On the third night of the siege Muriel went to bed wearied out. The weather made the major worse, the doctor could not be sent for, and she had sat up with him the previous night, scarcely sleeping at all. Tonight, no sooner was her head on the pillow than she was wrapped in the healthy slumber of a thoroughly tired girl.
How long she had been asleep she did not know; but suddenly she found herself wide awake, with an impression that some one had called her. She sat up; the expanse of snow without cast a reflection of light into the room, and, truth to tell, she expected to see Mrs. Gibson; but there was no one.
Concluding that Mrs. North might have called her, and her father be worse, she slipped out of bed, wrapped her warm gown about her, and opened the door. All was still. She crossed the passage, and from the bedroom came the sound of the major’s snores. Reassured she turned to go back, when her attention was caught by a curious phenomenon.
Between her and the open door of her own room there hovered a pale, nebulous light. It was of no particular shape, and perhaps two feet in height, seeming not to touch the floor. As the girl’s eyes fell upon it, it began to move, crossed the stair-head, and passed slowly on until it was in front of the door leading to the bedroom which contained the safe. Muriel caught her breath. Oh, if it went in there, she dared not, could not follow!
But it did go in—or rather, it vanished, seeming to pass through the wooden panels; and suddenly fear fell away from her like an external thing, and she knew that she must follow. As she turned the key, she heard the hall clock strike three, and thought, “I am not asleep; I hear the clock.”
The waning moon was on this side of the house, and objects in the room could be clearly distinguished; but quite distinct from its pallid radiance was the blue, quivering mass of light near the safe. It grew in size and height until it was the shape and size of a human figure—and slowly, as it seemed to her, it took on the likeness of Mrs. Gibson.
The details of her appearance were not like the former ones; she now wore the shawl in which Muriel had seen her in the flesh; her eyes were fixed upon the girl with eagerness and recognition; after a moment, words were clearly audible.
“It was the keys—can you hear me? Do you hear me? You say you have seen me—hear me now. The keys, I left that out, and the doctor ought to know. I buried them in my baby’s coffin; I shut them in his little dead hand, for it should all have been his; he was the heir. Three keys on a little chain…”
Muriel had no recollection of the end of the episode, nor of how she got back to bed. When she next awoke, in the broad sunshine, she was strongly inclined to consider the whole thing as a dream, in spite of the clock. However, as soon as she was up, she wrote down the curious words of the message. It was not until after the episode was finished that she heard that her step-mother, coming out of her room early that morning, had been startled to see the door of the spare room standing wide open.
Two days after, Dr. Forrest succeeded in braving the drifts, and arrived shortly after breakfast. The first thing he said to Muriel was—“Mrs. Gibson died the night before last, between two and three in the morning.”
The girl turned very white.
“She came to me with a message,” said she. “A very curious message about a key. I wonder if there is any sense in it.”
“About a key!” cried the doctor. “If it should be the missing one! I was there when she died, but she had been unconscious for hours when I arrived, and she never spoke or moved. After it was over, her husband showed me her will. She had no property of any kind to bequeath; all I have to do, is to take in charge the box mentioned in the inscription you saw, and to hand it and its contents intact to Maurice. Hackett immediately on his father’s death. There was no stipulation that we should not see what was inside, so I unlocked the box. It contains the letters you told me of, a quantity of babies’ clothes, a wedding-ring, one or two photographs, and a dispatch-box, of an expensive kind, with a lock which is evidently a complicated one, and no key that we can find. I really feel pretty sure that it is the dispatch-box, and I must take legal advice about withholding it from Hackett, I think.”
Muriel handed him the message, as she had written it. He was profoundly struck. At last—“They will have to open the vault to bury the mother,” he said. “If Gibson will consent, we might at least test the truth of this.”
* * * *
Within a fortnight it was known that Joshua Hackett, of White Gates, had died on the same night as that in which Josephine Gibson passed away. He was found dead in bed—heart failure—the Kenyon scourge, they said. Whether the vision that visited Muriel that night passed on to his bedside, who can say?’
