The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Sabine Baring-Gould

by Sabine Baring-Gould

  “Well, I put on your spectacles, and looked into her mind, and what I saw was: ‘The pestilent old cat; I only wish she would catch her death of cold, and then Thomson and I’—Thomson is my butler—‘could retire, and take a public-house. It is intolerable to go on serving this selfish old woman, and we would not do so but that we expect she will leave us something handsome in her will.’ I read this distinctly in her mind. Inconceivable ingratitude! But this is not all. At dinner, Thomson served, and I read his mind as a book, for I wore the spectacles. I saw that he was married to my maid, Martha a thing I had never suspected—and that between them they had a deep-laid plan to rob me when I should be on my deathbed.

  “I keep all my securities. I do not trust them to the bank. It was their intention, when I should be powerless, to get hold of the keys and possess themselves of such securities as they could. At dinner, when dessert was served, I had a slice of melon, with powdered ginger. Thompson’s eye rested on the ginger; and I saw into his heart, and he was saying to himself: ‘I wish that were arsenic. If it were not for the risk, I would spice her food for her.’ Why, my life is in jeopardy. Thompson’s impatience may get the better of his prudence, and he may spice my food. What can I do?”

  “Really, madam, I cannot say.”

  “I shall put all my securities in the bank. Oh, dear! What shall I do? I shall go into rooms in the Grosvenor Hotel, and get rid of my house and servants. I shall never be happy again.”

  I was relieved when the lady left. As she did so she ran against a young man who was entering. After mutual apologies she went forth, but he came up to me with a firm step and with an angry frown, saying: “Do you mean to throw these glasses broadcast through society?” He flung his pair on the table. “I was a fool to buy them. You have blighted my life. I can trust nobody, respect nobody any longer. I have already seen too much with them. I have seen the seamy side of everyone through them. Is this going on?”

  “Most assuredly it is,” said I, “till I have disposed of my stock.”

  “Oh, indeed!” he exclaimed, and walked towards the door, but turned abruptly, drew a revolver from his pocket, and presented it at my head.

  “Before I leave,” said he, “I will settle this. I will shoot you dead as a rat unless you surrender your whole stock of psychoscopes.”

  “My dear sir, my livelihood depends on the sale.”

  “I care not. I will rid society, the civilised world of such a terror.” He pulled out his watch. “I give you five minutes. I will put a bullet through your brain unless you clear out your drawers and yield me every bit of glass that you possess.”

  I looked at him. He was angry. I saw deadly resolution in his eyes.

  “The fool,” thought I. “What if he does get possession of my stock? I can obtain a fresh supply from the miller.” Happily, he had not the glasses on, and so could not read my thought.

  “Come,” said he; “two minutes have elapsed. Will you surrender, or must I shoot you?”

  Reluctantly, with the bore of that revolver covering me, I obeyed. He swept together my whole stock-in-trade.

  “A hammer,” he ordered. I submitted. With his disengaged hand he set to work and smashed the glasses, nor paused till he had reduced them to small fragments. Then he returned the revolver to his pocket, cast the whole pile on the floor, and ground them to glass dust under his heel; then he departed.

  I remained motionless and pondering. Then, starting up, I hurried to the station, and took a train to Chelmsford. Scruple was dead in me. I was an utterly miserable man, and in a fever to obtain a fresh supply of the glasses. Evening was coming on as I left Chelmsford and walked towards the mouth of the Blackwater. But the excitement during the previous days and the strain on my nerves were telling on me; and I was not sure of my way. I stumbled among the marshes. What cared I for glasswort now? What for the Red Hills? I caught my foot in the mud, and fell, measuring my length on the soil—and—

  ******

  The reciter of this story passed his hand over his face, looked vacantly at me, and said: “I can recall no more. I know why I am here, but how I came here I cannot say.”

  I had received tidings that a friend of mine was in the private lunatic asylum at Budleford, and I went to see him. He recognised me, and was glad to see me, and to me he poured forth the tale I have just recorded in his own words.

