Old Sarah Wall, the key-bearer, who now came ambling up at a very slow
pace, holding her hand to her side, and muttering feebly as she moved,
was a poor exchange, Olivia thought, for the masculine friend who had
ended his kindly services so abruptly. He had not even waited, as he
had intimated an intention of doing, to see the luggage safely moved
into the house. Mrs. Wall looked very cross and not too clean. Scarcely
deigning to glance at the strangers, she muttered, “This way!” and then
fell to groaning as she led the way through the farmyard up to the
house.
Olivia paused to look despairingly at her scattered trunks, and to
give a kindly word of comfort to the unlucky cab driver, who was still
occupied in estimating the damage done to his vehicle, and his chances
of getting it back to Matherham that night. As she did so she heard a
footstep on the hard ground beside her, and found the shamefaced and
blushing Mat at her side.
“Ah’ll get t’ luggage in seefe, never fear,” said he, in a voice so
gruff with excessive bashfulness that poor Olivia thought him surly,
and shrank back with a cold refusal of his services rising to her lips.
Mat thought she identified him with his father and so hastened to offer
a neat apology for that gentleman’s conduct.
“Feyther’s a pig,” said he. “Boot he wunna harm ye! an’ Ah’ll do what
Ah can to mak’ oop for him being so rough.”
And he shouldered one trunk and caught up another, and strode along
towards the house, whistling to himself with the defiant carelessness
of one who feels he has done a bold stroke. The lady and her attendant
followed, somewhat soothed by this little show of friendliness.
Even in the midst of her feelings of desolation and disappointment, in
spite of the keen cold and of the forlorn, blind look which shuttered
and shut-up windows, broken chimney pots, and untrimmed ivy gave to the
house, Olivia could not look quite without admiration and a youthful
sense of delight in the picturesque at the old Hall. The body of the
house was a long, plain, two-storeyed building, with a flagged roof
and a curious wide, flat portico, supported by two spindleshank wooden
windows, beneath which three stone steps, deeply hollowed out and
worn by generations of feet, led to the front door. At the west end
a gabled wing, flag-roofed like the rest, ran back from the body of
the house; and at right angles to this there jutted out westwards a
second small wing of the same shape. In these, the oldest portions of
the house, traces of former architectural beauties remained in stately
Tudor chimneys and two mullioned windows, round which the ivy clustered
in huge bushes, long left neglected and untrimmed. At this end of the
building a little garden ran underneath the walls, protected from the
incursions of intrusive cows by a wall which began towards the back
of the house by being very high and ended towards the front by being
very low. From the wall to the house the garden had been shut in by
palings and a little gate; but these were now much broken and decayed,
and afforded small protection to the yews and holly bushes, the little
leafless barberry tree and the shabby straggling evergreens, which grew
thickly against the weather-stained walls of the old house, choking the
broken panes of the lower windows as the ivy did those of the upper
ones. It was this western end that was visible from the road, the view
of the front being obscured by a long stone-built barn, very old, and
erected on foundations older still, about which hung traditions of
monkish days.
If she had seen it at any other time, Olivia would have been crazy
with delight at the thought of living in such a place; and even now,
cheerless as the immediate prospect was, it gave her a gleam of comfort
to reflect that, if she did have to pass the night without any bed
amongst the rats, the ancestors of those rats had scampered over the
place in the time of Queen Elizabeth.
With some difficulty, Mrs. Wall turned the key in the rusty lock and
admitted them. It seemed that she had a grievance in the fact that she
had not known on what day they were to arrive. As a matter of fact,
she was one of those persons who are never prepared for anything, but
Olivia had had no means of learning her peculiarities, and so she met
the old woman’s complaints in a humble and apologetic spirit which
increased Mrs. Wall’s arrogance.
The entrance hall was low-roofed and square; the walls were covered
with a cheap and commonplace paper, the wainscoting and the banisters
of the broad staircase were of painted wood. This was the portion
of the house which had suffered most during its decadence. Olivia,
examining everything with an eye keen to discover the good points to be
made the most of in her new home, found that where the paint had worn
off the staircase and wainscot dark oak was revealed underneath, and
she rashly uttered an exclamation of horror at the vandalism of the
farm’s late occupants.
“The idea of spoiling beautiful dark oak with this horrid paint! Why,
the people who did it ought to be sent to penal servitude!”
Mrs. Wall was scandalized.
“T’ fowk ’as lived here last liked t’ place clean,” she said, severely.
