[Illustration]




Ghost Stories of an Antiquary

by M. R. James

_These stories are dedicated to all those who at various times have listened
to them._


Contents

 Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book
 Lost Hearts
 The Mezzotint
 The Ash-tree
 Number 13
 Count Magnus
 “Oh, Whistle, and I’ll Come to You, My Lad”
 The Treasure of Abbot Thomas



If anyone is curious about my local settings, let it be recorded that
St Bertrand de Comminges and Viborg are real places: that in “Oh,
Whistle, and I’ll Come to You” I had Felixstowe in mind. As for the
fragments of ostensible erudition which are scattered about my pages,
hardly anything in them is not pure invention; there never was,
naturally, any such book as that which I quote in “The Treasure of
Abbot Thomas”. “Canon Alberic’s Scrap-book” was written in 1894 and
printed soon after in the _National Review_, “Lost Hearts” appeared in
the _Pall Mall Magazine_; of the next five stories, most of which were
read to friends at Christmas-time at King’s College, Cambridge, I only
recollect that I wrote “Number 13” in 1899, while “The Treasure of
Abbot Thomas” was composed in the summer of 1904.

M. R. JAMES




CANON ALBERIC’S SCRAP-BOOK


St Bertrand de Comminges is a decayed town on the spurs of the
Pyrenees, not very far from Toulouse, and still nearer to
Bagnères-de-Luchon. It was the site of a bishopric until the
Revolution, and has a cathedral which is visited by a certain number of
tourists. In the spring of 1883 an Englishman arrived at this old-world
place—I can hardly dignify it with the name of city, for there are not
a thousand inhabitants. He was a Cambridge man, who had come specially
from Toulouse to see St Bertrand’s Church, and had left two friends,
who were less keen archaeologists than himself, in their hotel at
Toulouse, under promise to join him on the following morning. Half an
hour at the church would satisfy _them_, and all three could then
pursue their journey in the direction of Auch. But our Englishman had
come early on the day in question, and proposed to himself to fill a
note-book and to use several dozens of plates in the process of
describing and photographing every corner of the wonderful church that
dominates the little hill of Comminges. In order to carry out this
design satisfactorily, it was necessary to monopolize the verger of the
church for the day. The verger or sacristan (I prefer the latter
appellation, inaccurate as it may be) was accordingly sent for by the
somewhat brusque lady who keeps the inn of the Chapeau Rouge; and when
he came, the Englishman found him an unexpectedly interesting object of
study. It was not in the personal appearance of the little, dry,
wizened old man that the interest lay, for he was precisely like dozens
of other church-guardians in France, but in a curious furtive, or
rather hunted and oppressed, air which he had. He was perpetually half
glancing behind him; the muscles of his back and shoulders seemed to be
hunched in a continual nervous contraction, as if he were expecting
every moment to find himself in the clutch of an enemy. The Englishman
hardly knew whether to put him down as a man haunted by a fixed
delusion, or as one oppressed by a guilty conscience, or as an
unbearably henpecked husband. The probabilities, when reckoned up,
certainly pointed to the last idea; but, still, the impression conveyed
was that of a more formidable persecutor even than a termagant wife.

However, the Englishman (let us call him Dennistoun) was soon too deep
in his note-book and too busy with his camera to give more than an
occasional glance to the sacristan. Whenever he did look at him, he
found him at no great distance, either huddling himself back against
the wall or crouching in one of the gorgeous stalls. Dennistoun became
rather fidgety after a time. Mingled suspicions that he was keeping the
old man from his _déjeuner_, that he was regarded as likely to make
away with St Bertrand’s ivory crozier, or with the dusty stuffed
crocodile that hangs over the font, began to torment him.

“Won’t you go home?” he said at last; “I’m quite well able to finish my
notes alone; you can lock me in if you like. I shall want at least two
hours more here, and it must be cold for you, isn’t it?”

“Good heavens!” said the little man, whom the suggestion seemed to
throw into a state of unaccountable terror, “such a thing cannot be
thought of for a moment. Leave monsieur alone in the church? No, no;
two hours, three hours, all will be the same to me. I have breakfasted,
I am not at all cold, with many thanks to monsieur.”

“Very well, my little man,” quoth Dennistoun to himself: “you have been
warned, and you must take the consequences.”

Before the expiration of the two hours, the stalls, the enormous
dilapidated organ, the choir-screen of Bishop John de Mauléon, the
remnants of glass and tapestry, and the objects in the
treasure-chamber, had been well and truly examined; the sacristan still
keeping at Dennistoun’s heels, and every now and then whipping round as
if he had been stung, when one or other of the strange noises that
trouble a large empty building fell on his ear. Curious noises they
were sometimes.

“Once,” Dennistoun said to me, “I could have sworn I heard a thin
metallic voice laughing high up in the tower. I darted an inquiring
glance at my sacristan. He was white to the lips. ‘It is he—that is—it
is no one; the door is locked,’ was all he said, and we looked at each
other for a full minute.”

Another little incident puzzled Dennistoun a good deal. He was
examining a large dark picture that hangs behind the altar, one of a
series illustrating the miracles of St Bertrand. The composition of the
picture is well-nigh indecipherable, but there is a Latin legend below,
which runs thus:

_Qualiter S. Bertrandus liberavit hominem quem diabolus diu volebat
strangulare_. (How St Bertrand delivered a man whom the Devil long
sought to strangle.)

Dennistoun was turning to the sacristan with a smile and a jocular
remark of some sort on his lips, but he was confounded to see the old
man on his knees, gazing at the picture with the eye of a suppliant in
agony, his hands tightly clasped, and a rain of tears on his cheeks.
Dennistoun naturally pretended to have noticed nothing, but the
question would not go away from him, “Why should a daub of this kind
affect anyone so strongly?” He seemed to himself to be getting some
sort of clue to the reason of the strange look that had been puzzling
him all the day: the man must be a monomaniac; but what was his
monomania?

It was nearly five o’clock; the short day was drawing in, and the
church began to fill with shadows, while the curious noises—the muffled
footfalls and distant talking voices that had been perceptible all
day—seemed, no doubt because of the fading light and the consequently
quickened sense of hearing, to become more frequent and insistent.

The sacristan began for the first time to show signs of hurry and
impatience. He heaved a sigh of relief when camera and note-book were
finally packed up and stowed away, and hurriedly beckoned Dennistoun to
the western door of the church, under the tower. It was time to ring
the Angelus. A few pulls at the reluctant rope, and the great bell
Bertrande, high in the tower, began to speak, and swung her voice up
among the pines and down to the valleys, loud with mountain-streams,
calling the dwellers on those lonely hills to remember and repeat the
salutation of the angel to her whom he called Blessed among women. With
that a profound quiet seemed to fall for the first time that day upon
the little town, and Dennistoun and the sacristan went out of the
church.

On the doorstep they fell into conversation.

“Monsieur seemed to interest himself in the old choir-books in the
sacristy.”

“Undoubtedly. I was going to ask you if there were a library in the
town.”

“No, monsieur; perhaps there used to be one belonging to the Chapter,
but it is now such a small place—” Here came a strange pause of
irresolution, as it seemed; then, with a sort of plunge, he went on:
“But if monsieur is _amateur des vieux livres_, I have at home
something that might interest him. It is not a hundred yards.”

At once all Dennistoun’s cherished dreams of finding priceless
manuscripts in untrodden corners of France flashed up, to die down
again the next moment. It was probably a stupid missal of Plantin’s
printing, about 1580. Where was the likelihood that a place so near
Toulouse would not have been ransacked long ago by collectors? However,
it would be foolish not to go; he would reproach himself for ever after
if he refused. So they set off. On the way the curious irresolution and
sudden determination of the sacristan recurred to Dennistoun, and he
wondered in a shamefaced way whether he was being decoyed into some
purlieu to be made away with as a supposed rich Englishman. He
contrived, therefore, to begin talking with his guide, and to drag in,
in a rather clumsy fashion, the fact that he expected two friends to
join him early the next morning. To his surprise, the announcement
seemed to relieve the sacristan at once of some of the anxiety that
oppressed him.

“That is well,” he said quite brightly—“that is very well. Monsieur
will travel in company with his friends; they will be always near him.
It is a good thing to travel thus in company—sometimes.”

The last word appeared to be added as an afterthought and to bring with
it a relapse into gloom for the poor little man.

They were soon at the house, which was one rather larger than its
neighbours, stone-built, with a shield carved over the door, the shield
of Alberic de Mauléon, a collateral descendant, Dennistoun tells me, of
Bishop John de Mauléon. This Alberic was a Canon of Comminges from 1680
to 1701. The upper windows of the mansion were boarded up, and the
whole place bore, as does the rest of Comminges, the aspect of decaying
age.

Arrived on his doorstep, the sacristan paused a moment.

“Perhaps,” he said, “perhaps, after all, monsieur has not the time?”

“Not at all—lots of time—nothing to do till tomorrow. Let us see what
it is you have got.”

The door was opened at this point, and a face looked out, a face far
younger than the sacristan’s, but bearing something of the same
distressing look: only here it seemed to be the mark, not so much of
fear for personal safety as of acute anxiety on behalf of another.
Plainly, the owner of the face was the sacristan’s daughter; and, but
for the expression I have described, she was a handsome girl enough.
She brightened up considerably on seeing her father accompanied by an
able-bodied stranger. A few remarks passed between father and daughter,
of which Dennistoun only caught these words, said by the sacristan, “He
was laughing in the church,” words which were answered only by a look
of terror from the girl.

But in another minute they were in the sitting-room of the house, a
small, high chamber with a stone floor, full of moving shadows cast by
a wood-fire that flickered on a great hearth. Something of the
character of an oratory was imparted to it by a tall crucifix, which
reached almost to the ceiling on one side; the figure was painted of
the natural colours, the cross was black. Under this stood a chest of
some age and solidity, and when a lamp had been brought, and chairs
set, the sacristan went to this chest, and produced therefrom, with
growing excitement and nervousness, as Dennistoun thought, a large
book, wrapped in a white cloth, on which cloth a cross was rudely
embroidered in red thread. Even before the wrapping had been removed,
Dennistoun began to be interested by the size and shape of the volume.
“Too large for a missal,” he thought, “and not the shape of an
antiphoner; perhaps it may be something good, after all.” The next
moment the book was open, and Dennistoun felt that he had at last lit
upon something better than good. Before him lay a large folio, bound,
perhaps, late in the seventeenth century, with the arms of Canon
Alberic de Mauléon stamped in gold on the sides. There may have been a
hundred and fifty leaves of paper in the book, and on almost every one
of them was fastened a leaf from an illuminated manuscript. Such a
collection Dennistoun had hardly dreamed of in his wildest moments.
Here were ten leaves from a copy of Genesis, illustrated with pictures,
which could not be later than A.D. 700. Further on was a complete set
of pictures from a Psalter, of English execution, of the very finest
kind that the thirteenth century could produce; and, perhaps best of
all, there were twenty leaves of uncial writing in Latin, which, as a
few words seen here and there told him at once, must belong to some
very early unknown patristic treatise. Could it possibly be a fragment
of the copy of Papias “On the Words of Our Lord”, which was known to
have existed as late as the twelfth century at Nîmes?[1] In any case,
his mind was made up; that book must return to Cambridge with him, even
if he had to draw the whole of his balance from the bank and stay at
St. Bertrand till the money came. He glanced up at the sacristan to see
if his face yielded any hint that the book was for sale. The sacristan
was pale, and his lips were working.

 [1] We now know that these leaves did contain a considerable fragment
 of that work, if not of that actual copy of it.

“If monsieur will turn on to the end,” he said.

So monsieur turned on, meeting new treasures at every rise of a leaf;
and at the end of the book he came upon two sheets of paper, of much
more recent date than anything he had yet seen, which puzzled him
considerably. They must be contemporary, he decided, with the
unprincipled Canon Alberic, who had doubtless plundered the Chapter
library of St Bertrand to form this priceless scrap-book. On the first
of the paper sheets was a plan, carefully drawn and instantly
recognizable by a person who knew the ground, of the south aisle and
cloisters of St Bertrand’s. There were curious signs looking like
planetary symbols, and a few Hebrew words in the corners; and in the
north-west angle of the cloister was a cross drawn in gold paint. Below
the plan were some lines of writing in Latin, which ran thus:

Responsa 12mi Dec. 1694. Interrogatum est: Inveniamne? Responsum est:
Invenies. Fiamne dives? Fies. Vivamne invidendus? Vives. Moriarne in
lecto meo? Ita. (Answers of the 12th of December, 1694. It was asked:
Shall I find it? Answer: Thou shalt. Shall I become rich? Thou wilt.
Shall I live an object of envy? Thou wilt. Shall I die in my bed? Thou
wilt.)

“A good specimen of the treasure-hunter’s record—quite reminds one of
Mr Minor-Canon Quatremain in _Old St Paul’s_,” was Dennistoun’s
comment, and he turned the leaf.

What he then saw impressed him, as he has often told me, more than he
could have conceived any drawing or picture capable of impressing him.
And, though the drawing he saw is no longer in existence, there is a
photograph of it (which I possess) which fully bears out that
statement. The picture in question was a sepia drawing at the end of
the seventeenth century, representing, one would say at first sight, a
Biblical scene; for the architecture (the picture represented an
interior) and the figures had that semi-classical flavour about them
which the artists of two hundred years ago thought appropriate to
illustrations of the Bible. On the right was a King on his throne, the
throne elevated on twelve steps, a canopy overhead, soldiers on either
side—evidently King Solomon. He was bending forward with outstretched
sceptre, in attitude of command; his face expressed horror and disgust,
yet there was in it also the mark of imperious command and confident
power. The left half of the picture was the strangest, however. The
interest plainly centred there. On the pavement before the throne were
grouped four soldiers, surrounding a crouching figure which must be
described in a moment. A fifth soldier lay dead on the pavement, his
neck distorted, and his eye-balls starting from his head. The four
surrounding guards were looking at the King. In their faces, the
sentiment of horror was intensified; they seemed, in fact, only
restrained from flight by their implicit trust in their master. All
this terror was plainly excited by the being that crouched in their
midst. I entirely despair of conveying by any words the impression
which this figure makes upon anyone who looks at it. I recollect once
showing the photograph of the drawing to a lecturer on morphology—a
person of, I was going to say, abnormally sane and unimaginative habits
of mind. He absolutely refused to be alone for the rest of that
evening, and he told me afterwards that for many nights he had not
dared to put out his light before going to sleep. However, the main
traits of the figure I can at least indicate. At first you saw only a
mass of coarse, matted black hair; presently it was seen that this
covered a body of fearful thinness, almost a skeleton, but with the
muscles standing out like wires. The hands were of a dusky pallor,
covered, like the body, with long, coarse hairs, and hideously taloned.
The eyes, touched in with a burning yellow, had intensely black pupils,
and were fixed upon the throned King with a look of beast-like hate.
Imagine one of the awful bird-catching spiders of South America
translated into human form, and endowed with intelligence just less
than human, and you will have some faint conception of the terror
inspired by the appalling effigy. One remark is universally made by
those to whom I have shown the picture: “It was drawn from the life.”

As soon as the first shock of his irresistible fright had subsided,
Dennistoun stole a look at his hosts. The sacristan’s hands were
pressed upon his eyes; his daughter, looking up at the cross on the
wall, was telling her beads feverishly.

At last the question was asked, “Is this book for sale?”

There was the same hesitation, the same plunge of determination that he
had noticed before, and then came the welcome answer, “If monsieur
pleases.”

“How much do you ask for it?”

“I will take two hundred and fifty francs.”

This was confounding. Even a collector’s conscience is sometimes
stirred, and Dennistoun’s conscience was tenderer than a collector’s.

“My good man!” he said again and again, “your book is worth far more
than two hundred and fifty francs, I assure you—far more.”

But the answer did not vary: “I will take two hundred and fifty francs,
not more.”

There was really no possibility of refusing such a chance. The money
was paid, the receipt signed, a glass of wine drunk over the
transaction, and then the sacristan seemed to become a new man. He
stood upright, he ceased to throw those suspicious glances behind him,
he actually laughed or tried to laugh. Dennistoun rose to go.

“I shall have the honour of accompanying monsieur to his hotel?” said
the sacristan.

“Oh no, thanks! it isn’t a hundred yards. I know the way perfectly, and
there is a moon.”

The offer was pressed three or four times, and refused as often.

“Then, monsieur will summon me if—if he finds occasion; he will keep
the middle of the road, the sides are so rough.”

“Certainly, certainly,” said Dennistoun, who was impatient to examine
his prize by himself; and he stepped out into the passage with his book
under his arm.

Here he was met by the daughter; she, it appeared, was anxious to do a
little business on her own account; perhaps, like Gehazi, to “take
somewhat” from the foreigner whom her father had spared.

“A silver crucifix and chain for the neck; monsieur would perhaps be
good enough to accept it?”

Well, really, Dennistoun hadn’t much use for these things. What did
mademoiselle want for it?

“Nothing—nothing in the world. Monsieur is more than welcome to it.”

The tone in which this and much more was said was unmistakably genuine,
so that Dennistoun was reduced to profuse thanks, and submitted to have
the chain put round his neck. It really seemed as if he had rendered
the father and daughter some service which they hardly knew how to
repay. As he set off with his book they stood at the door looking after
him, and they were still looking when he waved them a last good night
from the steps of the Chapeau Rouge.

Dinner was over, and Dennistoun was in his bedroom, shut up alone with
his acquisition. The landlady had manifested a particular interest in
him since he had told her that he had paid a visit to the sacristan and
bought an old book from him. He thought, too, that he had heard a
hurried dialogue between her and the said sacristan in the passage
outside the _salle à manger_; some words to the effect that “Pierre and
Bertrand would be sleeping in the house” had closed the conversation.

All this time a growing feeling of discomfort had been creeping over
him—nervous reaction, perhaps, after the delight of his discovery.
Whatever it was, it resulted in a conviction that there was someone
behind him, and that he was far more comfortable with his back to the
wall. All this, of course, weighed light in the balance as against the
obvious value of the collection he had acquired. And now, as I said, he
was alone in his bedroom, taking stock of Canon Alberic’s treasures, in
which every moment revealed something more charming.

“Bless Canon Alberic!” said Dennistoun, who had an inveterate habit of
talking to himself. “I wonder where he is now? Dear me! I wish that
landlady would learn to laugh in a more cheering manner; it makes one
feel as if there was someone dead in the house. Half a pipe more, did
you say? I think perhaps you are right. I wonder what that crucifix is
that the young woman insisted on giving me? Last century, I suppose.
Yes, probably. It is rather a nuisance of a thing to have round one’s
neck—just too heavy. Most likely her father has been wearing it for
years. I think I might give it a clean up before I put it away.”

He had taken the crucifix off, and laid it on the table, when his
attention was caught by an object lying on the red cloth just by his
left elbow. Two or three ideas of what it might be flitted through his
brain with their own incalculable quickness.

“A penwiper? No, no such thing in the house. A rat? No, too black. A
large spider? I trust to goodness not—no. Good God! a hand like the
hand in that picture!”

In another infinitesimal flash he had taken it in. Pale, dusky skin,
covering nothing but bones and tendons of appalling strength; coarse
black hairs, longer than ever grew on a human hand; nails rising from
the ends of the fingers and curving sharply down and forward, grey,
horny and wrinkled.

He flew out of his chair with deadly, inconceivable terror clutching at
his heart. The shape, whose left hand rested on the table, was rising
to a standing posture behind his seat, its right hand crooked above his
scalp. There was black and tattered drapery about it; the coarse hair
covered it as in the drawing. The lower jaw was thin—what can I call
it?—shallow, like a beast’s; teeth showed behind the black lips; there
was no nose; the eyes, of a fiery yellow, against which the pupils
showed black and intense, and the exulting hate and thirst to destroy
life which shone there, were the most horrifying features in the whole
vision. There was intelligence of a kind in them—intelligence beyond
that of a beast, below that of a man.

The feelings which this horror stirred in Dennistoun were the intensest
physical fear and the most profound mental loathing. What did he do?
What could he do? He has never been quite certain what words he said,
but he knows that he spoke, that he grasped blindly at the silver
crucifix, that he was conscious of a movement towards him on the part
of the demon, and that he screamed with the voice of an animal in
hideous pain.

Pierre and Bertrand, the two sturdy little serving-men, who rushed in,
saw nothing, but felt themselves thrust aside by something that passed
out between them, and found Dennistoun in a swoon. They sat up with him
that night, and his two friends were at St Bertrand by nine o’clock
next morning. He himself, though still shaken and nervous, was almost
himself by that time, and his story found credence with them, though
not until they had seen the drawing and talked with the sacristan.

Almost at dawn the little man had come to the inn on some pretence, and
had listened with the deepest interest to the story retailed by the
landlady. He showed no surprise.

“It is he—it is he! I have seen him myself,” was his only comment; and
to all questionings but one reply was vouchsafed: “Deux fois je l’ai
vu; mille fois je l’ai senti.” He would tell them nothing of the
provenance of the book, nor any details of his experiences. “I shall
soon sleep, and my rest will be sweet. Why should you trouble me?” he
said.[2]

 [2] He died that summer; his daughter married, and settled at St
 Papoul. She never understood the circumstances of her father’s
 “obsession”.

We shall never know what he or Canon Alberic de Mauléon suffered. At
the back of that fateful drawing were some lines of writing which may
be supposed to throw light on the situation:

Contradictio Salomonis cum demonio nocturno.
Albericus de Mauléone delineavit.
V. Deus in adiutorium. Ps. Qui habitat.
Sancte Bertrande, demoniorum effugator, intercede pro me miserrimo.
Primum uidi nocte 12(mi) Dec. 1694: uidebo mox ultimum. Peccaui et
passus sum, plura adhuc passurus. Dec. 29, 1701.[3]

 [3] _i.e._, The Dispute of Solomon with a demon of the night. Drawn by
 Alberic de Mauléon. _Versicle_. O Lord, make haste to help me.
 _Psalm_. Whoso dwelleth xci.
    Saint Bertrand, who puttest devils to flight, pray for me most
    unhappy. I saw it first on the night of Dec. 12, 1694: soon I shall
    see it for the last time. I have sinned and suffered, and have more
    to suffer yet. Dec. 29, 1701.
    The “Gallia Christiana” gives the date of the Canon’s death as
    December 31, 1701, “in bed, of a sudden seizure”. Details of this
    kind are not common in the great work of the Sammarthani.

I have never quite understood what was Dennistoun’s view of the events
I have narrated. He quoted to me once a text from Ecclesiasticus: “Some
spirits there be that are created for vengeance, and in their fury lay
on sore strokes.” On another occasion he said: “Isaiah was a very
sensible man; doesn’t he say something about night monsters living in
the ruins of Babylon? These things are rather beyond us at present.”

Another confidence of his impressed me rather, and I sympathized with
it. We had been, last year, to Comminges, to see Canon Alberic’s tomb.
It is a great marble erection with an effigy of the Canon in a large
wig and soutane, and an elaborate eulogy of his learning below. I saw
Dennistoun talking for some time with the Vicar of St Bertrand’s, and
as we drove away he said to me: “I hope it isn’t wrong: you know I am a
Presbyterian—but I—I believe there will be ‘saying of Mass and singing
of dirges’ for Alberic de Mauléon’s rest.” Then he added, with a touch
of the Northern British in his tone, “I had no notion they came so
dear.”

The book is in the Wentworth Collection at Cambridge. The drawing was
photographed and then burnt by Dennistoun on the day when he left
Comminges on the occasion of his first visit.




LOST HEARTS


It was, as far as I can ascertain, in September of the year 1811 that a
post-chaise drew up before the door of Aswarby Hall, in the heart of
Lincolnshire. The little boy who was the only passenger in the chaise,
and who jumped out as soon as it had stopped, looked about him with the
keenest curiosity during the short interval that elapsed between the
ringing of the bell and the opening of the hall door. He saw a tall,
square, red-brick house, built in the reign of Anne; a stone-pillared
porch had been added in the purer classical style of 1790; the windows
of the house were many, tall and narrow, with small panes and thick
white woodwork. A pediment, pierced with a round window, crowned the
front. There were wings to right and left, connected by curious glazed
galleries, supported by colonnades, with the central block. These wings
plainly contained the stables and offices of the house. Each was
surmounted by an ornamental cupola with a gilded vane.

An evening light shone on the building, making the window-panes glow
like so many fires. Away from the Hall in front stretched a flat park
studded with oaks and fringed with firs, which stood out against the
sky. The clock in the church-tower, buried in trees on the edge of the
park, only its golden weather-cock catching the light, was striking
six, and the sound came gently beating down the wind. It was altogether
a pleasant impression, though tinged with the sort of melancholy
appropriate to an evening in early autumn, that was conveyed to the
mind of the boy who was standing in the porch waiting for the door to
open to him.

