9 A Temporary Peace
It was scarcely light when I jumped out of bed, and murmuring, “Thank God it was only a dream,” dressed myself with all speed, and flinging open the window, looked out on a calm morning after the previous night’s storm.
Muddily and angrily the Thames rolled onward to the sea. On the opposite side of the river I could see stretches of green, with here and there a house dotting the banks.
A fleet of barges lay waiting the turn of the tide to proceed to their destination. The voices of the men shouting to each other, and blaspheming for no particular reason, came quite clear and distinct over the water. The garden was strewed with twigs and branches blown off the trees during the night; amongst them the sprigs of ivy I had myself cut off.
An hour and a scene not calculated to encourage superstitious fancies, it may be, but still not likely to enliven any man’s spirits—a quiet, dull, gray, listless, dispiriting morning, and, being country-bred, I felt its influence.
“I will walk into town, and ask Ned Munro to give me some breakfast,” I thought, and found comfort in the idea.
Ned Munro was a doctor, but not a struggling doctor. He was not rich, but he “made enough for a beginner”: so he said. He worked hard for little pay; “but I mean some day to have high pay, and take the world easy,” he explained. He was blessed with great hopes and good courage; he had high spirits, and a splendid constitution. He neither starved himself nor his friends; his landlady “loved him as her son”; and there were several good-looking girls who were very fond of him, not as a brother.
But Ned had no notion of marrying, yet awhile. “Time enough for that,” he told me once, “when I can furnish a good house, and set up a brougham, and choose my patients, and have a few hundreds lying idle in the bank.”
Meantime, as no one of these items had yet been realized, he lived in lodgings, ate toasted haddocks with his morning coffee, and smoked and read novels far into the night.
Yes, I could go and breakfast with Munro. Just then it occurred to me that the gas I had left lighted when I went to bed was out; that the door I had left locked was open.
Straight downstairs I went. The gas in the hall was out, and every door I had myself closed and locked the previous morning stood ajar, with the seal, however, remaining intact.
I had borne as much as I could: my nerves were utterly unhinged. Snatching my hat and coat, I left the house, and fled, rather than walked, towards London.
With every step I took towards town came renewed courage; and when I reached Ned’s lodgings, I felt ashamed of my pusillanimity.
“I have been sleep-walking, that is what it is,” I decided. “I have opened the doors and turned off the gas myself, and been frightened at the work of my own hands. I will ask Munro what is the best thing to insure a quiet night.”
Which I did accordingly, receiving for answer—
“Keep a quiet mind.”
“Yes, but if one cannot keep a quiet mind; if one is anxious and excited, and——”
“In love,” he finished, as I hesitated.
“Well, no; I did not mean that,” I said; “though, of course, that might enter into the case also. Suppose one is uneasy about a certain amount of money, for instance?”
“Are you?” he asked, ignoring the general suggestiveness of my remark.
“Well, yes; I want to make some if I can.”
“Don’t want, then,” he advised. “Take my word for it, no amount of money is worth the loss of a night’s rest; and you have been tossing about all night, I can see. Come, Patterson, if it’s forgery or embezzlement, out with it, man, and I will help you if I am able.”
“If it were either one or the other, I should go to Mr. Craven,” I answered, laughing.
“Then it must be love,” remarked my host; “and you will want to take me into your confidence some day. The old story, I suppose: beautiful girl, stern parents, wealthy suitor, poor lover. I wonder if we could interest her in a case of small-pox. If she took it badly, you might have a chance; but I have a presentiment that she has been vaccinated.”
“Ned,” was my protest, “I shall certainly fling a plate at your head.”
“All right, if you think the exertion would do you good,” he answered. “Give me your hand, Patterson”; and before I knew what he wanted with it, he had his fingers on my wrist.
“Look here, old fellow,” he said; “you will be laid up, if you don’t take care of yourself. I thought so when you came in, and I am sure of it now. What have you been doing?”
“Nothing wrong, Munro,” I answered, smiling in spite of myself. “I have not been picking, or stealing, or abducting any young woman, or courting my neighbour’s wife; but I am worried and perplexed. When I sleep I have dreadful dreams—horrible dreams,” I added, shuddering.
“Can you tell me what is worrying and perplexing you?” he asked, kindly, after a moment’s thought.