“It’ll nivver look t’ same again as it did, wi’ a clean white
antimacassar stitched on to ivery cheer, an’ wax flowers under glass
sheades in a’ t’ parlor windows. An’ t’ parlor a’ways as neat as a new
pin, so ye wur afreaid a’most to coom into ’t. Ah, ye meen talk o’ yer
gentlefowk, but they’ll nivver mak’ it look t’ same again!”
Olivia had opened the door to the right, and throwing wide the shutters
of one of the three large windows, revealed a long, low-ceilinged room,
used as the living room by the late farmer’s family, and having at the
further end a wide, high, old-fashioned fireplace, the mouldings of
which had been carefully covered with whitewash, now smoked-begrimed
and worn into dark streaks. The shutters and the wainscoting, which
in this room was breast high upon the walls, had been treated in the
same way. Olivia uttered a groan, and turned to the door, afraid of
uttering more offensive remarks. Then they went upstairs, and opened
the doors of a lot of little meanly papered bedrooms which formed the
upper storey of this part of the house. Having allowed the new comers
to examine these, while she remained sniffing in the passage, Mrs. Wall
shuttled hastily back to the staircase.
“Stop!” cried Olivia, as the old woman placed one downtrodden shoe on
the second step; “we haven’t seen the other part of the house at all.
Where does this lead to?”
And she peered into a crooked passage which led into the first of the
two older wings.
Mrs. Wall paused with evident reluctance.
“There’s nowt yonder but t’ worst o’ t’ bedrooms; ye’ve seen t’ best,”
she grumbled.
But Olivia was already exploring, followed by Lucy; and the old woman,
with much reluctance, brought up the rear. The passage was quite dark,
and very cold. The tallow dip which Mrs. Wall carried gave only just
enough light to enable the explorers to find the handles of the doors
on the left. One of these Olivia opened, not without difficulty; for
the floor was strewn with lumber of all sorts, which the last occupier
of the farm had not thought worth carrying away. The walls of this
room, which was very small, were panelled right up to the low ceiling;
and the panelling had been whitewashed. A second chamber in this
passage was in a similar condition, except that the panelling had been
torn down from two of the four walls, and its place supplied by a layer
of plaster. Holding up her skirts very carefully, Olivia stepped across
the dusty piles of broken boxes, damaged fireirons, and odds and ends
of torn carpet with which the floor of this room also was covered, and
looked through the dusty panes of the little window.
“Now you’ve seen a’,” said Mrs. Wall, rather querulously. “An’ t’ lad
downstairs ’ll be wanting to know wheer to put t’ things.”
She was retreating with her candle, when Olivia stopped her again.
“No,” she said, eagerly, “we’ve not seen all. There’s a wing of the
house we have not been into at all; and I can see through the little
window, on this side of it, some curtains and a flower vase with
something still in it. It doesn’t look empty and deserted like the
rest. I must get in there before I go down.”
But Mrs. Wall’s old face had wrinkled up with superstitious terror, and
it was only by force of muscle that the young girl succeeded in cutting
off her retreat.
“Na’,” she said, her voice sinking to a croaking whisper. “I canna tak’
ye in theer. An’--an’ t’ doors are locked, ye see,” she added, eagerly,
as Olivia, still grasping her conductress’ arm, in vain tried the door
at the end of the passage, and one on the left-hand side, at right
angles with it.
“Well, but why are they locked?” asked the young girl, impatiently, her
rich-toned, youthful voice ringing sonorously through the long-disused
passage. “The whole place is ours now, and I have a right to see into
every corner of it.”
“Oh, Miss Olivia, perhaps we’d better go back--go downstairs--for
to-day,” suggested the little maid Lucy, rather timorously behind her.
Mrs. Wall’s nervous tremors were beginning to infect the poor girl, who
was, moreover, very cold, and was longing for some tea. But her young
mistress had at least her fair share of an immovable British obstinacy.
Finding that both doors were firmly locked and that there was no key
to either forthcoming, she flung the whole weight of her massive and
muscular young body against the door on the left, until the old wood
cracked and the rusty nails rattled in the disused hinges.
“Mercy on us!” exclaimed Sarah Wall, petrified by the audacity of the
young amazon. “Shoo ’ll have t’ owd place aboot our ears!”
“Take the candle, Lucy,” said Olivia, imperiously, perceiving that the
dip was flaring and wobbling in an ominous manner in the old woman’s
trembling fingers.
Lucy obeyed, frightened but curious. Her mistress made two more
vigorous onslaughts upon the door; the first produced a great creaking
and straining; at the second the door gave way on its upper hinge, so
that the girl’s strong hands were able to force the lock with ease. She
turned to the guide in some triumph.
