Dr. Ashton—Thomas Ashton, Doctor of Divinity—sat
in his study, habited in a dressing-gown, and with a silk cap on his shaven
head—his wig being for the time taken off and placed on its block on a side
table. He was a man of some fifty-five years, strongly made, of a sanguine
complexion, an angry eye, and a long upper lip. Face and eye were lighted up at
the moment when I picture him by the level ray of an afternoon sun that shone
in upon him through a tall sash window, giving on the west. The room into which
it shone was also tall, lined with book-cases, and, where the wall showed
between them, panelled. On the table near the doctor’s elbow was a green cloth,
and upon it what he would have called a silver standish—a tray with
inkstands—quill pens, a calf-bound book or two, some papers, a churchwarden
pipe and brass tobacco-box, a flask cased in plaited straw, and a liqueur
glass. The year was 1730, the month December, the hour somewhat past three in
the afternoon.
I have described in these lines pretty much all
that a superficial observer would have noted when he looked into the room. What
met Dr. Ashton’s eye when he looked out of it, sitting in his leather
arm-chair? Little more than the tops of the shrubs and fruit-trees of his
garden could be seen from that point, but the red brick wall of it was visible
in almost all the length of its western side. In the middle of that was a
gate—a double gate of rather elaborate iron scroll-work, which allowed
something of a view beyond. Through it he could see that the ground sloped away
almost at once to a bottom, along which a stream must run, and rose steeply
from it on the other side, up to a field that was park-like in character, and
thickly studded with oaks, now, of course, leafless. They did not stand so
thick together but that some glimpse of sky and horizon could be seen between
their stems. The sky was now golden and the horizon, a horizon of distant
woods, it seemed, was purple.
But all that Dr. Ashton could find to say, after
contemplating this prospect for many minutes, was: “Abominable!”
A listener would have been aware, immediately upon
this, of the sound of footsteps coming somewhat hurriedly in the direction of
the study: by the resonance he could have told that they were traversing a much
larger room. Dr. Ashton turned round in his chair as the door opened, and
looked expectant. The incomer was a lady—a stout lady in the dress of the time:
though I have made some attempt at indicating the doctor’s costume, I will not
enterprise that of his wife—for it was Mrs. Ashton who now entered. She had an
anxious, even a sorely distracted, look, and it was in a very disturbed voice
that she almost whispered to Dr. Ashton, putting her head close to his, “He’s
in a very sad way, love, worse, I’m afraid.” “Tt—tt, is he really?” and he
leaned back and looked in her face. She nodded. Two solemn bells, high up, and
not far away, rang out the half-hour at this moment. Mrs. Ashton started. “Oh,
do you think you can give order that the minster clock be stopped chiming to-night?
’Tis just over his chamber, and will keep him from sleeping, and to sleep is
the only chance for him, that’s certain.” “Why, to be sure, if there were need,
real need, it could be done, but not upon any light occasion. This Frank, now,
do you assure me that his recovery stands upon it?’” said Dr. Ashton: his voice
was loud and rather hard. “I do verily believe it,” said his wife. “Then, if it
must be, bid Molly run across to Simpkins and say on my authority that he is to
stop the clock chimes at sunset: and—yes—she is after that to say to my lord
Saul that I wish to see him presently in this room.” Mrs. Ashton hurried off.
Before any other visitor enters, it will be well
to explain the situation.
Dr. Ashton was the holder, among other
preferments, of a prebend in the rich collegiate church of Whitminster, one of
the foundations which, though not a cathedral, survived dissolution and
reformation, and retained its constitution and endowments for a hundred years
after the time of which I write. The great church, the residences of the dean
and the two prebendaries, the choir and its appurtenances, were all intact and
in working order. A dean who flourished soon after 1500 had been a great
builder, and had erected a spacious quadrangle of red brick adjoining the
church for the residence of the officials. Some of these persons were no longer
required: their offices had dwindled down to mere titles, borne by clergy or
lawyers in the town and neighbourhood; and so the houses that had been meant to
accommodate eight or ten people were now shared among three, the dean and the
two prebendaries. Dr. Ashton’s included what had been the common parlour and
the dining-hall of the whole body. It occupied a whole side of the court, and
at one end had a private door into the minster. The other end, as we have seen,
looked out over the country.
So much for the house. As for the inmates, Dr.
Ashton was a wealthy man and childless, and he had adopted, or rather
undertaken to bring up, the orphan son of his wife’s sister. Frank Sydall was
the lad’s name: he had been a good many months in the house. Then one day came
a letter from an Irish peer, the Earl of Kildonan (who had known Dr. Ashton at
college), putting it to the doctor whether he would consider taking into his
family the Viscount Saul, the Earl’s heir, and acting in some sort as his
tutor. Lord Kildonan was shortly to take up a post in the Lisbon Embassy, and
the boy was unfit to make the voyage: “not that he is sickly,” the Earl wrote,
“though you’ll find him whimsical, or of late I’ve thought him so, and to
confirm this, ’twas only today his old nurse came expressly to tell me he was
possess’d: but let that pass; I’ll warrant you can find a spell to make all
straight. Your arm was stout enough in old days, and I give you plenary
authority to use it as you see fit. The truth is, he has here no boys of his
age or quality to consort with, and is given to moping about in our raths and
graveyards: and he brings home romances that fright my servants out of their
wits. So there are you and your lady forewarned.” It was perhaps with half an
eye open to the possibility of an Irish bishopric (at which another sentence in
the Earl’s letter seemed to hint) that Dr. Ashton accepted the charge of my
Lord Viscount Saul and of the 200 guineas a year that were to come with him.