“Not yet, Ned,” I answered; “though I expect I shall have to tell you soon. Give me something to make me sleep quietly: that is all I want now.”
“Can’t you go out of town?” he inquired.
“I do not want to go out of town,” I answered.
“I will make you up something to strengthen your nerves,” he said, after a pause; “but if you are not better—well, before the end of the week, take my advice, and run down to Brighton over Sunday. Now, you ought to give me a guinea for that,” he added, laughing. “I assure you, all the gold-headed cane, all the wonderful chronometer doctors who pocket thousands per annum at the West End, could make no more of your case than I have done.”
“I am sure they could not,” I said, gratefully; “and when I have the guinea to spare, be sure I shall not forget your fee.”
Whether it was owing to his medicine, or his advice, or his cheery, health-giving manner, I have no idea; but that night, when I walked towards the Uninhabited House, I felt a different being.
On my way I called at a small corn-chandler’s, and bought a quartern of flour done up in a thin and utterly insufficient bag. I told the man the wrapper would not bear its contents, and he said he could not help that.
I asked him if he had no stronger bags. He answered that he had, but he could not afford to give them away.
I laid down twopence extra, and inquired if that would cover the expense of a sheet of brown paper.
Ashamed, he turned aside and produced a substantial bag, into which he put the flour in its envelope of curling-tissue.
I thanked him, and pushed the twopence across the counter. With a grunt, he thrust the money back. I said good-night, leaving current coin of the realm to the amount indicated behind me.
Through the night be shouted, “Hi! sir, you’ve forgotten your change.”
Through the night I shouted back, “Give your next customer its value in civility.”
All of which did me good. Squabbling with flesh and blood is not a bad preliminary to entering a ghost-haunted house.
Once again I was at River Hall. Looking up at its cheerless portal, I was amazed at first to see the outside lamp flaring away in the darkness. Then I remembered that all the other gas being out, of course this, which I had not turned off, would blaze more brightly.
Purposely I had left my return till rather late. I had gone to one of the theatres, and remained until a third through the principal piece. Then I called at a supper-room, had half a dozen oysters and some stout; after which, like a giant refreshed, I wended my way westward.
Utterly false would it be for me to say I liked the idea of entering the Uninhabited House; but still, I meant to do it, and I did.
No law-books for me that night; no seductive fire; no shining lights all over the house. Like a householder of twenty years’ standing, I struck a match, and turned the gas on to a single hall-lamp. I did not trouble myself even about shutting the doors opening into the hall; I only strewed flour copiously over the marble pavement, and on the first flight of stairs, and then, by the servant’s passages, crept into the upper story, and so to bed.
That night I slept dreamlessly. I awoke in broad daylight, wondering why I had not been called sooner, and then remembered there was no one to call, and that if I required hot water, I must boil it for myself.
With that light heart which comes after a good night’s rest, I put on some part of my clothing, and was commencing to descend the principal staircase, when my proceedings of the previous night flashed across my mind; and pausing, I looked down into the hall. No sign of a foot on the flour. The white powder lay there innocent of human pressure as the untrodden snow; and yet, and yet, was I dreaming—could I have been drunk without my own knowledge, before I went to bed? The gas was ablaze in the hall and on the staircase, and every door left open over-night was close shut.
Curiously enough, at that moment fear fell from me like a garment which has served its turn, and in the strength of my manhood, I felt able to face anything the Uninhabited House might have to show.
Over the latter part of that week, as being utterly unimportant in its events or consequences, I pass rapidly, only saying that, when Saturday came, I followed Munro’s advice, and ran down to Brighton, under the idea that by so doing I should thoroughly strengthen myself for the next five days’ ordeal. But the idea was a mistaken one. The Uninhabited House took its ticket for Brighton by the same express; it got into the compartment with me; it sat beside me at dinner; it hob-nobbed to me over my own wine; uninvited it came out to walk with me; and when I stood still, listening to the band, it stood still too. It went with me to the pier, and when the wind blew, as the wind did, it said, “We were quite as well off on the Thames.”
When I woke, through the night, it seemed to shout, “Are you any better off here?” And when I went to church the next day it crept close up to me in the pew, and said, “Come, now, it is all very well to say you are a Christian; but if you were really one you would not be afraid of the place you and I wot of.”
Finally, I was so goaded and maddened that I shook my fist at the sea, and started off by the evening train for the Uninhabited House.