The post-chaise had brought him from Warwickshire, where, some six
months before, he had been left an orphan. Now, owing to the generous
offer of his elderly cousin, Mr Abney, he had come to live at Aswarby.
The offer was unexpected, because all who knew anything of Mr Abney
looked upon him as a somewhat austere recluse, into whose steady-going
household the advent of a small boy would import a new and, it seemed,
incongruous element. The truth is that very little was known of Mr
Abney’s pursuits or temper. The Professor of Greek at Cambridge had
been heard to say that no one knew more of the religious beliefs of the
later pagans than did the owner of Aswarby. Certainly his library
contained all the then available books bearing on the Mysteries, the
Orphic poems, the worship of Mithras, and the Neo-Platonists. In the
marble-paved hall stood a fine group of Mithras slaying a bull, which
had been imported from the Levant at great expense by the owner. He had
contributed a description of it to the _Gentleman’s Magazine_, and he
had written a remarkable series of articles in the _Critical Museum_ on
the superstitions of the Romans of the Lower Empire. He was looked
upon, in fine, as a man wrapped up in his books, and it was a matter of
great surprise among his neighbours that he should ever have heard of
his orphan cousin, Stephen Elliott, much more that he should have
volunteered to make him an inmate of Aswarby Hall.

Whatever may have been expected by his neighbours, it is certain that
Mr Abney—the tall, the thin, the austere—seemed inclined to give his
young cousin a kindly reception. The moment the front-door was opened
he darted out of his study, rubbing his hands with delight.

“How are you, my boy?—how are you? How old are you?” said he—“that is,
you are not too much tired, I hope, by your journey to eat your
supper?”

“No, thank you, sir,” said Master Elliott; “I am pretty well.”

“That’s a good lad,” said Mr Abney. “And how old are you, my boy?”

It seemed a little odd that he should have asked the question twice in
the first two minutes of their acquaintance.

“I’m twelve years old next birthday, sir,” said Stephen.

“And when is your birthday, my dear boy? Eleventh of September, eh?
That’s well—that’s very well. Nearly a year hence, isn’t it? I like—ha,
ha!—I like to get these things down in my book. Sure it’s twelve?
Certain?”

“Yes, quite sure, sir.”

“Well, well! Take him to Mrs Bunch’s room, Parkes, and let him have his
tea—supper—whatever it is.”

“Yes, sir,” answered the staid Mr Parkes; and conducted Stephen to the
lower regions.

Mrs Bunch was the most comfortable and human person whom Stephen had as
yet met in Aswarby. She made him completely at home; they were great
friends in a quarter of an hour: and great friends they remained. Mrs
Bunch had been born in the neighbourhood some fifty-five years before
the date of Stephen’s arrival, and her residence at the Hall was of
twenty years’ standing. Consequently, if anyone knew the ins and outs
of the house and the district, Mrs Bunch knew them; and she was by no
means disinclined to communicate her information.

Certainly there were plenty of things about the Hall and the Hall
gardens which Stephen, who was of an adventurous and inquiring turn,
was anxious to have explained to him. “Who built the temple at the end
of the laurel walk? Who was the old man whose picture hung on the
staircase, sitting at a table, with a skull under his hand?” These and
many similar points were cleared up by the resources of Mrs Bunch’s
powerful intellect. There were others, however, of which the
explanations furnished were less satisfactory.

One November evening Stephen was sitting by the fire in the
housekeeper’s room reflecting on his surroundings.

“Is Mr Abney a good man, and will he go to heaven?” he suddenly asked,
with the peculiar confidence which children possess in the ability of
their elders to settle these questions, the decision of which is
believed to be reserved for other tribunals.

“Good?—bless the child!” said Mrs Bunch. “Master’s as kind a soul as
ever I see! Didn’t I never tell you of the little boy as he took in out
of the street, as you may say, this seven years back? and the little
girl, two years after I first come here?”

“No. Do tell me all about them, Mrs Bunch—now, this minute!”

“Well,” said Mrs Bunch, “the little girl I don’t seem to recollect so
much about. I know master brought her back with him from his walk one
day, and give orders to Mrs Ellis, as was housekeeper then, as she
should be took every care with. And the pore child hadn’t no one
belonging to her—she telled me so her own self—and here she lived with
us a matter of three weeks it might be; and then, whether she were
somethink of a gipsy in her blood or what not, but one morning she out
of her bed afore any of us had opened a eye, and neither track nor yet
trace of her have I set eyes on since. Master was wonderful put about,
and had all the ponds dragged; but it’s my belief she was had away by
them gipsies, for there was singing round the house for as much as an
hour the night she went, and Parkes, he declare as he heard them
a-calling in the woods all that afternoon. Dear, dear! a hodd child she
was, so silent in her ways and all, but I was wonderful taken up with
her, so domesticated she was—surprising.”

“And what about the little boy?” said Stephen.

“Ah, that pore boy!” sighed Mrs Bunch. “He were a foreigner—Jevanny he
called hisself—and he come a-tweaking his ’urdy-gurdy round and about
the drive one winter day, and master ’ad him in that minute, and ast
all about where he came from, and how old he was, and how he made his
way, and where was his relatives, and all as kind as heart could wish.
But it went the same way with him. They’re a hunruly lot, them foreign
nations, I do suppose, and he was off one fine morning just the same as
the girl. Why he went and what he done was our question for as much as
a year after; for he never took his ’urdy-gurdy, and there it lays on
the shelf.”

The remainder of the evening was spent by Stephen in miscellaneous
cross-examination of Mrs Bunch and in efforts to extract a tune from
the hurdy-gurdy.

That night he had a curious dream. At the end of the passage at the top
of the house, in which his bedroom was situated, there was an old
disused bathroom. It was kept locked, but the upper half of the door
was glazed, and, since the muslin curtains which used to hang there had
long been gone, you could look in and see the lead-lined bath affixed
to the wall on the right hand, with its head towards the window.

On the night of which I am speaking, Stephen Elliott found himself, as
he thought, looking through the glazed door. The moon was shining
through the window, and he was gazing at a figure which lay in the
bath.

His description of what he saw reminds me of what I once beheld myself
in the famous vaults of St Michan’s Church in Dublin, which possess the
horrid property of preserving corpses from decay for centuries. A
figure inexpressibly thin and pathetic, of a dusty leaden colour,
enveloped in a shroud-like garment, the thin lips crooked into a faint
and dreadful smile, the hands pressed tightly over the region of the
heart.

As he looked upon it, a distant, almost inaudible moan seemed to issue
from its lips, and the arms began to stir. The terror of the sight
forced Stephen backwards, and he awoke to the fact that he was indeed
standing on the cold boarded floor of the passage in the full light of
the moon. With a courage which I do not think can be common among boys
of his age, he went to the door of the bathroom to ascertain if the
figure of his dream were really there. It was not, and he went back to
bed.

Mrs Bunch was much impressed next morning by his story, and went so far
as to replace the muslin curtain over the glazed door of the bathroom.
Mr Abney, moreover, to whom he confided his experiences at breakfast,
was greatly interested, and made notes of the matter in what he called
“his book”.

The spring equinox was approaching, as Mr Abney frequently reminded his
cousin, adding that this had been always considered by the ancients to
be a critical time for the young: that Stephen would do well to take
care of himself, and to shut his bedroom window at night; and that
Censorinus had some valuable remarks on the subject. Two incidents that
occurred about this time made an impression upon Stephen’s mind.

The first was after an unusually uneasy and oppressed night that he had
passed—though he could not recall any particular dream that he had had.

The following evening Mrs Bunch was occupying herself in mending his
nightgown.

“Gracious me, Master Stephen!” she broke forth rather irritably, “how
do you manage to tear your nightdress all to flinders this way? Look
here, sir, what trouble you do give to poor servants that have to darn
and mend after you!”

There was indeed a most destructive and apparently wanton series of
slits or scorings in the garment, which would undoubtedly require a
skilful needle to make good. They were confined to the left side of the
chest—long, parallel slits, about six inches in length, some of them
not quite piercing the texture of the linen. Stephen could only express
his entire ignorance of their origin: he was sure they were not there
the night before.

“But,” he said, “Mrs Bunch, they are just the same as the scratches on
the outside of my bedroom door; and I’m sure I never had anything to do
with making _them_.”

Mrs Bunch gazed at him open-mouthed, then snatched up a candle,
departed hastily from the room, and was heard making her way upstairs.
In a few minutes she came down.

“Well,” she said, “Master Stephen, it’s a funny thing to me how them
marks and scratches can ’a’ come there—too high up for any cat or dog
to ’ave made ’em, much less a rat: for all the world like a Chinaman’s
finger-nails, as my uncle in the tea-trade used to tell us of when we
was girls together. I wouldn’t say nothing to master, not if I was you,
Master Stephen, my dear; and just turn the key of the door when you go
to your bed.”

“I always do, Mrs Bunch, as soon as I’ve said my prayers.”

“Ah, that’s a good child: always say your prayers, and then no one
can’t hurt you.”

Herewith Mrs Bunch addressed herself to mending the injured nightgown,
with intervals of meditation, until bed-time. This was on a Friday
night in March, 1812.

On the following evening the usual duet of Stephen and Mrs Bunch was
augmented by the sudden arrival of Mr Parkes, the butler, who as a rule
kept himself rather _to_ himself in his own pantry. He did not see that
Stephen was there: he was, moreover, flustered and less slow of speech
than was his wont.

“Master may get up his own wine, if he likes, of an evening,” was his
first remark. “Either I do it in the daytime or not at all, Mrs Bunch.
I don’t know what it may be: very like it’s the rats, or the wind got
into the cellars; but I’m not so young as I was, and I can’t go through
with it as I have done.”

“Well, Mr Parkes, you know it is a surprising place for the rats, is
the Hall.”

“I’m not denying that, Mrs Bunch; and, to be sure, many a time I’ve
heard the tale from the men in the shipyards about the rat that could
speak. I never laid no confidence in that before; but tonight, if I’d
demeaned myself to lay my ear to the door of the further bin, I could
pretty much have heard what they was saying.”

“Oh, there, Mr Parkes, I’ve no patience with your fancies! Rats talking
in the wine-cellar indeed!”

“Well, Mrs Bunch, I’ve no wish to argue with you: all I say is, if you
choose to go to the far bin, and lay your ear to the door, you may
prove my words this minute.”

“What nonsense you do talk, Mr Parkes—not fit for children to listen
to! Why, you’ll be frightening Master Stephen there out of his wits.”

“What! Master Stephen?” said Parkes, awaking to the consciousness of
the boy’s presence. “Master Stephen knows well enough when I’m
a-playing a joke with you, Mrs Bunch.”

In fact, Master Stephen knew much too well to suppose that Mr Parkes
had in the first instance intended a joke. He was interested, not
altogether pleasantly, in the situation; but all his questions were
unsuccessful in inducing the butler to give any more detailed account
of his experiences in the wine-cellar.

We have now arrived at March 24, 1812. It was a day of curious
experiences for Stephen: a windy, noisy day, which filled the house and
the gardens with a restless impression. As Stephen stood by the fence
of the grounds, and looked out into the park, he felt as if an endless
procession of unseen people were sweeping past him on the wind, borne
on resistlessly and aimlessly, vainly striving to stop themselves, to
catch at something that might arrest their flight and bring them once
again into contact with the living world of which they had formed a
part. After luncheon that day Mr Abney said:

“Stephen, my boy, do you think you could manage to come to me tonight
as late as eleven o’clock in my study? I shall be busy until that time,
and I wish to show you something connected with your future life which
it is most important that you should know. You are not to mention this
matter to Mrs Bunch nor to anyone else in the house; and you had better
go to your room at the usual time.”

Here was a new excitement added to life: Stephen eagerly grasped at the
opportunity of sitting up till eleven o’clock. He looked in at the
library door on his way upstairs that evening, and saw a brazier, which
he had often noticed in the corner of the room, moved out before the
fire; an old silver-gilt cup stood on the table, filled with red wine,
and some written sheets of paper lay near it. Mr Abney was sprinkling
some incense on the brazier from a round silver box as Stephen passed,
but did not seem to notice his step.

The wind had fallen, and there was a still night and a full moon. At
about ten o’clock Stephen was standing at the open window of his
bedroom, looking out over the country. Still as the night was, the
mysterious population of the distant moon-lit woods was not yet lulled
to rest. From time to time strange cries as of lost and despairing
wanderers sounded from across the mere. They might be the notes of owls
or water-birds, yet they did not quite resemble either sound. Were not
they coming nearer? Now they sounded from the nearer side of the water,
and in a few moments they seemed to be floating about among the
shrubberies. Then they ceased; but just as Stephen was thinking of
shutting the window and resuming his reading of _Robinson Crusoe_, he
caught sight of two figures standing on the gravelled terrace that ran
along the garden side of the Hall—the figures of a boy and girl, as it
seemed; they stood side by side, looking up at the windows. Something
in the form of the girl recalled irresistibly his dream of the figure
in the bath. The boy inspired him with more acute fear.

Whilst the girl stood still, half smiling, with her hands clasped over
her heart, the boy, a thin shape, with black hair and ragged clothing,
raised his arms in the air with an appearance of menace and of
unappeasable hunger and longing. The moon shone upon his almost
transparent hands, and Stephen saw that the nails were fearfully long
and that the light shone through them. As he stood with his arms thus
raised, he disclosed a terrifying spectacle. On the left side of his
chest there opened a black and gaping rent; and there fell upon
Stephen’s brain, rather than upon his ear, the impression of one of
those hungry and desolate cries that he had heard resounding over the
woods of Aswarby all that evening. In another moment this dreadful pair
had moved swiftly and noiselessly over the dry gravel, and he saw them
no more.

Inexpressibly frightened as he was, he determined to take his candle
and go down to Mr Abney’s study, for the hour appointed for their
meeting was near at hand. The study or library opened out of the
front-hall on one side, and Stephen, urged on by his terrors, did not
take long in getting there. To effect an entrance was not so easy. It
was not locked, he felt sure, for the key was on the outside of the
door as usual. His repeated knocks produced no answer. Mr Abney was
engaged: he was speaking. What! why did he try to cry out? and why was
the cry choked in his throat? Had he, too, seen the mysterious
children? But now everything was quiet, and the door yielded to
Stephen’s terrified and frantic pushing.

On the table in Mr Abney’s study certain papers were found which
explained the situation to Stephen Elliott when he was of an age to
understand them. The most important sentences were as follows:

“It was a belief very strongly and generally held by the ancients—of
whose wisdom in these matters I have had such experience as induces me
to place confidence in their assertions—that by enacting certain
processes, which to us moderns have something of a barbaric complexion,
a very remarkable enlightenment of the spiritual faculties in man may
be attained: that, for example, by absorbing the personalities of a
certain number of his fellow-creatures, an individual may gain a
complete ascendancy over those orders of spiritual beings which control
the elemental forces of our universe.

“It is recorded of Simon Magus that he was able to fly in the air, to
become invisible, or to assume any form he pleased, by the agency of
the soul of a boy whom, to use the libellous phrase employed by the
author of the _Clementine Recognitions_, he had ‘murdered’. I find it
set down, moreover, with considerable detail in the writings of Hermes
Trismegistus, that similar happy results may be produced by the
absorption of the hearts of not less than three human beings below the
age of twenty-one years. To the testing of the truth of this receipt I
have devoted the greater part of the last twenty years, selecting as
the _corpora vilia_ of my experiment such persons as could conveniently
be removed without occasioning a sensible gap in society. The first
step I effected by the removal of one Phoebe Stanley, a girl of gipsy
extraction, on March 24, 1792. The second, by the removal of a
wandering Italian lad, named Giovanni Paoli, on the night of March 23,
1805. The final ‘victim’—to employ a word repugnant in the highest
degree to my feelings—must be my cousin, Stephen Elliott. His day must
be this March 24, 1812.

“The best means of effecting the required absorption is to remove the
heart from the _living_ subject, to reduce it to ashes, and to mingle
them with about a pint of some red wine, preferably port. The remains
of the first two subjects, at least, it will be well to conceal: a
disused bathroom or wine-cellar will be found convenient for such a
purpose. Some annoyance may be experienced from the psychic portion of
the subjects, which popular language dignifies with the name of ghosts.
But the man of philosophic temperament—to whom alone the experiment is
appropriate—will be little prone to attach importance to the feeble
efforts of these beings to wreak their vengeance on him. I contemplate
with the liveliest satisfaction the enlarged and emancipated existence
which the experiment, if successful, will confer on me; not only
placing me beyond the reach of human justice (so-called), but
eliminating to a great extent the prospect of death itself.”

Mr Abney was found in his chair, his head thrown back, his face stamped
with an expression of rage, fright, and mortal pain. In his left side
was a terrible lacerated wound, exposing the heart. There was no blood
on his hands, and a long knife that lay on the table was perfectly
clean. A savage wild-cat might have inflicted the injuries. The window
of the study was open, and it was the opinion of the coroner that Mr
Abney had met his death by the agency of some wild creature. But
Stephen Elliott’s study of the papers I have quoted led him to a very
different conclusion.




THE MEZZOTINT


Some time ago I believe I had the pleasure of telling you the story of
an adventure which happened to a friend of mine by the name of
Dennistoun, during his pursuit of objects of art for the museum at
Cambridge.

He did not publish his experiences very widely upon his return to
England; but they could not fail to become known to a good many of his
friends, and among others to the gentleman who at that time presided
over an art museum at another University. It was to be expected that
the story should make a considerable impression on the mind of a man
whose vocation lay in lines similar to Dennistoun’s, and that he should
be eager to catch at any explanation of the matter which tended to make
it seem improbable that he should ever be called upon to deal with so
agitating an emergency. It was, indeed, somewhat consoling to him to
reflect that he was not expected to acquire ancient MSS. for his
institution; that was the business of the Shelburnian Library. The
authorities of that institution might, if they pleased, ransack obscure
corners of the Continent for such matters. He was glad to be obliged at
the moment to confine his attention to enlarging the already
unsurpassed collection of English topographical drawings and engravings
possessed by his museum. Yet, as it turned out, even a department so
homely and familiar as this may have its dark corners, and to one of
these Mr Williams was unexpectedly introduced.

Those who have taken even the most limited interest in the acquisition
of topographical pictures are aware that there is one London dealer
whose aid is indispensable to their researches. Mr J. W. Britnell
publishes at short intervals very admirable catalogues of a large and
constantly changing stock of engravings, plans, and old sketches of
mansions, churches, and towns in England and Wales. These catalogues
were, of course, the ABC of his subject to Mr Williams: but as his
museum already contained an enormous accumulation of topographical
pictures, he was a regular, rather than a copious, buyer; and he rather
looked to Mr Britnell to fill up gaps in the rank and file of his
collection than to supply him with rarities.

Now, in February of last year there appeared upon Mr Williams’s desk at
the museum a catalogue from Mr Britnell’s emporium, and accompanying it
was a typewritten communication from the dealer himself. This latter
ran as follows:

DEAR SIR,
    We beg to call your attention to No. 978 in our accompanying
    catalogue, which we shall be glad to send on approval.

Yours faithfully,
J. W. BRITNELL.

To turn to No. 978 in the accompanying catalogue was with Mr. Williams
(as he observed to himself) the work of a moment, and in the place
indicated he found the following entry:

978.—_Unknown._ Interesting mezzotint: View of a manor-house, early
part of the century. 15 by 10 inches; black frame. £2 2s.

It was not specially exciting, and the price seemed high. However, as
Mr Britnell, who knew his business and his customer, seemed to set
store by it, Mr Williams wrote a postcard asking for the article to be
sent on approval, along with some other engravings and sketches which
appeared in the same catalogue. And so he passed without much
excitement of anticipation to the ordinary labours of the day.

A parcel of any kind always arrives a day later than you expect it, and
that of Mr Britnell proved, as I believe the right phrase goes, no
exception to the rule. It was delivered at the museum by the afternoon
post of Saturday, after Mr Williams had left his work, and it was
accordingly brought round to his rooms in college by the attendant, in
order that he might not have to wait over Sunday before looking through
it and returning such of the contents as he did not propose to keep.
And here he found it when he came in to tea, with a friend.

The only item with which I am concerned was the rather large,
black-framed mezzotint of which I have already quoted the short
description given in Mr Britnell’s catalogue. Some more details of it
will have to be given, though I cannot hope to put before you the look
of the picture as clearly as it is present to my own eye. Very nearly
the exact duplicate of it may be seen in a good many old inn parlours,
or in the passages of undisturbed country mansions at the present
moment. It was a rather indifferent mezzotint, and an indifferent
mezzotint is, perhaps, the worst form of engraving known. It presented
a full-face view of a not very large manor-house of the last century,
with three rows of plain sashed windows with rusticated masonry about
them, a parapet with balls or vases at the angles, and a small portico
in the centre. On either side were trees, and in front a considerable
expanse of lawn. The legend _A. W. F. sculpsit_ was engraved on the
narrow margin; and there was no further inscription. The whole thing
gave the impression that it was the work of an amateur. What in the
world Mr Britnell could mean by affixing the price of £2 2s. to such an
object was more than Mr Williams could imagine. He turned it over with
a good deal of contempt; upon the back was a paper label, the left-hand
half of which had been torn off. All that remained were the ends of two
lines of writing: the first had the letters—_ngley Hall_; the
second,—_ssex_.

It would, perhaps, be just worth while to identify the place
represented, which he could easily do with the help of a gazetteer, and
then he would send it back to Mr Britnell, with some remarks reflecting
upon the judgement of that gentleman.

He lighted the candles, for it was now dark, made the tea, and supplied
the friend with whom he had been playing golf (for I believe the
authorities of the University I write of indulge in that pursuit by way
of relaxation); and tea was taken to the accompaniment of a discussion
which golfing persons can imagine for themselves, but which the
conscientious writer has no right to inflict upon any non-golfing
persons.

The conclusion arrived at was that certain strokes might have been
better, and that in certain emergencies neither player had experienced
that amount of luck which a human being has a right to expect. It was
now that the friend—let us call him Professor Binks—took up the framed
engraving, and said:

“What’s this place, Williams?”

“Just what I am going to try to find out,” said Williams, going to the
shelf for a gazetteer. “Look at the back. Somethingley Hall, either in
Sussex or Essex. Half the name’s gone, you see. You don’t happen to
know it, I suppose?”

“It’s from that man Britnell, I suppose, isn’t it?” said Binks. “Is it
for the museum?”

“Well, I think I should buy it if the price was five shillings,” said
Williams; “but for some unearthly reason he wants two guineas for it. I
can’t conceive why. It’s a wretched engraving, and there aren’t even
any figures to give it life.”

“It’s not worth two guineas, I should think,” said Binks; “but I don’t
think it’s so badly done. The moonlight seems rather good to me; and I
should have thought there _were_ figures, or at least a figure, just on
the edge in front.”

“Let’s look,” said Williams. “Well, it’s true the light is rather
cleverly given. Where’s your figure? Oh yes! Just the head, in the very
front of the picture.”

And indeed there was—hardly more than a black blot on the extreme edge
of the engraving—the head of a man or woman, a good deal muffled up,
the back turned to the spectator, and looking towards the house.

Williams had not noticed it before.

“Still,” he said, “though it’s a cleverer thing than I thought, I can’t
spend two guineas of museum money on a picture of a place I don’t
know.”

Professor Binks had his work to do, and soon went; and very nearly up
to Hall time Williams was engaged in a vain attempt to identify the
subject of his picture. “If the vowel before the _ng_ had only been
left, it would have been easy enough,” he thought; “but as it is, the
name may be anything from Guestingley to Langley, and there are many
more names ending like this than I thought; and this rotten book has no
index of terminations.”

Hall in Mr Williams’s college was at seven. It need not be dwelt upon;
the less so as he met there colleagues who had been playing golf during
the afternoon, and words with which we have no concern were freely
bandied across the table—merely golfing words, I would hasten to
explain.

I suppose an hour or more to have been spent in what is called
common-room after dinner. Later in the evening some few retired to
Williams’s rooms, and I have little doubt that whist was played and
tobacco smoked. During a lull in these operations Williams picked up
the mezzotint from the table without looking at it, and handed it to a
person mildly interested in art, telling him where it had come from,
and the other particulars which we already know.

The gentleman took it carelessly, looked at it, then said, in a tone of
some interest:

“It’s really a very good piece of work, Williams; it has quite a
feeling of the romantic period. The light is admirably managed, it
seems to me, and the figure, though it’s rather too grotesque, is
somehow very impressive.”

“Yes, isn’t it?” said Williams, who was just then busy giving
whisky-and-soda to others of the company, and was unable to come across
the room to look at the view again.