So he came, one night in September. When he got
out of the chaise that brought him, he went first and spoke to the postboy and
gave him some money, and patted the neck of his horse. Whether he made some
movement that scared it or not, there was very nearly a nasty accident, for the
beast started violently, and the postilion being unready was thrown and lost
his fee, as he found afterwards, and the chaise lost some paint on the
gateposts, and the wheel went over the man’s foot who was taking out the
baggage. When Lord Saul came up the steps into the light of the lamp in the
porch to be greeted by Dr. Ashton, he was seen to be a thin youth of, say,
sixteen years old, with straight black hair and the pale colouring that is
common to such a figure. He took the accident and commotion calmly enough, and
expressed a proper anxiety for the people who had been, or might have been,
hurt: his voice was smooth and pleasant, and without any trace, curiously, of
an Irish brogue.
Frank Sydall was a younger boy, perhaps of eleven
or twelve, but Lord Saul did not for that reject his company. Frank was able to
teach him various games he had not known in Ireland, and he was apt at learning
them; apt, too, at his books, though he had had little or no regular teaching
at home. It was not long before he was making a shift to puzzle out the
inscriptions on the tombs in the minster, and he would often put a question to
the doctor about the old books in the library that required some thought to
answer. It is to be supposed that he made himself very agreeable to the
servants, for within ten days of his coming they were almost falling over each
other in their efforts to oblige him. At the same time, Mrs. Ashton was rather
put to it to find new maidservants; for there were several changes, and some of
the families in the town from which she had been accustomed to draw seemed to
have no one available. She was forced to go further afield than was usual.
These generalities I gather from the doctor’s notes
in his diary and from letters. They are generalities, and we should like, in
view of what has to be told, something sharper and more detailed. We get it in
entries which begin late in the year, and, I think, were posted up all together
after the final incident; but they cover so few days in all that there is no
need to doubt that the writer could remember the course of things accurately.
On a Friday morning it was that a fox, or perhaps
a cat, made away with Mrs. Ashton’s most prized black cockerel, a bird without
a single white feather on its body. Her husband had told her often enough that
it would make a suitable sacrifice to Æsculapius; that had discomfited her
much, and now she would hardly be consoled. The boys looked everywhere for
traces of it: Lord Saul brought in a few feathers, which seemed to have been
partially burnt on the garden rubbish-heap. It was on the same day that Dr.
Ashton, looking out of an upper window, saw the two boys playing in the corner
of the garden at a game he did not understand. Frank was looking earnestly at
something in the palm of his hand. Saul stood behind him and seemed to be
listening. After some minutes he very gently laid his hand on Frank’s head, and
almost instantly thereupon, Frank suddenly dropped whatever it was that he was
holding, clapped his hands to his eyes, and sank down on the grass. Saul, whose
face expressed great anger, hastily picked the object up, of which it could
only be seen that it was glittering, put it in his pocket, and turned away, leaving
Frank huddled up on the grass. Dr. Ashton rapped on the window to attract their
attention, and Saul looked up as if in alarm, and then springing to Frank,
pulled him up by the arm and led him away. When they came in to dinner, Saul
explained that they had been acting a part of the tragedy of Radamistus, in
which the heroine reads the future fate of her father’s kingdom by means of a
glass ball held in her hand, and is overcome by the terrible events she has
seen. During this explanation Frank said nothing, only looked rather
bewilderedly at Saul. He must, Mrs. Ashton thought, have contracted a chill
from the wet of the grass, for that evening he was certainly feverish and
disordered; and the disorder was of the mind as well as the body, for he seemed
to have something he wished to say to Mrs. Ashton, only a press of household
affairs prevented her from paying attention to him; and when she went,
according to her habit, to see that the light in the boys’ chamber had been
taken away, and to bid them good-night, he seemed to be sleeping, though his
face was unnaturally flushed, to her thinking: Lord Saul, however, was pale and
quiet, and smiling in his slumber.
Next morning it happened that Dr. Ashton was
occupied in church and other business, and unable to take the boys’ lessons. He
therefore set them tasks to be written and brought to him. Three times, if not
oftener, Frank knocked at the study door, and each time the doctor chanced to
be engaged with some visitor, and sent the boy off rather roughly, which he
later regretted. Two clergymen were at dinner this day, and both remarked—being
fathers of families—that the lad seemed sickening for a fever, in which they
were too near the truth, and it had been better if he had been put to bed
forthwith: for a couple of hours later in the afternoon he came running into
the house, crying out in a way that was really terrifying, and rushing to Mrs.
Ashton, clung about her, begging her to protect him, and saying, “Keep them
off! keep them off!” without intermission. And it was now evident that some
sickness had taken strong hold of him. He was therefore got to bed in another
chamber from that in which he commonly lay, and the physician brought to him:
who pronounced the disorder to be grave and affecting the lad’s brain, and
prognosticated a fatal end to it if strict quiet were not observed, and those
sedative remedies used which he should prescribe.
We are now come by another way to the point we had
reached before. The minster clock has been stopped from striking, and Lord Saul
is on the threshold of the study.
