mother lay dying, there was an apparition of a turkey-cock that sat upon
the palings opposite our cottage, and when it fluttered off ’em with a
screech, just for all the world like a real turkey, you know, sir, she
turned on her side suddenly, and give up the ghost. I’ve always believed
in apparitions since then.’
‘And when my sister Jane lay in of her last,’ chimed in Mrs Bizzey,
‘there was a little clock stood on the mantel-shelf that had always been
wound up regular and gone regular ever since she was married; and we was
moving a lot of things to one side, and we moved that clock and found
it had stopped; and the nurse, she said to me, “Mark my words if that’s
not a warning of death;” and, sure enough, Jane died before the morning,
which makes me so careful of moving a clock since then that I’d rather go
three miles round than touch one if a body lay sick in the house.’
‘I see that you both take a most sensible view of the business, and are
fully alive to the importance attached to it,’ I answered; ‘I hope,
therefore, to secure your assistance to find out what these unusual and
mysterious noises in your house portend, and what the authors require us
to do for them.’
Then—whilst the old man scratched his head with bewilderment, and the old
woman looked scared out of her seven senses—I explained to them, as well
as I was able, the nature of a séance, and asked them if they would come
and sit at the table with me that evening and hold one.
‘But, lawk a mussy, sir, you never want to speak to them!’ cried Mrs
Bizzey.
‘How else are we to ascertain for what reason these spirits disturb your
lodgers and render your rooms uninhabitable by their pranks?’
‘I should die of fright before we had been at it five minutes,’ was her
comment; but her husband was pluckier, and took a more practical view of
the matter.
‘You’ll just do as I bid you, missus, and hold your chatter. There’s no
doubt these noises are a great nuisance—not to say a loss—and if this
gentleman will be good enough to try and stop them, and can’t do without
us, I’ll help him for one, and you will for another.’
Mrs Bizzey protested, and wept, and was even refractory, but it was
all of no avail, and before we separated it had been agreed we should
meet again at ten o’clock, and hold a séance. There was some whispering
between the old couple after that that I did not quite understand, but as
it ended by Mrs Bizzey ejaculating, ‘Nonsense; I tell you the house will
be quiet enough by ten o’clock,’ I concluded he was referring to some
expected visitor, and dismissed the subject from my mind. As soon as they
had disappeared I delivered myself up to self-gratulation. I was really
going to hold a séance, under my own direction and the most favourable
circumstances, with a large haunted house at my command, and no one to be
any the wiser for my dabbling in the necromantic art. I took out an old
number of the ‘Spiritualist,’ and referred to the directions for forming
circles at home. I prepared the paper, pencils, and speaking tubes, and
symmetrically arranged the table and chairs.
Nothing was wanted when Mr and Mrs Bizzey entered my room at the
appointed hour—he looking expectant, and she very much alarmed. I was
prepared for this, however, and insisted upon their both joining me in
a glass of whisky and hot water before commencing the sitting, alleging
as a reason the fact that the presence of spirits invariably chills
the atmosphere, whether in summer or winter. So I mixed three bumping
tumblers of toddy, strong enough to give us the courage we required for
the occasion; and after we had (according to the directions) engaged for
some little time in light and friendly conversation, I induced my friends
to approach the table.
It was now, I was glad to see by my watch, about half-past eleven—just
about the time when the mysterious sounds had commenced the night before;
and having lowered the lamp, much to Mrs Bizzey’s horror, until it was
represented by a mere glimmer of light, I instructed her husband and
herself how to place their hands upon the table, linked with mine, and
the séance began.
I had enjoined perfect silence on my companions, and after we had been
sitting still for about fifteen minutes, during which I had watched in
vain for some symptoms of movement on the part of the table, we all heard
distinctly the sound of a foot creeping cautiously about the upper rooms,
upon which Mrs Bizzey, too frightened to shriek, began to weep, and her
husband, in order to stop her, pinched her violently in the dark.
