the prospect of several guests of position arriving in the course
of the day, who would expect sport of some kind, and the
inroads of the distemper (which continued among his game)
had been lately so serious that he was afraid for his reputation
as a game-preserver. But what really touched him most nearly
was the other matter of his sleepless night. He could certainly
not sleep in that room again.
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M. R. James
That was the chief subject of his meditations at breakfast,
and after it he began a systematic examination of the rooms
to see which would suit his notions best. It was long before
he found one. This had a window with an eastern aspect and
that with a northern; this door the servants would be always
passing, and he did not like the bedstead in that. No, he must
have a room with a western look-out, so that the sun could
not wake him early, and it must be out of the way of the
business of the house. The housekeeper was at the end of her
resources.
“ Well, Sir Richard,” she said, “ you know that there is
but the one room like that in the house.”
“ Which may that be?” said Sir Richard.
“ And that is Sir Matthew’s—the West Chamber.”
“ Well, put me in there, for there I ’ll lie tonight,” said her
master. “ Which way is it? Here, to be sure” ; and he hurried
off.
“ Oh, Sir Richard, but no one has slept there these forty
years. The air has hardly been changed since Sir Matthew
died there. ’ ’
Thus she spoke, and rustled after him.
“ Come, open the door, Mrs. Chiddock. I ’ll see the chamber, at least.”
So it was opened, and, indeed, the smell was very close
and earthy. Sir Richard crossed to the window, and, impatiently, as was his wont, threw the shutters back, and flung open the casement. For this end of the house was one which
the alterations had barely touched, grown up as it was with
the great ash-tree, and being otherwise concealed from view.
“ Air it, Mrs. Chiddock, all today, and move my bed-
furniture in in the afternoon. Put the Bishop of Kilmore in
my old room.”
“ Pray, Sir Richard,” said a new voice, breaking in on his
speech, “ might I have the favour of a moment’s interview?”
Sir Richard turned around and saw a man in black in the
doorway, who bowed.
‘ ‘I must ask your indulgence for this intrusion, Sir Rich
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67
ard. You will, perhaps, hardly remember me. My name is
William Crome, and my grandfather was Vicar in your grandfather’s tim e.”
“ Well, sir,” said Sir Richard, “ the name of Crome is
always a passport to Castringham. I am glad to renew a
friendship of two generations’ standing. In what can I serve
you? for your hour of calling—and, if I do not mistake you,
your bearing—shows you to be in some haste.”
“ That is no more than the truth, sir. I am riding from
Norwich to Bury St. Edmunds with what haste I can make,
and I have called in on my way to leave with you some papers
which we have but just come upon in looking over what my
grandfather left at his death. It is thought you may find some
matters of family interest in them.”
“ You are mighty obliging, Mr. Crome, and, if you will
be so good as to follow me to the parlour, and drink a glass
o f wine, we will take a first look at these same papers together. And you, Mrs. Chiddock, as I said, be about airing this chamber . . . Yes, it is here my grandfather died . . .
Yes, the tree, perhaps, does make die place a little dampish . . . No; I do not wish to listen to any more. Make no difficulties, I beg. You have your orders—go. Will you follow
me, sir?”
They went to the study. The packet which young Mr.
Crome had brought—he was then just become a Fellow of
Clare Hall in Cambridge, I may say, and subsequendy brought
out a respectable edition of Polyaenus—contained among
other things the notes which the old Vicar had made upon the
occasion of Sir Matthew Fell’s death. And for the first time
Sir Richard was confronted with the enigmatical Sortes Bib-
licae which you have heard. They amused him a good deal.
“ Well,” he said, “ my grandfather’s Bible gave one prudent piece of advice —Cut it down. If that stands for the ash-tree, he may rest assured I shall not neglect it. Such a nest
of catarrhs and agues was never seen.”
The parlour contained the family books, which, pending
die arrival of a collection which Sir Richard had made in
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M. R. James
Italy, and the building of a proper room to receive them, were
not many in number.
Sir Richard looked up from the paper to the bookcase.
“ I wonder,” says he, ‘‘whether die old prophet is there
yet? I fancy I see him.”
Crossing the room, he took out a dumpy Bible, which, sure
enough, bore on the flyleaf the inscription: “ To Matthew
Fell, from his Loving Godmother, Anne Aldous, 2 September 1659.”
“ It would be no bad plan to test him again, Mr. Crome. I
will wager we get a couple of names in the Chronicles. H ’m!
what have we here? ‘Thou shalt seek me in the morning, and
I shall not be. ’ Well, well! Your grandfather would have made
a fine omen of that, hey? No more prophets for me! They are
all in a tale. And now, Mr. Crome, I am infinitely obliged to
you for your packet. You will, I fear, be impatient to get on.