It was by this time rather late in the evening, and the visitors were
on the move. After they went Williams was obliged to write a letter or
two and clear up some odd bits of work. At last, some time past
midnight, he was disposed to turn in, and he put out his lamp after
lighting his bedroom candle. The picture lay face upwards on the table
where the last man who looked at it had put it, and it caught his eye
as he turned the lamp down. What he saw made him very nearly drop the
candle on the floor, and he declares now that if he had been left in
the dark at that moment he would have had a fit. But, as that did not
happen, he was able to put down the light on the table and take a good
look at the picture. It was indubitable—rankly impossible, no doubt,
but absolutely certain. In the middle of the lawn in front of the
unknown house there was a figure where no figure had been at five
o’clock that afternoon. It was crawling on all-fours towards the house,
and it was muffled in a strange black garment with a white cross on the
back.

I do not know what is the ideal course to pursue in a situation of this
kind. I can only tell you what Mr Williams did. He took the picture by
one corner and carried it across the passage to a second set of rooms
which he possessed. There he locked it up in a drawer, sported the
doors of both sets of rooms, and retired to bed; but first he wrote out
and signed an account of the extraordinary change which the picture had
undergone since it had come into his possession.

Sleep visited him rather late; but it was consoling to reflect that the
behaviour of the picture did not depend upon his own unsupported
testimony. Evidently the man who had looked at it the night before had
seen something of the same kind as he had, otherwise he might have been
tempted to think that something gravely wrong was happening either to
his eyes or his mind. This possibility being fortunately precluded, two
matters awaited him on the morrow. He must take stock of the picture
very carefully, and call in a witness for the purpose, and he must make
a determined effort to ascertain what house it was that was
represented. He would therefore ask his neighbour Nisbet to breakfast
with him, and he would subsequently spend a morning over the gazetteer.

Nisbet was disengaged, and arrived about 9.30. His host was not quite
dressed, I am sorry to say, even at this late hour. During breakfast
nothing was said about the mezzotint by Williams, save that he had a
picture on which he wished for Nisbet’s opinion. But those who are
familiar with University life can picture for themselves the wide and
delightful range of subjects over which the conversation of two Fellows
of Canterbury College is likely to extend during a Sunday morning
breakfast. Hardly a topic was left unchallenged, from golf to
lawn-tennis. Yet I am bound to say that Williams was rather distraught;
for his interest naturally centred in that very strange picture which
was now reposing, face downwards, in the drawer in the room opposite.

The morning pipe was at last lighted, and the moment had arrived for
which he looked. With very considerable—almost tremulous—excitement he
ran across, unlocked the drawer, and, extracting the picture—still face
downwards—ran back, and put it into Nisbet’s hands.

“Now,” he said, “Nisbet, I want you to tell me exactly what you see in
that picture. Describe it, if you don’t mind, rather minutely. I’ll
tell you why afterwards.”

“Well,” said Nisbet, “I have here a view of a country-house—English, I
presume—by moonlight.”

“Moonlight? You’re sure of that?”

“Certainly. The moon appears to be on the wane, if you wish for
details, and there are clouds in the sky.”

“All right. Go on. I’ll swear,” added Williams in an aside, “there was
no moon when I saw it first.”

“Well, there’s not much more to be said,” Nisbet continued. “The house
has one—two—three rows of windows, five in each row, except at the
bottom, where there’s a porch instead of the middle one, and—”

“But what about figures?” said Williams, with marked interest.

“There aren’t any,” said Nisbet; “but—”

“What! No figure on the grass in front?”

“Not a thing.”

“You’ll swear to that?”

“Certainly I will. But there’s just one other thing.”

“What?”

“Why, one of the windows on the ground-floor—left of the door—is open.”

“Is it really so? My goodness! he must have got in,” said Williams,
with great excitement; and he hurried to the back of the sofa on which
Nisbet was sitting, and, catching the picture from him, verified the
matter for himself.

It was quite true. There was no figure, and there was the open window.
Williams, after a moment of speechless surprise, went to the
writing-table and scribbled for a short time. Then he brought two
papers to Nisbet, and asked him first to sign one—it was his own
description of the picture, which you have just heard—and then to read
the other which was Williams’s statement written the night before.

“What can it all mean?” said Nisbet.

“Exactly,” said Williams. “Well, one thing I must do—or three things,
now I think of it. I must find out from Garwood”—this was his last
night’s visitor—“what he saw, and then I must get the thing
photographed before it goes further, and then I must find out what the
place is.”

“I can do the photographing myself,” said Nisbet, “and I will. But, you
know, it looks very much as if we were assisting at the working out of
a tragedy somewhere. The question is, has it happened already, or is it
going to come off? You must find out what the place is. Yes,” he said,
looking at the picture again, “I expect you’re right: he has got in.
And if I don’t mistake there’ll be the devil to pay in one of the rooms
upstairs.”

“I’ll tell you what,” said Williams: “I’ll take the picture across to
old Green” (this was the senior Fellow of the College, who had been
Bursar for many years). “It’s quite likely he’ll know it. We have
property in Essex and Sussex, and he must have been over the two
counties a lot in his time.”

“Quite likely he will,” said Nisbet; “but just let me take my
photograph first. But look here, I rather think Green isn’t up today.
He wasn’t in Hall last night, and I think I heard him say he was going
down for the Sunday.”

“That’s true, too,” said Williams; “I know he’s gone to Brighton. Well,
if you’ll photograph it now, I’ll go across to Garwood and get his
statement, and you keep an eye on it while I’m gone. I’m beginning to
think two guineas is not a very exorbitant price for it now.”

In a short time he had returned, and brought Mr Garwood with him.
Garwood’s statement was to the effect that the figure, when he had seen
it, was clear of the edge of the picture, but had not got far across
the lawn. He remembered a white mark on the back of its drapery, but
could not have been sure it was a cross. A document to this effect was
then drawn up and signed, and Nisbet proceeded to photograph the
picture.

“Now what do you mean to do?” he said. “Are you going to sit and watch
it all day?”

“Well, no, I think not,” said Williams. “I rather imagine we’re meant
to see the whole thing. You see, between the time I saw it last night
and this morning there was time for lots of things to happen, but the
creature only got into the house. It could easily have got through its
business in the time and gone to its own place again; but the fact of
the window being open, I think, must mean that it’s in there now. So I
feel quite easy about leaving it. And, besides, I have a kind of idea
that it wouldn’t change much, if at all, in the daytime. We might go
out for a walk this afternoon, and come in to tea, or whenever it gets
dark. I shall leave it out on the table here, and sport the door. My
skip can get in, but no one else.”

The three agreed that this would be a good plan; and, further, that if
they spent the afternoon together they would be less likely to talk
about the business to other people; for any rumour of such a
transaction as was going on would bring the whole of the
Phasmatological Society about their ears.

We may give them a respite until five o’clock.

At or near that hour the three were entering Williams’s staircase. They
were at first slightly annoyed to see that the door of his rooms was
unsported; but in a moment it was remembered that on Sunday the skips
came for orders an hour or so earlier than on weekdays. However, a
surprise was awaiting them. The first thing they saw was the picture
leaning up against a pile of books on the table, as it had been left,
and the next thing was Williams’s skip, seated on a chair opposite,
gazing at it with undisguised horror. How was this? Mr Filcher (the
name is not my own invention) was a servant of considerable standing,
and set the standard of etiquette to all his own college and to several
neighbouring ones, and nothing could be more alien to his practice than
to be found sitting on his master’s chair, or appearing to take any
particular notice of his master’s furniture or pictures. Indeed, he
seemed to feel this himself. He started violently when the three men
were in the room, and got up with a marked effort. Then he said:

“I ask your pardon, sir, for taking such a freedom as to set down.”

“Not at all, Robert,” interposed Mr Williams. “I was meaning to ask you
some time what you thought of that picture.”

“Well, sir, of course I don’t set up my opinion again yours, but it
ain’t the pictur I should ’ang where my little girl could see it, sir.”

“Wouldn’t you, Robert? Why not?”

“No, sir. Why, the pore child, I recollect once she see a Door Bible,
with pictures not ’alf what that is, and we ’ad to set up with her
three or four nights afterwards, if you’ll believe me; and if she was
to ketch a sight of this skelinton here, or whatever it is, carrying
off the pore baby, she would be in a taking. You know ’ow it is with
children; ’ow nervish they git with a little thing and all. But what I
should say, it don’t seem a right pictur to be laying about, sir, not
where anyone that’s liable to be startled could come on it. Should you
be wanting anything this evening, sir? Thank you, sir.”

With these words the excellent man went to continue the round of his
masters, and you may be sure the gentlemen whom he left lost no time in
gathering round the engraving. There was the house, as before, under
the waning moon and the drifting clouds. The window that had been open
was shut, and the figure was once more on the lawn: but not this time
crawling cautiously on hands and knees. Now it was erect and stepping
swiftly, with long strides, towards the front of the picture. The moon
was behind it, and the black drapery hung down over its face so that
only hints of that could be seen, and what was visible made the
spectators profoundly thankful that they could see no more than a white
dome-like forehead and a few straggling hairs. The head was bent down,
and the arms were tightly clasped over an object which could be dimly
seen and identified as a child, whether dead or living it was not
possible to say. The legs of the appearance alone could be plainly
discerned, and they were horribly thin.

From five to seven the three companions sat and watched the picture by
turns. But it never changed. They agreed at last that it would be safe
to leave it, and that they would return after Hall and await further
developments.

When they assembled again, at the earliest possible moment, the
engraving was there, but the figure was gone, and the house was quiet
under the moonbeams. There was nothing for it but to spend the evening
over gazetteers and guide-books. Williams was the lucky one at last,
and perhaps he deserved it. At 11.30 p.m. he read from Murray’s _Guide
to Essex_ the following lines:

16½ miles, _Anningley_. The church has been an interesting building of
Norman date, but was extensively classicized in the last century. It
contains the tomb of the family of Francis, whose mansion, Anningley
Hall, a solid Queen Anne house, stands immediately beyond the
churchyard in a park of about 80 acres. The family is now extinct, the
last heir having disappeared mysteriously in infancy in the year 1802.
The father, Mr Arthur Francis, was locally known as a talented amateur
engraver in mezzotint. After his son’s disappearance he lived in
complete retirement at the Hall, and was found dead in his studio on
the third anniversary of the disaster, having just completed an
engraving of the house, impressions of which are of considerable
rarity.

This looked like business, and, indeed, Mr Green on his return at once
identified the house as Anningley Hall.

“Is there any kind of explanation of the figure, Green?” was the
question which Williams naturally asked.

“I don’t know, I’m sure, Williams. What used to be said in the place
when I first knew it, which was before I came up here, was just this:
old Francis was always very much down on these poaching fellows, and
whenever he got a chance he used to get a man whom he suspected of it
turned off the estate, and by degrees he got rid of them all but one.
Squires could do a lot of things then that they daren’t think of now.
Well, this man that was left was what you find pretty often in that
country—the last remains of a very old family. I believe they were
Lords of the Manor at one time. I recollect just the same thing in my
own parish.”

“What, like the man in _Tess o’ the Durbervilles_?” Williams put in.

“Yes, I dare say; it’s not a book I could ever read myself. But this
fellow could show a row of tombs in the church there that belonged to
his ancestors, and all that went to sour him a bit; but Francis, they
said, could never get at him—he always kept just on the right side of
the law—until one night the keepers found him at it in a wood right at
the end of the estate. I could show you the place now; it marches with
some land that used to belong to an uncle of mine. And you can imagine
there was a row; and this man Gawdy (that was the name, to be
sure—Gawdy; I thought I should get it—Gawdy), he was unlucky enough,
poor chap! to shoot a keeper. Well, that was what Francis wanted, and
grand juries—you know what they would have been then—and poor Gawdy was
strung up in double-quick time; and I’ve been shown the place he was
buried in, on the north side of the church—you know the way in that
part of the world: anyone that’s been hanged or made away with
themselves, they bury them that side. And the idea was that some friend
of Gawdy’s—not a relation, because he had none, poor devil! he was the
last of his line: kind of _spes ultima gentis_—must have planned to get
hold of Francis’s boy and put an end to _his_ line, too. I don’t
know—it’s rather an out-of-the-way thing for an Essex poacher to think
of—but, you know, I should say now it looks more as if old Gawdy had
managed the job himself. Booh! I hate to think of it! have some whisky,
Williams!”

The facts were communicated by Williams to Dennistoun, and by him to a
mixed company, of which I was one, and the Sadducean Professor of
Ophiology another. I am sorry to say that the latter, when asked what
he thought of it, only remarked: “Oh, those Bridgeford people will say
anything”—a sentiment which met with the reception it deserved.

I have only to add that the picture is now in the Ashleian Museum; that
it has been treated with a view to discovering whether sympathetic ink
has been used in it, but without effect; that Mr Britnell knew nothing
of it save that he was sure it was uncommon; and that, though carefully
watched, it has never been known to change again.




THE ASH-TREE


Everyone who has travelled over Eastern England knows the smaller
country-houses with which it is studded—the rather dank little
buildings, usually in the Italian style, surrounded with parks of some
eighty to a hundred acres. For me they have always had a very strong
attraction: with the grey paling of split oak, the noble trees, the
meres with their reed-beds, and the line of distant woods. Then, I like
the pillared portico—perhaps stuck on to a red-brick Queen Anne house
which has been faced with stucco to bring it into line with the
“Grecian” taste of the end of the eighteenth century; the hall inside,
going up to the roof, which hall ought always to be provided with a
gallery and a small organ. I like the library, too, where you may find
anything from a Psalter of the thirteenth century to a Shakespeare
quarto. I like the pictures, of course; and perhaps most of all I like
fancying what life in such a house was when it was first built, and in
the piping times of landlords’ prosperity, and not least now, when, if
money is not so plentiful, taste is more varied and life quite as
interesting. I wish to have one of these houses, and enough money to
keep it together and entertain my friends in it modestly.

But this is a digression. I have to tell you of a curious series of
events which happened in such a house as I have tried to describe. It
is Castringham Hall in Suffolk. I think a good deal has been done to
the building since the period of my story, but the essential features I
have sketched are still there—Italian portico, square block of white
house, older inside than out, park with fringe of woods, and mere. The
one feature that marked out the house from a score of others is gone.
As you looked at it from the park, you saw on the right a great old
ash-tree growing within half a dozen yards of the wall, and almost or
quite touching the building with its branches. I suppose it had stood
there ever since Castringham ceased to be a fortified place, and since
the moat was filled in and the Elizabethan dwelling-house built. At any
rate, it had well-nigh attained its full dimensions in the year 1690.

In that year the district in which the Hall is situated was the scene
of a number of witch-trials. It will be long, I think, before we arrive
at a just estimate of the amount of solid reason—if there was any—which
lay at the root of the universal fear of witches in old times. Whether
the persons accused of this offence really did imagine that they were
possessed of unusual power of any kind; or whether they had the will at
least, if not the power, of doing mischief to their neighbours; or
whether all the confessions, of which there are so many, were extorted
by the mere cruelty of the witch-finders—these are questions which are
not, I fancy, yet solved. And the present narrative gives me pause. I
cannot altogether sweep it away as mere invention. The reader must
judge for himself.

Castringham contributed a victim to the _auto-da-fé_. Mrs Mothersole
was her name, and she differed from the ordinary run of village witches
only in being rather better off and in a more influential position.
Efforts were made to save her by several reputable farmers of the
parish. They did their best to testify to her character, and showed
considerable anxiety as to the verdict of the jury.

But what seems to have been fatal to the woman was the evidence of the
then proprietor of Castringham Hall—Sir Matthew Fell. He deposed to
having watched her on three different occasions from his window, at the
full of the moon, gathering sprigs “from the ash-tree near my house”.
She had climbed into the branches, clad only in her shift, and was
cutting off small twigs with a peculiarly curved knife, and as she did
so she seemed to be talking to herself. On each occasion Sir Matthew
had done his best to capture the woman, but she had always taken alarm
at some accidental noise he had made, and all he could see when he got
down to the garden was a hare running across the path in the direction
of the village.

On the third night he had been at the pains to follow at his best
speed, and had gone straight to Mrs Mothersole’s house; but he had had
to wait a quarter of an hour battering at her door, and then she had
come out very cross, and apparently very sleepy, as if just out of bed;
and he had no good explanation to offer of his visit.

Mainly on this evidence, though there was much more of a less striking
and unusual kind from other parishioners, Mrs Mothersole was found
guilty and condemned to die. She was hanged a week after the trial,
with five or six more unhappy creatures, at Bury St Edmunds.

Sir Matthew Fell, then Deputy-Sheriff, was present at the execution. It
was a damp, drizzly March morning when the cart made its way up the
rough grass hill outside Northgate, where the gallows stood. The other
victims were apathetic or broken down with misery; but Mrs Mothersole
was, as in life so in death, of a very different temper. Her “poysonous
Rage”, as a reporter of the time puts it, “did so work upon the
Bystanders—yea, even upon the Hangman—that it was constantly affirmed
of all that saw her that she presented the living Aspect of a mad
Divell. Yet she offer’d no Resistance to the Officers of the Law; onely
she looked upon those that laid Hands upon her with so direfull and
venomous an Aspect that—as one of them afterwards assured me—the meer
Thought of it preyed inwardly upon his Mind for six Months after.”

However, all that she is reported to have said was the seemingly
meaningless words: “There will be guests at the Hall.” Which she
repeated more than once in an undertone.

Sir Matthew Fell was not unimpressed by the bearing of the woman. He
had some talk upon the matter with the Vicar of his parish, with whom
he travelled home after the assize business was over. His evidence at
the trial had not been very willingly given; he was not specially
infected with the witch-finding mania, but he declared, then and
afterwards, that he could not give any other account of the matter than
that he had given, and that he could not possibly have been mistaken as
to what he saw. The whole transaction had been repugnant to him, for he
was a man who liked to be on pleasant terms with those about him; but
he saw a duty to be done in this business, and he had done it. That
seems to have been the gist of his sentiments, and the Vicar applauded
it, as any reasonable man must have done.

A few weeks after, when the moon of May was at the full, Vicar and
Squire met again in the park, and walked to the Hall together. Lady
Fell was with her mother, who was dangerously ill, and Sir Matthew was
alone at home; so the Vicar, Mr Crome, was easily persuaded to take a
late supper at the Hall.

Sir Matthew was not very good company this evening. The talk ran
chiefly on family and parish matters, and, as luck would have it, Sir
Matthew made a memorandum in writing of certain wishes or intentions of
his regarding his estates, which afterwards proved exceedingly useful.

When Mr Crome thought of starting for home, about half past nine
o’clock, Sir Matthew and he took a preliminary turn on the gravelled
walk at the back of the house. The only incident that struck Mr Crome
was this: they were in sight of the ash-tree which I described as
growing near the windows of the building, when Sir Matthew stopped and
said:

“What is that that runs up and down the stem of the ash? It is never a
squirrel? They will all be in their nests by now.”

The Vicar looked and saw the moving creature, but he could make nothing
of its colour in the moonlight. The sharp outline, however, seen for an
instant, was imprinted on his brain, and he could have sworn, he said,
though it sounded foolish, that, squirrel or not, it had more than four
legs.

Still, not much was to be made of the momentary vision, and the two men
parted. They may have met since then, but it was not for a score of
years.

Next day Sir Matthew Fell was not downstairs at six in the morning, as
was his custom, nor at seven, nor yet at eight. Hereupon the servants
went and knocked at his chamber door. I need not prolong the
description of their anxious listenings and renewed batterings on the
panels. The door was opened at last from the outside, and they found
their master dead and black. So much you have guessed. That there were
any marks of violence did not at the moment appear; but the window was
open.

One of the men went to fetch the parson, and then by his directions
rode on to give notice to the coroner. Mr Crome himself went as quick
as he might to the Hall, and was shown to the room where the dead man
lay. He has left some notes among his papers which show how genuine a
respect and sorrow was felt for Sir Matthew, and there is also this
passage, which I transcribe for the sake of the light it throws upon
the course of events, and also upon the common beliefs of the time:

“There was not any the least Trace of an Entrance having been forc’d to
the Chamber: but the Casement stood open, as my poor Friend would
always have it in this Season. He had his Evening Drink of small Ale in
a silver vessel of about a pint measure, and tonight had not drunk it
out. This Drink was examined by the Physician from Bury, a Mr Hodgkins,
who could not, however, as he afterwards declar’d upon his Oath, before
the Coroner’s quest, discover that any matter of a venomous kind was
present in it. For, as was natural, in the great Swelling and Blackness
of the Corpse, there was talk made among the Neighbours of Poyson. The
Body was very much Disorder’d as it laid in the Bed, being twisted
after so extream a sort as gave too probable Conjecture that my worthy
Friend and Patron had expir’d in great Pain and Agony. And what is as
yet unexplain’d, and to myself the Argument of some Horrid and Artfull
Designe in the Perpetrators of this Barbarous Murther, was this, that
the Women which were entrusted with the laying-out of the Corpse and
washing it, being both sad Persons and very well Respected in their
Mournfull Profession, came to me in a great Pain and Distress both of
Mind and Body, saying, what was indeed confirmed upon the first View,
that they had no sooner touch’d the Breast of the Corpse with their
naked Hands than they were sensible of a more than ordinary violent
Smart and Acheing in their Palms, which, with their whole Forearms, in
no long time swell’d so immoderately, the Pain still continuing, that,
as afterwards proved, during many weeks they were forc’d to lay by the
exercise of their Calling; and yet no mark seen on the Skin.

“Upon hearing this, I sent for the Physician, who was still in the
House, and we made as carefull a Proof as we were able by the Help of a
small Magnifying Lens of Crystal of the condition of the Skinn on this
Part of the Body: but could not detect with the Instrument we had any
Matter of Importance beyond a couple of small Punctures or Pricks,
which we then concluded were the Spotts by which the Poyson might be
introduced, remembering that Ring of _Pope Borgia_, with other known
Specimens of the Horrid Art of the Italian Poysoners of the last age.

“So much is to be said of the Symptoms seen on the Corpse. As to what I
am to add, it is meerly my own Experiment, and to be left to Posterity
to judge whether there be anything of Value therein. There was on the
Table by the Beddside a Bible of the small size, in which my
Friend—punctuall as in Matters of less Moment, so in this more weighty
one—used nightly, and upon his First Rising, to read a sett Portion.
And I taking it up—not without a Tear duly paid to him wich from the
Study of this poorer Adumbration was now pass’d to the contemplation of
its great Originall—it came into my Thoughts, as at such moments of
Helplessness we are prone to catch at any the least Glimmer that makes
promise of Light, to make trial of that old and by many accounted
Superstitious Practice of drawing the _Sortes;_ of which a Principall
Instance, in the case of his late Sacred Majesty the Blessed Martyr
King _Charles_ and my Lord _Falkland_, was now much talked of. I must
needs admit that by my Trial not much Assistance was afforded me: yet,
as the Cause and Origin of these Dreadfull Events may hereafter be
search’d out, I set down the Results, in the case it may be found that
they pointed the true Quarter of the Mischief to a quicker Intelligence
than my own.

“I made, then, three trials, opening the Book and placing my Finger
upon certain Words: which gave in the first these words, from Luke
xiii. 7, _Cut it down_; in the second, Isaiah xiii. 20, _It shall never
be inhabited_; and upon the third Experiment, Job xxxix. 30, _Her young
ones also suck up blood_.”

This is all that need be quoted from Mr Crome’s papers. Sir Matthew
Fell was duly coffined and laid into the earth, and his funeral sermon,
preached by Mr Crome on the following Sunday, has been printed under
the title of “The Unsearchable Way; or, England’s Danger and the
Malicious Dealings of Antichrist”, it being the Vicar’s view, as well
as that most commonly held in the neighbourhood, that the Squire was
the victim of a recrudescence of the Popish Plot.

His son, Sir Matthew the second, succeeded to the title and estates.
And so ends the first act of the Castringham tragedy. It is to be
mentioned, though the fact is not surprising, that the new Baronet did
not occupy the room in which his father had died. Nor, indeed, was it
slept in by anyone but an occasional visitor during the whole of his
occupation. He died in 1735, and I do not find that anything particular
marked his reign, save a curiously constant mortality among his cattle
and live-stock in general, which showed a tendency to increase slightly
as time went on.

Those who are interested in the details will find a statistical account
in a letter to the _Gentleman’s Magazine_ of 1772, which draws the
facts from the Baronet’s own papers. He put an end to it at last by a
very simple expedient, that of shutting up all his beasts in sheds at
night, and keeping no sheep in his park. For he had noticed that
nothing was ever attacked that spent the night indoors. After that the
disorder confined itself to wild birds, and beasts of chase. But as we
have no good account of the symptoms, and as all-night watching was
quite unproductive of any clue, I do not dwell on what the Suffolk
farmers called the “Castringham sickness”.

The second Sir Matthew died in 1735, as I said, and was duly succeeded
by his son, Sir Richard. It was in his time that the great family pew
was built out on the north side of the parish church. So large were the
Squire’s ideas that several of the graves on that unhallowed side of
the building had to be disturbed to satisfy his requirements. Among
them was that of Mrs Mothersole, the position of which was accurately
known, thanks to a note on a plan of the church and yard, both made by
Mr Crome.