“Now, Mrs. Wall, we’ll unearth your ghost, if there is one. At any
rate, we’ll get to the bottom of your mystery in five minutes.”
But she did not. Pressing on to the end of a very narrow, unlighted
passage in which she now found herself, Olivia came to a second door;
this opened easily and admitted her into a large chamber, the aspect of
which, dimly seen by the fading light which came through a small square
window on her left, filled her brave young spirit with a sudden sense
of dreariness and desolation.
For it was not empty and lumber-strewn, like the rest of the rooms
she had entered. The dark forms of cumbrous, old-fashioned furniture
were discernible in the dusk; the heavy hangings of a huge four-post
mahogany bedstead shook, as a rat, disturbed by the unwonted intrusion,
slid down the curtain and scurried across the floor. As she stepped
slowly forward on the carpet, which was damp to the tread, and peered
to the right and left in the gloom, Olivia could see strange relics of
the room’s last occupant; the withered remains of what had been a bunch
of flowers on a table in front of the little window; an assortment of
Christmas cards and valentines, all of design now out of date, and all
thickly covered with brown dust, fastened with pins on to the wall
on each side of the high mantle-piece; even a book, a railway novel,
with its yellow boards gnawed by the rats, which she picked up rather
timorously from the floor, where, by this time, it seemed to have
acquired a consecrated right to lie.
Still advancing very slowly, Olivia reached the opposite side of the
room, where her quick eyes had perceived the barred shutters of a
second and much larger window. With some difficulty she removed the
bar, which had grown stiff and rusty, and, drawing back the heavy
shutters, revealed the long, stone-mullioned window, with diamond
panes, which had been such a picturesque feature of the house from the
outside. The thick, untrained ivy obscured one end of it, but enough
light glimmered through the dirt-encrusted panes for Olivia to be now
quite sure of two things of which she felt nearly sure before--namely,
that this was the best bedroom in the house, and that, for some
mysterious reason, this chamber, instead of being dismantled like the
rest, had been allowed to remain for a period of years almost as its
last occupant had left it. Almost, but not quite; for the bedding had
been removed, the covers to the dressing-table and the gigantic chest
of drawers, and the white curtains which had once hung before the
shuttered window.
On the other hand, a host of knicknacks remained to testify to
the sex, the approximate age, and the measure of refinement of the
late owner. More railway novels, all well-worn; flower vases of an
inexpensive kind; two hand mirrors, one broken; a dream book; a bow
of bright ribbon; a handsome cut-glass scent bottle; these things,
among others, were as suggestive as a photograph; while the fact that
this room alone had been studiously left in its original state, and
even furnished in accordance with it, threw a new and more favorable
light on the taste of that mysteriously interesting somebody whose
individuality made itself felt across a lapse of years to the wondering
new comer.
Olivia Denison was not by any means a fanciful girl. She had been
brought up by a step-mother--a mode of education little likely to
produce an unwholesome forcing of the sentimental tendencies. She
was besides too athletic and vigorously healthy to be prone to
superstitious or morbid imaginings. But as she stood straining her eyes
in the fading daylight to take in every detail of the mysterious room,
the panelling, which in this apartment alone was left its own dark
color, seemed to take strange moving patterns as she looked; the musty,
close air seemed to choke her; and faint creakings and moanings, either
in the ancient woodwork or the loose-hanging ivy outside, grew in her
listening ears to a murmur as of a voice trying to speak, and miserably
failing to make itself understood. She was roused by a shrill cry, and
found Lucy, whose fear for her mistress had overcome her fear of this
desolate room, shaking her by the arm and pulling her towards the door.
“Oh, Miss Olivia, do come out--do come out! You’re going to faint; I’m
sure you are. It’s all this horrid room--this horrid house. Oh, do come
and write, and tell master it’s not a fit place for Christians to come
to, and he’d never prosper if he was to come here, and nor wouldn’t
none of us, I’m positive. Do come, Miss Olivia, there’s a dear. It’s
fit to choke one in here, what with the rats and the damp, that it is.
And if we was to stay here long enough we’d see ghosts, I know.”
Olivia laughed. No phantom had terrors for her, however strong an
impression half-guessed realities might make upon her youthful
imagination.
“Don’t be afraid, Lucy,” she said, encouragingly. “We’ll soon frighten
the ghosts away by letting a little fresh air into these musty rooms.
Here, help me.”