“What account can you give of this poor lad’s
state?” was Dr. Ashton’s first question. “Why, sir, little more than you know
already, I fancy. I must blame myself, though, for giving him a fright
yesterday when we were acting that foolish play you saw. I fear I made him take
it more to heart than I meant.” “How so?” “Well, by telling him foolish tales I
had picked up in Ireland of what we call the second sight.” “Second sight! What
kind of sight might that be?” “Why, you know our ignorant people pretend that
some are able to foresee what is to come—sometimes in a glass, or in the air,
maybe, and at Kildonan we had an old woman that pretended to such a power. And
I daresay I coloured the matter more highly than I should: but I never dreamed
Frank would take it so near as he did.” “You were wrong, my lord, very wrong,
in meddling with such superstitious matters at all, and you should have
considered whose house you were in, and how little becoming such actions are to
my character and person or to your own: but pray how came it that you, acting,
as you say, a play, should fall upon anything that could so alarm Frank?” “That
is what I can hardly tell, sir: he passed all in a moment from rant about
battles and lovers and Cleodora and Antigenes to something I could not follow
at all, and then dropped down as you saw.” “Yes: was that at the moment when
you laid your hand on the top of his head?” Lord Saul gave a quick look at his
questioner—quick and spiteful—and for the first time seemed unready with an
answer. “About that time it may have been,” he said. “I have tried to recollect
myself, but I am not sure. There was, at any rate, no significance in what I
did then.” “Ah!” said Dr. Ashton, “well, my lord, I should do wrong were I not
to tell you that this fright of my poor nephew may have very ill consequences
to him. The doctor speaks very despondingly of his state.” Lord Saul pressed
his hands together and looked earnestly upon Dr. Ashton. “I am willing to
believe you had no bad intention, as assuredly you could have no reason to bear
the poor boy malice: but I cannot wholly free you from blame in the affair.” As
he spoke, the hurrying steps were heard again, and Mrs. Ashton came quickly
into the room, carrying a candle, for the evening had by this time closed in.
She was greatly agitated. “O come!” she cried, “come directly. I’m sure he is
going.” “Going? Frank? Is it possible? Already?” With some such incoherent
words the doctor caught up a book of prayers from the table and ran out after
his wife. Lord Saul stopped for a moment where he was. Molly, the maid, saw him
bend over and put both hands to his face. If it were the last words she had to
speak, she said afterwards, he was striving to keep back a fit of laughing. Then
he went out softly, following the others.
Mrs. Ashton was sadly right in her forecast. I
have no inclination to imagine the last scene in detail. What Dr. Ashton
records is, or may be taken to be, important to the story. They asked Frank if
he would like to see his companion, Lord Saul, once again. The boy was quite
collected, it appears, in these moments. “No,” he said, “I do not want to see
him; but you should tell him I am afraid he will be very cold.” “What do you
mean, my dear?” said Mrs. Ashton. “Only that;” said Frank, “but say to him besides
that I am free of them now, but he should take care. And I am sorry about your
black cockerel, Aunt Ashton; but he said we must use it so, if we were to see
all that could be seen.”
Not many minutes after, he was gone. Both the
Ashtons were grieved, she naturally most; but the doctor, though not an
emotional man, felt the pathos of the early death: and, besides, there was the
growing suspicion that all had not been told him by Saul, and that there was
something here which was out of his beaten track. When he left the chamber of
death, it was to walk across the quadrangle of the residence to the sexton’s
house. A passing bell, the greatest of the minster bells, must be rung, a grave
must be dug in the minster yard, and there was now no need to silence the chiming
of the minster clock. As he came slowly back in the dark, he thought he must
see Lord Saul again. That matter of the black cockerel—trifling as it might
seem—would have to be cleared up. It might be merely a fancy of the sick boy,
but if not, was there not a witch-trial he had read, in which some grim little
rite of sacrifice had played a part? Yes, he must see Saul.
I rather guess these thoughts of his than find
written authority for them. That there was another interview is certain:
certain also that Saul would (or, as he said, could) throw no light on Frank’s
words: though the message, or some part of it, appeared to affect him horribly.
But there is no record of the talk in detail. It is only said that Saul sat all
that evening in the study, and when he bid good-night, which he did most
reluctantly, asked for the doctor’s prayers.
The month of January was near its end when Lord
Kildonan, in the Embassy at Lisbon, received a letter that for once gravely
disturbed that vain man and neglectful father. Saul was dead. The scene at
Frank’s burial had been very distressing. The day was awful in blackness and
wind: the bearers, staggering blindly along under the flapping black pall,
found it a hard job, when they emerged from the porch of the minster, to make
their way to the grave. Mrs. Ashton was in her room—women did not then go to
their kinsfolk’s funerals—but Saul was there, draped in the mourning cloak of
the time, and his face was white and fixed as that of one dead, except when, as
was noticed three or four times, he suddenly turned his head to the left and
looked over his shoulder. It was then alive with a terrible expression of
listening fear. No one saw him go away: and no one could find him that evening.
All night the gale buffeted the high windows of the church, and howled over the
upland and roared through the woodland. It was useless to search in the open:
no voice of shouting or cry for help could possibly be heard. All that Dr.
Ashton could do was to warn the people about the college, and the town
constables, and to sit up, on the alert for any news, and this he did. News
came early next morning, brought by the sexton, whose business it was to open
the church for early prayers at seven, and who sent the maid rushing upstairs
with wild eyes and flying hair to summon her master. The two men dashed across
to the south door of the minster, there to find Lord Saul clinging desperately
to the great ring of the door, his head sunk between his shoulders, his
stockings in rags, his shoes gone, his legs torn and bloody.
This was what had to be told to Lord Kildonan, and
this really ends the first part of the story. The tomb of Frank Sydall and of
the Lord Viscount Saul, only child and heir to William Earl of Kildonan, is
one: a stone altar tomb in Whitminster churchyard.
Dr. Ashton lived on for over thirty years in his
prebendal house, I do not know how quietly, but without visible disturbance.
His successor preferred a house he already owned in the town, and left that of
the senior prebendary vacant. Between them these two men saw the eighteenth
century out and the nineteenth in; for Mr. Hindes, the successor of Ashton,
became prebendary at nine-and-twenty and died at nine-and-eighty. So that it
was not till 1823 or 1824 that any one succeeded to the post who intended to
make the house his home. The man who did was Dr. Henry Oldys, whose name may be
known to some of my readers as that of the author of a row of volumes labelled
Oldys’s Works, which occupy a place that must be honoured, since it is so rarely
touched, upon the shelves of many a substantial library.