Pray allow me—another glass.”
So with offers of hospitality, which were genuinely meant
(for Sir Richard thought well of the young man’s address and
manner), they parted.
In the afternoon came the guests—the Bishop of Kilmore,
Lady Mary Hervey, Sir William Kentfield, etc. Dinner at five,
wine, cards, supper, and dispersal to bed.
Next morning Sir Richard is disinclined to take his gun
with the rest. He talks with the Bishop of Kilmore. This prelate, unlike a good many of the Irish Bishops of his day, had visited his see, and, indeed, resided there, for some considerable time. This morning, as the two were walking along the terrace and talking over the alterations and improvements
in the house, the Bishop said, pointing to the window of the
West Room:
“ You could never get one of my Irish flock to occupy that
room, Sir Richard.”
“ Why is that, my lord? It is, in fact, my own.”
“ Well, our Irish peasantry will always have it that it brings
the worst of luck to sleep near an ash-tree, and you have a
fine growth of ash not two yards from your chamber window.
The Ash-Tree
69
Perhaps,” the Bishop went on, with a smile, “ it has given
you a touch of its quality already, for you do not seem, if I
may say it, so much the fresher for your night’s rest as your
friends would like to see you.’’
“ That, or something else, it is true, cost me my sleep from
twelve to four, my lord. But the tree is to come down tomorrow, so I shall not hear much more from it.’’
; “ I applaud your determination. It can hardly be wholesome to have the air you breathe strained, as it were, through all that leafage.’’
“ Your lordship is right there, I think. But I had not my
window open last night. It was rather the noise that went
on—no doubt from the twigs sweeping the glass—that kept
me open-eyed.”
“ I think that can hardly be, Sir Richard. Here—you see it
from this point. None of these nearest branches even can
touch your casement unless there were a gale, and there was
none of that last night. They miss the panes by a foot.”
“ No, sir, true. What, then, will it be, I wonder, that
scratched and rustled so—ay, and covered the dust on my sill
with lines and marks?”
At last they agreed that the rats must have come up through
the ivy. That was the Bishop’s idea, and Sir Richard jumped
at it.
So the day passed quietly, and night came, and the party
dispersed to their rooms, and wished Sir Richard a better
night.
And now we are in his bedroom, with the light out and
the Squire in bed. The room is over the kitchen, and the night
outside still and warm, so the window stands open.
There is very little light about the bedstead, but there is a
strange movement there; it seems as if Sir Richard were moving his head rapidly to and fro with only the slightest possible sound. And now you would guess, so deceptive is die halfdarkness, that he had several heads, round and brownish which move back and forward, even as low as his chest. It
is a horrible illusion. Is it nothing more? There! something
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M. R. James
drops off the bed with a soft plump, like a kitten, and is out
of the window in a flash; another—four—and after that there
is quiet again.
Thou shalt seek me in the morning, and I shall not be.
As with Sir Matthew, so with Sir Richard—dead and black
in his bed!
A pale and silent party of guests and servants gathered
under the window when the news was known. Italian poisoners, Popish emissaries, infected air—all these and more guesses were hazarded, and the Bishop of Kilmore looked at
the tree, in the fork of whose lower boughs a white tom-cat
was crouching, looking down the hollow which years had
gnawed in the trunk. It was watching something inside the
tree with great interest.
Suddenly it got up and craned over the hole. Then a bit of
the edge on which it stood gave way, and it went slithering
in. Everyone looked up at the noise of the fall.
It is known to most of us that a cat can cry; but few of us
have heard, I hope, such a yell as came out of the trunk of
the great ash. Two or three screams there were—the witnesses
are not sure which—and then a slight and muffled noise of
some commotion or struggling was all that came. But Lady
Mary Hervey fainted outright, and the housekeeper stopped
her ears and fled till she fell on the terrace.
The Bishop of Kilmore and Sir William Kentfleld stayed.
Yet even they were daunted, though it was only at the cry of
a cat; and Sir William swallowed once or twice before he
could say:
“ There is something more than we know of in that tree,
my lord. I am for an instant search.”
And this was agreed upon. A ladder was brought, and one
of the gardeners went up, and, looking down the hollow,
could detect nothing but a few dim indications of something
moving. They got a lantern, and let it down by a rope.
“ We must get at the bottom of this. My life upon it, my
lord, but the secret of these terrible deaths is there.”