A certain amount of interest was excited in the village when it was
known that the famous witch, who was still remembered by a few, was to
be exhumed. And the feeling of surprise, and indeed disquiet, was very
strong when it was found that, though her coffin was fairly sound and
unbroken, there was no trace whatever inside it of body, bones, or
dust. Indeed, it is a curious phenomenon, for at the time of her
burying no such things were dreamt of as resurrection-men, and it is
difficult to conceive any rational motive for stealing a body otherwise
than for the uses of the dissecting-room.

The incident revived for a time all the stories of witch-trials and of
the exploits of the witches, dormant for forty years, and Sir Richard’s
orders that the coffin should be burnt were thought by a good many to
be rather foolhardy, though they were duly carried out.

Sir Richard was a pestilent innovator, it is certain. Before his time
the Hall had been a fine block of the mellowest red brick; but Sir
Richard had travelled in Italy and become infected with the Italian
taste, and, having more money than his predecessors, he determined to
leave an Italian palace where he had found an English house. So stucco
and ashlar masked the brick; some indifferent Roman marbles were
planted about in the entrance-hall and gardens; a reproduction of the
Sibyl’s temple at Tivoli was erected on the opposite bank of the mere;
and Castringham took on an entirely new, and, I must say, a less
engaging, aspect. But it was much admired, and served as a model to a
good many of the neighbouring gentry in after-years.

One morning (it was in 1754) Sir Richard woke after a night of
discomfort. It had been windy, and his chimney had smoked persistently,
and yet it was so cold that he must keep up a fire. Also something had
so rattled about the window that no man could get a moment’s peace.
Further, there was 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.

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 this speech,
“might I have the favour of a moment’s interview?”

Sir Richard turned round and saw a man in black in the doorway, who
bowed.

“I must ask your indulgence for this intrusion, Sir Richard. You will,
perhaps, hardly remember me. My name is William Crome, and my
grandfather was Vicar here in your grandfather’s time.”

“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 of 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 the 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 subsequently 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
Biblicæ_ 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 the arrival of a
collection which Sir Richard had made in 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 the 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. 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 the half-darkness, 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
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 Kentfield 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 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 a 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 me more
curious, at the 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.”




NUMBER 13


Among the towns of Jutland, Viborg justly holds a high place. It is the
seat of a bishopric; it has a handsome but almost entirely new
cathedral, a charming garden, a lake of great beauty, and many storks.
Near it is Hald, accounted one of the prettiest things in Denmark; and
hard by is Finderup, where Marsk Stig murdered King Erik Glipping on St
Cecilia’s Day, in the year 1286. Fifty-six blows of square-headed iron
maces were traced on Erik’s skull when his tomb was opened in the
seventeenth century. But I am not writing a guide-book.

There are good hotels in Viborg—Preisler’s and the Phœnix are all that
can be desired. But my cousin, whose experiences I have to tell you
now, went to the Golden Lion the first time that he visited Viborg. He
has not been there since, and the following pages will, perhaps,
explain the reason of his abstention.

The Golden Lion is one of the very few houses in the town that were not
destroyed in the great fire of 1726, which practically demolished the
cathedral, the Sognekirke, the Raadhuus, and so much else that was old
and interesting. It is a great red-brick house—that is, the front is of
brick, with corbie steps on the gables and a text over the door; but
the courtyard into which the omnibus drives is of black and white wood
and plaster.

The sun was declining in the heavens when my cousin walked up to the
door, and the light smote full upon the imposing façade of the house.
He was delighted with the old-fashioned aspect of the place, and
promised himself a thoroughly satisfactory and amusing stay in an inn
so typical of old Jutland.

It was not business in the ordinary sense of the word that had brought
Mr Anderson to Viborg. He was engaged upon some researches into the
Church history of Denmark, and it had come to his knowledge that in the
Rigsarkiv of Viborg there were papers, saved from the fire, relating to
the last days of Roman Catholicism in the country. He proposed,
therefore, to spend a considerable time—perhaps as much as a fortnight
or three weeks—in examining and copying these, and he hoped that the
Golden Lion would be able to give him a room of sufficient size to
serve alike as a bedroom and a study. His wishes were explained to the
landlord, and, after a certain amount of thought, the latter suggested
that perhaps it might be the best way for the gentleman to look at one
or two of the larger rooms and pick one for himself. It seemed a good
idea.

The top floor was soon rejected as entailing too much getting upstairs
after the day’s work; the second floor contained no room of exactly the
dimensions required; but on the first floor there was a choice of two
or three rooms which would, so far as size went, suit admirably.

The landlord was strongly in favour of Number 17, but Mr Anderson
pointed out that its windows commanded only the blank wall of the next
house, and that it would be very dark in the afternoon. Either Number
12 or Number 14 would be better, for both of them looked on the street,
and the bright evening light and the pretty view would more than
compensate him for the additional amount of noise.

Eventually Number 12 was selected. Like its neighbours, it had three
windows, all on one side of the room; it was fairly high and unusually
long. There was, of course, no fireplace, but the stove was handsome
and rather old—a cast-iron erection, on the side of which was a
representation of Abraham sacrificing Isaac, and the inscription, “1
Bog Mose, Cap. 22,” above. Nothing else in the room was remarkable; the
only interesting picture was an old coloured print of the town, date
about 1820.

Supper-time was approaching, but when Anderson, refreshed by the
ordinary ablutions, descended the staircase, there were still a few
minutes before the bell rang. He devoted them to examining the list of
his fellow-lodgers. As is usual in Denmark, their names were displayed
on a large blackboard, divided into columns and lines, the numbers of
the rooms being painted in at the beginning of each line. The list was
not exciting. There was an advocate, or Sagförer, a German, and some
bagmen from Copenhagen. The one and only point which suggested any food
for thought was the absence of any Number 13 from the tale of the
rooms, and even this was a thing which Anderson had already noticed
half a dozen times in his experience of Danish hotels. He could not
help wondering whether the objection to that particular number, common
as it is, was so widespread and so strong as to make it difficult to
let a room so ticketed, and he resolved to ask the landlord if he and
his colleagues in the profession had actually met with many clients who
refused to be accommodated in the thirteenth room.

He had nothing to tell me (I am giving the story as I heard it from
him) about what passed at supper, and the evening, which was spent in
unpacking and arranging his clothes, books, and papers, was not more
eventful. Towards eleven o’clock he resolved to go to bed, but with
him, as with a good many other people nowadays, an almost necessary
preliminary to bed, if he meant to sleep, was the reading of a few
pages of print, and he now remembered that the particular book which he
had been reading in the train, and which alone would satisfy him at
that present moment, was in the pocket of his great-coat, then hanging
on a peg outside the dining-room.

To run down and secure it was the work of a moment, and, as the
passages were by no means dark, it was not difficult for him to find
his way back to his own door. So, at least, he thought; but when he
arrived there, and turned the handle, the door entirely refused to
open, and he caught the sound of a hasty movement towards it from
within. He had tried the wrong door, of course. Was his own room to the
right or to the left? He glanced at the number: it was 13. His room
would be on the left; and so it was. And not before he had been in bed
for some minutes, had read his wonted three or four pages of his book,
blown out his light, and turned over to go to sleep, did it occur to
him that, whereas on the blackboard of the hotel there had been no
Number 13, there was undoubtedly a room numbered 13 in the hotel. He
felt rather sorry he had not chosen it for his own. Perhaps he might
have done the landlord a little service by occupying it, and given him
the chance of saying that a well-born English gentleman had lived in it
for three weeks and liked it very much. But probably it was used as a
servant’s room or something of the kind. After all, it was most likely
not so large or good a room as his own. And he looked drowsily about
the room, which was fairly perceptible in the half-light from the
street-lamp. It was a curious effect, he thought. Rooms usually look
larger in a dim light than a full one, but this seemed to have
contracted in length and grown proportionately higher. Well, well!
sleep was more important than these vague ruminations—and to sleep he
went.

On the day after his arrival Anderson attacked the Rigsarkiv of Viborg.
He was, as one might expect in Denmark, kindly received, and access to
all that he wished to see was made as easy for him as possible. The
documents laid before him were far more numerous and interesting than
he had at all anticipated. Besides official papers, there was a large
bundle of correspondence relating to Bishop Jörgen Friis, the last
Roman Catholic who held the see, and in these there cropped up many
amusing and what are called “intimate” details of private life and
individual character. There was much talk of a house owned by the
Bishop, but not inhabited by him, in the town. Its tenant was
apparently somewhat of a scandal and a stumbling-block to the reforming
party. He was a disgrace, they wrote, to the city; he practised secret
and wicked arts, and had sold his soul to the enemy. It was of a piece
with the gross corruption and superstition of the Babylonish Church
that such a viper and blood-sucking _Troldmand_ should be patronized
and harboured by the Bishop. The Bishop met these reproaches boldly; he
protested his own abhorrence of all such things as secret arts, and
required his antagonists to bring the matter before the proper court—of
course, the spiritual court—and sift it to the bottom. No one could be
more ready and willing than himself to condemn Mag Nicolas Francken if
the evidence showed him to have been guilty of any of the crimes
informally alleged against him.

Anderson had not time to do more than glance at the next letter of the
Protestant leader, Rasmus Nielsen, before the record office was closed
for the day, but he gathered its general tenor, which was to the effect
that Christian men were now no longer bound by the decisions of Bishops
of Rome, and that the Bishop’s Court was not, and could not be, a fit
or competent tribunal to judge so grave and weighty a cause.

On leaving the office, Mr Anderson was accompanied by the old gentleman
who presided over it, and, as they walked, the conversation very
naturally turned to the papers of which I have just been speaking.

Herr Scavenius, the Archivist of Viborg, though very well informed as
to the general run of the documents under his charge, was not a
specialist in those of the Reformation period. He was much interested
in what Anderson had to tell him about them. He looked forward with
great pleasure, he said, to seeing the publication in which Mr Anderson
spoke of embodying their contents. “This house of the Bishop Friis,” he
added, “it is a great puzzle to me where it can have stood. I have
studied carefully the topography of old Viborg, but it is most
unlucky—of the old terrier of the Bishop’s property which was made in
1560, and of which we have the greater part in the Arkiv, just the
piece which had the list of the town property is missing. Never mind.
Perhaps I shall some day succeed to find him.”

After taking some exercise—I forget exactly how or where—Anderson went
back to the Golden Lion, his supper, his game of patience, and his bed.
On the way to his room it occurred to him that he had forgotten to talk
to the landlord about the omission of Number 13 from the hotel board,
and also that he might as well make sure that Number 13 did actually
exist before he made any reference to the matter.

The decision was not difficult to arrive at. There was the door with
its number as plain as could be, and work of some kind was evidently
going on inside it, for as he neared the door he could hear footsteps
and voices, or a voice, within. During the few seconds in which he
halted to make sure of the number, the footsteps ceased, seemingly very
near the door, and he was a little startled at hearing a quick hissing
breathing as of a person in strong excitement. He went on to his own
room, and again he was surprised to find how much smaller it seemed now
than it had when he selected it. It was a slight disappointment, but
only slight. If he found it really not large enough, he could very
easily shift to another. In the meantime he wanted something—as far as
I remember it was a pocket-handkerchief—out of his portmanteau, which
had been placed by the porter on a very inadequate trestle or stool
against the wall at the farthest end of the room from his bed. Here was
a very curious thing: the portmanteau was not to be seen. It had been
moved by officious servants; doubtless the contents had been put in the
wardrobe. No, none of them were there. This was vexatious. The idea of
a theft he dismissed at once. Such things rarely happen in Denmark, but
some piece of stupidity had certainly been performed (which is not so
uncommon), and the _stuepige_ must be severely spoken to. Whatever it
was that he wanted, it was not so necessary to his comfort that he
could not wait till the morning for it, and he therefore settled not to
ring the bell and disturb the servants. He went to the window—the
right-hand window it was—and looked out on the quiet street. There was
a tall building opposite, with large spaces of dead wall; no
passers-by; a dark night; and very little to be seen of any kind.

The light was behind him, and he could see his own shadow clearly cast
on the wall opposite. Also the shadow of the bearded man in Number 11
on the left, who passed to and fro in shirtsleeves once or twice, and
was seen first brushing his hair, and later on in a nightgown. Also the
shadow of the occupant of Number 13 on the right. This might be more
interesting. Number 13 was, like himself, leaning on his elbows on the
window-sill looking out into the street. He seemed to be a tall thin
man—or was it by any chance a woman?—at least, it was someone who
covered his or her head with some kind of drapery before going to bed,
and, he thought, must be possessed of a red lamp-shade—and the lamp
must be flickering very much. There was a distinct playing up and down
of a dull red light on the opposite wall. He craned out a little to see
if he could make any more of the figure, but beyond a fold of some
light, perhaps white, material on the window-sill he could see nothing.

Now came a distant step in the street, and its approach seemed to
recall Number 13 to a sense of his exposed position, for very swiftly
and suddenly he swept aside from the window, and his red light went
out. Anderson, who had been smoking a cigarette, laid the end of it on
the window-sill and went to bed.

Next morning he was woken by the _stuepige_ with hot water, etc. He
roused himself, and after thinking out the correct Danish words, said
as distinctly as he could:

“You must not move my portmanteau. Where is it?”

As is not uncommon, the maid laughed, and went away without making any
distinct answer.

Anderson, rather irritated, sat up in bed, intending to call her back,
but he remained sitting up, staring straight in front of him. There was
his portmanteau on its trestle, exactly where he had seen the porter
put it when he first arrived. This was a rude shock for a man who
prided himself on his accuracy of observation. How it could possibly
have escaped him the night before he did not pretend to understand; at
any rate, there it was now.

The daylight showed more than the portmanteau; it let the true
proportions of the room with its three windows appear, and satisfied
its tenant that his choice after all had not been a bad one. When he
was almost dressed he walked to the middle one of the three windows to
look out at the weather. Another shock awaited him. Strangely
unobservant he must have been last night. He could have sworn ten times
over that he had been smoking at the right-hand window the last thing
before he went to bed, and here was his cigarette-end on the sill of
the middle window.

He started to go down to breakfast. Rather late, but Number 13 was
later: here were his boots still outside his door—a gentleman’s boots.
So then Number 13 was a man, not a woman. Just then he caught sight of
the number on the door. It was 14. He thought he must have passed
Number 13 without noticing it. Three stupid mistakes in twelve hours
were too much for a methodical, accurate-minded man, so he turned back
to make sure. The next number to 14 was number 12, his own room. There
was no Number 13 at all.

After some minutes devoted to a careful consideration of everything he
had had to eat and drink during the last twenty-four hours, Anderson
decided to give the question up. If his eyes or his brain were giving
way he would have plenty of opportunities for ascertaining that fact;
if not, then he was evidently being treated to a very interesting
experience. In either case the development of events would certainly be
worth watching.

During the day he continued his examination of the episcopal
correspondence which I have already summarized. To his disappointment,
it was incomplete. Only one other letter could be found which referred
to the affair of Mag Nicolas Francken. It was from the Bishop Jörgen
Friis to Rasmus Nielsen. He said:

“Although we are not in the least degree inclined to assent to your
judgement concerning our court, and shall be prepared if need be to
withstand you to the uttermost in that behalf, yet forasmuch as our
trusty and well-beloved Mag Nicolas Francken, against whom you have
dared to allege certain false and malicious charges, hath been suddenly
removed from among us, it is apparent that the question for this time
falls. But forasmuch as you further allege that the Apostle and
Evangelist St John in his heavenly Apocalypse describes the Holy Roman
Church under the guise and symbol of the Scarlet Woman, be it known to
you,” etc.

Search as he might, Anderson could find no sequel to this letter nor
any clue to the cause or manner of the “removal” of the _casus belli_.
He could only suppose that Francken had died suddenly; and as there
were only two days between the date of Nielsen’s last letter—when
Francken was evidently still in being—and that of the Bishop’s letter,
the death must have been completely unexpected.

In the afternoon he paid a short visit to Hald, and took his tea at
Baekkelund; nor could he notice, though he was in a somewhat nervous
frame of mind, that there was any indication of such a failure of eye
or brain as his experiences of the morning had led him to fear.

At supper he found himself next to the landlord.

“What,” he asked him, after some indifferent conversation, “is the
reason why in most of the hotels one visits in this country the number
thirteen is left out of the list of rooms? I see you have none here.”

The landlord seemed amused.

“To think that you should have noticed a thing like that! I’ve thought
about it once or twice myself, to tell the truth. An educated man, I’ve
said, has no business with these superstitious notions. I was brought
up myself here in the high school of Viborg, and our old master was
always a man to set his face against anything of that kind. He’s been
dead now this many years—a fine upstanding man he was, and ready with
his hands as well as his head. I recollect us boys, one snowy day—”

Here he plunged into reminiscence.

“Then you don’t think there is any particular objection to having a
Number 13?” said Anderson.

“Ah! to be sure. Well, you understand, I was brought up to the business
by my poor old father. He kept an hotel in Aarhuus first, and then,
when we were born, he moved to Viborg here, which was his native place,
and had the Phœnix here until he died. That was in 1876. Then I started
business in Silkeborg, and only the year before last I moved into this
house.”

Then followed more details as to the state of the house and business
when first taken over.

“And when you came here, was there a Number 13?”

“No, no. I was going to tell you about that. You see, in a place like
this, the commercial class—the travellers—are what we have to provide
for in general. And put them in Number 13? Why, they’d as soon sleep in
the street, or sooner. As far as I’m concerned myself, it wouldn’t make
a penny difference to me what the number of my room was, and so I’ve
often said to them; but they stick to it that it brings them bad luck.
Quantities of stories they have among them of men that have slept in a
Number 13 and never been the same again, or lost their best customers,
or—one thing and another,” said the landlord, after searching for a
more graphic phrase.

“Then, what do you use your Number 13 for?” said Anderson, conscious as
he said the words of a curious anxiety quite disproportionate to the
importance of the question.

“My Number 13? Why, don’t I tell you that there isn’t such a thing in
the house? I thought you might have noticed that. If there was it would
be next door to your own room.”

“Well, yes; only I happened to think—that is, I fancied last night that
I had seen a door numbered thirteen in that passage; and, really, I am
almost certain I must have been right, for I saw it the night before as
well.”

Of course, Herr Kristensen laughed this notion to scorn, as Anderson
had expected, and emphasized with much iteration the fact that no
Number 13 existed or had existed before him in that hotel.

Anderson was in some ways relieved by his certainty, but still puzzled,
and he began to think that the best way to make sure whether he had
indeed been subject to an illusion or not was to invite the landlord to
his room to smoke a cigar later on in the evening. Some photographs of
English towns which he had with him formed a sufficiently good excuse.

Herr Kristensen was flattered by the invitation, and most willingly
accepted it. At about ten o’clock he was to make his appearance, but
before that Anderson had some letters to write, and retired for the
purpose of writing them. He almost blushed to himself at confessing it,
but he could not deny that it was the fact that he was becoming quite
nervous about the question of the existence of Number 13; so much so
that he approached his room by way of Number 11, in order that he might
not be obliged to pass the door, or the place where the door ought to
be. He looked quickly and suspiciously about the room when he entered
it, but there was nothing, beyond that indefinable air of being smaller
than usual, to warrant any misgivings. There was no question of the
presence or absence of his portmanteau tonight. He had himself emptied
it of its contents and lodged it under his bed. With a certain effort
he dismissed the thought of Number 13 from his mind, and sat down to
his writing.

His neighbours were quiet enough. Occasionally a door opened in the
passage and a pair of boots was thrown out, or a bagman walked past
humming to himself, and outside, from time to time, a cart thundered
over the atrocious cobble-stones, or a quick step hurried along the
flags.

Anderson finished his letters, ordered in whisky and soda, and then
went to the window and studied the dead wall opposite and the shadows
upon it.

As far as he could remember, Number 14 had been occupied by the lawyer,
a staid man, who said little at meals, being generally engaged in
studying a small bundle of papers beside his plate. Apparently,
however, he was in the habit of giving vent to his animal spirits when
alone. Why else should he be dancing? The shadow from the next room
evidently showed that he was. Again and again his thin form crossed the
window, his arms waved, and a gaunt leg was kicked up with surprising
agility. He seemed to be barefooted, and the floor must be well laid,
for no sound betrayed his movements. Sagförer Herr Anders Jensen,
dancing at ten o’clock at night in a hotel bedroom, seemed a fitting
subject for a historical painting in the grand style; and Anderson’s
thoughts, like those of Emily in the “Mysteries of Udolpho”, began to
“arrange themselves in the following lines”:

“When I return to my hotel,
    At ten o’clock p.m.,
The waiters think I am unwell;
    I do not care for them.
But when I’ve locked my chamber door,
    And put my boots outside,
I dance all night upon the floor.
And even if my neighbours swore,
I’d go on dancing all the more,
For I’m acquainted with the law,
And in despite of all their jaw,
Their protests I deride.”

Had not the landlord at this moment knocked at the door, it is probable
that quite a long poem might have been laid before the reader. To judge
from his look of surprise when he found himself in the room, Herr
Kristensen was struck, as Anderson had been, by something unusual in
its aspect. But he made no remark. Anderson’s photographs interested
him mightily, and formed the text of many autobiographical discourses.
Nor is it quite clear how the conversation could have been diverted
into the desired channel of Number 13, had not the lawyer at this
moment begun to sing, and to sing in a manner which could leave no
doubt in anyone’s mind that he was either exceedingly drunk or raving
mad. It was a high, thin voice that they heard, and it seemed dry, as
if from long disuse. Of words or tune there was no question. It went
sailing up to a surprising height, and was carried down with a
despairing moan as of a winter wind in a hollow chimney, or an organ
whose wind fails suddenly. It was a really horrible sound, and Anderson
felt that if he had been alone he must have fled for refuge and society
to some neighbour bagman’s room.

The landlord sat open-mouthed.

“I don’t understand it,” he said at last, wiping his forehead. “It is
dreadful. I have heard it once before, but I made sure it was a cat.”

“Is he mad?” said Anderson.

“He must be; and what a sad thing! Such a good customer, too, and so
successful in his business, by what I hear, and a young family to bring
up.”

Just then came an impatient knock at the door, and the knocker entered,
without waiting to be asked. It was the lawyer, in _déshabille_ and
very rough-haired; and very angry he looked.

“I beg pardon, sir,” he said, “but I should be much obliged if you
would kindly desist—”

Here he stopped, for it was evident that neither of the persons before
him was responsible for the disturbance; and after a moment’s lull it
swelled forth again more wildly than before.

“But what in the name of Heaven does it mean?” broke out the lawyer.
“Where is it? Who is it? Am I going out of my mind?”

“Surely, Herr Jensen, it comes from your room next door? Isn’t there a
cat or something stuck in the chimney?”

This was the best that occurred to Anderson to say, and he realized its
futility as he spoke; but anything was better than to stand and listen
to that horrible voice, and look at the broad, white face of the
landlord, all perspiring and quivering as he clutched the arms of his
chair.

“Impossible,” said the lawyer, “impossible. There is no chimney. I came
here because I was convinced the noise was going on here. It was
certainly in the next room to mine.”

“Was there no door between yours and mine?” said Anderson eagerly.

“No, sir,” said Herr Jensen, rather sharply. “At least, not this
morning.”

“Ah!” said Anderson. “Nor tonight?”

“I am not sure,” said the lawyer with some hesitation.

Suddenly the crying or singing voice in the next room died away, and
the singer was heard seemingly to laugh to himself in a crooning
manner. The three men actually shivered at the sound. Then there was a
silence.

“Come,” said the lawyer, “what have you to say, Herr Kristensen? What
does this mean?”

“Good Heaven!” said Kristensen. “How should I tell! I know no more than
you, gentlemen. I pray I may never hear such a noise again.”

“So do I,” said Herr Jensen, and he added something under his breath.
Anderson thought it sounded like the last words of the Psalter, “_omnis
spiritus laudet Dominum_,” but he could not be sure.

“But we must do something,” said Anderson—“the three of us. Shall we go
and investigate in the next room?”

“But that is Herr Jensen’s room,” wailed the landlord. “It is no use;
he has come from there himself.”

“I am not so sure,” said Jensen. “I think this gentleman is right: we
must go and see.”

The only weapons of defence that could be mustered on the spot were a
stick and umbrella. The expedition went out into the passage, not
without quakings. There was a deadly quiet outside, but a light shone
from under the next door. Anderson and Jensen approached it. The latter
turned the handle, and gave a sudden vigorous push. No use. The door
stood fast.

“Herr Kristensen,” said Jensen, “will you go and fetch the strongest
servant you have in the place? We must see this through.”

The landlord nodded, and hurried off, glad to be away from the scene of
action. Jensen and Anderson remained outside looking at the door.