Half reassured by her resonant voice, the maid accompanied her to the
larger window, still clinging to her arm, but more for companionship
than with the idea of affording support to her mistress, who had
recovered her self-command. Together they succeeded in throwing open
both windows to their full extent, not, however, accomplishing this
without a shriek from Lucy as a great bird flew out of the hanging ivy
and almost flapped against their faces in his confusion at this unusual
disturbance. They both felt a sense of relief as the keen but fresh
outside air blew into the long-closed room, dispersing the mouldy,
musty smell of damp hangings and decaying wood. Even the old woman, who
had stood all this time in the doorway, apparently engaged in muttering
incantations over her tallow dip, but really transfixed by this
audacity of young blood, drew a long breath as the rush of fresh air
reached her, and gathered courage to ask “what they were after doin’
now?”
“Were ‘after’ ransacking every corner of this old ghost run, turning
it upside down and inside out, and chasing away the last shadow of a
bogey,” answered Olivia, cheerily. “Here’s another room to look into.”
Crossing the room with a light step, she opened the door of the
second of the closed-up apartments. This chamber also had escaped the
dismantling of the rest of the house, but it contained very little
that would have been worth taking away. It was lighted by three small
windows, all much broken, and all hung with limp rags which had once
been muslin curtains, gaily tied up with blue ribbons, which were
now almost colorless with dust and damp. The floor was covered with
matting, which smelt like damp straw, and had evidently afforded many a
meal to the rats now scurrying behind the woodwork, which in this room
was much decayed and in far from good repair. A plain deal table, from
which the cover had been removed; two limp wicker chairs with ragged
cushions; an empty birdcage; a fanciful wicker kennel for a lapdog;
these were nearly all that were left of the furniture. Olivia inspected
everything with eager but silent interest, and then turned suddenly to
Sarah Wall, who had again followed them as far as the door, preferring
even the eerie passage of the bedroom to solitude outside.
“Who lived in these rooms last?” she asked.
But the candle nearly fell from Mrs. Wall’s hand as, for all answer,
she withdrew into the desolation of the deserted bedroom rather than
face the eager questioner again.
Olivia was not to be put off so easily. She followed precipitately,
and, changing the form of her attack, said--
“How long is it since these rooms were shut up, Mrs. Wall?”
The guide’s eyes shifted about, refusing to meet those of the young
girl.
“Twea year’; same as rest o’ t’ house,” she answered, in a grumbling
tone.
“Only two years! It wasn’t shut up long before the family went away,
then?” said Olivia, incredulously.
“Not as Ah knaws on,” answered Sarah Wall.
Miss Denison hated an untruth with the impetuous loathing of an honest
nature. She would have liked to shake this wretched old woman, who
would not be candid on a subject which could not be of the slightest
importance to her. Perhaps her companion got an inkling of this
inclination, for she turned and beat a hasty retreat along the narrow
passage which led from the bedroom to the body of the house. Olivia did
not at once follow her. With a curious reluctance, whether reverence
for a dead past whose relics she was disturbing, or fear of some shock
which its revelations might bring her, she scarcely knew, the girl
picked up one of the dust-begrimed novels, and looked at the title
page. But there was nothing written on it. She opened three or four
more of the novels with the same result. By this time it was growing so
dark that she had to hasten her movements for fear that when at last a
clue was found she might be unable to distinguish the letters. Having
in vain examined every book upon the table, she continued to explore
until she found, on a small hanging bookshelf in an obscure corner
of the room, a little pile of devotional works--Bible, hymn book,
Bogatsky’s “Golden Treasury,” a tiny “Daily Portion,” and a prayer
book. This last was on the top of all. As Olivia opened it, there fell
to the floor tiny dried scraps of flowers and fern. Turning to the
flyleaf, and carrying the book in haste to the window, she found these
words, written in a round, school-boy hand--
“Ellen Mitchell, from her affectionate brother Ned.” And a date of
eighteen years back.
Olivia replaced the prayer book on the shelf, and left the old room
without further delay, followed by Lucy, who had remained close at
hand, but discreetly silent, during these investigations.
When they reached the outer end of the passage, Olivia glanced with
some curiosity at the old door she had so roughly broken down, and as
she did so, some letters written in pencil high on the upper panel
caught her eye. With difficulty she made out a date in July ten years
before.
“I wonder,” she thought, “whether that is the date on which the rooms
were locked up. If so, it was eight years before the last people left
the house, I know. And their name was Mitchell. Who can I ask to tell
me the story?”
And, having forgotten cold, fatigue, and hunger in the interest of
her discoveries, Olivia Denison made her way slowly down to the
ground floor again, where she caught Mrs. Wall in the act of slipping
out of the front door.