  Again he passed his hand over his face, and said: “I know very well why I have been locked up in this place. It is a deep-laid plot. All the world is against me. All mankind is in alarm lest I should get a fresh supply of psychoscopic glasses; and to prevent that they have conspired against me to secure me behind bolts and bars. The world of men is afraid of being seen through. That is the secret why I am held in durance. But I cannot recall how I was got hold of and locked in here.”

  As I left the asylum I said to one of the keepers: “Can you tell me if there is a windmill somewhere about the mouth of the Blackwater—whereabouts I do not know?”

  “The Devil’s Mill. That poor gentleman was found near it—mad—quite mad.”

  A Happy Release

  (A tale from A Book of Ghosts)

  Mr. Benjamin Woolfield was a widower. For twelve months he put on mourning. The mourning was external, and by no means represented the condition of his feelings; for his married life had not been happy. He and Kesiah had been unequally yoked together. The Mosaic law forbade the union of the ox and the ass to draw one plough; and two more uncongenial creatures than Benjamin and Kesiah could hardly have been coupled to draw the matrimonial furrow.

  She was a Plymouth Sister, and he, as she repeatedly informed him whenever he indulged in light reading, laughed, smoked, went out shooting, or drank a glass of wine, was of the earth, earthy, and a miserable worldling.

  For some years Mr. Woolfield had been made to feel as though he were a moral and religious pariah. Kesiah had invited to the house and to meals, those of her own way of thinking, and on such occasions had spared no pains to have the table well served, for the elect are particular about their feeding, if indifferent as to their drinks. On such occasions, moreover, when Benjamin had sat at the bottom of his own table, he had been made to feel that he was a worm to be trodden on. The topics of conversation were such as were far beyond his horizon, and concerned matters of which he was ignorant. He attempted at intervals to enter into the circle of talk. He knew that such themes as football matches, horse races, and cricket were taboo, but he did suppose that home or foreign politics might interest the guests of Kesiah. But he soon learned that this was not the case, unless such matters tended to the fulfilment of prophecy.

  When, however, in his turn, Benjamin invited home to dinner some of his old friends, he found that all provided for them was hashed mutton, cottage pie, and tapioca pudding. But even these could have been stomached, had not Mrs. Woolfield sat stern and silent at the head of the table, not uttering a word, but giving vent to occasional, very audible sighs.

  When the year of mourning was well over, Mr. Woolfield put on a light suit, and contented himself, as an indication of bereavement, with a slight black band round the left arm. He also began to look about him for someone who might make up for the years during which he had felt like a crushed strawberry.

  And in casting his inquiring eye about, it lighted upon Philippa Weston, a bright, vigorous young lady, well educated and intelligent. She was aged twenty-four and he was but eighteen years older, a difference on the right side.

  It took Mr. Woolfield but a short courtship to reach an understanding, and he became engaged.

  On the same evening upon which he had received a satisfactory answer to the question put to her, and had pressed for an early marriage, to which also consent had been accorded, he sat by his study fire, with his hands on his knees, looking into the embers and building love-castles there. Then he smiled and patted his knees.

  He was startled from his honey reveries by a sniff. He looked round. There was a familiar ring in that sniff which was unp
leasant to him.

  What he then saw dissipated his rosy dreams, and sent his blood to his heart.

  At the table sat his Kesiah, looking at him with her beady black eyes, and with stern lines in her face. He was so startled and shocked that he could not speak.

  “Benjamin,” said the apparition, “I know your purpose. It shall never be carried to accomplishment. I will prevent it.”

  “Prevent what, my love, my treasure?” he gathered up his faculties to reply.

  “It is in vain that you assume that infantile look of innocence,” said his deceased wife. “You shall never—never—lead her to the hymeneal altar.”

  “Lead whom, my idol? You astound me.”

  “I know all. I can read your heart. A lost being though you be, you have still me to watch over you. When you quit this earthly tabernacle, if you have given up taking in the Field, and have come to realise your fallen condition, there is a chance—a distant chance—but yet one of our union becoming eternal.”