“It _is_ Number 13, you see,” said the latter.

“Yes; there is your door, and there is mine,” said Jensen.

“My room has three windows in the daytime,” said Anderson, with
difficulty suppressing a nervous laugh.

“By George, so has mine!” said the lawyer, turning and looking at
Anderson. His back was now to the door. In that moment the door opened,
and an arm came out and clawed at his shoulder. It was clad in ragged,
yellowish linen, and the bare skin, where it could be seen, had long
grey hair upon it.

Anderson was just in time to pull Jensen out of its reach with a cry of
disgust and fright, when the door shut again, and a low laugh was
heard.

Jensen had seen nothing, but when Anderson hurriedly told him what a
risk he had run, he fell into a great state of agitation, and suggested
that they should retire from the enterprise and lock themselves up in
one or other of their rooms.

However, while he was developing this plan, the landlord and two
able-bodied men arrived on the scene, all looking rather serious and
alarmed. Jensen met them with a torrent of description and explanation,
which did not at all tend to encourage them for the fray.

The men dropped the crowbars they had brought, and said flatly that
they were not going to risk their throats in that devil’s den. The
landlord was miserably nervous and undecided, conscious that if the
danger were not faced his hotel was ruined, and very loth to face it
himself. Luckily Anderson hit upon a way of rallying the demoralized
force.

“Is this,” he said, “the Danish courage I have heard so much of? It
isn’t a German in there, and if it was, we are five to one.”

The two servants and Jensen were stung into action by this, and made a
dash at the door.

“Stop!” said Anderson. “Don’t lose your heads. You stay out here with
the light, landlord, and one of you two men break in the door, and
don’t go in when it gives way.”

The men nodded, and the younger stepped forward, raised his crowbar,
and dealt a tremendous blow on the upper panel. The result was not in
the least what any of them anticipated. There was no cracking or
rending of wood—only a dull sound, as if the solid wall had been
struck. The man dropped his tool with a shout, and began rubbing his
elbow. His cry drew their eyes upon him for a moment; then Anderson
looked at the door again. It was gone; the plaster wall of the passage
stared him in the face, with a considerable gash in it where the
crowbar had struck it. Number 13 had passed out of existence.

For a brief space they stood perfectly still, gazing at the blank wall.
An early cock in the yard beneath was heard to crow; and as Anderson
glanced in the direction of the sound, he saw through the window at the
end of the long passage that the eastern sky was paling to the dawn.

“Perhaps,” said the landlord, with hesitation, “you gentlemen would
like another room for tonight—a double-bedded one?”

Neither Jensen nor Anderson was averse to the suggestion. They felt
inclined to hunt in couples after their late experience. It was found
convenient, when each of them went to his room to collect the articles
he wanted for the night, that the other should go with him and hold the
candle. They noticed that both Number 12 and Number 14 had _three_
windows.

Next morning the same party reassembled in Number 12. The landlord was
naturally anxious to avoid engaging outside help, and yet it was
imperative that the mystery attaching to that part of the house should
be cleared up. Accordingly the two servants had been induced to take
upon them the function of carpenters. The furniture was cleared away,
and, at the cost of a good many irretrievably damaged planks, that
portion of the floor was taken up which lay nearest to Number 14.

You will naturally suppose that a skeleton—say that of Mag Nicolas
Francken—was discovered. That was not so. What they did find lying
between the beams which supported the flooring was a small copper box.
In it was a neatly-folded vellum document, with about twenty lines of
writing. Both Anderson and Jensen (who proved to be something of a
palæographer) were much excited by this discovery, which promised to
afford the key to these extraordinary phenomena.

I possess a copy of an astrological work which I have never read. It
has, by way of frontispiece, a woodcut by Hans Sebald Beham,
representing a number of sages seated round a table. This detail may
enable connoisseurs to identify the book. I cannot myself recollect its
title, and it is not at this moment within reach; but the fly-leaves of
it are covered with writing, and, during the ten years in which I have
owned the volume, I have not been able to determine which way up this
writing ought to be read, much less in what language it is. Not
dissimilar was the position of Anderson and Jensen after the protracted
examination to which they submitted the document in the copper box.

After two days’ contemplation of it, Jensen, who was the bolder spirit
of the two, hazarded the conjecture that the language was either Latin
or Old Danish.

Anderson ventured upon no surmises, and was very willing to surrender
the box and the parchment to the Historical Society of Viborg to be
placed in their museum.

I had the whole story from him a few months later, as we sat in a wood
near Upsala, after a visit to the library there, where we—or, rather,
I—had laughed over the contract by which Daniel Salthenius (in later
life Professor of Hebrew at Königsberg) sold himself to Satan. Anderson
was not really amused.

“Young idiot!” he said, meaning Salthenius, who was only an
undergraduate when he committed that indiscretion, “how did he know
what company he was courting?”

And when I suggested the usual considerations he only grunted. That
same afternoon he told me what you have read; but he refused to draw
any inferences from it, and to assent to any that I drew for him.




COUNT MAGNUS


By what means the papers out of which I have made a connected story
came into my hands is the last point which the reader will learn from
these pages. But it is necessary to prefix to my extracts from them a
statement of the form in which I possess them.

They consist, then, partly of a series of collections for a book of
travels, such a volume as was a common product of the forties and
fifties. Horace Marryat’s _Journal of a Residence in Jutland and the
Danish Isles_ is a fair specimen of the class to which I allude. These
books usually treated of some unknown district on the Continent. They
were illustrated with woodcuts or steel plates. They gave details of
hotel accommodation, and of means of communication, such as we now
expect to find in any well-regulated guide-book, and they dealt largely
in reported conversations with intelligent foreigners, racy innkeepers,
and garrulous peasants. In a word, they were chatty.

Begun with the idea of furnishing material for such a book, my papers
as they progressed assumed the character of a record of one single
personal experience, and this record was continued up to the very eve,
almost, of its termination.

The writer was a Mr Wraxall. For my knowledge of him I have to depend
entirely on the evidence his writings afford, and from these I deduce
that he was a man past middle age, possessed of some private means, and
very much alone in the world. He had, it seems, no settled abode in
England, but was a denizen of hotels and boarding-houses. It is
probable that he entertained the idea of settling down at some future
time which never came; and I think it also likely that the Pantechnicon
fire in the early seventies must have destroyed a great deal that would
have thrown light on his antecedents, for he refers once or twice to
property of his that was warehoused at that establishment.

It is further apparent that Mr Wraxall had published a book, and that
it treated of a holiday he had once taken in Brittany. More than this I
cannot say about his work, because a diligent search in bibliographical
works has convinced me that it must have appeared either anonymously or
under a pseudonym.

As to his character, it is not difficult to form some superficial
opinion. He must have been an intelligent and cultivated man. It seems
that he was near being a Fellow of his college at Oxford—Brasenose, as
I judge from the Calendar. His besetting fault was pretty clearly that
of over-inquisitiveness, possibly a good fault in a traveller,
certainly a fault for which this traveller paid dearly enough in the
end.

On what proved to be his last expedition, he was plotting another book.
Scandinavia, a region not widely known to Englishmen forty years ago,
had struck him as an interesting field. He must have alighted on some
old books of Swedish history or memoirs, and the idea had struck him
that there was room for a book descriptive of travel in Sweden,
interspersed with episodes from the history of some of the great
Swedish families. He procured letters of introduction, therefore, to
some persons of quality in Sweden, and set out thither in the early
summer of 1863.

Of his travels in the North there is no need to speak, nor of his
residence of some weeks in Stockholm. I need only mention that some
_savant_ resident there put him on the track of an important collection
of family papers belonging to the proprietors of an ancient manor-house
in Vestergothland, and obtained for him permission to examine them.

The manor-house, or _herrgård_, in question is to be called Råbäck
(pronounced something like Roebeck), though that is not its name. It is
one of the best buildings of its kind in all the country, and the
picture of it in Dahlenberg’s _Suecia antiqua et moderna_, engraved in
1694, shows it very much as the tourist may see it today. It was built
soon after 1600, and is, roughly speaking, very much like an English
house of that period in respect of material—red-brick with stone
facings—and style. The man who built it was a scion of the great house
of De la Gardie, and his descendants possess it still. De la Gardie is
the name by which I will designate them when mention of them becomes
necessary.

They received Mr Wraxall with great kindness and courtesy, and pressed
him to stay in the house as long as his researches lasted. But,
preferring to be independent, and mistrusting his powers of conversing
in Swedish, he settled himself at the village inn, which turned out
quite sufficiently comfortable, at any rate during the summer months.
This arrangement would entail a short walk daily to and from the
manor-house of something under a mile. The house itself stood in a
park, and was protected—we should say grown up—with large old timber.
Near it you found the walled garden, and then entered a close wood
fringing one of the small lakes with which the whole country is pitted.
Then came the wall of the demesne, and you climbed a steep knoll—a knob
of rock lightly covered with soil—and on the top of this stood the
church, fenced in with tall dark trees. It was a curious building to
English eyes. The nave and aisles were low, and filled with pews and
galleries. In the western gallery stood the handsome old organ, gaily
painted, and with silver pipes. The ceiling was flat, and had been
adorned by a seventeenth-century artist with a strange and hideous
“Last Judgement”, full of lurid flames, falling cities, burning ships,
crying souls, and brown and smiling demons. Handsome brass coronae hung
from the roof; the pulpit was like a doll’s-house covered with little
painted wooden cherubs and saints; a stand with three hour-glasses was
hinged to the preacher’s desk. Such sights as these may be seen in many
a church in Sweden now, but what distinguished this one was an addition
to the original building. At the eastern end of the north aisle the
builder of the manor-house had erected a mausoleum for himself and his
family. It was a largish eight-sided building, lighted by a series of
oval windows, and it had a domed roof, topped by a kind of
pumpkin-shaped object rising into a spire, a form in which Swedish
architects greatly delighted. The roof was of copper externally, and
was painted black, while the walls, in common with those of the church,
were staringly white. To this mausoleum there was no access from the
church. It had a portal and steps of its own on the northern side.

Past the churchyard the path to the village goes, and not more than
three or four minutes bring you to the inn door.

On the first day of his stay at Råbäck Mr Wraxall found the church door
open, and made those notes of the interior which I have epitomized.
Into the mausoleum, however, he could not make his way. He could by
looking through the keyhole just descry that there were fine marble
effigies and sarcophagi of copper, and a wealth of armorial ornament,
which made him very anxious to spend some time in investigation.

The papers he had come to examine at the manor-house proved to be of
just the kind he wanted for his book. There were family correspondence,
journals, and account-books of the earliest owners of the estate, very
carefully kept and clearly written, full of amusing and picturesque
detail. The first De la Gardie appeared in them as a strong and capable
man. Shortly after the building of the mansion there had been a period
of distress in the district, and the peasants had risen and attacked
several châteaux and done some damage. The owner of Råbäck took a
leading part in supressing the trouble, and there was reference to
executions of ring-leaders and severe punishments inflicted with no
sparing hand.

The portrait of this Magnus de la Gardie was one of the best in the
house, and Mr Wraxall studied it with no little interest after his
day’s work. He gives no detailed description of it, but I gather that
the face impressed him rather by its power than by its beauty or
goodness; in fact, he writes that Count Magnus was an almost
phenomenally ugly man.

On this day Mr Wraxall took his supper with the family, and walked back
in the late but still bright evening.

“I must remember,” he writes, “to ask the sexton if he can let me into
the mausoleum at the church. He evidently has access to it himself, for
I saw him tonight standing on the steps, and, as I thought, locking or
unlocking the door.”

I find that early on the following day Mr Wraxall had some conversation
with his landlord. His setting it down at such length as he does
surprised me at first; but I soon realized that the papers I was
reading were, at least in their beginning, the materials for the book
he was meditating, and that it was to have been one of those
quasi-journalistic productions which admit of the introduction of an
admixture of conversational matter.

His object, he says, was to find out whether any traditions of Count
Magnus de la Gardie lingered on in the scenes of that gentleman’s
activity, and whether the popular estimate of him were favourable or
not. He found that the Count was decidedly not a favourite. If his
tenants came late to their work on the days which they owed to him as
Lord of the Manor, they were set on the wooden horse, or flogged and
branded in the manor-house yard. One or two cases there were of men who
had occupied lands which encroached on the lord’s domain, and whose
houses had been mysteriously burnt on a winter’s night, with the whole
family inside. But what seemed to dwell on the innkeeper’s mind
most—for he returned to the subject more than once—was that the Count
had been on the Black Pilgrimage, and had brought something or someone
back with him.

You will naturally inquire, as Mr Wraxall did, what the Black
Pilgrimage may have been. But your curiosity on the point must remain
unsatisfied for the time being, just as his did. The landlord was
evidently unwilling to give a full answer, or indeed any answer, on the
point, and, being called out for a moment, trotted out with obvious
alacrity, only putting his head in at the door a few minutes afterwards
to say that he was called away to Skara, and should not be back till
evening.

So Mr Wraxall had to go unsatisfied to his day’s work at the
manor-house. The papers on which he was just then engaged soon put his
thoughts into another channel, for he had to occupy himself with
glancing over the correspondence between Sophia Albertina in Stockholm
and her married cousin Ulrica Leonora at Råbäck in the years 1705-1710.
The letters were of exceptional interest from the light they threw upon
the culture of that period in Sweden, as anyone can testify who has
read the full edition of them in the publications of the Swedish
Historical Manuscripts Commission.

In the afternoon he had done with these, and after returning the boxes
in which they were kept to their places on the shelf, he proceeded,
very naturally, to take down some of the volumes nearest to them, in
order to determine which of them had best be his principal subject of
investigation next day. The shelf he had hit upon was occupied mostly
by a collection of account-books in the writing of the first Count
Magnus. But one among them was not an account-book, but a book of
alchemical and other tracts in another sixteenth-century hand. Not
being very familiar with alchemical literature, Mr Wraxall spends much
space which he might have spared in setting out the names and
beginnings of the various treatises: The book of the Phœnix, book of
the Thirty Words, book of the Toad, book of Miriam, Turba
philosophorum, and so forth; and then he announces with a good deal of
circumstance his delight at finding, on a leaf originally left blank
near the middle of the book, some writing of Count Magnus himself
headed “Liber nigræ peregrinationis”. It is true that only a few lines
were written, but there was quite enough to show that the landlord had
that morning been referring to a belief at least as old as the time of
Count Magnus, and probably shared by him. This is the English of what
was written:

“If any man desires to obtain a long life, if he would obtain a
faithful messenger and see the blood of his enemies, it is necessary
that he should first go into the city of Chorazin, and there salute the
prince….” Here there was an erasure of one word, not very thoroughly
done, so that Mr Wraxall felt pretty sure that he was right in reading
it as _aëris_ (“of the air”). But there was no more of the text copied,
only a line in Latin: _Quære reliqua hujus materiei inter secretiora_.
(See the rest of this matter among the more private things.)

It could not be denied that this threw a rather lurid light upon the
tastes and beliefs of the Count; but to Mr Wraxall, separated from him
by nearly three centuries, the thought that he might have added to his
general forcefulness alchemy, and to alchemy something like magic, only
made him a more picturesque figure; and when, after a rather prolonged
contemplation of his picture in the hall, Mr Wraxall set out on his
homeward way, his mind was full of the thought of Count Magnus. He had
no eyes for his surroundings, no perception of the evening scents of
the woods or the evening light on the lake; and when all of a sudden he
pulled up short, he was astonished to find himself already at the gate
of the churchyard, and within a few minutes of his dinner. His eyes
fell on the mausoleum.

“Ah,” he said, “Count Magnus, there you are. I should dearly like to
see you.”

“Like many solitary men,” he writes, “I have a habit of talking to
myself aloud; and, unlike some of the Greek and Latin particles, I do
not expect an answer. Certainly, and perhaps fortunately in this case,
there was neither voice nor any that regarded: only the woman who, I
suppose, was cleaning up the church, dropped some metallic object on
the floor, whose clang startled me. Count Magnus, I think, sleeps sound
enough.”

That same evening the landlord of the inn, who had heard Mr Wraxall say
that he wished to see the clerk or deacon (as he would be called in
Sweden) of the parish, introduced him to that official in the inn
parlour. A visit to the De la Gardie tomb-house was soon arranged for
the next day, and a little general conversation ensued.

Mr Wraxall, remembering that one function of Scandinavian deacons is to
teach candidates for Confirmation, thought he would refresh his own
memory on a Biblical point.

“Can you tell me,” he said, “anything about Chorazin?”

The deacon seemed startled, but readily reminded him how that village
had once been denounced.

“To be sure,” said Mr Wraxall; “it is, I suppose, quite a ruin now?”

“So I expect,” replied the deacon. “I have heard some of our old
priests say that Antichrist is to be born there; and there are tales—”

“Ah! what tales are those?” Mr Wraxall put in.

“Tales, I was going to say, which I have forgotten,” said the deacon;
and soon after that he said good night.

The landlord was now alone, and at Mr Wraxall’s mercy; and that
inquirer was not inclined to spare him.

“Herr Nielsen,” he said, “I have found out something about the Black
Pilgrimage. You may as well tell me what you know. What did the Count
bring back with him?”

Swedes are habitually slow, perhaps, in answering, or perhaps the
landlord was an exception. I am not sure; but Mr Wraxall notes that the
landlord spent at least one minute in looking at him before he said
anything at all. Then he came close up to his guest, and with a good
deal of effort he spoke:

“Mr Wraxall, I can tell you this one little tale, and no more—not any
more. You must not ask anything when I have done. In my grandfather’s
time—that is, ninety-two years ago—there were two men who said: ‘The
Count is dead; we do not care for him. We will go tonight and have a
free hunt in his wood’—the long wood on the hill that you have seen
behind Råbäck. Well, those that heard them say this, they said: ‘No, do
not go; we are sure you will meet with persons walking who should not
be walking. They should be resting, not walking.’ These men laughed.
There were no forestmen to keep the wood, because no one wished to live
there. The family were not here at the house. These men could do what
they wished.

“Very well, they go to the wood that night. My grandfather was sitting
here in this room. It was the summer, and a light night. With the
window open, he could see out to the wood, and hear.

“So he sat there, and two or three men with him, and they listened. At
first they hear nothing at all; then they hear someone—you know how far
away it is—they hear someone scream, just as if the most inside part of
his soul was twisted out of him. All of them in the room caught hold of
each other, and they sat so for three-quarters of an hour. Then they
hear someone else, only about three hundred ells off. They hear him
laugh out loud: it was not one of those two men that laughed, and,
indeed, they have all of them said that it was not any man at all.
After that they hear a great door shut.

“Then, when it was just light with the sun, they all went to the
priest. They said to him:

“‘Father, put on your gown and your ruff, and come to bury these men,
Anders Bjornsen and Hans Thorbjorn.’

“You understand that they were sure these men were dead. So they went
to the wood—my grandfather never forgot this. He said they were all
like so many dead men themselves. The priest, too, he was in a white
fear. He said when they came to him:

“‘I heard one cry in the night, and I heard one laugh afterwards. If I
cannot forget that, I shall not be able to sleep again.’

“So they went to the wood, and they found these men on the edge of the
wood. Hans Thorbjorn was standing with his back against a tree, and all
the time he was pushing with his hands—pushing something away from him
which was not there. So he was not dead. And they led him away, and
took him to the house at Nykjoping, and he died before the winter; but
he went on pushing with his hands. Also Anders Bjornsen was there; but
he was dead. And I tell you this about Anders Bjornsen, that he was
once a beautiful man, but now his face was not there, because the flesh
of it was sucked away off the bones. You understand that? My
grandfather did not forget that. And they laid him on the bier which
they brought, and they put a cloth over his head, and the priest walked
before; and they began to sing the psalm for the dead as well as they
could. So, as they were singing the end of the first verse, one fell
down, who was carrying the head of the bier, and the others looked
back, and they saw that the cloth had fallen off, and the eyes of
Anders Bjornsen were looking up, because there was nothing to close
over them. And this they could not bear. Therefore the priest laid the
cloth upon him, and sent for a spade, and they buried him in that
place.”

The next day Mr Wraxall records that the deacon called for him soon
after his breakfast, and took him to the church and mausoleum. He
noticed that the key of the latter was hung on a nail just by the
pulpit, and it occurred to him that, as the church door seemed to be
left unlocked as a rule, it would not be difficult for him to pay a
second and more private visit to the monuments if there proved to be
more of interest among them than could be digested at first. The
building, when he entered it, he found not unimposing. The monuments,
mostly large erections of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
were dignified if luxuriant, and the epitaphs and heraldry were
copious. The central space of the domed room was occupied by three
copper sarcophagi, covered with finely-engraved ornament. Two of them
had, as is commonly the case in Denmark and Sweden, a large metal
crucifix on the lid. The third, that of Count Magnus, as it appeared,
had, instead of that, a full-length effigy engraved upon it, and round
the edge were several bands of similar ornament representing various
scenes. One was a battle, with cannon belching out smoke, and walled
towns, and troops of pikemen. Another showed an execution. In a third,
among trees, was a man running at full speed, with flying hair and
outstretched hands. After him followed a strange form; it would be hard
to say whether the artist had intended it for a man, and was unable to
give the requisite similitude, or whether it was intentionally made as
monstrous as it looked. In view of the skill with which the rest of the
drawing was done, Mr Wraxall felt inclined to adopt the latter idea.
The figure was unduly short, and was for the most part muffled in a
hooded garment which swept the ground. The only part of the form which
projected from that shelter was not shaped like any hand or arm. Mr
Wraxall compares it to the tentacle of a devil-fish, and continues: “On
seeing this, I said to myself, ‘This, then, which is evidently an
allegorical representation of some kind—a fiend pursuing a hunted
soul—may be the origin of the story of Count Magnus and his mysterious
companion. Let us see how the huntsman is pictured: doubtless it will
be a demon blowing his horn.”’ But, as it turned out, there was no such
sensational figure, only the semblance of a cloaked man on a hillock,
who stood leaning on a stick, and watching the hunt with an interest
which the engraver had tried to express in his attitude.

Mr Wraxall noted the finely-worked and massive steel padlocks—three in
number—which secured the sarcophagus. One of them, he saw, was
detached, and lay on the pavement. And then, unwilling to delay the
deacon longer or to waste his own working-time, he made his way onward
to the manor-house.

“It is curious,” he notes, “how, on retracing a familiar path, one’s
thoughts engross one to the absolute exclusion of surrounding objects.
Tonight, for the second time, I had entirely failed to notice where I
was going (I had planned a private visit to the tomb-house to copy the
epitaphs), when I suddenly, as it were, awoke to consciousness, and
found myself (as before) turning in at the churchyard gate, and, I
believe, singing or chanting some such words as, ‘Are you awake, Count
Magnus? Are you asleep, Count Magnus?’ and then something more which I
have failed to recollect. It seemed to me that I must have been
behaving in this nonsensical way for some time.”

He found the key of the mausoleum where he had expected to find it, and
copied the greater part of what he wanted; in fact, he stayed until the
light began to fail him.

“I must have been wrong,” he writes, “in saying that one of the
padlocks of my Count’s sarcophagus was unfastened; I see tonight that
two are loose. I picked both up, and laid them carefully on the
window-ledge, after trying unsuccessfully to close them. The remaining
one is still firm, and, though I take it to be a spring lock, I cannot
guess how it is opened. Had I succeeded in undoing it, I am almost
afraid I should have taken the liberty of opening the sarcophagus. It
is strange, the interest I feel in the personality of this, I fear,
somewhat ferocious and grim old noble.”

The day following was, as it turned out, the last of Mr Wraxall’s stay
at Råbäck. He received letters connected with certain investments which
made it desirable that he should return to England; his work among the
papers was practically done, and travelling was slow. He decided,
therefore, to make his farewells, put some finishing touches to his
notes, and be off.

These finishing touches and farewells, as it turned out, took more time
than he had expected. The hospitable family insisted on his staying to
dine with them—they dined at three—and it was verging on half past six
before he was outside the iron gates of Råbäck. He dwelt on every step
of his walk by the lake, determined to saturate himself, now that he
trod it for the last time, in the sentiment of the place and hour. And
when he reached the summit of the churchyard knoll, he lingered for
many minutes, gazing at the limitless prospect of woods near and
distant, all dark beneath a sky of liquid green. When at last he turned
to go, the thought struck him that surely he must bid farewell to Count
Magnus as well as the rest of the De la Gardies. The church was but
twenty yards away, and he knew where the key of the mausoleum hung. It
was not long before he was standing over the great copper coffin, and,
as usual, talking to himself aloud. “You may have been a bit of a
rascal in your time, Magnus,” he was saying, “but for all that I should
like to see you, or, rather—”

“Just at that instant,” he says, “I felt a blow on my foot. Hastily
enough I drew it back, and something fell on the pavement with a clash.
It was the third, the last of the three padlocks which had fastened the
sarcophagus. I stooped to pick it up, and—Heaven is my witness that I
am writing only the bare truth—before I had raised myself there was a
sound of metal hinges creaking, and I distinctly saw the lid shifting
upwards. I may have behaved like a coward, but I could not for my life
stay for one moment. I was outside that dreadful building in less time
than I can write—almost as quickly as I could have said—the words; and
what frightens me yet more, I could not turn the key in the lock. As I
sit here in my room noting these facts, I ask myself (it was not twenty
minutes ago) whether that noise of creaking metal continued, and I
cannot tell whether it did or not. I only know that there was something
more than I have written that alarmed me, but whether it was sound or
sight I am not able to remember. What is this that I have done?”