The dispatch-box was handed over at once, by the much relieved doctor, to Maurice, and with it the keys, taken from the hand of a dead baby, in Mr. Gibson’s family vault.
The jewels were all there; with them was a sheaf of Bank of England notes, the total value of which was £25,000.
The packet of letters from Joshua to the woman whom he had deceived by a mock marriage, were a full explanation of her wrongs. There was no doubt that her intention in making the theft was to secure a part of Joshua’s fortune for her unborn child. A written statement which accompanied the letters showed that she had no idea of the amount of the hoard beforehand; but dare not afterwards send any of it back. This statement also related in full how she had opened the box, when she got safely out of the room, to remove any papers which might supply a clue to the owner of the property; how, not clearly understanding how the intricate lock worked, she had failed to re-fasten it securely, and how, just as she was in the act of flight, the box flew open, and the jewels rolled about the hall, on which she gave up all for lost, till emboldened by the fact that, although she knew Miss Anna had been awakened by her theft of the keys from her neck, still there was no sign or sound of any one moving in the house. She then ventured to light her lantern, to pick up every single gem, and to make good her escape; and it was not until weeks after that she heard the horrible news that she had been the unintentional murderer of the old lady.
The above curious facts remain the solitary psychic experience in the life of Muriel North. No doubt the girl arrived at the house just when the thoughts of the woman, by reason of approaching death, were constantly and strongly turned upon the events immediately preceding her marriage: the period into which had been crowded all the tragedy and bitterness of her afterwards monotonous existence. The influence was potent, the girl’s temperament of a quality to respond. She has been inclined to avoid haunted houses since. White Gates no longer belongs to this interesting category.
THE SHADOW ON THE BLIND, by Mrs. Alfred (Louisa) Baldwin
Harbledon Hall had stood empty for seven years. For seven years no smoke had issued from its chimneys telling of the cheerful hearth within, no voice or laughter had been heard under its roof, no footstep coming or going across its threshold. A straggling growth of ivy and Virginia creeper that covered the walls and veiled the windows made the front of the house look as forlorn and neglected as the face of a sick man who has grown a ragged beard during a long illness. The window-sills were green with the drip of rain from the spouts choked with decaying leaves, and the brickwork was stained with dark patches of damp. The birds had built their nests undisturbed in every gable and projection of the roof, and in the wide chimneys, secure from danger of being smoked out of their comfortable quarters.
And within the house, though man had withdrawn his presence from it, other tenants were in possession. Rats and mice held revels in the empty rooms and passages, that resounded with the patter of their feet, the squeak of their voices, and the nibbling of their teeth. In the dead of night, bold as they had grown, they scared themselves by catching in wires that set bells ringing and echoing through the house, and an army of rats would rush helter-skelter down the great staircase, bounding over one another’s backs in their pani
c, as we see them depicted in illustrations of the famous history of Whittington and his cat.
If desolation reigned in Harbledon Hall, its gardens were returning to a state of savage nature, and the rank growth of weeds choked and overtopped the flowers and shrubs. No seeds had been sown, no lawns mown, no hedges clipped or tree or bush pruned in seven long years, and the once orderly gardens had become a tangled thicket where the fairy prince might seek the sleeping beauty. A bramble had sprung up by the sundial, and clasping it in its thorny arms, threw its branches about it, effectually hiding it from the light of day. The stone basin of the disused fountain had become a nursery of young frogs, that hopped, swam, and croaked undisturbed, and nature was endeavouring to re-establish her sway where man had withdrawn his cultivating and restraining hand.
It was a radiant day in June. The hot sun poured down on the tangled overgrowth in the gardens of Harbledon Hall, the birds were in a perfect riot of song, and a south-west wind rocked them on the bough. Even the old forsaken house on such a day wore its least sombre aspect. One could imagine there had been happy household life within its walls, and it was possible to conceive that they might again resound to the laughter and voices of children at play.