Dr. Oldys, his niece, and his servants took some
months to transfer furniture and books from his Dorsetshire parsonage to the
quadrangle of Whitminster, and to get everything into place. But eventually the
work was done, and the house (which, though untenanted, had always been kept
sound and weather-tight) woke up, and like Monte Cristo’s mansion at Auteuil,
lived, sang, and bloomed once more. On a certain morning in June it looked
especially fair, as Dr. Oldys strolled in his garden before breakfast and gazed
over the red roof at the minster tower with its four gold vanes, backed by a
very blue sky, and very white little clouds.
“Mary,” he said, as he seated himself at the
breakfast table and laid down something hard and shiny on the cloth, “here’s a
find which the boy made just now. You’ll be sharper than I if you can guess
what it’s meant for.” It was a round and perfectly smooth tablet—as much as an
inch thick—of what seemed clear glass. “It is rather attractive at all events,”
said Mary: she was a fair woman, with light hair and large eyes, rather a
devotee of literature. “Yes,” said her uncle, “I thought you’d be pleased with
it. I presume it came from the house: it turned up in the rubbish-heap in the
corner.” “I’m not sure that I do like it, after all,” said Mary, some minutes
later. “Why in the world not, my dear?” “I don’t know, I’m sure. Perhaps it’s
only fancy.” “Yes, only fancy and romance, of course. What’s that book, now—the
name of that book, I mean, that you had your head in all yesterday?” “The
Talisman, Uncle. Oh, if this should turn out to be a talisman, how enchanting
it would be!” “Yes, The Talisman: ah, well, you’re welcome to it, whatever it
is: I must be off about my business. Is all well in the house? Does it suit
you? Any complaints from the servants’ hall?” “No, indeed, nothing could be
more charming. The only soupçon of a complaint besides the lock of the linen
closet, which I told you of, is that Mrs. Maple says she cannot get rid of the
sawflies out of that room you pass through at the other end of the hall. By the
way, are you sure you like your bedroom? It is a long way off from any one
else, you know.” “Like “it? To be sure I do; the further off from you, my dear,
the better. There, don’t think it necessary to beat me: accept my apologies.
But what are sawflies? will they eat my coats? If not, they may have the room
to themselves for what I care. We are not likely to be using it.” “No, of
course not. Well, what she calls sawflies are those reddish things like a
daddy-longlegs, but smaller,[1] and there are a
great many of them perching about that room, certainly. I don’t like them, but
I don’t fancy they are mischievous.” “There seem to be several things you don’t
like this fine morning,” said her uncle, as he closed the door. Miss Oldys
remained in her chair looking at the tablet, which she was holding in the palm
of her hand. The smile that had been on her face faded slowly from it and gave
place to an expression of curiosity and almost strained attention. Her reverie
was broken by the entrance of Mrs. Maple, and her invariable opening, “Oh,
Miss, could I speak to you a minute?”
A letter from Miss Oldys to a friend in Lichfield,
begun a day or two before, is the next source for this story. It is not devoid
of traces of the influence of that leader of female thought in her day, Miss
Anna Seward, known to some as the Swan of Lichfield.
“My sweetest Emily will be rejoiced to hear that
we are at length—my beloved uncle and myself—settled in the house that now
calls us master—nay, master and mistress—as in past ages it has called so many
others. Here we taste a mingling of modern elegance and hoary antiquity, such
as has never ere now graced life for either of us. The town, small as it is,
affords us some reflection, pale indeed, but veritable, of the sweets of polite
intercourse: the adjacent country numbers amid the occupants of its scattered
mansions some whose polish is annually refreshed by contact with metropolitan
splendour, and others whose robust and homely geniality is, at times, and by
way of contrast, not less cheering and acceptable. Tired of the parlours and
drawing-rooms of our friends, we have ready to hand a refuge from the clash of
wits or the small talk of the day amid the solemn beauties of our venerable
minster, whose silvern chimes daily ‘knoll us to prayer,” and in the shady
walks of whose tranquil graveyard we muse with softened heart, and ever and
anon with moistened eye, upon the memorials of the young, the beautiful, the
aged, the wise, and the good.”
Here there is an abrupt break both in the writing
and the style.
“But my dearest Emily, I can no longer write with
the care which you deserve, and in which we both take pleasure. What I have to
tell you is wholly foreign to what has gone before. This morning my uncle
brought in to breakfast an object which had been found in the garden; it was a
glass or crystal tablet of this shape (a little sketch is given), which he
handed to me, and which, after he left the room, remained on the table by me. I
gazed at it, I know not why, for some minutes, till called away by the day’s
duties; and you will smile incredulously when I say that I seemed to myself to
begin to descry reflected in it objects and scenes which were not in the room
where I was. You will not, however, be surprised that after such an experience
I took the first opportunity to seclude myself in my room with what I now half
believed to be a talisman of mickle might. I was not disappointed. I assure you,
Emily, by that memory which is dearest to both of us, that what I went through
this afternoon transcends the limits of what I had before deemed credible. In
brief, what I saw, seated in my bedroom, in the broad daylight of summer, and
looking into the crystal depth of that small round tablet, was this. First, a
prospect, strange to me, of an enclosure of rough and hillocky grass, with a
grey stone ruin in the midst, and a wall of rough stones about it. In this
stood an old, and very ugly, woman in a red cloak and ragged skirt, talking to
a boy dressed in the fashion of maybe a hundred years ago. She put something
which glittered into his hand, and he something into hers, which I saw to be
money, for a single coin fell from her trembling hand into the grass. The scene
passed—I should have remarked, by the way, that on the rough walls of the
enclosure I could distinguish bones, and even a skull, lying in a disorderly
fashion. Next, I was looking upon two boys; one the figure of the former
vision, the other younger. They were in a plot of garden, walled round, and
this garden, in spite of the difference in arrangement, and the small size of
the trees, I could clearly recognize as being that upon which I now look from
my window. The boys were engaged in some curious play, it seemed. Something was
smouldering on the ground. The elder placed his hands upon it, and then raised
them in what I took to be an attitude of prayer: and I saw, and started at
seeing, that on them were deep stains of blood. The sky above was overcast. The
same boy now turned his face towards the wall of the garden, and beckoned with
both his raised hands, and as he did so I was conscious that some moving
objects were becoming visible over the top of the wall—whether heads or other
parts of some animal or human forms I could not tell. Upon the instant the
elder boy turned sharply, seized the arm of the younger (who all this time had
been poring over what lay on the ground), and both hurried off. I then saw
blood upon the grass, a little pile of bricks, and what I thought were black
feathers scattered about. That scene closed, and the next was so dark that
perhaps the full meaning of it escaped me. But what I seemed to see was a form,
at first crouching low among trees or bushes that were being threshed by a
violent wind, then running very swiftly, and constantly turning a pale face to
look behind him, as if he feared a pursuer: and, indeed, pursuers were
following hard after him. Their shapes were but dimly seen, their number—three
or four, perhaps, only guessed. I suppose they were on the whole more like dogs
than anything else, but dogs such as we have seen they assuredly were not.