Poor Mr Wraxall! He set out on his journey to England on the next day,
as he had planned, and he reached England in safety; and yet, as I
gather from his changed hand and inconsequent jottings, a broken man.
One of several small note-books that have come to me with his papers
gives, not a key to, but a kind of inkling of, his experiences. Much of
his journey was made by canal-boat, and I find not less than six
painful attempts to enumerate and describe his fellow-passengers. The
entries are of this kind:

24. Pastor of village in Skåne. Usual black coat and soft black hat.
25. Commercial traveller from Stockholm going to Trollhättan. Black
cloak, brown hat.
26. Man in long black cloak, broad-leafed hat, very old-fashioned.

This entry is lined out, and a note added: “Perhaps identical with No.
13. Have not yet seen his face.” On referring to No. 13, I find that he
is a Roman priest in a cassock.

The net result of the reckoning is always the same. Twenty-eight people
appear in the enumeration, one being always a man in a long black cloak
and broad hat, and another a “short figure in dark cloak and hood”. On
the other hand, it is always noted that only twenty-six passengers
appear at meals, and that the man in the cloak is perhaps absent, and
the short figure is certainly absent.

On reaching England, it appears that Mr Wraxall landed at Harwich, and
that he resolved at once to put himself out of the reach of some person
or persons whom he never specifies, but whom he had evidently come to
regard as his pursuers. Accordingly he took a vehicle—it was a closed
fly—not trusting the railway and drove across country to the village of
Belchamp St Paul. It was about nine o’clock on a moonlight August night
when he neared the place. He was sitting forward, and looking out of
the window at the fields and thickets—there was little else to be
seen—racing past him. Suddenly he came to a cross-road. At the corner
two figures were standing motionless; both were in dark cloaks; the
taller one wore a hat, the shorter a hood. He had no time to see their
faces, nor did they make any motion that he could discern. Yet the
horse shied violently and broke into a gallop, and Mr Wraxall sank back
into his seat in something like desperation. He had seen them before.

Arrived at Belchamp St Paul, he was fortunate enough to find a decent
furnished lodging, and for the next twenty-four hours he lived,
comparatively speaking, in peace. His last notes were written on this
day. They are too disjointed and ejaculatory to be given here in full,
but the substance of them is clear enough. He is expecting a visit from
his pursuers—how or when he knows not—and his constant cry is “What has
he done?” and “Is there no hope?” Doctors, he knows, would call him
mad, policemen would laugh at him. The parson is away. What can he do
but lock his door and cry to God?

People still remembered last year at Belchamp St Paul how a strange
gentleman came one evening in August years back; and how the next
morning but one he was found dead, and there was an inquest; and the
jury that viewed the body fainted, seven of ’em did, and none of ’em
wouldn’t speak to what they see, and the verdict was visitation of God;
and how the people as kep’ the ’ouse moved out that same week, and went
away from that part. But they do not, I think, know that any glimmer of
light has ever been thrown, or could be thrown, on the mystery. It so
happened that last year the little house came into my hands as part of
a legacy. It had stood empty since 1863, and there seemed no prospect
of letting it; so I had it pulled down, and the papers of which I have
given you an abstract were found in a forgotten cupboard under the
window in the best bedroom.




“OH, WHISTLE, AND I’LL COME TO YOU, MY LAD”


“I suppose you will be getting away pretty soon, now Full Term is over,
Professor,” said a person not in the story to the Professor of
Ontography, soon after they had sat down next to each other at a feast
in the hospitable hall of St James’s College.

The Professor was young, neat, and precise in speech.

“Yes,” he said; “my friends have been making me take up golf this term,
and I mean to go to the East Coast—in point of fact to Burnstow—(I dare
say you know it) for a week or ten days, to improve my game. I hope to
get off tomorrow.”

“Oh, Parkins,” said his neighbour on the other side, “if you are going
to Burnstow, I wish you would look at the site of the Templars’
preceptory, and let me know if you think it would be any good to have a
dig there in the summer.”

It was, as you might suppose, a person of antiquarian pursuits who said
this, but, since he merely appears in this prologue, there is no need
to give his entitlements.

“Certainly,” said Parkins, the Professor: “if you will describe to me
whereabouts the site is, I will do my best to give you an idea of the
lie of the land when I get back; or I could write to you about it, if
you would tell me where you are likely to be.”

“Don’t trouble to do that, thanks. It’s only that I’m thinking of
taking my family in that direction in the Long, and it occurred to me
that, as very few of the English preceptories have ever been properly
planned, I might have an opportunity of doing something useful on
off-days.”

The Professor rather sniffed at the idea that planning out a preceptory
could be described as useful. His neighbour continued:

“The site—I doubt if there is anything showing above ground—must be
down quite close to the beach now. The sea has encroached tremendously,
as you know, all along that bit of coast. I should think, from the map,
that it must be about three-quarters of a mile from the Globe Inn, at
the north end of the town. Where are you going to stay?”

“Well, _at_ the Globe Inn, as a matter of fact,” said Parkins; “I have
engaged a room there. I couldn’t get in anywhere else; most of the
lodging-houses are shut up in winter, it seems; and, as it is, they
tell me that the only room of any size I can have is really a
double-bedded one, and that they haven’t a corner in which to store the
other bed, and so on. But I must have a fairly large room, for I am
taking some books down, and mean to do a bit of work; and though I
don’t quite fancy having an empty bed—not to speak of two—in what I may
call for the time being my study, I suppose I can manage to rough it
for the short time I shall be there.”

“Do you call having an extra bed in your room roughing it, Parkins?”
said a bluff person opposite. “Look here, I shall come down and occupy
it for a bit; it’ll be company for you.”

The Professor quivered, but managed to laugh in a courteous manner.

“By all means, Rogers; there’s nothing I should like better. But I’m
afraid you would find it rather dull; you don’t play golf, do you?”

“No, thank Heaven!” said rude Mr Rogers.

“Well, you see, when I’m not writing I shall most likely be out on the
links, and that, as I say, would be rather dull for you, I’m afraid.”

“Oh, I don’t know! There’s certain to be somebody I know in the place;
but, of course, if you don’t want me, speak the word, Parkins; I shan’t
be offended. Truth, as you always tell us, is never offensive.”

Parkins was, indeed, scrupulously polite and strictly truthful. It is
to be feared that Mr Rogers sometimes practised upon his knowledge of
these characteristics. In Parkins’s breast there was a conflict now
raging, which for a moment or two did not allow him to answer. That
interval being over, he said:

“Well, if you want the exact truth, Rogers, I was considering whether
the room I speak of would really be large enough to accommodate us both
comfortably; and also whether (mind, I shouldn’t have said this if you
hadn’t pressed me) you would not constitute something in the nature of
a hindrance to my work.”

Rogers laughed loudly.

“Well done, Parkins!” he said. “It’s all right. I promise not to
interrupt your work; don’t you disturb yourself about that. No, I won’t
come if you don’t want me; but I thought I should do so nicely to keep
the ghosts off.” Here he might have been seen to wink and to nudge his
next neighbour. Parkins might also have been seen to become pink. “I
beg pardon, Parkins,” Rogers continued; “I oughtn’t to have said that.
I forgot you didn’t like levity on these topics.”

“Well,” Parkins said, “as you have mentioned the matter, I freely own
that I do _not_ like careless talk about what you call ghosts. A man in
my position,” he went on, raising his voice a little, “cannot, I find,
be too careful about appearing to sanction the current beliefs on such
subjects. As you know, Rogers, or as you ought to know; for I think I
have never concealed my views—”

“No, you certainly have not, old man,” put in Rogers _sotto voce._

“—I hold that any semblance, any appearance of concession to the view
that such things might exist is equivalent to a renunciation of all
that I hold most sacred. But I’m afraid I have not succeeded in
securing your attention.”

“Your _undivided_ attention, was what Dr Blimber actually _said_,”[4]
Rogers interrupted, with every appearance of an earnest desire for
accuracy. “But I beg your pardon, Parkins: I’m stopping you.”

 [4] Mr Rogers was wrong, _vide Dombey and Son_, chapter xii.

“No, not at all,” said Parkins. “I don’t remember Blimber; perhaps he
was before my time. But I needn’t go on. I’m sure you know what I
mean.”

“Yes, yes,” said Rogers, rather hastily—“just so. We’ll go into it
fully at Burnstow, or somewhere.”

In repeating the above dialogue I have tried to give the impression
which it made on me, that Parkins was something of an old woman—rather
henlike, perhaps, in his little ways; totally destitute, alas! of the
sense of humour, but at the same time dauntless and sincere in his
convictions, and a man deserving of the greatest respect. Whether or
not the reader has gathered so much, that was the character which
Parkins had.

On the following day Parkins did, as he had hoped, succeed in getting
away from his college, and in arriving at Burnstow. He was made welcome
at the Globe Inn, was safely installed in the large double-bedded room
of which we have heard, and was able before retiring to rest to arrange
his materials for work in apple-pie order upon a commodious table which
occupied the outer end of the room, and was surrounded on three sides
by windows looking out seaward; that is to say, the central window
looked straight out to sea, and those on the left and right commanded
prospects along the shore to the north and south respectively. On the
south you saw the village of Burnstow. On the north no houses were to
be seen, but only the beach and the low cliff backing it. Immediately
in front was a strip—not considerable—of rough grass, dotted with old
anchors, capstans, and so forth; then a broad path; then the beach.
Whatever may have been the original distance between the Globe Inn and
the sea, not more than sixty yards now separated them.

The rest of the population of the inn was, of course, a golfing one,
and included few elements that call for a special description. The most
conspicuous figure was, perhaps, that of an _ancien militaire_,
secretary of a London club, and possessed of a voice of incredible
strength, and of views of a pronouncedly Protestant type. These were
apt to find utterance after his attendance upon the ministrations of
the Vicar, an estimable man with inclinations towards a picturesque
ritual, which he gallantly kept down as far as he could out of
deference to East Anglian tradition.

Professor Parkins, one of whose principal characteristics was pluck,
spent the greater part of the day following his arrival at Burnstow in
what he had called improving his game, in company with this Colonel
Wilson: and during the afternoon—whether the process of improvement
were to blame or not, I am not sure—the Colonel’s demeanour assumed a
colouring so lurid that even Parkins jibbed at the thought of walking
home with him from the links. He determined, after a short and furtive
look at that bristling moustache and those incarnadined features, that
it would be wiser to allow the influences of tea and tobacco to do what
they could with the Colonel before the dinner-hour should render a
meeting inevitable.

“I might walk home tonight along the beach,” he reflected—“yes, and
take a look—there will be light enough for that—at the ruins of which
Disney was talking. I don’t exactly know where they are, by the way;
but I expect I can hardly help stumbling on them.”

This he accomplished, I may say, in the most literal sense, for in
picking his way from the links to the shingle beach his foot caught,
partly in a gorse-root and partly in a biggish stone, and over he went.
When he got up and surveyed his surroundings, he found himself in a
patch of somewhat broken ground covered with small depressions and
mounds. These latter, when he came to examine them, proved to be simply
masses of flints embedded in mortar and grown over with turf. He must,
he quite rightly concluded, be on the site of the preceptory he had
promised to look at. It seemed not unlikely to reward the spade of the
explorer; enough of the foundations was probably left at no great depth
to throw a good deal of light on the general plan. He remembered
vaguely that the Templars, to whom this site had belonged, were in the
habit of building round churches, and he thought a particular series of
the humps or mounds near him did appear to be arranged in something of
a circular form. Few people can resist the temptation to try a little
amateur research in a department quite outside their own, if only for
the satisfaction of showing how successful they would have been had
they only taken it up seriously. Our Professor, however, if he felt
something of this mean desire, was also truly anxious to oblige Mr
Disney. So he paced with care the circular area he had noticed, and
wrote down its rough dimensions in his pocket-book. Then he proceeded
to examine an oblong eminence which lay east of the centre of the
circle, and seemed to his thinking likely to be the base of a platform
or altar. At one end of it, the northern, a patch of the turf was
gone—removed by some boy or other creature _feraæ naturæ_. It might, he
thought, be as well to probe the soil here for evidences of masonry,
and he took out his knife and began scraping away the earth. And now
followed another little discovery: a portion of soil fell inward as he
scraped, and disclosed a small cavity. He lighted one match after
another to help him to see of what nature the hole was, but the wind
was too strong for them all. By tapping and scratching the sides with
his knife, however, he was able to make out that it must be an
artificial hole in masonry. It was rectangular, and the sides, top, and
bottom, if not actually plastered, were smooth and regular. Of course
it was empty. No! As he withdrew the knife he heard a metallic clink,
and when he introduced his hand it met with a cylindrical object lying
on the floor of the hole. Naturally enough, he picked it up, and when
he brought it into the light, now fast fading, he could see that it,
too, was of man’s making—a metal tube about four inches long, and
evidently of some considerable age.

By the time Parkins had made sure that there was nothing else in this
odd receptacle, it was too late and too dark for him to think of
undertaking any further search. What he had done had proved so
unexpectedly interesting that he determined to sacrifice a little more
of the daylight on the morrow to archaeology. The object which he now
had safe in his pocket was bound to be of some slight value at least,
he felt sure.

Bleak and solemn was the view on which he took a last look before
starting homeward. A faint yellow light in the west showed the links,
on which a few figures moving towards the club-house were still
visible, the squat martello tower, the lights of Aldsey village, the
pale ribbon of sands intersected at intervals by black wooden
groynings, the dim and murmuring sea. The wind was bitter from the
north, but was at his back when he set out for the Globe. He quickly
rattled and clashed through the shingle and gained the sand, upon
which, but for the groynings which had to be got over every few yards,
the going was both good and quiet. One last look behind, to measure the
distance he had made since leaving the ruined Templars’ church, showed
him a prospect of company on his walk, in the shape of a rather
indistinct personage, who seemed to be making great efforts to catch up
with him, but made little, if any, progress. I mean that there was an
appearance of running about his movements, but that the distance
between him and Parkins did not seem materially to lessen. So, at
least, Parkins thought, and decided that he almost certainly did not
know him, and that it would be absurd to wait until he came up. For all
that, company, he began to think, would really be very welcome on that
lonely shore, if only you could choose your companion. In his
unenlightened days he had read of meetings in such places which even
now would hardly bear thinking of. He went on thinking of them,
however, until he reached home, and particularly of one which catches
most people’s fancy at some time of their childhood. “Now I saw in my
dream that Christian had gone but a very little way when he saw a foul
fiend coming over the field to meet him.” “What should I do now,” he
thought, “if I looked back and caught sight of a black figure sharply
defined against the yellow sky, and saw that it had horns and wings? I
wonder whether I should stand or run for it. Luckily, the gentleman
behind is not of that kind, and he seems to be about as far off now as
when I saw him first. Well, at this rate, he won’t get his dinner as
soon as I shall; and, dear me! it’s within a quarter of an hour of the
time now. I must run!”

Parkins had, in fact, very little time for dressing. When he met the
Colonel at dinner, Peace—or as much of her as that gentleman could
manage—reigned once more in the military bosom; nor was she put to
flight in the hours of bridge that followed dinner, for Parkins was a
more than respectable player. When, therefore, he retired towards
twelve o’clock, he felt that he had spent his evening in quite a
satisfactory way, and that, even for so long as a fortnight or three
weeks, life at the Globe would be supportable under similar
conditions—“especially,” thought he, “if I go on improving my game.”

As he went along the passages he met the boots of the Globe, who
stopped and said:

“Beg your pardon, sir, but as I was a-brushing your coat just now there
was somethink fell out of the pocket. I put it on your chest of
drawers, sir, in your room, sir—a piece of a pipe or somethink of that,
sir. Thank you, sir. You’ll find it on your chest of drawers, sir—yes,
sir. Good night, sir.”

The speech served to remind Parkins of his little discovery of that
afternoon. It was with some considerable curiosity that he turned it
over by the light of his candles. It was of bronze, he now saw, and was
shaped very much after the manner of the modern dog-whistle; in fact it
was—yes, certainly it was—actually no more nor less than a whistle. He
put it to his lips, but it was quite full of a fine, caked-up sand or
earth, which would not yield to knocking, but must be loosened with a
knife. Tidy as ever in his habits, Parkins cleared out the earth on to
a piece of paper, and took the latter to the window to empty it out.
The night was clear and bright, as he saw when he had opened the
casement, and he stopped for an instant to look at the sea and note a
belated wanderer stationed on the shore in front of the inn. Then he
shut the window, a little surprised at the late hours people kept at
Burnstow, and took his whistle to the light again. Why, surely there
were marks on it, and not merely marks, but letters! A very little
rubbing rendered the deeply-cut inscription quite legible, but the
Professor had to confess, after some earnest thought, that the meaning
of it was as obscure to him as the writing on the wall to Belshazzar.
There were legends both on the front and on the back of the whistle.
The one read thus:

FLA FUR BIS FLE

The other:

QUIS EST ISTE QUI VENIT

“I ought to be able to make it out,” he thought; “but I suppose I am a
little rusty in my Latin. When I come to think of it, I don’t believe I
even know the word for a whistle. The long one does seem simple enough.
It ought to mean, ‘Who is this who is coming?’ Well, the best way to
find out is evidently to whistle for him.”

He blew tentatively and stopped suddenly, startled and yet pleased at
the note he had elicited. It had a quality of infinite distance in it,
and, soft as it was, he somehow felt it must be audible for miles
round. It was a sound, too, that seemed to have the power (which many
scents possess) of forming pictures in the brain. He saw quite clearly
for a moment a vision of a wide, dark expanse at night, with a fresh
wind blowing, and in the midst a lonely figure—how employed, he could
not tell. Perhaps he would have seen more had not the picture been
broken by the sudden surge of a gust of wind against his casement, so
sudden that it made him look up, just in time to see the white glint of
a seabird’s wing somewhere outside the dark panes.

The sound of the whistle had so fascinated him that he could not help
trying it once more, this time more boldly. The note was little, if at
all, louder than before, and repetition broke the illusion—no picture
followed, as he had half hoped it might. ‘But what is this? Goodness!
what force the wind can get up in a few minutes! What a tremendous
gust! There! I knew that window-fastening was no use! Ah! I thought
so—both candles out. It is enough to tear the room to pieces.’

The first thing was to get the window shut. While you might count
twenty Parkins was struggling with the small casement, and felt almost
as if he were pushing back a sturdy burglar, so strong was the
pressure. It slackened all at once, and the window banged to and
latched itself. Now to relight the candles and see what damage, if any,
had been done. No, nothing seemed amiss; no glass even was broken in
the casement. But the noise had evidently roused at least one member of
the household: the Colonel was to be heard stumping in his stockinged
feet on the floor above, and growling.

Quickly as it had risen, the wind did not fall at once. On it went,
moaning and rushing past the house, at times rising to a cry so
desolate that, as Parkins disinterestedly said, it might have made
fanciful people feel quite uncomfortable; even the unimaginative, he
thought after a quarter of an hour, might be happier without it.

Whether it was the wind, or the excitement of golf, or of the
researches in the preceptory that kept Parkins awake, he was not sure.
Awake he remained, in any case, long enough to fancy (as I am afraid I
often do myself under such conditions) that he was the victim of all
manner of fatal disorders: he would lie counting the beats of his
heart, convinced that it was going to stop work every moment, and would
entertain grave suspicions of his lungs, brain, liver, etc.—suspicions
which he was sure would be dispelled by the return of daylight, but
which until then refused to be put aside. He found a little vicarious
comfort in the idea that someone else was in the same boat. A near
neighbour (in the darkness it was not easy to tell his direction) was
tossing and rustling in his bed, too.

The next stage was that Parkins shut his eyes and determined to give
sleep every chance. Here again over-excitement asserted itself in
another form—that of making pictures. _Experto crede_, pictures do come
to the closed eyes of one trying to sleep, and are often so little to
his taste that he must open his eyes and disperse them.

Parkins’s experience on this occasion was a very distressing one. He
found that the picture which presented itself to him was continuous.
When he opened his eyes, of course, it went; but when he shut them once
more it framed itself afresh, and acted itself out again, neither
quicker nor slower than before. What he saw was this:

A long stretch of shore—shingle edged by sand, and intersected at short
intervals with black groynes running down to the water—a scene, in
fact, so like that of his afternoon’s walk that, in the absence of any
landmark, it could not be distinguished therefrom. The light was
obscure, conveying an impression of gathering storm, late winter
evening, and slight cold rain. On this bleak stage at first no actor
was visible. Then, in the distance, a bobbing black object appeared; a
moment more, and it was a man running, jumping, clambering over the
groynes, and every few seconds looking eagerly back. The nearer he came
the more obvious it was that he was not only anxious, but even terribly
frightened, though his face was not to be distinguished. He was,
moreover, almost at the end of his strength. On he came; each
successive obstacle seemed to cause him more difficulty than the last.
“Will he get over this next one?” thought Parkins; “it seems a little
higher than the others.” Yes; half climbing, half throwing himself, he
did get over, and fell all in a heap on the other side (the side
nearest to the spectator). There, as if really unable to get up again,
he remained crouching under the groyne, looking up in an attitude of
painful anxiety.

So far no cause whatever for the fear of the runner had been shown; but
now there began to be seen, far up the shore, a little flicker of
something light-coloured moving to and fro with great swiftness and
irregularity. Rapidly growing larger, it, too, declared itself as a
figure in pale, fluttering draperies, ill-defined. There was something
about its motion which made Parkins very unwilling to see it at close
quarters. It would stop, raise arms, bow itself towards the sand, then
run stooping across the beach to the water-edge and back again; and
then, rising upright, once more continue its course forward at a speed
that was startling and terrifying. The moment came when the pursuer was
hovering about from left to right only a few yards beyond the groyne
where the runner lay in hiding. After two or three ineffectual castings
hither and thither it came to a stop, stood upright, with arms raised
high, and then darted straight forward towards the groyne.

It was at this point that Parkins always failed in his resolution to
keep his eyes shut. With many misgivings as to incipient failure of
eyesight, overworked brain, excessive smoking, and so on, he finally
resigned himself to light his candle, get out a book, and pass the
night waking, rather than be tormented by this persistent panorama,
which he saw clearly enough could only be a morbid reflection of his
walk and his thoughts on that very day.

The scraping of match on box and the glare of light must have startled
some creatures of the night—rats or what not—which he heard scurry
across the floor from the side of his bed with much rustling. Dear,
dear! the match is out! Fool that it is! But the second one burnt
better, and a candle and book were duly procured, over which Parkins
pored till sleep of a wholesome kind came upon him, and that in no long
space. For about the first time in his orderly and prudent life he
forgot to blow out the candle, and when he was called next morning at
eight there was still a flicker in the socket and a sad mess of
guttered grease on the top of the little table.

After breakfast he was in his room, putting the finishing touches to
his golfing costume—fortune had again allotted the Colonel to him for a
partner—when one of the maids came in.

“Oh, if you please,” she said, “would you like any extra blankets on
your bed, sir?”

“Ah! thank you,” said Parkins. “Yes, I think I should like one. It
seems likely to turn rather colder.”

In a very short time the maid was back with the blanket.

“Which bed should I put it on, sir?” she asked.

“What? Why, that one—the one I slept in last night,” he said, pointing
to it.

“Oh yes! I beg your pardon, sir, but you seemed to have tried both of
“em; leastways, we had to make ’em both up this morning.”

“Really? How very absurd!” said Parkins. “I certainly never touched the
other, except to lay some things on it. Did it actually seem to have
been slept in?”

“Oh yes, sir!” said the maid. “Why, all the things was crumpled and
throwed about all ways, if you’ll excuse me, sir—quite as if anyone
’adn’t passed but a very poor night, sir.”

“Dear me,” said Parkins. “Well, I may have disordered it more than I
thought when I unpacked my things. I’m very sorry to have given you the
extra trouble, I’m sure. I expect a friend of mine soon, by the way—a
gentleman from Cambridge—to come and occupy it for a night or two. That
will be all right, I suppose, won’t it?”

“Oh yes, to be sure, sir. Thank you, sir. It’s no trouble, I’m sure,”
said the maid, and departed to giggle with her colleagues.

Parkins set forth, with a stern determination to improve his game.

