other Stories, 1897.
“Eternal longing with eternal pain,
Want without hope, and memory saddening all,
All congregated failure and despair
Shall wander there through some old maze of wrong.”
“His wife?” cried Felipa.
“Yes,” I answered, unwillingly; for until the steamer brought Mrs. Anson I believed in this Mexican woman’s right to that name. I felt sorry for the bright eyes and kind heart that had cheered Anson’s lodgers through weary months of early days in San Francisco.
She burst into tears. None of us knew how to comfort her. Dering spoke first: “Beauty always wins friends.”
Between her sobs she repeated one of the pithy sayings of her language: “It is as easy to find a lover as to keep a friend, but as hard to find a friend as to keep a lover.”
“Yes,” said Volz, “a new friendship is like a new string to your guitar—you are not sure what its tone may prove, nor how soon it may break.”
“But at least its falsity is learned at once,” she sobbed.
“Is it possible,” I asked, “that you had no suspicion?”
“None. He told me—” She ended in a fresh gust of tears.
“The old story,” muttered Dering. “Marryatt’s skipper was right in thinking everything that once happened would come again somewhere.”
Anson came. He had left the newcomer at the Niantic, on pretense of putting his house in order. Felipa turned on him before we could go.
“Is this true?” she cried.
Without reply he went to the window and stood looking out. She sprang toward him, with rage distorting her face. “Coward!” she screamed, in fierce scorn.
Then she fell senseless. Two doctors were called. One said she was dead. The other, at first doubtful, vainly tried hot sealing-wax and other tests. After thirty-six hours her funeral was planned. Yet Dering, once medical student, had seen an electric current used in such a case in Vienna, and wanted to try it. That night, he, Volz, and I offered to watch. When all was still, Dering, who had smuggled in the simple things needed, began his weird work.
“Is it not too late?” I asked.
“Every corpse,” said he, “can be thus excited soon after death, for a brief time only, and but once. If the body is not lifeless, the electric current has power at any time.”
Volz, too nervous to stay near, stood in the door open to the dark hall. It was a dreadful sight. The dead woman’s breast rose and fell; smiles and frowns flitted across her face.
“The body begins to react finely,” cried Dering, making Volz open the windows, while I wrapped hot blankets round Felipa, and he instilled clear coffee and brandy.
“It seems like sacrilege! Let her alone!” I exclaimed. “Better dead than alive!”
“My God! Say not that!” cried Volz; “the nerve which hears is la
st to die. She may know all we say.”
“Musical bosh!” I muttered.
“Perhaps not,” said Dering; “in magnetic sleep that nerve can be roused.”
The night seemed endless. The room gained an uncanny look, the macaws on the gaudy, old-fashioned wall-paper seemed fluttering and changing places. Volz crouched in a heap near the door. Dering stood by Felipa, watching closely. I paced the shadowy room, looked at the gleam of the moon on the bay, listened to the soughing wind in the gum-trees mocking the sea, and tried to recall more cheerful scenes, but always bent under the weight of that fearful test going on beside me. Where was her soul? Beyond the stars, in the room with us, or “like trodden snowdrift melting in the dark?” Volz came behind, startling me by grasping my elbow.
“Shall I not play?” he whispered. “Familiar music is remembrance changed to sound—it brings the past as perfume does. Gypsy music in her ear would be like holding wild flowers to her nostrils.”
“Ask Dering,” I said; “he will know best.”
I heard him urging Dering.
“She has gypsy blood,” he said; “their music will rouse her.”
Dering unwillingly agreed. “But nothing abrupt—begin low,” said he.
Vaguely uneasy, I turned to object; but Volz had gone for his violin. Far off arose a soft, wavering, sleepy strain, like a wind blowing over a field of poppies. He passed, in slow, dramatic style, through the hall, playing on the way. As he came in, oddly sustained notes trembled like sighs and sobs; these were by degrees subdued, though with spasmodic outbursts, amid a grand movement as of phantom shapes through cloud-land. One heart-rending phrase recurring as of one of the shadowy host striving to break loose, but beaten back by impalpable throngs, numberless grace-notes trailing their sparks like fireworks. No music of our intervals and our rhythms, but perplexing in its charm like a draught that maddens. Time, space, our very identities, were consumed in this white heat of sound. I held my breath. I caught his arm.
The Sixth Ghost Story Megapack Page 26