‘Hush!’ I exclaimed, almost as agitated as the woman. ‘Do not disturb
them for your life, and whatever you may see, don’t scream.’
‘La, sir, you never mean to say that they’ll come downstairs?’
‘I cannot say what they may do. I think I hear a step descending now. But
remember, Mrs Bizzey, they will not hurt you, and try and be brave for
all our sakes.’
We were in a state of high nervous excitement for the next five minutes,
during which the same noises I had heard the night before were repeated
overhead, only that the curses were louder and delivered with more
determination, and the falls appeared to succeed each other like hail.
‘Oh, sir, what are they a-doing?’ exclaimed Mrs Bizzey, paralysed with
terror. ‘They must be killing each other all round.’
‘Hush!’ I replied. ‘Listen, now. Some one is pleading for love or for
mercy. How soft and clear the voice is!’
‘It sounds for all the world like my poor sister Jane when she was asking
her husband to forgive her for everything she had done amiss,’ said the
old woman.
‘Perhaps it is your sister Jane, or some of your relations,’ I replied.
‘She may want you to do something for her. Would you be afraid if she
were suddenly to open the door and come into the room?’
‘Oh, I don’t know, I’m sure, sir; but I hope she mayn’t. It makes me
curdle all over only to think of it.’
‘They’re quieter now. Let us ask if there is any one present who wishes
to speak to us,’ I said; and addressing the table to that effect, I
commenced to spell out the alphabet rather loudly—‘A, B, C,’ etc.
Whether from my nervousness, or the united strain we laid upon it, I know
not, but the table certainly began to rock at that juncture, though I
could make neither head nor tail of its intentions. Treating it in the
orthodox manner by which Britons invariably attempt to communicate with
a foreigner who does not understand one word of the language spoken, I
began to bawl at the table, and my A, B, C must have reverberated through
the empty house.
Again the old woman whispered mysteriously to the old man, but he
dismissed her question with an impatient answer; and my attention was
too much attracted in another direction at that moment to give much heed
of what they were doing. My ear had caught the sound of a descending
footstep, and I felt sure the spirits were at last about to visit us _in
propriæ personæ_. But dreading the effect it might have on Mrs Bizzey’s
nerves, I purposely held my tongue, and applied myself afresh to a
vigorous repetition of the alphabet, striving to cover the approaching
footstep by the noise of my own voice, although I was trembling with
excitement and delight at the successful issue of my undertaking. At
last I plainly heard the footstep pause outside the door, as though
deliberating before it opened it. The old man was apparently too deaf
or too absorbed to notice it, and his wife was in a state of helpless
fright. I alone sufficiently retained my senses to see the door slowly
open, and a white-robed figure—a real, materialised spirit—stand upon the
threshold. The gesture of delight, which I could not repress, roused my
companions from their reverie; and as soon as Mrs Bizzey turned and saw
the figure, she recognised it.
‘It’s Jane!’ she screamed. ‘It’s my own poor sister Jane come back from
the grave to visit me again, with her red hair and blue eyes; I can see
’em as plain as plain. I’ll die of the shock, I know I shall!’
‘Nonsense!’ I exclaimed, sternly, fearful, lest by her folly she should
scare the newly-born spirit back to the spheres. ‘If it is your sister,
speak to her as you used to do. Tell her you are glad to see her, and ask
if she wants anything done.’
‘Oh, Jane!’ said the old woman, half falling upon her knees, ‘don’t come
a-nigher me, for mercy’s sake! I never kept nothing of yourn back from
the children except the old blue dress, which it wouldn’t have been no
use for them to wear, and the ring, which I had asked you to give me a
dozen times in your life, and you had always refused. I’d give ’em both
back now if I could, Jane, but the gownd have been on the dust-heap these
twenty years past, and the ring I sold the minute my man was laid up with
rheumatis. Forgive me, Jane, forgive me!’
‘_Why, what on earth are you making such a row about?_’ replied the
spirit.
I leapt to my feet in a moment.