I am glad to be able to report that he succeeded so far in this
enterprise that the Colonel, who had been rather repining at the
prospect of a second day’s play in his company, became quite chatty as
the morning advanced; and his voice boomed out over the flats, as
certain also of our own minor poets have said, “like some great bourdon
in a minster tower”.

“Extraordinary wind, that, we had last night,” he said. “In my old home
we should have said someone had been whistling for it.”

“Should you, indeed!” said Parkins. “Is there a superstition of that
kind still current in your part of the country?”

“I don’t know about superstition,” said the Colonel. “They believe in
it all over Denmark and Norway, as well as on the Yorkshire coast; and
my experience is, mind you, that there’s generally something at the
bottom of what these country-folk hold to, and have held to for
generations. But it’s your drive” (or whatever it might have been: the
golfing reader will have to imagine appropriate digressions at the
proper intervals).

When conversation was resumed, Parkins said, with a slight hesitancy:

“A propos of what you were saying just now, Colonel, I think I ought to
tell you that my own views on such subjects are very strong. I am, in
fact, a convinced disbeliever in what is called the ‘supernatural’.”

“What!” said the Colonel, “do you mean to tell me you don’t believe in
second-sight, or ghosts, or anything of that kind?”

“In nothing whatever of that kind,” returned Parkins firmly.

“Well,” said the Colonel, “but it appears to me at that rate, sir, that
you must be little better than a Sadducee.”

Parkins was on the point of answering that, in his opinion, the
Sadducees were the most sensible persons he had ever read of in the Old
Testament; but, feeling some doubt as to whether much mention of them
was to be found in that work, he preferred to laugh the accusation off.

“Perhaps I am,” he said; “but—Here, give me my cleek, boy!—Excuse me
one moment, Colonel.” A short interval. “Now, as to whistling for the
wind, let me give you my theory about it. The laws which govern winds
are really not at all perfectly known—to fisherfolk and such, of
course, not known at all. A man or woman of eccentric habits, perhaps,
or a stranger, is seen repeatedly on the beach at some unusual hour,
and is heard whistling. Soon afterwards a violent wind rises; a man who
could read the sky perfectly or who possessed a barometer could have
foretold that it would. The simple people of a fishing-village have no
barometers, and only a few rough rules for prophesying weather. What
more natural than that the eccentric personage I postulated should be
regarded as having raised the wind, or that he or she should clutch
eagerly at the reputation of being able to do so? Now, take last
night’s wind: as it happens, I myself was whistling. I blew a whistle
twice, and the wind seemed to come absolutely in answer to my call. If
anyone had seen me—”

The audience had been a little restive under this harangue, and Parkins
had, I fear, fallen somewhat into the tone of a lecturer; but at the
last sentence the Colonel stopped.

“Whistling, were you?” he said. “And what sort of whistle did you use?
Play this stroke first.” Interval.

“About that whistle you were asking, Colonel. It’s rather a curious
one. I have it in my—No; I see I’ve left it in my room. As a matter of
fact, I found it yesterday.”

And then Parkins narrated the manner of his discovery of the whistle,
upon hearing which the Colonel grunted, and opined that, in Parkins’s
place, he should himself be careful about using a thing that had
belonged to a set of Papists, of whom, speaking generally, it might be
affirmed that you never knew what they might not have been up to. From
this topic he diverged to the enormities of the Vicar, who had given
notice on the previous Sunday that Friday would be the Feast of St
Thomas the Apostle, and that there would be service at eleven o’clock
in the church. This and other similar proceedings constituted in the
Colonel’s view a strong presumption that the Vicar was a concealed
Papist, if not a Jesuit; and Parkins, who could not very readily follow
the Colonel in this region, did not disagree with him. In fact, they
got on so well together in the morning that there was no talk on either
side of their separating after lunch.

Both continued to play well during the afternoon, or, at least, well
enough to make them forget everything else until the light began to
fail them. Not until then did Parkins remember that he had meant to do
some more investigating at the preceptory; but it was of no great
importance, he reflected. One day was as good as another; he might as
well go home with the Colonel.

As they turned the corner of the house, the Colonel was almost knocked
down by a boy who rushed into him at the very top of his speed, and
then, instead of running away, remained hanging on to him and panting.
The first words of the warrior were naturally those of reproof and
objurgation, but he very quickly discerned that the boy was almost
speechless with fright. Inquiries were useless at first. When the boy
got his breath he began to howl, and still clung to the Colonel’s legs.
He was at last detached, but continued to howl.

“What in the world _is_ the matter with you? What have you been up to?
What have you seen?” said the two men.

“Ow, I seen it wive at me out of the winder,” wailed the boy, “and I
don’t like it.”

“What window?” said the irritated Colonel. “Come, pull yourself
together, my boy.”

“The front winder it was, at the ’otel,” said the boy.

At this point Parkins was in favour of sending the boy home, but the
Colonel refused; he wanted to get to the bottom of it, he said; it was
most dangerous to give a boy such a fright as this one had had, and if
it turned out that people had been playing jokes, they should suffer
for it in some way. And by a series of questions he made out this
story: The boy had been playing about on the grass in front of the
Globe with some others; then they had gone home to their teas, and he
was just going, when he happened to look up at the front winder and see
it a-wiving at him. _It_ seemed to be a figure of some sort, in white
as far as he knew—couldn’t see its face; but it wived at him, and it
warn’t a right thing—not to say not a right person. Was there a light
in the room? No, he didn’t think to look if there was a light. Which
was the window? Was it the top one or the second one? The seckind one
it was—the big winder what got two little uns at the sides.

“Very well, my boy,” said the Colonel, after a few more questions. “You
run away home now. I expect it was some person trying to give you a
start. Another time, like a brave English boy, you just throw a
stone—well, no, not that exactly, but you go and speak to the waiter,
or to Mr Simpson, the landlord, and—yes—and say that I advised you to
do so.”

The boy’s face expressed some of the doubt he felt as to the likelihood
of Mr Simpson’s lending a favourable ear to his complaint, but the
Colonel did not appear to perceive this, and went on:

“And here’s a sixpence—no, I see it’s a shilling—and you be off home,
and don’t think any more about it.”

The youth hurried off with agitated thanks, and the Colonel and Parkins
went round to the front of the Globe and reconnoitred. There was only
one window answering to the description they had been hearing.

“Well, that’s curious,” said Parkins; “it’s evidently my window the lad
was talking about. Will you come up for a moment, Colonel Wilson? We
ought to be able to see if anyone has been taking liberties in my
room.”

They were soon in the passage, and Parkins made as if to open the door.
Then he stopped and felt in his pockets.

“This is more serious than I thought,” was his next remark. “I remember
now that before I started this morning I locked the door. It is locked
now, and, what is more, here is the key.” And he held it up. “Now,” he
went on, “if the servants are in the habit of going into one’s room
during the day when one is away, I can only say that—well, that I don’t
approve of it at all.” Conscious of a somewhat weak climax, he busied
himself in opening the door (which was indeed locked) and in lighting
candles. “No,” he said, “nothing seems disturbed.”

“Except your bed,” put in the Colonel.

“Excuse me, that isn’t my bed,” said Parkins. “I don’t use that one.
But it does look as if someone had been playing tricks with it.”

It certainly did: the clothes were bundled up and twisted together in a
most tortuous confusion. Parkins pondered.

“That must be it,” he said at last: “I disordered the clothes last
night in unpacking, and they haven’t made it since. Perhaps they came
in to make it, and that boy saw them through the window; and then they
were called away and locked the door after them. Yes, I think that must
be it.”

“Well, ring and ask,” said the Colonel, and this appealed to Parkins as
practical.

The maid appeared, and, to make a long story short, deposed that she
had made the bed in the morning when the gentleman was in the room, and
hadn’t been there since. No, she hadn’t no other key. Mr Simpson he
kep’ the keys; he’d be able to tell the gentleman if anyone had been
up.

This was a puzzle. Investigation showed that nothing of value had been
taken, and Parkins remembered the disposition of the small objects on
tables and so forth well enough to be pretty sure that no pranks had
been played with them. Mr and Mrs Simpson furthermore agreed that
neither of them had given the duplicate key of the room to any person
whatever during the day. Nor could Parkins, fair-minded man as he was,
detect anything in the demeanour of master, mistress, or maid that
indicated guilt. He was much more inclined to think that the boy had
been imposing on the Colonel.

The latter was unwontedly silent and pensive at dinner and throughout
the evening. When he bade goodnight to Parkins, he murmured in a gruff
undertone:

“You know where I am if you want me during the night.”

“Why, yes, thank you, Colonel Wilson, I think I do; but there isn’t
much prospect of my disturbing you, I hope. By the way,” he added, “did
I show you that old whistle I spoke of? I think not. Well, here it is.”

The Colonel turned it over gingerly in the light of the candle.

“Can you make anything of the inscription?” asked Parkins, as he took
it back.

“No, not in this light. What do you mean to do with it?”

“Oh, well, when I get back to Cambridge I shall submit it to some of
the archaeologists there, and see what they think of it; and very
likely, if they consider it worth having, I may present it to one of
the museums.”

“’M!” said the Colonel. “Well, you may be right. All I know is that, if
it were mine, I should chuck it straight into the sea. It’s no use
talking, I’m well aware, but I expect that with you it’s a case of live
and learn. I hope so, I’m sure, and I wish you a good night.”

He turned away, leaving Parkins in act to speak at the bottom of the
stair, and soon each was in his own bedroom.

By some unfortunate accident, there were neither blinds nor curtains to
the windows of the Professor’s room. The previous night he had thought
little of this, but tonight there seemed every prospect of a bright
moon rising to shine directly on his bed, and probably wake him later
on. When he noticed this he was a good deal annoyed, but, with an
ingenuity which I can only envy, he succeeded in rigging up, with the
help of a railway-rug, some safety-pins, and a stick and umbrella, a
screen which, if it only held together, would completely keep the
moonlight off his bed. And shortly afterwards he was comfortably in
that bed. When he had read a somewhat solid work long enough to produce
a decided wish for sleep, he cast a drowsy glance round the room, blew
out the candle, and fell back upon the pillow.

He must have slept soundly for an hour or more, when a sudden clatter
shook him up in a most unwelcome manner. In a moment he realized what
had happened: his carefully-constructed screen had given way, and a
very bright frosty moon was shining directly on his face. This was
highly annoying. Could he possibly get up and reconstruct the screen?
or could he manage to sleep if he did not?

For some minutes he lay and pondered over the possibilities; then he
turned over sharply, and with his eyes open lay breathlessly listening.
There had been a movement, he was sure, in the empty bed on the
opposite side of the room. Tomorrow he would have it moved, for there
must be rats or something playing about in it. It was quiet now. No!
the commotion began again. There was a rustling and shaking: surely
more than any rat could cause.

I can figure to myself something of the Professor’s bewilderment and
horror, for I have in a dream thirty years back seen the same thing
happen; but the reader will hardly, perhaps, imagine how dreadful it
was to him to see a figure suddenly sit up in what he had known was an
empty bed. He was out of his own bed in one bound, and made a dash
towards the window, where lay his only weapon, the stick with which he
had propped his screen. This was, as it turned out, the worst thing he
could have done, because the personage in the empty bed, with a sudden
smooth motion, slipped from the bed and took up a position, with
outspread arms, between the two beds, and in front of the door. Parkins
watched it in a horrid perplexity. Somehow, the idea of getting past it
and escaping through the door was intolerable to him; he could not have
borne—he didn’t know why—to touch it; and as for its touching him, he
would sooner dash himself through the window than have that happen. It
stood for the moment in a band of dark shadow, and he had not seen what
its face was like. Now it began to move, in a stooping posture, and all
at once the spectator realized, with some horror and some relief, that
it must be blind, for it seemed to feel about it with its muffled arms
in a groping and random fashion. Turning half away from him, it became
suddenly conscious of the bed he had just left, and darted towards it,
and bent and felt over the pillows in a way which made Parkins shudder
as he had never in his life thought it possible. In a very few moments
it seemed to know that the bed was empty, and then, moving forward into
the area of light and facing the window, it showed for the first time
what manner of thing it was.

Parkins, who very much dislikes being questioned about it, did once
describe something of it in my hearing, and I gathered that what he
chiefly remembers about it is a horrible, an intensely horrible, face
_of crumpled linen._ What expression he read upon it he could not or
would not tell, but that the fear of it went nigh to maddening him is
certain.

But he was not at leisure to watch it for long. With formidable
quickness it moved into the middle of the room, and, as it groped and
waved, one corner of its draperies swept across Parkins’s face. He
could not, though he knew how perilous a sound was—he could not keep
back a cry of disgust, and this gave the searcher an instant clue. It
leapt towards him upon the instant, and the next moment he was half-way
through the window backwards, uttering cry upon cry at the utmost pitch
of his voice, and the linen face was thrust close into his own. At
this, almost the last possible second, deliverance came, as you will
have guessed: the Colonel burst the door open, and was just in time to
see the dreadful group at the window. When he reached the figures only
one was left. Parkins sank forward into the room in a faint, and before
him on the floor lay a tumbled heap of bed-clothes.

Colonel Wilson asked no questions, but busied himself in keeping
everyone else out of the room and in getting Parkins back to his bed;
and himself, wrapped in a rug, occupied the other bed, for the rest of
the night. Early on the next day Rogers arrived, more welcome than he
would have been a day before, and the three of them held a very long
consultation in the Professor’s room. At the end of it the Colonel left
the hotel door carrying a small object between his finger and thumb,
which he cast as far into the sea as a very brawny arm could send it.
Later on the smoke of a burning ascended from the back premises of the
Globe.

Exactly what explanation was patched up for the staff and visitors at
the hotel I must confess I do not recollect. The Professor was somehow
cleared of the ready suspicion of delirium tremens, and the hotel of
the reputation of a troubled house.

There is not much question as to what would have happened to Parkins if
the Colonel had not intervened when he did. He would either have fallen
out of the window or else lost his wits. But it is not so evident what
more the creature that came in answer to the whistle could have done
than frighten. There seemed to be absolutely nothing material about it
save the bedclothes of which it had made itself a body. The Colonel,
who remembered a not very dissimilar occurrence in India, was of the
opinion that if Parkins had closed with it it could really have done
very little, and that its one power was that of frightening. The whole
thing, he said, served to confirm his opinion of the Church of Rome.

There is really nothing more to tell, but, as you may imagine, the
Professor’s views on certain points are less clear cut than they used
to be. His nerves, too, have suffered: he cannot even now see a
surplice hanging on a door quite unmoved, and the spectacle of a
scarecrow in a field late on a winter afternoon has cost him more than
one sleepless night.




THE TREASURE OF ABBOT THOMAS


I

Verum usque in præsentem diem multa garriunt inter se Canonici de
abscondito quodam istius Abbatis Thomæ thesauro, quem sæpe, quanquam
adhuc incassum, quæsiverunt Steinfeldenses. Ipsum enim Thomam adhuc
florida in ætate existentem ingentem auri massam circa monasterium
defodisse perhibent; de quo multoties interrogatus ubi esset, cum risu
respondere solitus erat: “Job, Johannes, et Zacharias vel vobis vel
posteris indicabunt”; idemque aliquando adiicere se inventuris minime
invisurum. Inter alia huius Abbatis opera, hoc memoria præcipue dignum
iudico quod fenestram magnam in orientali parte alæ australis in
ecclesia sua imaginibus optime in vitro depictis impleverit: id quod et
ipsius effigies et insignia ibidem posita demonstrant. Domum quoque
Abbatialem fere totam restauravit: puteo in atrio ipsius effosso et
lapidibus marmoreis pulchre cælatis exornato. Decessit autem, morte
aliquantulum subitanea perculsus, ætatis suæ anno lxxiido,
incarnationis vero Dominiæ mdxxixo.

“I suppose I shall have to translate this,” said the antiquary to
himself, as he finished copying the above lines from that rather rare
and exceedingly diffuse book, the _Sertum Steinfeldense
Norbertinum._[5] “Well, it may as well be done first as last,” and
accordingly the following rendering was very quickly produced:

 [5] An account of the Premonstratensian abbey of Steinfeld, in the
 Eiffel, with lives of the Abbots, published at Cologne in 1712 by
 Christian Albert Erhard, a resident in the district. The epithet
 _Norbertinum_ is due to the fact that St Norbert was founder of the
 Premonstratensian Order.

Up to the present day there is much gossip among the Canons about a
certain hidden treasure of this Abbot Thomas, for which those of
Steinfeld have often made search, though hitherto in vain. The story is
that Thomas, while yet in the vigour of life, concealed a very large
quantity of gold somewhere in the monastery. He was often asked where
it was, and always answered, with a laugh: “Job, John, and Zechariah
will tell either you or your successors.” He sometimes added that he
should feel no grudge against those who might find it. Among other
works carried out by this Abbot I may specially mention his filling the
great window at the east end of the south aisle of the church with
figures admirably painted on glass, as his effigy and arms in the
window attest. He also restored almost the whole of the Abbot’s
lodging, and dug a well in the court of it, which he adorned with
beautiful carvings in marble. He died rather suddenly in the
seventy-second year of his age, A.D. 1529.

The object which the antiquary had before him at the moment was that of
tracing the whereabouts of the painted windows of the Abbey Church of
Steinfeld. Shortly after the Revolution, a very large quantity of
painted glass made its way from the dissolved abbeys of Germany and
Belgium to this country, and may now be seen adorning various of our
parish churches, cathedrals, and private chapels. Steinfeld Abbey was
among the most considerable of these involuntary contributors to our
artistic possessions (I am quoting the somewhat ponderous preamble of
the book which the antiquary wrote), and the greater part of the glass
from that institution can be identified without much difficulty by the
help, either of the numerous inscriptions in which the place is
mentioned, or of the subjects of the windows, in which several
well-defined cycles or narratives were represented.

The passage with which I began my story had set the antiquary on the
track of another identification. In a private chapel—no matter where—he
had seen three large figures, each occupying a whole light in a window,
and evidently the work of one artist. Their style made it plain that
that artist had been a German of the sixteenth century; but hitherto
the more exact localizing of them had been a puzzle. They
represented—will you be surprised to hear it?—JOB PATRIARCHA, JOHANNES
EVANGELISTA, ZACHARIAS PROPHETA, and each of them held a book or
scroll, inscribed with a sentence from his writings. These, as a matter
of course, the antiquary had noted, and had been struck by the curious
way in which they differed from any text of the Vulgate that he had
been able to examine. Thus the scroll in Job’s hand was inscribed:
_Auro est locus in quo absconditur_ (for _conflatur_);[6] on the book
of John was: _Habent in vestimentis suis scripturam quam nemo novit_[7]
(for in _vestimento scriptum_, the following words being taken from
another verse); and Zacharias had: _Super lapidem unum septem oculi
sunt_[8] (which alone of the three presents an unaltered text).

 [6] There is a place for gold where it is hidden.

 [7] They have on their raiment a writing which no man knoweth.

 [8] Upon one stone are seven eyes.

A sad perplexity it had been to our investigator to think why these
three personages should have been placed together in one window. There
was no bond of connexion between them, either historic, symbolic, or
doctrinal, and he could only suppose that they must have formed part of
a very large series of Prophets and Apostles, which might have filled,
say, all the clerestory windows of some capacious church. But the
passage from the _Sertum_ had altered the situation by showing that the
names of the actual personages represented in the glass now in Lord
D——’s chapel had been constantly on the lips of Abbot Thomas von
Eschenhausen of Steinfeld, and that this Abbot had put up a painted
window, probably about the year 1520, in the south aisle of his abbey
church. It was no very wild conjecture that the three figures might
have formed part of Abbot Thomas’s offering; it was one which,
moreover, could probably be confirmed or set aside by another careful
examination of the glass. And, as Mr. Somerton was a man of leisure, he
set out on pilgrimage to the private chapel with very little delay. His
conjecture was confirmed to the full. Not only did the style and
technique of the glass suit perfectly with the date and place required,
but in another window of the chapel he found some glass, known to have
been bought along with the figures, which contained the arms of Abbot
Thomas von Eschenhausen.

At intervals during his researches Mr. Somerton had been haunted by the
recollection of the gossip about the hidden treasure, and, as he
thought the matter over, it became more and more obvious to him that if
the Abbot meant anything by the enigmatical answer which he gave to his
questioners, he must have meant that the secret was to be found
somewhere in the window he had placed in the abbey church. It was
undeniable, furthermore, that the first of the curiously-selected texts
on the scrolls in the window might be taken to have a reference to
hidden treasure.

Every feature, therefore, or mark which could possibly assist in
elucidating the riddle which, he felt sure, the Abbot had set to
posterity he noted with scrupulous care, and, returning to his
Berkshire manor-house, consumed many a pint of the midnight oil over
his tracings and sketches. After two or three weeks, a day came when Mr
Somerton announced to his man that he must pack his own and his
master’s things for a short journey abroad, whither for the moment we
will not follow him.


II

Mr Gregory, the Rector of Parsbury, had strolled out before breakfast,
it being a fine autumn morning, as far as the gate of his
carriage-drive, with intent to meet the postman and sniff the cool air.
Nor was he disappointed of either purpose. Before he had had time to
answer more than ten or eleven of the miscellaneous questions
propounded to him in the lightness of their hearts by his young
offspring, who had accompanied him, the postman was seen approaching;
and among the morning’s budget was one letter bearing a foreign
postmark and stamp (which became at once the objects of an eager
competition among the youthful Gregorys), and was addressed in an
uneducated, but plainly an English hand.

When the Rector opened it, and turned to the signature, he realized
that it came from the confidential valet of his friend and squire, Mr.
Somerton. Thus it ran:

HONOURED SIR,
    Has I am in a great anxiety about Master I write at is Wish to beg
    you Sir if you could be so good as Step over. Master Has add a
    Nastey Shock and keeps His Bedd. I never Have known Him like this
    but No wonder and Nothing will serve but you Sir. Master says would
    I mintion the Short Way Here is Drive to Cobblince and take a Trap.
    Hopeing I Have maid all Plain, but am much Confused in Myself what
    with Anxiatey and Weakfulness at Night. If I might be so Bold Sir
    it will be a Pleasure to see a Honnest Brish Face among all These
    Forig ones.

I am Sir
Your obedt Servt
William Brown.

P.S.—The Village for Town I will not Turm. It is name Steenfeld.

The reader must be left to picture to himself in detail the surprise,
confusion, and hurry of preparation into which the receipt of such a
letter would be likely to plunge a quiet Berkshire parsonage in the
year of grace 1859. It is enough for me to say that a train to town was
caught in the course of the day, and that Mr Gregory was able to secure
a cabin in the Antwerp boat and a place in the Coblentz train. Nor was
it difficult to manage the transit from that centre to Steinfeld.

I labour under a grave disadvantage as narrator of this story in that I
have never visited Steinfeld myself, and that neither of the principal
actors in the episode (from whom I derive my information) was able to
give me anything but a vague and rather dismal idea of its appearance.
I gather that it is a small place, with a large church despoiled of its
ancient fittings; a number of rather ruinous great buildings, mostly of
the seventeenth century, surround this church; for the abbey, in common
with most of those on the Continent, was rebuilt in a luxurious fashion
by its inhabitants at that period. It has not seemed to me worth while
to lavish money on a visit to the place, for though it is probably far
more attractive than either Mr Somerton or Mr Gregory thought it, there
is evidently little, if anything, of first-rate interest to be
seen—except, perhaps, one thing, which I should not care to see.

The inn where the English gentleman and his servant were lodged is, or
was, the only “possible” one in the village. Mr Gregory was taken to it
at once by his driver, and found Mr Brown waiting at the door. Mr
Brown, a model when in his Berkshire home of the impassive whiskered
race who are known as confidential valets, was now egregiously out of
his element, in a light tweed suit, anxious, almost irritable, and
plainly anything but master of the situation. His relief at the sight
of the “honest British face” of his Rector was unmeasured, but words to
describe it were denied him. He could only say:

“Well, I ham pleased, I’m sure, sir, to see you. And so I’m sure, sir,
will master.”

“How _is_ your master, Brown?” Mr Gregory eagerly put in.

“I think he’s better, sir, thank you; but he’s had a dreadful time of
it. I ’ope he’s gettin’ some sleep now, but—”

“What has been the matter—I couldn’t make out from your letter? Was it
an accident of any kind?”

“Well, sir, I ’ardly know whether I’d better speak about it. Master was
very partickler he should be the one to tell you. But there’s no bones
broke—that’s one thing I’m sure we ought to be thankful—”

“What does the doctor say?” asked Mr Gregory.

They were by this time outside Mr Somerton’s bedroom door, and speaking
in low tones. Mr Gregory, who happened to be in front, was feeling for
the handle, and chanced to run his fingers over the panels. Before
Brown could answer, there was a terrible cry from within the room.

“In God’s name, who is that?” were the first words they heard. “Brown,
is it?”