Up went the gardener again with the lantern, and let it
The Ash-Tree
71
down the hole cautiously. They saw the yellow light upon his
face as he bent over, and saw his face struck with an incredulous terror and loathing before he cried out in a dreadful voice and fell back from the ladder—where, happily, he was
caught by two of the men—letting the lantern fall inside the
tree.
He was in a dead faint, and it was some time before any
word could be got from him.
By then they had something else to look at. The lantern
must have broken at the bottom, and the light in it caught
upon dry leaves and rubbish that lay there, for in a few minutes a dense smoke began to come up, and then flame; and, to be short, the tree was in a blaze.
The bystanders made a ring at some yards’ distance, and
Sir William and the Bishop sent men to get what weapons
and tools they could; for, clearly, whatever might be using
the tree as its lair would be forced out by the fire.
So it was. First, at the fork, they saw a round body covered
with fire—the size of man’s head—appear very suddenly, then
seem to collapse and fall back. This, five or six times; then
a similar ball leapt into the air and fell on the grass, where
after a moment it lay still. The Bishop went as near as he
dared to it, and saw—what but the remains of an enormous
spider, veinous and seared! And, as the fire burned lower
down, more terrible bodies like this began to break out from
the trunk, and it was seen that these were covered with greyish hair.
All that day the ash burned, and until it fell to pieces the
men stood about it, and from time to time killed the brutes
as they darted out. At last there was a long interval when
none appeared, and they cautiously closed in and examined
the roots of the tree.
“ They found,” says the Bishop of Kilmore, “ below it a
rounded hollow place in the earth, wherein were two or
three bodies of these creatures that had plainly been smothered by the smoke; and, what is to be more curious, at the
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side of this den, against the wall, was crouching the anatomy or skeleton of a human being, with the skin dried upon the bones, having some remains of black hair, which was
pronounced by those that examined it to be undoubtedly the
body of a woman, and clearly dead for a period of fifty
years.”
Lucy Clifford
The Mew Mother
Lucy Clifford was a Victorian writer of children's fantasies. "The New Mother" is from Anyhow Stories, Moral
and Otherwise (London, 1882). It is a curious example
of the often-noted tendency of Victorian morality to be
at odds in an unsettling way with human psychology.
"Step on a crack, break your mother’s back,” or step
out of line and you will be punished horribly, out of all
proportion to the sin, seems to be the moral, familiar
from horrid children’s rhymes. It represents herein the
whole tradition of tales calculated to terrify and horrify
children into good behavior through moral allegory. The
allegory may be awry, but the horror is real.
I
The children were always called Blue-Eyes and the Turkey. The elder one was like her dear father who was far away at sea; for the father had the bluest of blue eyes, and
so gradually his little girl came to be called after them. The
younger one had once, while she was still almost a baby,
cried b
itterly because a turkey that lived near the cottage
suddenly vanished in the middle of the winter; and to console
her she had been called by its name.
Now the mother and Blue-Eyes and the Turkey and the
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Lucy Clifford
baby all lived in a lonely cottage on the edge of the forest. It
was a long way to the village, nearly a mile and a half, and
the mother had to work hard and had not time to go often
herself to see if there was a letter at the post-office from the
dear father, and so very often in the afternoon she used to
send the two children. They were very proud of being able
to go alone. When they came back tired with the long walk,
there would be the mother waiting and watching for them,
and the tea would be ready, and the baby crowing with
delight; and if by any chance there was a letter from the sea,
then they were happy indeed. The cottage room was so cosy:
the walls were as white as snow inside as well as out. The
baby’s high chair stood in one comer, and in another there
was a cupboard, in which the mother kept all manner of
surprises.
“ Dear children,” the mother said one afternoon late in the
autumn, “ it is very chilly for you to go to the village, but
you must walk quickly, and who knows but what you may
bring back a letter saying that dear father is already on his
way to England. Don’t be long,” the mother said, as she
always did before they started. “ Go the nearest way and don’t
look at any strangers you meet, and be sure you do not talk
with them.”
“ No, mother,” they answered; and then she kissed them
and called them dear good children, and they joyfully started
on their way.
The village was gayer than usual, for there had been a fair
the day before. “ Oh, I do wish we had been here yesterday,”
Blue-Eyes said as they went on to the grocer’s, which was
also the post-office. The post-mistress was very busy and just
said “ No letter for you to-day.” Then Blue-Eyes and the
Tbrkey turned away to go home. They had left the village and
walked some way, and then they noticed, resting against a
pile of stones by the wayside, a strange wild-looking girl,
The Color of Evil - The Dark Descent V1 (1991) Page 9