Could I have closed my eyes to this horror, I would have done so at once, but I
was helpless. The last I saw was the victim darting beneath an arch and
clutching at some object to which he clung: and those that were pursuing him
overtook him, and I seemed to hear the echo of a cry of despair. It may be that
I became unconscious: certainly I had the sensation of awaking to the light of
day after an interval of darkness. Such, in literal truth, Emily, was my
vision—I can call it by no other name—of this afternoon. Tell me, have I not
been the unwilling witness of some episode of a tragedy connected with this
very house?”
The letter is continued next day. “The tale of
yesterday was not completed when I laid down my pen. I said nothing of my
experiences to my uncle—you know, yourself, how little his robust common-sense
would be prepared to allow of them, and how in his eyes the specific remedy
would be a black draught or a glass of port. After a silent evening,
then—silent, not sullen—I retired to rest. Judge of my terror, when, not yet in
bed, I heard what I can only describe as a distant bellow, and knew it for my
uncle’s voice, though never in my hearing so exerted before. His sleeping-room
is at the further extremity of this large house, and to gain access to it one
must traverse an antique hall some eighty feet long and a lofty panelled
chamber, and two unoccupied bedrooms. In the second of these—a room almost
devoid of furniture—I found him, in the dark, his candle lying smashed on the
floor. As I ran in, bearing a light, he clasped me in arms that trembled for
the first time since I have known him, thanked God, and hurried me out of the
room. He would say nothing of what had alarmed him. ‘To-morrow, tomorrow,’ was
all I could get from him. A bed was hastily improvised for him in the room next
to my own. I doubt if his night was more restful than mine. I could only get to
sleep in the small hours, when daylight was already strong, and then my dreams
were of the grimmest—particularly one which stamped itself on my brain, and
which I must set down on the chance of dispersing the impression it has made.
It was that I came up to my room with a heavy foreboding of evil oppressing me,
and went with a hesitation and reluctance I could not explain to my chest of
drawers. I opened the top drawer, in which was nothing but ribbons and
handkerchiefs, and then the second, where was as little to alarm, and then, O
heavens, the third and last: and there was a mass of linen neatly folded: upon
which, as I looked with curiosity that began to be tinged with horror, I
perceived a movement in it, and a pink hand was thrust out of the folds and
began to grope feebly in the air. I could bear it no more, and rushed from the
room, clapping the door after me, and strove with all my force to lock it. But
the key would not turn in the wards, and from within the room came a sound of
rustling and bumping, drawing nearer and nearer to the door. Why I did not flee
down the stairs I know not. I continued grasping the handle, and mercifully, as
the door was plucked from my hand with an irresistible force, I awoke. You may
not think this very alarming, but I assure you it was so to me.
“At breakfast today my uncle was very
uncommunicative, and I think ashamed of the fright he had given us; but
afterwards he inquired of me whether Mr. Spearman was still in town, adding
that he thought that was a young man who had some sense left in his head. I
think you know, my dear Emily, that I am not inclined to disagree with him
there, and also that I was not unlikely to be able to answer his question. To
Mr. Spearman he accordingly went, and I have not seen him since. I must send
this strange budget of news to you now, or it may have to wait over more than
one post.”
The reader will not be far out if he guesses that
Miss Mary and Mr. Spearman made a match of it not very long after this month of
June. Mr. Spearman was a young spark, who had a good property in the
neighbourhood of Whitminster, and not unfrequently about this time spent a few
days at the “King’s Head,” ostensibly on business. But he must have had some
leisure, for his diary is copious, especially for the days of which I am
telling the story. It is probable to me that he wrote this episode as fully as
he could at the bidding of Miss Mary.
“Uncle Oldys (how I hope I may have the right to
call him so before long!) called this morning. After throwing out a good many
short remarks on indifferent topics, he said ‘I wish, Spearman, you’d listen to
an odd story and keep a close tongue about it just” for a bit, till I get more
light on it.’ ‘To be sure,’ said I, ‘you may count on me.’ ‘I don’t know what
to make of it,’ he said. ‘You know my bedroom. It is well away from every one
else’s, and I pass through the great hall and two or three other rooms to get
to it.’ ‘Is it at the end next the minster, then?’ I asked. ‘Yes, it is: well,
now, yesterday morning my Mary told me that the room next before it was
infested with some sort of fly that the housekeeper couldn’t get rid of. That
may be the explanation, or it may not. What do you think?’ ‘Why,’ said I,
‘you’ve not yet told me what has to be explained.’ ‘True enough, I don’t
believe I have; but by-the-by, what are these sawflies? What’s the size of
them?’ I began to wonder if he was touched in the head. ‘What I call a sawfly,’
I said very patiently, ‘is a red animal, like a daddy-longlegs, but not so big,
perhaps an inch long, perhaps less. It is very hard in the body, and to me’—I
was going to say ‘particularly offensive,’ but he broke in, ‘Come, come; an
inch or less. That won’t do.’ ‘I can only tell you,’ I said, ‘what I know.