  “You don’t mean to say so,” said Mr. Woolfield, his jaw falling.

  “There is—there is that to look to. That to lead you to turn over a new leaf. But it can never be if you become united to that Flibbertigibbet.”

  Mentally, Benjamin said: “I must hurry up with my marriage!”

  Vocally he said: “Dear me! Dear me!”

  “My care for you is still so great,” continued the apparition, “that I intend to haunt you by night and by day, till that engagement be broken off.”

  “I would not put you to so much trouble,” said he.

  “It is my duty,” replied the late Mrs. Woolfield sternly.

  “You are oppressively kind,” sighed the widower.

  At dinner that evening Mr. Woolfield had a friend to keep him company, a friend to whom he had poured out his heart. To his dismay, he saw seated opposite him the form of his deceased wife.

  He tried to be lively; he cracked jokes, but the sight of the grim face and the stony eyes riveted on him damped his spirits, and all his mirth died away.

  “You seem to be out of sorts tonight,” said his friend.

  “I am sorry that I act so bad a host,” apologised Mr. Woolfield. “Two is company, three is none.”

  “But we are only two here tonight.”

  “My wife is with me in spirit.”

  “Which, she that was, or she that is to be?” Mr. Woolfield looked with timid eyes towards her who sat at the end of the table. She was raising her hands in holy horror, and her face was black with frowns.

  His friend said to himself when he left: “Oh, these lovers! They are never themselves so long as the fit lasts.”

  Mr. Woolfield retired early to bed. When a man has screwed himself up to proposing to a lady, it has taken a great deal out of him, and nature demands rest. It was so with Benjamin; he was sleepy. A nice little fire burned in his grate. He undressed and slipped between the sheets.

  Before he put out the light he became aware that the late Mrs. Woolfield was standing by his bedside with a nightcap on her head.

  “I am cold,” said she, “bitterly cold.”

  “I am sorry to hear it, my dear,” said Benjamin.

  “The grave is cold as ice,” she said. “I am going to step into bed.”

  “No—never!” exclaimed the widower, sitting up. “It won’t do. It really won’t. You will draw all the vital heat out of me, and I shall be laid up with rheumatic fever. It will be ten times worse than damp sheets.”

  “I am coming to bed,” repeated the deceased lady, inflexible as ever in carrying out her will.

  As she stepped in Mr. Woolfield crept out on the side of the fire and seated himself by the grate.

  He sat there some considerable time, and then, feeling cold, he fetched his dressing-gown and enveloped himself in that.

  He looked at the bed. In it lay the deceased lady with her long slit of a mouth shut like a rat-trap, and her hard eyes fixed on him.

  “It is of no use your thinking of marrying, Benjamin,” she said. “I shall haunt you till you give it up.”

  Mr. Woolfield sat by his fire all night, and only dozed off towards morning.

  During the day he called at the house of Miss Weston, and was shown into the drawing-room. But there, standing behind her chair, was his deceased wife with her arms folded on the back of the seat, glowering at him.

  It was impossible for the usual tender passages to ensue between the lovers with a witness present, expressing by gesture her disapproval of such matters and her inflexible determination to force on a rupture.

  The dear departed did not attend Mr. Woolfield continuously during the day, but appeared at intervals. He could never say when he would be free, when she would not turn up.

  In the evening he rang for the housemaid. “Jemima,” he said, “put two hot bottles into my bed tonight. It is somewhat chilly.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And let the water be boiling—not with the chill off.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  When somewhat late Mr. Woolfield retired to his room he found, as he had feared, that his late wife was there before him. She lay in the bed with her mouth snapped, her eyes like black balls, staring at him.

  “My dear,” said Benjamin, “I hope you are more comfortable.”

  “I’m cold, deadly cold.”

  “But I trust you are enjoying the hot bottles.”

  “I lack animal heat,” replied the late Mrs. Woolfield.