‘This is some shameful hoax!’ I exclaimed. ‘Who are you, and what do you
do here?’
‘I should think I might put the same question to you, since I find you
sitting in the dark, at dead of night, with my landlord and landlady.’
‘Lor’, Mr Montmorency, it’s never you, sir!’ ejaculated old Bizzey, with
a feeble giggle.
The voice seemed familiar to me. Who on earth was this Mr Montmorency,
who had intruded upon our séance at the most important juncture? I turned
up the lamp and threw its light full upon his features. ‘Good heavens!’ I
exclaimed, ‘it’s Julian Cockleboat.’
The young man was equally astonished with myself.
‘Did Lord Seaborne send you after me?’ he said, guessing the truth at
once. ‘And how did you find out I was lodging here?’
‘Aha, my boy!’ I replied, unwilling to deny the _kúdos_ with which he
credited me, ‘that’s _my_ secret. Do you suppose I have gained the name
of the amateur detective among my friends for nothing? No, no! I am in
Norwich expressly for the purpose of restoring you to your guardian, and
as I knew that to show my hand more openly would be to scare you off to
another hiding place, I devised this little plan for making you reveal
yourself in your true character.’
‘Did Robson tell you, then, that I had taken an engagement at the theatre
here?’
‘Never you mind, Mr Cockleboat; it is quite sufficient that I knew it.
This is a proper sort of house to play hide-and-seek in, isn’t it?’
I was dispersing the table and chairs again with angry jerks as I spoke,
fearful lest my attempted investigation of the occult mysteries should be
discovered before I had removed its traces.
‘Still I can’t understand how you discovered that Mr Montmorency was
myself, although naturally my night rehearsals must have disturbed you.
But you told me you had no other lodgers,’ continued Julian Cockleboat
reproachfully, to the Bizzeys.
‘And you said the same thing to me,’ I added, in similar tones.
‘Well, sir—well, Mr Montmorency, I’m very sorry it should have happened
so,’ replied the landlord, turning from one to the other, ‘but it’s all
my old woman’s fault, for I said to her—’
‘You did nothing of the sort,’ interrupted his better half; ‘for when I
come to you and told you as a second gentleman wanted rooms here, it was
you as said, “Let him have the little room upstairs, and no one will be
ever the wiser if he takes his meals out of a day.”’
‘But we never thought—begging your pardon, Mr Montmorency—as you’d take
such a liberty with the upper offices as to make noises in them as should
disturb the whole house.’
‘Well, what was I to do?’ replied the young man, appealing to me.
‘They’ve given me three leading parts to get up at a fortnight’s notice,
and if I don’t study them at night I have no chance of being ready in
time.’
‘In fact,’ I said, oracularly, ‘you’ve been cheating each other all
round. Mr Bizzey has cheated his employers by letting apartments to
which he has no right; you have cheated the Bizzeys by using one which
you never hired of them; and I have—’ ‘cheated myself,’ I might have
added, but I stopped short and looked wise instead.
‘And it was never no ghosts after all!’ said Mrs Bizzey, in accents of
disappointment, as her husband marched her downstairs.
* * * * *
There is nothing more to tell. I reconciled Mr Julian Cockleboat to his
guardian and his destiny; and I wrote ‘The Origin of Dreams,’ the best
part, by the way (as all the critics affirmed), of ‘The Cyclopædia of the
Brain.’ I made more money by my little trip than six months of ordinary
labour would have brought me; and Lord Seaborne speaks of me to this day,
amongst his acquaintances, as the ‘very cleverest amateur detective he
has ever known.’
And so I am.
THE END.
[Illustration]
THE GHOST OF CHARLOTTE CRAY.