“Yes, sir—me, sir, and Mr Gregory,” Brown hastened to answer, and there
was an audible groan of relief in reply.

They entered the room, which was darkened against the afternoon sun,
and Mr Gregory saw, with a shock of pity, how drawn, how damp with
drops of fear, was the usually calm face of his friend, who, sitting up
in the curtained bed, stretched out a shaking hand to welcome him.

“Better for seeing you, my dear Gregory,” was the reply to the Rector’s
first question, and it was palpably true.

After five minutes of conversation Mr Somerton was more his own man,
Brown afterwards reported, than he had been for days. He was able to
eat a more than respectable dinner, and talked confidently of being fit
to stand a journey to Coblentz within twenty-four hours.

“But there’s one thing,” he said, with a return of agitation which Mr
Gregory did not like to see, “which I must beg you to do for me, my
dear Gregory. Don’t,” he went on, laying his hand on Gregory’s to
forestall any interruption—“don’t ask me what it is, or why I want it
done. I’m not up to explaining it yet; it would throw me back—undo all
the good you have done me by coming. The only word I will say about it
is that you run no risk whatever by doing it, and that Brown can and
will show you tomorrow what it is. It’s merely to put back—to
keep—something—No; I can’t speak of it yet. Do you mind calling Brown?”

“Well, Somerton,” said Mr Gregory, as he crossed the room to the door,
“I won’t ask for any explanations till you see fit to give them. And if
this bit of business is as easy as you represent it to be, I will very
gladly undertake it for you the first thing in the morning.”

“Ah, I was sure you would, my dear Gregory; I was certain I could rely
on you. I shall owe you more thanks than I can tell. Now, here is
Brown. Brown, one word with you.”

“Shall I go?” interjected Mr Gregory.

“Not at all. Dear me, no. Brown, the first thing tomorrow morning—(you
don’t mind early hours, I know, Gregory)—you must take the Rector
to—_there_, you know” (a nod from Brown, who looked grave and anxious),
“and he and you will put that back. You needn’t be in the least
alarmed; it’s _perfectly_ safe in the daytime. You know what I mean. It
lies on the step, you know, where—where we put it.” (Brown swallowed
dryly once or twice, and, failing to speak, bowed.) “And—yes, that’s
all. Only this one other word, my dear Gregory. If you _can_ manage to
keep from questioning Brown about this matter, I shall be still more
bound to you. Tomorrow evening, at latest, if all goes well, I shall be
able, I believe, to tell you the whole story from start to finish. And
now I’ll wish you good night. Brown will be with me—he sleeps here—and
if I were you, I should lock my door. Yes, be particular to do that.
They—they like it, the people here, and it’s better. Good night, good
night.”

They parted upon this, and if Mr Gregory woke once or twice in the
small hours and fancied he heard a fumbling about the lower part of his
locked door, it was, perhaps, no more than what a quiet man, suddenly
plunged into a strange bed and the heart of a mystery, might reasonably
expect. Certainly he thought, to the end of his days, that he had heard
such a sound twice or three times between midnight and dawn.

He was up with the sun, and out in company with Brown soon after.
Perplexing as was the service he had been asked to perform for Mr
Somerton, it was not a difficult or an alarming one, and within half an
hour from his leaving the inn it was over. What it was I shall not as
yet divulge.

Later in the morning Mr Somerton, now almost himself again, was able to
make a start from Steinfeld; and that same evening, whether at Coblentz
or at some intermediate stage on the journey I am not certain, he
settled down to the promised explanation. Brown was present, but how
much of the matter was ever really made plain to his comprehension he
would never say, and I am unable to conjecture.


III

This was Mr Somerton’s story:

“You know roughly, both of you, that this expedition of mine was
undertaken with the object of tracing something in connexion with some
old painted glass in Lord D——’s private chapel. Well, the
starting-point of the whole matter lies in this passage from an old
printed book, to which I will ask your attention.”

And at this point Mr Somerton went carefully over some ground with
which we are already familiar.

“On my second visit to the chapel,” he went on, “my purpose was to take
every note I could of figures, lettering, diamond-scratchings on the
glass, and even apparently accidental markings. The first point which I
tackled was that of the inscribed scrolls. I could not doubt that the
first of these, that of Job—‘There is a place for the gold where it is
hidden’—with its intentional alteration, must refer to the treasure; so
I applied myself with some confidence to the next, that of St
John—‘They have on their vestures a writing which no man knoweth.’ The
natural question will have occurred to you: Was there an inscription on
the robes of the figures? I could see none; each of the three had a
broad black border to his mantle, which made a conspicuous and rather
ugly feature in the window. I was nonplussed, I will own, and, but for
a curious bit of luck, I think I should have left the search where the
Canons of Steinfeld had left it before me. But it so happened that
there was a good deal of dust on the surface of the glass, and Lord
D——, happening to come in, noticed my blackened hands, and kindly
insisted on sending for a Turk’s head broom to clean down the window.
There must, I suppose, have been a rough piece in the broom; anyhow, as
it passed over the border of one of the mantles, I noticed that it left
a long scratch, and that some yellow stain instantly showed up. I asked
the man to stop his work for a moment, and ran up the ladder to examine
the place. The yellow stain was there, sure enough, and what had come
away was a thick black pigment, which had evidently been laid on with
the brush after the glass had been burnt, and could therefore be easily
scraped off without doing any harm. I scraped, accordingly, and you
will hardly believe—no, I do you an injustice; you will have guessed
already—that I found under this black pigment two or three
clearly-formed capital letters in yellow stain on a clear ground. Of
course, I could hardly contain my delight.

“I told Lord D—— that I had detected an inscription which I thought
might be very interesting, and begged to be allowed to uncover the
whole of it. He made no difficulty about it whatever, told me to do
exactly as I pleased, and then, having an engagement, was
obliged—rather to my relief, I must say—to leave me. I set to work at
once, and found the task a fairly easy one. The pigment, disintegrated,
of course, by time, came off almost at a touch, and I don’t think that
it took me a couple of hours, all told, to clean the whole of the black
borders in all three lights. Each of the figures had, as the
inscription said, ‘a writing on their vestures which nobody knew’.

“This discovery, of course, made it absolutely certain to my mind that
I was on the right track. And, now, what was the inscription? While I
was cleaning the glass I almost took pains not to read the lettering,
saving up the treat until I had got the whole thing clear. And when
that was done, my dear Gregory, I assure you I could almost have cried
from sheer disappointment. What I read was only the most hopeless
jumble of letters that was ever shaken up in a hat. Here it is:

_Job_.	DREVICIOPEDMOOMSMVIVLISLCAVIBASBATAOVT _St
John_.	RDIIEAMRLESIPVSPODSEEIRSETTAAESGIAVNNR
_Zechariah_.	DREVICIOPEDMOOMSMVIVLISLCAVIBASBATAOVT

“Blank as I felt and must have looked for the first few minutes, my
disappointment didn’t last long. I realized almost at once that I was
dealing with a cipher or cryptogram; and I reflected that it was likely
to be of a pretty simple kind, considering its early date. So I copied
the letters with the most anxious care. Another little point, I may
tell you, turned up in the process which confirmed my belief in the
cipher. After copying the letters on Job’s robe I counted them, to make
sure that I had them right. There were thirty-eight; and, just as I
finished going through them, my eye fell on a scratching made with a
sharp point on the edge of the border. It was simply the number xxxviii
in Roman numerals. To cut the matter short, there was a similar note,
as I may call it, in each of the other lights; and that made it plain
to me that the glass-painter had had very strict orders from Abbot
Thomas about the inscription, and had taken pains to get it correct.

“Well, after that discovery you may imagine how minutely I went over
the whole surface of the glass in search of further light. Of course, I
did not neglect the inscription on the scroll of Zechariah—‘Upon one
stone are seven eyes,’ but I very quickly concluded that this must
refer to some mark on a stone which could only be found _in situ_,
where the treasure was concealed. To be short, I made all possible
notes and sketches and tracings, and then came back to Parsbury to work
out the cipher at leisure. Oh, the agonies I went through! I thought
myself very clever at first, for I made sure that the key would be
found in some of the old books on secret writing. The _Steganographia_
of Joachim Trithemius, who was an earlier contemporary of Abbot Thomas,
seemed particularly promising; so I got that and Selenius’s
_Cryptographia_ and Bacon’s _de Augmentis Scientiarum_ and some more.
But I could hit upon nothing. Then I tried the principle of the ‘most
frequent letter’, taking first Latin and then German as a basis. That
didn’t help, either; whether it ought to have done so, I am not clear.
And then I came back to the window itself, and read over my notes,
hoping almost against hope that the Abbot might himself have somewhere
supplied the key I wanted. I could make nothing out of the colour or
pattern of the robes. There were no landscape backgrounds with
subsidiary objects; there was nothing in the canopies. The only
resource possible seemed to be in the attitudes of the figures. ‘Job,’
I read: ‘scroll in left hand, forefinger of right hand extended
upwards. John: holds inscribed book in left hand; with right hand
blesses, with two fingers. Zechariah: scroll in left hand; right hand
extended upwards, as Job, but with three fingers pointing up.’ In other
words, I reflected, Job has _one_ finger extended, John has _two_,
Zechariah has _three_. May not there be a numeral key concealed in
that? My dear Gregory,” said Mr Somerton, laying his hand on his
friend’s knee, “that _was_ the key. I didn’t get it to fit at first,
but after two or three trials I saw what was meant. After the first
letter of the inscription you skip _one_ letter, after the next you
skip _two_, and after that skip _three_. Now look at the result I got.
I’ve underlined the letters which form words:

[D]R[E]VI[C]IOP[E]D[M]OO[M]SMV[I]V[L]IS[L]CAV[I]B[A]SB[A]TAO[V]T
[R]DI[I]EAM[R]L[E]SI[P]VSP[O]D[S]EE[I]RSE[T]T[A]AE[S]GIA[V]N[N]R
F[T]EEA[I]L[N]QD[P]VAI[V]M[T]LE[E]ATT[O]H[I]OO[N]VMC[A]A[T].H.Q.E.

“Do you see it? ‘_Decem millia auri reposita sunt in puteo in at_. . .’
(Ten thousand [pieces] of gold are laid up in a well in …), followed by
an incomplete word beginning _at_. So far so good. I tried the same
plan with the remaining letters; but it wouldn’t work, and I fancied
that perhaps the placing of dots after the three last letters might
indicate some difference of procedure. Then I thought to myself,
‘Wasn’t there some allusion to a well in the account of Abbot Thomas in
that book the “_Sertum_”?’ Yes, there was: he built a _puteus in atrio_
(a well in the court). There, of course, was my word _atrio_. The next
step was to copy out the remaining letters of the inscription, omitting
those I had already used. That gave what you will see on this slip:

RVIIOPDOOSMVVISCAVBSBTAOTDIEAMLSIVSPDEERSETAEGIANRFEEALQDVAIMLEATTHOOVM
CA.H.Q.E.

“Now, I knew what the three first letters I wanted were—namely,
_rio_—to complete the word _atrio_; and, as you will see, these are all
to be found in the first five letters. I was a little confused at first
by the occurrence of two _i’s_, but very soon I saw that every
alternate letter must be taken in the remainder of the inscription. You
can work it out for yourself; the result, continuing where the first
‘round’ left off, is this:

‘_rio domus abbatialis de Steinfeld a me, Thoma, qui posui custodem
super ea. Gare à qui la touche_’.

“So the whole secret was out:

‘Ten thousand pieces of gold are laid up in the well in the court of
the Abbot’s house of Steinfeld by me, Thomas, who have set a guardian
over them. _Gare à qui la touche_.’

“The last words, I ought to say, are a device which Abbot Thomas had
adopted. I found it with his arms in another piece of glass at Lord
D——’s, and he drafted it bodily into his cipher, though it doesn’t
quite fit in point of grammar.

“Well, what would any human being have been tempted to do, my dear
Gregory, in my place? Could he have helped setting off, as I did, to
Steinfeld, and tracing the secret literally to the fountain-head? I
don’t believe he could. Anyhow, I couldn’t, and, as I needn’t tell you,
I found myself at Steinfeld as soon as the resources of civilization
could put me there, and installed myself in the inn you saw. I must
tell you that I was not altogether free from forebodings—on one hand of
disappointment, on the other of danger. There was always the
possibility that Abbot Thomas’s well might have been wholly
obliterated, or else that someone, ignorant of cryptograms, and guided
only by luck, might have stumbled on the treasure before me. And
then”—there was a very perceptible shaking of the voice here—’I was not
entirely easy, I need not mind confessing, as to the meaning of the
words about the guardian of the treasure. But, if you don’t mind, I’ll
say no more about that until—until it becomes necessary.

“At the first possible opportunity Brown and I began exploring the
place. I had naturally represented myself as being interested in the
remains of the abbey, and we could not avoid paying a visit to the
church, impatient as I was to be elsewhere. Still, it did interest me
to see the windows where the glass had been, and especially that at the
east end of the south aisle. In the tracery lights of that I was
startled to see some fragments and coats-of-arms remaining—Abbot
Thomas’s shield was there, and a small figure with a scroll inscribed
_Oculos habent, et non videbunt_ (They have eyes, and shall not see),
which, I take it, was a hit of the Abbot at his Canons.

“But, of course, the principal object was to find the Abbot’s house.
There is no prescribed place for this, so far as I know, in the plan of
a monastery; you can’t predict of it, as you can of the chapter-house,
that it will be on the eastern side of the cloister, or, as of the
dormitory, that it will communicate with a transept of the church. I
felt that if I asked many questions I might awaken lingering memories
of the treasure, and I thought it best to try first to discover it for
myself. It was not a very long or difficult search. That three-sided
court south-east of the church, with deserted piles of building round
it, and grass-grown pavement, which you saw this morning, was the
place. And glad enough I was to see that it was put to no use, and was
neither very far from our inn nor overlooked by any inhabited building;
there were only orchards and paddocks on the slopes east of the church.
I can tell you that fine stone glowed wonderfully in the rather watery
yellow sunset that we had on the Tuesday afternoon.

“Next, what about the well? There was not much doubt about that, as you
can testify. It is really a very remarkable thing. That curb is, I
think, of Italian marble, and the carving I thought must be Italian
also. There were reliefs, you will perhaps remember, of Eliezer and
Rebekah, and of Jacob opening the well for Rachel, and similar
subjects; but, by way of disarming suspicion, I suppose, the Abbot had
carefully abstained from any of his cynical and allusive inscriptions.

“I examined the whole structure with the keenest interest, of course—a
square well-head with an opening in one side; an arch over it, with a
wheel for the rope to pass over, evidently in very good condition
still, for it had been used within sixty years, or perhaps even later,
though not quite recently. Then there was the question of depth and
access to the interior. I suppose the depth was about sixty to seventy
feet; and as to the other point, it really seemed as if the Abbot had
wished to lead searchers up to the very door of his treasure-house,
for, as you tested for yourself, there were big blocks of stone bonded
into the masonry, and leading down in a regular staircase round and
round the inside of the well.

“It seemed almost too good to be true. I wondered if there was a
trap—if the stones were so contrived as to tip over when a weight was
placed on them; but I tried a good many with my own weight and with my
stick, and all seemed, and actually were, perfectly firm. Of course, I
resolved that Brown and I would make an experiment that very night.

“I was well prepared. Knowing the sort of place I should have to
explore, I had brought a sufficiency of good rope and bands of webbing
to surround my body, and cross-bars to hold to, as well as lanterns and
candles and crowbars, all of which would go into a single carpet-bag
and excite no suspicion. I satisfied myself that my rope would be long
enough, and that the wheel for the bucket was in good working order,
and then we went home to dinner.

“I had a little cautious conversation with the landlord, and made out
that he would not be overmuch surprised if I went out for a stroll with
my man about nine o’clock, to make (Heaven forgive me!) a sketch of the
abbey by moonlight. I asked no questions about the well, and am not
likely to do so now. I fancy I know as much about it as anyone in
Steinfeld: at least”—with a strong shudder—“I don’t want to know any
more.

“Now we come to the crisis, and, though I hate to think of it, I feel
sure, Gregory, that it will be better for me in all ways to recall it
just as it happened. We started, Brown and I, at about nine with our
bag, and attracted no attention; for we managed to slip out at the
hinder end of the inn-yard into an alley which brought us quite to the
edge of the village. In five minutes we were at the well, and for some
little time we sat on the edge of the well-head to make sure that no
one was stirring or spying on us. All we heard was some horses cropping
grass out of sight farther down the eastern slope. We were perfectly
unobserved, and had plenty of light from the gorgeous full moon to
allow us to get the rope properly fitted over the wheel. Then I secured
the band round my body beneath the arms. We attached the end of the
rope very securely to a ring in the stonework. Brown took the lighted
lantern and followed me; I had a crowbar. And so we began to descend
cautiously, feeling every step before we set foot on it, and scanning
the walls in search of any marked stone.

“Half aloud I counted the steps as we went down, and we got as far as
the thirty-eighth before I noted anything at all irregular in the
surface of the masonry. Even here there was no mark, and I began to
feel very blank, and to wonder if the Abbot’s cryptogram could possibly
be an elaborate hoax. At the forty-ninth step the staircase ceased. It
was with a very sinking heart that I began retracing my steps, and when
I was back on the thirty-eighth—Brown, with the lantern, being a step
or two above me—I scrutinized the little bit of irregularity in the
stonework with all my might; but there was no vestige of a mark.

“Then it struck me that the texture of the surface looked just a little
smoother than the rest, or, at least, in some way different. It might
possibly be cement and not stone. I gave it a good blow with my iron
bar. There was a decidedly hollow sound, though that might be the
result of our being in a well. But there was more. A great flake of
cement dropped on to my feet, and I saw marks on the stone underneath.
I had tracked the Abbot down, my dear Gregory; even now I think of it
with a certain pride. It took but a very few more taps to clear the
whole of the cement away, and I saw a slab of stone about two feet
square, upon which was engraven a cross. Disappointment again, but only
for a moment. It was you, Brown, who reassured me by a casual remark.
You said, if I remember right:

“‘It’s a funny cross: looks like a lot of eyes.’

“I snatched the lantern out of your hand, and saw with inexpressible
pleasure that the cross _was_ composed of seven eyes, four in a
vertical line, three horizontal. The last of the scrolls in the window
was explained in the way I had anticipated. Here was my ‘stone with the
seven eyes’. So far the Abbot’s data had been exact, and, as I thought
of this, the anxiety about the ‘guardian’ returned upon me with
increased force. Still, I wasn’t going to retreat now.

“Without giving myself time to think, I knocked away the cement all
round the marked stone, and then gave it a prise on the right side with
my crowbar. It moved at once, and I saw that it was but a thin light
slab, such as I could easily lift out myself, and that it stopped the
entrance to a cavity. I did lift it out unbroken, and set it on the
step, for it might be very important to us to be able to replace it.
Then I waited for several minutes on the step just above. I don’t know
why, but I think to see if any dreadful thing would rush out. Nothing
happened. Next I lit a candle, and very cautiously I placed it inside
the cavity, with some idea of seeing whether there were foul air, and
of getting a glimpse of what was inside. There _was_ some foulness of
air which nearly extinguished the flame, but in no long time it burned
quite steadily. The hole went some little way back, and also on the
right and left of the entrance, and I could see some rounded
light-coloured objects within which might be bags. There was no use in
waiting. I faced the cavity, and looked in. There was nothing
immediately in the front of the hole. I put my arm in and felt to the
right, very gingerly….

“Just give me a glass of cognac, Brown. I’ll go on in a moment,
Gregory….

“Well, I felt to the right, and my fingers touched something curved,
that felt—yes—more or less like leather; dampish it was, and evidently
part of a heavy, full thing. There was nothing, I must say, to alarm
one. I grew bolder, and putting both hands in as well as I could, I
pulled it to me, and it came. It was heavy, but moved more easily than
I had expected. As I pulled it towards the entrance, my left elbow
knocked over and extinguished the candle. I got the thing fairly in
front of the mouth and began drawing it out. Just then Brown gave a
sharp ejaculation and ran quickly up the steps with the lantern. He
will tell you why in a moment. Startled as I was, I looked round after
him, and saw him stand for a minute at the top and then walk away a few
yards. Then I heard him call softly, ‘All right, sir,’ and went on
pulling out the great bag, in complete darkness. It hung for an instant
on the edge of the hole, then slipped forward on to my chest, and _put
its arms round my neck_.

“My dear Gregory, I am telling you the exact truth. I believe I am now
acquainted with the extremity of terror and repulsion which a man can
endure without losing his mind. I can only just manage to tell you now
the bare outline of the experience. I was conscious of a most horrible
smell of mould, and of a cold kind of face pressed against my own, and
moving slowly over it, and of several—I don’t know how many—legs or
arms or tentacles or something clinging to my body. I screamed out,
Brown says, like a beast, and fell away backward from the step on which
I stood, and the creature slipped downwards, I suppose, on to that same
step. Providentially the band round me held firm. Brown did not lose
his head, and was strong enough to pull me up to the top and get me
over the edge quite promptly. How he managed it exactly I don’t know,
and I think he would find it hard to tell you. I believe he contrived
to hide our implements in the deserted building near by, and with very
great difficulty he got me back to the inn. I was in no state to make
explanations, and Brown knows no German; but next morning I told the
people some tale of having had a bad fall in the abbey ruins, which, I
suppose, they believed. And now, before I go further, I should just
like you to hear what Brown’s experiences during those few minutes
were. Tell the Rector, Brown, what you told me.”

“Well, sir,” said Brown, speaking low and nervously, “it was just this
way. Master was busy down in front of the ’ole, and I was ’olding the
lantern and looking on, when I ’eard somethink drop in the water from
the top, as I thought. So I looked up, and I see someone’s ’ead lookin’
over at us. I s’pose I must ha’ said somethink, and I ’eld the light up
and run up the steps, and my light shone right on the face. That was a
bad un, sir, if ever I see one! A holdish man, and the face very much
fell in, and larfin’, as I thought. And I got up the steps as quick
pretty nigh as I’m tellin’ you, and when I was out on the ground there
warn’t a sign of any person. There ’adn’t been the time for anyone to
get away, let alone a hold chap, and I made sure he warn’t crouching
down by the well, nor nothink. Next thing I hear master cry out
somethink ’orrible, and hall I see was him hanging out by the rope,
and, as master says, ’owever I got him up I couldn’t tell you.”

“You hear that, Gregory?” said Mr Somerton. “Now, does any explanation
of that incident strike you?”

“The whole thing is so ghastly and abnormal that I must own it puts me
quite off my balance; but the thought did occur to me that possibly
the—well, the person who set the trap might have come to see the
success of his plan.”

“Just so, Gregory, just so. I can think of nothing else so—_likely_, I
should say, if such a word had a place anywhere in my story. I think it
must have been the Abbot…. Well, I haven’t much more to tell you. I
spent a miserable night, Brown sitting up with me. Next day I was no
better; unable to get up; no doctor to be had; and, if one had been
available, I doubt if he could have done much for me. I made Brown
write off to you, and spent a second terrible night. And, Gregory, of
this I am sure, and I think it affected me more than the first shock,
for it lasted longer: there was someone or something on the watch
outside my door the whole night. I almost fancy there were two. It
wasn’t only the faint noises I heard from time to time all through the
dark hours, but there was the smell—the hideous smell of mould. Every
rag I had had on me on that first evening I had stripped off and made
Brown take it away. I believe he stuffed the things into the stove in
his room; and yet the smell was there, as intense as it had been in the
well; and, what is more, it came from outside the door. But with the
first glimmer of dawn it faded out, and the sounds ceased, too; and
that convinced me that the thing or things were creatures of darkness,
and could not stand the daylight; and so I was sure that if anyone
could put back the stone, it or they would be powerless until someone
else took it away again. I had to wait until you came to get that done.
Of course, I couldn’t send Brown to do it by himself, and still less
could I tell anyone who belonged to the place.

“Well, there is my story; and, if you don’t believe it, I can’t help
it. But I think you do.”

“Indeed,” said Mr Gregory, “I can find no alternative. I _must_ believe
it! I saw the well and the stone myself, and had a glimpse, I thought,
of the bags or something else in the hole. And, to be plain with you,
Somerton, I believe my door was watched last night, too.”

“I dare say it was, Gregory; but, thank goodness, that is over. Have
you, by the way, anything to tell about your visit to that dreadful
place?”

“Very little,” was the answer. “Brown and I managed easily enough to
get the slab into its place, and he fixed it very firmly with the irons
and wedges you had desired him to get, and we contrived to smear the
surface with mud so that it looks just like the rest of the wall. One
thing I did notice in the carving on the well-head, which I think must
have escaped you. It was a horrid, grotesque shape—perhaps more like a
toad than anything else, and there was a label by it inscribed with the
two words, ‘Depositum custodi’.”[9]

 [9] “Keep that which is committed to thee.”