Some such thought as this must have entered the mind of an elderly gentleman driving by in an open carriage, with his wife, a pale grey-haired lady, seated beside him. Mr. Stackpoole was a cheerful, energetic man of sixty years of age, of strong likes and dislikes and sudden impulses. As he caught sight of the wide front of Harbledon Hall with its red gables glowing in the sun, its confused mass of creepers almost hiding the lower storeys from view, he told the coachman to draw up at the iron gates at the entrance.
“This is a very picturesque house, my dear; I should like to have a look at it,” he said to his wife; “it may be the kind of place we are in search of,” and he alighted from the carriage as nimbly as a young man to read the notice painted on the weather-stained board fastened to the gates.:
For admission to view these premises,
apply to Mr. Judd, sexton, by the church.
Mr. Stackpoole returned to the carriage and bade the coachman drive to the church, the tower of which they could see embowered among trees, apparently not more than a quarter of a mile distant. As they drove, he continued, “I like the look of the place very much. I am sure I could do something with it. I should just enjoy setting to work upon it to call order out of chaos, and in six months I would undertake to effect an entire transformation in the house and grounds and make it one of the prettiest places in the neighbourhood. What do you think, my dear? Hey?”
The frail-looking elderly lady thus addressed made but a faint rejoinder, and her husband’s sanguine enthusiasm by no means communicated itself to her. Harbledon Hall was the sixth old house to which Mr. Stackpoole had taken a fancy in the last ten years, and fallen out of love with as quickly, after exercising his ingenuity in putting it in perfect order and living in it for a short time. It was his diversion, now that he had retired from business and had nothing particular to do, to hunt up old country houses, put them in thorough modern repair and working order, live in them just long enough to induce his wife to hope that he had pitched his tent finally, when the demon of unrest would break out in him once more, and he was off again on the old quest.
This hunting of houses, catching them, and then letting them go that he might pursue game of the same kind elsewhere was naturally more entertaining to Mr. Stackpoole than it could be to his wife and daughter. But the elder lady was patient and philosophic, and when her daughter said petulantly, “Oh, Mamma, what a shame it is that we have to be dragged about the country like this! We have not been a year in this lovely house, and Papa is tired of it already, and looking out again for some tumble-down old place to put that in good order, and leave it too, I suppose!” Mrs. Stackpoole would say, “Never mind, Ella. Papa must do as he thinks best. The excitement and interest he finds in frequently changing house are necessary to him now that he has done with business; and remember, my dear, he has no home occupations to pass the time like you and I have.” But Ella Stackpoole was now married and settled in a home of her own, and the only other child, a son, was stationed with his regiment in Malta.
Therefore it was that when Mr. Stackpoole became suddenly interested in the appearance of Harbledon Hall his wife was unable to feel any enthusiasm on the subject. Their last home had been in Cornwall, where, after six months spent in its most westerly corner, Mr. Stackpoole discovered what everyone else had always known, that he was in a decidedly rainy part of England. He could scarcely have been more astonished at the quantity of rain that fell if it had been in Egypt, and he fled to London to make that his headquarters while he looked about for an old house to suit his fancy in the drier county of Surrey.
And on this bright June day, he and his wife were driving through the fair country house-hunting, and the more dilapidated a house looked, provided that his experienced eye saw capacities of improvement about it, the more attractive it appeared to Mr. Stackpoole, as affording wider scope for his particular form of genius. His was a costly hobby, and strangers reaped the benefit of his lavish outlay on houses he perfected, tired of, and left so soon.