Would it not be better if you told me from first to last what it is that has
puzzled you, and then I may be able to give you some kind of an opinion.’ He
gazed at me meditatively. ‘Perhaps it would,’ he said. ‘I told Mary only today
that I thought you had some vestiges of sense in your head.’ (I bowed my
acknowledgements.) ‘The thing is, I’ve an odd kind of shyness about talking of
it. Nothing of the sort has happened to me before. Well, about eleven o’clock
last night, or after, I took my candle and set out for my room. I had a book in
my other hand—I always read something for a few minutes before I drop off to
sleep. A dangerous habit: I don’t recommend it: but I know how to manage my
light and my bed curtains. Now then, first, as I stepped out of my study into
the great half that’s next to it, and shut the door, my candle went out. I
supposed I had clapped the door behind me too quick, and made a draught, and I
was annoyed, for I’d no tinder-box nearer than my bedroom. But I knew my way
well enough, and went on. The next thing was that my book was struck out of my
hand in the dark: if I said twitched out of my hand it would better express the
sensation. It fell on the floor. I picked it up, and went on, more annoyed than
before, and a little startled. But as you know, that hall has many windows
without curtains, and in summer nights like these it is easy to see not only
where the furniture is, but whether there’s any one or anything moving, and
there was no one—nothing of the kind. So on I went through the hall and through
the audit chamber next to it, which also has big windows, and then into the
bedrooms which lead to my own, where the curtains were drawn, and I had to go
slower because of steps here and there. It was in the second of those rooms
that I nearly got my quietus. The moment I opened the door of it I felt there
was something wrong. I thought twice, I confess, whether I shouldn’t turn back
and find another way there is to my room rather than go through that one. Then
I was ashamed of myself, and thought what people call better of it, though I
don’t know about ‘better’ in this case. If I was to describe my experience
exactly, I should say this: there was a dry, light, rustling sound all over the
room as I went in, and then (you remember it was perfectly dark) something
seemed to rush at me, and there was—I don’t know how to put it—a sensation of
long thin arms, or legs, or feelers, all about my face, and neck, and body.
Very little strength in them, there seemed to be, but Spearman, I don’t think I
was ever more horrified or disgusted in all my life, that I remember: and it
does take something to put me out. I roared out as loud as I could, and flung
away my candle at random, and, knowing I was near the window, I tore at the
curtain and somehow let in enough light to be able to see something waving
which I knew was an insect’s leg, by the shape of it: but, Lord, what a size!
Why the beast must have been as tall as I am. And now you tell me sawflies are
an inch long or less. What do you make of it, Spearman?’
“’For goodness sake finish your story first,’ I
said. ‘I never heard anything like it.’ ‘Oh,’ said he, ‘there’s no more to
tell. Mary ran in with a light, and there was nothing there. I didn’t tell her
what was the matter. I changed my room for last night, and I expect for good.’
‘Have you searched this odd room of yours?’ I said. ‘What do you keep in it?’
‘We don’t use it,’ he answered. ‘There’s an old press there, and some little
other furniture.’ ‘And in the press?’ said I. ‘I don’t know; I never saw it
opened, but I do know that it’s locked.’ ‘Well, I should have it looked into,
and, if you had time, I own to having some curiosity to see the place myself.’
‘I didn’t exactly like to ask you, but that’s rather what I hoped you’d say.
Name your time and I’ll take you there.’ ‘No time like the present,’ I said at
once, for I saw he would never settle down to anything while this affair was in
suspense. He got up with great alacrity, and looked at me, I am tempted to
think, with marked approval. ‘Come along,’ was all he said, however; and was
pretty silent all the way to his house. My Mary (as he calls her in public, and
I in private) was summoned, and we proceeded to the room. The Doctor had gone
so far as to tell her that he had had something of a fright there last night,
of what nature he had not yet divulged; but now he pointed out and described,
very briefly, the incidents of his progress. When we were near the important
spot, he pulled up, and allowed me to pass on. ‘There’s the room,’ he said. ‘Go
in, Spearman, and tell us what you find.’ Whatever I might have felt at
midnight, noonday I was sure would keep back anything sinister, and I flung the
door open with an air and stepped in. It was a well-lighted room, with its
large window on the right, though not, I thought, a very airy one. The
principal piece of furniture was the gaunt old press of dark wood. There was,
too, a four-post bedstead, a mere skeleton which could hide nothing, and there
was a chest of drawers. On the window-sill and the floor near it were the dead
bodies of many hundred sawflies, and one torpid one which I had some
satisfaction in killing. I tried the door of the press, but could not open it:
the drawers, too, were locked. Somewhere, I was conscious, there was a faint
rustling sound, but I could not locate it, and when I made my report to those
outside, I said nothing of it. But, I said, clearly the next thing was to see
what was in those locked receptacles. Uncle Oldys turned to Mary. ‘Mrs. Maple,’
he said, and Mary ran off—no one, I am sure, steps like her—and soon came back
at a soberer pace, with an elderly lady of discreet aspect.
“’Have you the keys of these things, Mrs. Maple?’
said Uncle Oldys. His simple words let loose a torrent (not violent, but
copious) of speech: had she been a shade or two higher in the social scale,
Mrs. Maple might have stood as the model for Miss Bates.