Mr Sigismund Braggett was sitting in the little room he called his
study, wrapped in a profound—not to say a mournful—reverie. Now, there
was nothing in the present life nor surroundings of Mr Braggett to
account for such a demonstration. He was a publisher and bookseller; a
man well to do, with a thriving business in the city, and the prettiest
of all pretty villas at Streatham. And he was only just turned forty;
had not a grey hair in his head nor a false tooth in his mouth; and
had been married but three short months to one of the fairest and most
affectionate specimens of English womanhood that ever transformed a
bachelor’s quarters into Paradise.
What more could Mr Sigismund Braggett possibly want? Nothing! His trouble
lay in the fact that he had got rather more than he wanted. Most of us
have our little peccadilloes in this world—awkward reminiscences that we
would like to bury five fathoms deep, and never hear mentioned again, but
that have an uncomfortable habit of cropping up at the most inconvenient
moments; and no mortal is more likely to be troubled with them than a
middle-aged bachelor who has taken to matrimony.
Mr Sigismund Braggett had no idea what he was going in for when he led
the blushing Emily Primrose up to the altar, and swore to be hers, and
hers only, until death should them part. He had no conception a woman’s
curiosity could be so keen, her tongue so long, and her inventive
faculties so correct. He had spent whole days before the fatal moment of
marriage in burning letters, erasing initials, destroying locks of hair,
and making offerings of affection look as if he had purchased them with
his own money. But it had been of little avail. Mrs Braggett had swooped
down upon him like a beautiful bird of prey, and wheedled, coaxed, or
kissed him out of half his secrets before he knew what he was about. But
he had never told her about Charlotte Cray. And now he almost wished that
he had done so, for Charlotte Cray was the cause of his present dejected
mood.
Now, there are ladies _and_ ladies in this world. Some are very shy, and
will only permit themselves to be wooed by stealth. Others, again, are
the pursuers rather than the pursued, and chase the wounded or the flying
even to the very doors of their stronghold, or lie in wait for them like
an octopus, stretching out their tentacles on every side in search of
victims.
And to the latter class Miss Charlotte Cray decidedly belonged. Not
a person worth mourning over, you will naturally say. But, then, Mr
Sigismund Braggett had not behaved well to her. She was one of the
‘peccadilloes.’ She was an authoress—not an author, mind you, which term
smacks more of the profession than the sex—but an ‘authoress,’ with lots
of the ‘ladylike’ about the plots of her stories and the metre of her
rhymes. They had come together in the sweet connection of publisher and
writer—had met first in a dingy, dusty little office at the back of his
house of business, and laid the foundation of their friendship with the
average amount of chaffering and prevarication that usually attend such
proceedings.
Mr Braggett ran a risk in publishing Miss Cray’s tales or verses, but he
found her useful in so many other ways that he used occasionally to hold
forth a sop to Cerberus in the shape of publicity for the sake of keeping
her in his employ. For Miss Charlotte Cray—who was as old as himself, and
had arrived at the period of life when women are said to pray ‘Any, good
Lord, any!’—was really a clever woman, and could turn her hand to most
things required of her, or upon which she had set her mind; and she had
most decidedly set her mind upon marrying Mr Braggett, and he—to serve
his own purposes—had permitted her to cherish the idea, and this was the
Nemesis that was weighing him down in the study at the present moment.
He had complimented Miss Cray, and given her presents, and taken her out
a-pleasuring, all because she was useful to him, and did odd jobs that
no one else would undertake, and for less than any one else would have
accepted; and he had known the while that she was in love with him, and
that she believed he was in love with her.
He had not thought much of it at the time. He had not then made up his
mind to marry Emily Primrose, and considered that what pleased Miss Cray,
and harmed no one else, was fair play for all sides. But he had come to
see things differently now. He had been married three months, and the
first two weeks had been very bitter ones to him. Miss Cray had written
him torrents of reproaches during that unhappy period, besides calling
day after day at his office to deliver them in person. This and her
threats had frightened him out of his life. He had lived in hourly terror
lest the clerks should overhear what passed at their interviews, or that
his wife should be made acquainted with them.