* * * *
Mr. Judd, the sexton, was found without difficulty; for, indeed, he was a conspicuous object, sitting in a large armchair by his cottage door reading the newspaper, and taking an occasional sip from a glass of cold brandy-and-water that stood beside him on the window-sill. He was a person of dignity in the village, accustomed to waste his own time and that of others; but Mr. Stackpoole hurried him off to the carriage as soon as he had found the keys and compelled him to unwonted activity. “The garden be a wilderness, sir,” said the old man, opening one of the great iron gates, “and it’s four years since e’er an inquiry was made about the place.”
“It wouldn’t be to everyone’s taste, you see; it’ll need a considerable outlay upon it before it is fit for habitation,” said Mr. Stackpoole complacently as he stooped to disentangle a briar from his wife’s skirt. “Who were the last tenants, and how long had they lived here?” he said, turning to the old man and asking two questions at once.
“Sir Eoland Shawe and his family had it last, sir. They took the place on a twenty-one years” lease, and they left uncommon sudden when it had five years and more to run. There was a deal o’ talk about what made ’em leave it that way,” and Judd opened wide the front door as he spoke, and they entered a large, lofty hall, smelling mouldy as though there were vaults below.
“Folks did say there was reasons more ’n what they’d own up to, for a large fam’ly to turn out all of a sudden, as if they was running away from the plague,” and the old sexton looked mysterious and as though he longed to be questioned. Mr. Stackpoole, however, was too much interested in pacing the length of the dining room to notice any hints he might throw out.
“My dear,” he said to his wife, who was resting on the low window seat, “we will have the whole of this oak floor polished, and Turkish rugs laid down at intervals.”
“That is just what we did in our house in Cumberland,” said Mrs. Stackpoole gently, “and if you remember you were not pleased with it when it was done;” then, turning to the old man: “You were going to tell us why Sir Koland Shawe left so suddenly.”
“Forbid, ma’am, that I should say definite why he left, not knowing for certain,” said Mr. Judd, swelling with importance as he spoke. “I never believe more ’n ’alf o’ what I hear, and puts no faith in tales, whether master’s or man’s. But by what I can make out and old Jimmy Judd can see through a stone wall as fer as most folks I should say as ghosts was at the bottom of the whole kick-up.”
Mrs. Stackpoole smiled at the old man’s mode of expressing himself, and then looked anxiously towards her husband, who laughed heartily, and they left the dining room for the upstairs regions, which he was impatient to explore
.
“They fled before ghosts, did they?” said Mr. Stackpoole, still laughing at the idea. “If the house is supposed to be haunted I should like it all the better for its reputation,” and he swung open the door of a large, low room, with a deep projecting chimney-place and wide window letting in a flood of sunshine.
“This is certainly a very cheerful aspect,” said his wife, stepping to the window and looking out upon the wild garden enclosed by ragged yew hedges; “there is nothing ghostly about this room, at all events!”
“Pooh! Ghosts indeed! those who believe in them deserve to see them,” said Mr. Stackpoole contemptuously. “If we take the house this shall be your morning-room; you’ll get plenty of sunshine, which is a great thing for you; and if I like the room under it I will have it done up for a business-room for myself.” And they wandered from cellar to attic of the big house, Mr. St ackpoole delighted with the possibilities of the place, and noting in his pocket-book the dimensions of the chief rooms and of the entrance hall.
“At all events I shall inquire on what terms the house is to be let,” he said, after spending two hours in energetically inspecting the premises, and as he slipped five shillings into Mr. Judd’s expectant palm, “By the way, I have not asked who is the landlord?”
“The landlord, sir, be a many and not one,” and the old man named a well-known city company to which the property belonged.
“I’ve rented from landlords, and landladies, and trustees, but never yet from a company. It’s all one to me, and I shall see their agent in town tomorrow.” Then Mr. Stackpoole took a farewell look at the room on the ground floor, immediately under the cheerful room at the head of the stairs that he had assigned to his wife’s prospective use, and decided that it was exactly adapted to his requirements, after which they threaded their way back to the gates through the neglected maze of the garden.
The Third Ghost Story Megapack Page 36