“’Oh, Doctor, and Miss, and you too, sir,’ she
said, acknowledging my presence with a bend, ‘them keys! who was that again
that come when first we took over things in this house—a gentleman in business
it was, and I gave him his luncheon in the small parlour on account of us not
having everything as we should like to see it in the large one—chicken, and
apple-pie, and a glass of madeira—dear, dear, you’ll say I’m running on, Miss
Mary; but I only mention it to bring back my recollection; and there it
comes—Gardner, just the same as it did last week with the artichokes and the
text of the sermon. Now that Mr. Gardner, every key I got from him were
labelled to itself, and each and every one was a key of some door or another in
this house, and sometimes two; and when I say door, my meaning is door of a
room, not like such a press as this is. Yes, Miss Mary, I know full well, and
I’m just making it clear to your uncle and you too, sir. But now there was a
box which this same gentleman he give over into my charge, and thinking no harm
after he was gone I took the liberty, knowing it was your uncle’s property, to
rattle it: and unless I’m most surprisingly deceived, in that box there was
keys, but what keys, that, Doctor, is known Elsewhere, for open the box, no
that I would not do.’
“I wondered that Uncle Oldys remained as quiet as
he did under this address. Mary, I knew, was amused by it, and he probably had
been taught by experience that it was useless to break in upon it. At any rate
he did not, but merely said at the end, ‘Have you that box handy, Mrs. Maple?
If so, you might bring it here.’ Mrs. Maple pointed her finger at him, either
in accusation or in gloomy triumph. ‘There,’ she said, ‘was I to choose out the
very words out of your mouth, Doctor, them would be the ones. And if I’ve took
it to my own rebuke one half-a-dozen times, it’s been nearer fifty. Laid awake
I have in my bed, sat down in my chair I have, the same you and Miss Mary gave
me the day I was twenty year in your service, and no person could desire a
better—yes, Miss Mary, but it is the truth, and well we know who it is would
have it different if he could. ‘All very well,’ says I to myself, ‘but pray,
when the Doctor calls you to account for that box, what are you going to say?’
No, Doctor, if you was some masters I’ve heard of and I was some servants I
could name, I should have an easy task before me, but things being, humanly
speaking, what they are, the one course open to me is just to say to you that
without Miss Mary comes to my room and helps me to my recollection, which her
wits may manage what’s slipped beyond mine, no such box as that, small though
it be, will cross your eyes this many a day to come.’
“’Why, dear Mrs. Maple, why didn’t you tell me
before that you wanted me to help you to find it?’ said my Mary. ‘No, never
mind telling me why it was: let us come at once and look for it.’ They hastened
off together. I could hear Mrs. Maple beginning an explanation which, I doubt
not, lasted into the furthest recesses of the housekeeper’s department. Uncle
Oldys and I were left alone. ‘A valuable servant,’ he said, nodding towards the
door. ‘Nothing goes wrong under her: the speeches are seldom over three
minutes.’ ‘How will Miss Oldys manage to make her remember about the box?’ I
asked.
“’Mary? Oh, she’ll make her sit down and ask her
about her aunt’s last illness, or who gave her the china dog on the
mantel-piece—something quite off the point. Then, as Maple says, one thing
brings up another, and the right one will come round sooner than you could
suppose. There! I believe I hear them coming back already.’
“It was indeed so, and Mrs. Maple was hurrying on
ahead of Mary with the box in her outstretched hand, and a beaming face. ‘What
was it,’ she cried as she drew near, ‘what was it as I said, before ever I come
out of Dorsetshire to this place? Not that I’m a Dorset woman myself, nor had
need to be. “Safe bind, safe find,” and there it was in the place where I’d put
it—what?—two months back, I daresay.’ She handed it to Uncle Oldys, and he and
I examined it with some interest, so that I ceased to pay attention to Mrs. Ann
Maple for the moment, though I know that she went on to expound exactly where
the box had been, and in what way Mary had helped to refresh her memory on the
subject.
“It was an oldish box, tied with pink tape and
sealed, and on the lid was pasted a label inscribed in old ink, ‘The Senior
Prebendary’s House, Whitminster.’ On being opened it was found to contain two
keys of moderate size, and a paper, on which, in the same hand as the label,
was ‘Keys of the Press and Box of Drawers standing in the disused Chamber.’
Also this: ‘The Effects in this Press and Box are held by me, and to be held by
my successors in the Residence, in trust for the noble Family of Kildonan, if
claim be made by any survivor of it. I having made all the Enquiry possible to
myself am of the opinion that that noble House is wholly extinct: the last Earl
having been, as is notorious, cast away at sea, and his only Child and Heire
deceas’d in my House (the Papers as to which melancholy Casualty were by me
repos’d in the same Press in this year of our Lord 1753, 21 March). I am
further of opinion that unless grave discomfort arise, such persons, not being
of the Family of Kildonan, as shall become possess’d of these keys, will be
well advised to leave matters as they are: which opinion I do not express
without weighty and sufficient reason; and am Happy to have my Judgment
confirm’d by the other Members of this College and Church who are conversant
with the Events referr’d to in this Paper. Tho. Ashton, S.T.P., Præb. senr.
Will. Blake, S.T.P., Decanus. Hen. Goodman, S.T.B., Præb. junr.’
“‘Ah!’ said Uncle Oldys, ‘grave discomfort! So he
thought there might be something. I suspect it was that young man,’ he went on,
pointing with the key to the line about the ‘only Child and Heire.’ ‘Eh, Mary?
The viscounty of Kildonan was Saul.’ ‘How do you know that, Uncle?’ said Mary.
‘Oh, why not? it’s all in Debrett—two little fat books. But I meant the tomb by
the lime walk. He’s there. What’s the story, I wonder? Do you know it, Mrs.
Maple? and, by the way, look at your sawflies by the window there.’
“‘Mrs. Maple, thus confronted with two subjects at
once, was a little put to it to do justice to both. It was no doubt rash in
Uncle Oldys to give her the opportunity. I could only guess that he had some
slight hesitation about using the key he held in his hand.