  Benjamin fled the room and returned to his study, where he unlocked his spirit case and filled his pipe. The fire was burning. He made it up. He would sit there all night During the passing hours, however, he was not left quite alone. At intervals the door was gently opened, and the night-capped head of the late Mrs. Woolfield was thrust in.

  “Don’t think, Benjamin, that your engagement will lead to anything,” she would say, “because it will not. I shall stop it.”

  So time passed. Mr. Woolfield found it impossible to escape this persecution. He lost spirits; he lost flesh.

  At last, after sad thought, he saw but one way of relief, and that was to submit. And in order to break off the engagement he must have a prolonged interview with Philippa. He went to the theatre and bought two stall tickets, and sent one to her with the earnest request that she would accept it and meet him that evening at the theatre. He had something to communicate of the utmost importance.

  At the theatre he knew that he would be safe; the principles of Kesiah would not suffer her to enter there.

  At the proper time Mr. Woolfield drove round to Miss Weston’s, picked her up, and together they went to the theatre and took their places in the stalls. Their seats were side by side.

  “I am so glad you have been able to come,” said Benjamin. “I have a most shocking disclosure to make to you. I am afraid that—but I hardly know how to say it—that—I really must break it off.”

  “Break what off?”

  “Our engagement.”

  “Nonsense. I have been fitted for my trousseau.”

  “Your what?”

  “My wedding-dresses.”

  “Oh, I beg pardon. I did not understand your French pronunciation. I thought—but it does not matter what I thought.”

  “Pray what is the sense of this?”

  “Philippa, my affection for you is unabated. Do not suppose that I love you one whit the less. But I am oppressed by a horrible nightmare—daymare as well. I am haunted.”

  “Haunted, indeed!”

  “Yes; by my late wife. She allows me no peace. She has made up her mind that I shall not marry you.”

  “Oh! Is that all? I am haunted also.”

  “Surely not?”

  “It is a fact.”

  “Hush, hush!” from persons in front and at the side. Neither Ben nor Philippa had noticed that the curtain had risen and that the play had begun.

  “We are disturbing the audience,” whispered Mr. Woolfield. “Let us go out into the passage and promenade ther
e, and then we can talk freely.”

  So both rose, left their stalls, and went into the couloir. “Look here, Philippa,” said he, offering the girl his arm, which she took, “the case is serious. I am badgered out of my reason, out of my health, by the late Mrs. Woolfield. She always had an iron will, and she has intimated to me that she will force me to give you up.”

  “Defy her.”

  “I cannot.”

  “Tut! these ghosts are exacting. Give them an inch and they take an ell. They are like old servants; if you yield to them they tyrannise over you.”

  “But how do you know, Philippa, dearest?”

  “Because, as I said, I also am haunted.”

  “That only makes the matter more hopeless.”

  “On the contrary, it only shows how well suited we are to each other. We are in one box.”

  “Philippa, it is a dreadful thing. When my wife was dying she told me she was going to a better world, and that we should never meet again. And she has not kept her word.”

  The girl laughed. “Rag her with it.”

  “How can I?”

  “You can do it perfectly. Ask her why she is left out in the cold. Give her a piece of your mind. Make it unpleasant for her. I give Jehu no good time.”

  “Who is Jehu?”

  “Jehu Post is the ghost who haunts me. When in the flesh he was a great admirer of mine, and in his cumbrous way tried to court me; but I never liked him, and gave him no encouragement. I snubbed him unmercifully, but he was one of those self-satisfied, self-assured creatures incapable of taking a snubbing. He was a Plymouth Brother.”

  “My wife was a Plymouth Sister.”

  “I know she was, and I always felt for you. It was so sad. Well, to go on with my story. In a frivolous mood Jehu took to a bicycle, and the very first time he scorched he was thrown, and so injured his back that he died in a week. Before he departed he entreated that I would see him; so I could not be nasty, and I went. And he told me then that he was about to be wrapped in glory. I asked him if this were so certain. ‘Cocksure’ was his reply; and they were his last words. And he has not kept his word.”