This time I travelled alone. The Uninhabited House preceded me.
There, in its old position, looking gloomy and mysterious in the shadows of night, I found it on my return to town; and, as if tired of playing tricks with one who had become indifferent to their vagaries, all the doors remained precisely as I had left them; and if there were ghosts in the house that night, they did not interfere with me or the chamber I occupied.
Next morning, while I was dressing, a most remarkable thing occurred; a thing for which I was in no wise prepared. Spirits, and sights and sounds supposed appropriate to spirithood, I had expected; but for a modest knock at the front door I was not prepared.
When, after hurriedly completing my toilet, I undrew the bolts and undid the chain, and opened the door wide, there came rushing into the house a keen easterly wind, behind which I beheld a sad-faced woman, dressed in black, who dropped me a curtsey, and said:
“If you please, sir—I suppose you are the gentleman?”
Now, I could make nothing out of this, so I asked her to be good enough to explain.
Then it all came out: “Did I want a person to char?”
This was remarkable—very. Her question amazed me to such an extent that I had to ask her in, and request her to seat herself on one of the hall chairs, and go upstairs myself, and think the matter over before I answered her.
It had been so impressed upon me that no one in the neighbourhood would come near River Hall, that I should as soon have thought of Victoria by the grace of God paying me a friendly visit, as of being waited on by a charwoman.
I went downstairs again.
At sight of me my new acquaintance rose from her seat, and began curling up the corner of her apron.
“Do you know,” I said, “that this house bears the reputation of being haunted?”
“I have heard people say it is, sir,” she answered.
“And do you know that servants will not stay in it—that tenants will not occupy it?”
“I have heard so, sir,” she answered once again.
“Then what do you mean by offering to come?” I inquired.
She looked up into my face, and I saw the tears come softly stealing into her eyes, and her mouth began to pucker, ere, drooping her head, she replied:
“Sir, just three months ago, come the twentieth, I was a happy woman. I had a good husband and a tidy home. There was not a lady in the land I would have changed places with. But that night, my man, coming home in a fog, fell into the river and was drowned. It was a week before they found him, and all the time—while I had been hoping to hear his step every minute in the day—I was a widow.”
“Poor soul!” I said, involuntarily.
“Well, sir, when a man goes, all goes. I have done my best, but still I have not been able to feed my children—his children—properly, and the sight of their poor pinched faces breaks my heart, it do, sir,” and she burst out sobbing.
“And so, I suppose,” I remarked, “you thought you would face this house rather than poverty?”
“Yes, sir. I heard the neighbours talking about this place, and you, sir, and I made up my mind to come and ask if I mightn’t tidy up things a bit for you, sir. I was a servant, sir, before I married, and I’d be so thankful.”
Well, to cut the affair shorter for the reader than I was able to do for myself, I gave her half a crown, and told her I would think over her proposal, and let her hear from me—which I did. I told her she might come for a couple of hours each morning, and a couple each evening, and she could bring one of the children with her if she thought she was likely to find the place lonely.
I would not let her come in the day-time, because, in the quest I had set myself, it was needful I should feel assured no person could have an opportunity of elaborating any scheme for frightening me, on the premises.
“Real ghosts,” said I to Mr. Craven, “I do not mind; but the physical agencies which may produce ghosts, I would rather avoid.” Acting on which principle I always remained in the house while Mrs. Stott—my charwoman was so named—cleaned, and cooked, and boiled, and put things straight.
No one can imagine what a revolution this woman effected in my ways and habits, and in the ways and habits of the Uninhabited House.
Tradesmen called for orders. The butcher’s boy came whistling down the lane to deliver the rump-steak or mutton-chop I had decided on for dinner; the greengrocer delivered his vegetables; the cheesemonger took solemn affidavit concerning the freshness of his stale eggs and the superior quality of a curious article which he called country butter, and declared came from a particular dairy famed for the excellence of its produce; the milkman’s yahoo sounded cheerfully in the morning hours; and the letter-box was filled with cards from all sorts and descriptions of people—from laundresses to wine merchants, from gardeners to undertakers.
The doors now never shut nor opened of their own accord. A great peace seemed to have settled over River Hall.
It was all too peaceful, in fact. I had gone to the place to hunt a ghost, and not even the ghost of a ghost seemed inclined to reveal itself to me.