“‘Oh them flies, how bad they was, Doctor and
Miss, this three or four days: and you, too, sir, you wouldn’t guess, none of
you! And how they come, too! First we took the room in hand, the shutters was
up, and had been, I daresay, years upon years, and not a fly to be seen. Then
we got the shutter bars down with a deal of trouble and left it so for the day,
and next day I sent Susan in with the broom to sweep about, and not two minutes
hadn’t passed when out she come into the hall like a blind thing, and we had
regular to beat them off her. Why her cap and her hair, you couldn’t see the
colour of it, I do assure you, and all clustering round her eyes, too.
Fortunate enough she’s not a girl with fancies, else if it had been me, why
only the tickling of the nasty things would have drove me out of my wits. And
now there they lay like so many dead things. Well, they was lively enough on
the Monday, and now here’s Thursday, is it, or no, Friday. Only to come near
the door and you’d hear them pattering up against it, and once you opened it,
dash at you, they would, as if they’d eat you. I couldn’t help thinking to
myself, “If you was bats, where should we be this night?” Nor you can’t cresh
’em, not like a usual kind of a fly. Well, there’s something to be thankful
for, if we could but learn by it. And then this tomb, too,’ she said, hastening
on to her second point to elude any chance of interruption, ‘of them two poor
young lads. I say poor, and yet when I recollect myself, I was at tea with Mrs.
Simpkins, the sexton’s wife, before you come, Doctor and Miss Mary, and that’s
a family has been in the place, what? I daresay a hundred years in that very
house, and could put their hand on any tomb or yet grave in all the yard and
give you name and age. And his account of that young man, Mr. Simpkins’s I mean
to say—well!’ She compressed her lips and nodded several times. ‘Tell us, Mrs.
Maple,’ said Mary. ‘Go on,’ said Uncle Oldys. ‘What about him?’ said I. ‘Never
was such a thing seen in this place, not since Queen Mary’s times and the Pope
and all,’ said Mrs. Maple. ‘Why, do you know he lived in this very house, him
and them that was with him, and for all I can tell in this identical room’ (she
shifted her feet uneasily on the floor). ‘Who was with him? Do you mean the
people of the house?’ said Uncle Oldys suspiciously. ‘Not to call people,
Doctor, dear no,’ was the answer; ‘more what he brought with him from Ireland,
I believe it was. No, the people in the house was the last to hear anything of
his goings-on. But in the town not a family but knew how he stopped out at
night: and them that was with him, why they were such as would strip the skin
from the child in its grave; and a withered heart makes an ugly thin ghost,
says Mr. Simpkins. But they turned on him at the last, he says, and there’s the
mark still to be seen on the minster door where they run him down. And that’s
no more than the truth, for I got him to show it to myself, and that’s what he
said. A lord he was, with a Bible name of a wicked king, whatever his
godfathers could have been thinking of.’ ‘Saul was the name,’ said Uncle Oldys.
‘To be sure it was Saul, Doctor, and thank you; and now isn’t it King Saul that
we read of raising up the dead ghost that was slumbering in its tomb till he
disturbed it, and isn’t that a strange thing, this young lord to have such a
name, and Mr. Simpkins’s grandfather to see him out of his window of a dark
night going about from one grave to another in the yard with a candle, and them
that was with him following through the grass at his heels: and one night him
to come right up to old Mr. Simpkins’s window that gives on the yard and press
his face up against it to find out if there was any one in the room that could
see him: and only just time there was for old Mr. Simpkins to drop down like,
quiet, just under the window and hold his breath, and not stir till he heard
him stepping away again, and this rustling-like in the grass after him as he
went, and then when he looked out of his window in the morning there was
treadings in the grass and a dead man’s bone. Oh, he was a cruel child for
certain, but he had to pay in the end, and after.’ ‘After?’ said Uncle Oldys,
with a frown. ‘Oh yes, Doctor, night after night in old Mr. Simpkins’s time,
and his son, that’s our Mr. Simpkins’s father, yes, and our own Mr. Simpkins
too. Up against that same window, particular when they’ve had a fire of a
chilly evening, with his face right on the panes, and his hands fluttering out,
and his mouth open and shut, open and shut, for a minute or more, and then gone
off in the dark yard. But open the window at such times, no, that they dare not
do, though they could find it in their heart to pity the poor thing, that
pinched up with the cold, and seemingly fading away to a nothink as the years
passed on. Well, indeed, I believe it is no more than the truth what our Mr.
Simpkins says on his own grandfather’s word, ‘A withered heart makes an ugly thin
ghost.’ ’ ‘I daresay,’ said Uncle Oldys suddenly: so suddenly that Mrs. Maple
stopped short. ‘Thank you. Come away, all of you.’ ‘Why, Uncle,’ said Mary,
‘are you not going to open the press after all?’ Uncle Oldys blushed, actually
blushed. ‘My dear,’ he said, ‘you are at liberty to call me a coward, or
applaud me as a prudent man, whichever you please. But I am neither going to
open that press nor that chest of drawers myself, nor am I going to hand over
the keys to you or to any other person. Mrs. Maple, will you kindly see about
getting a man or two to move those pieces of furniture into the garret?’ ‘And
when they do it, Mrs. Maple,’ said Mary, who seemed to me—I did not then know
why—more relieved than disappointed by her uncle’s decision, ‘I have something
that I want put with the rest; only quite a small packet.’
‘We left that curious room not unwillingly, I
think. Uncle Oldys’s orders were carried out that same day. And so,’ concludes
Mr. Spearman, ‘Whitminster has a Bluebeard’s chamber, and, I am rather inclined
to suspect, a Jack-inthe-box, awaiting some future occupant of the residence of
the senior prebendary.’
1 Apparently the ichneumon fly (Ophion obscurum), and not the true
sawfly, is meant.