He had implored Miss Cray, both by word of mouth and letter, to cease her
persecution of him; but all the reply he received was that he was a base
and perjured man, and that she should continue to call at his office, and
write to him through the penny post, until he had introduced her to his
wife. For therein lay the height and depth of his offending. He had been
afraid to bring Emily and Miss Cray together, and the latter resented the
omission as an insult. It was bad enough to find that Sigismund Braggett,
whose hair she wore next her heart, and whose photograph stood as in a
shrine upon her bedroom mantelpiece, had married another woman, without
giving her even the chance of a refusal, but it was worse still to come
to the conclusion that he did not intend her to have a glimpse into the
garden of Eden he had created for himself.
Miss Cray was a lady of vivid imagination and strong aspirations. All
was not lost in her ideas, although Mr Braggett _had_ proved false to
the hopes he had raised. Wives did not live for ever; and the chances
and changes of this life were so numerous, that stranger things had
happened than that Mr Braggett might think fit to make better use of the
second opportunity afforded him than he had done of the first. But if she
were not to continue even his friend, it was too hard. But the perjured
publisher had continued resolute, notwithstanding all Miss Cray’s
persecution, and now he had neither seen nor heard from her for a month;
and, man-like, he was beginning to wonder what had become of her, and
whether she had found anybody to console her for his untruth. Mr Braggett
did not wish to comfort Miss Cray himself; but he did not quite like the
notion of her being comforted.
After all—so he soliloquised—he had been very cruel to her; for the poor
thing was devoted to him. How her eyes used to sparkle and her cheek to
flush when she entered his office, and how eagerly she would undertake
any work for him, however disagreeable to perform! He knew well that
she had expected to be Mrs Braggett, and it must have been a terrible
disappointment to her when he married Emily Primrose.
Why had he not asked her out to Violet Villa since? What harm could she
do as a visitor there? particularly if he cautioned her first as to the
peculiarity of Mrs Braggett’s disposition, and the quickness with which
her jealousy was excited. It was close upon Christmas-time, the period
when all old friends meet together and patch up, if they cannot entirely
forget, everything that has annoyed them in the past. Mr Braggett
pictured to himself the poor old maid sitting solitary in her small rooms
at Hammersmith, no longer able to live in the expectation of seeing his
manly form at the wicket-gate, about to enter and cheer her solitude.
The thought smote him as a two-edged sword, and he sat down at once and
penned Miss Charlotte a note, in which he inquired after her health, and
hoped that they should soon see her at Violet Villa.
He felt much better after this note was written and despatched. He came
out of the little study and entered the cheerful drawing-room, and sat
with his pretty wife by the light of the fire, telling her of the lonely
lady to whom he had just proposed to introduce her.
‘An old friend of mine, Emily. A clever, agreeable woman, though rather
eccentric. You will be polite to her, I know, for my sake.’
‘An _old_ woman, is she?’ said Mrs Braggett, elevating her eyebrows. ‘And
what do you call ‘old,’ Siggy, I should like to know?’
‘Twice as old as yourself, my dear—five-and-forty at the very least, and
not personable-looking, even for that age. Yet I think you will find her
a pleasant companion, and I am sure she will be enchanted with you.’
‘I don’t know that: clever women don’t like me, as a rule, though I
don’t know why.’
‘They are jealous of your beauty, my darling; but Miss Cray is above such
meanness, and will value you for your own sake.’
‘She’d better not let me catch her valuing me for _yours_,’ responded Mrs
Braggett, with a flash of the eye that made her husband ready to regret
the dangerous experiment he was about to make of bringing together two
women who had each, in her own way, a claim upon him, and each the will
to maintain it.
So he dropped the subject of Miss Charlotte Cray, and took to admiring
his wife’s complexion instead, so that the evening passed harmoniously,
and both parties were satisfied.
For two days Mr Braggett received no answer from Miss Cray, which
rather surprised him. He had quite expected that on the reception of
his invitation she would rush down to his office and into his arms,
behind the shelter of the ground-glass door that enclosed his chair of
authority. For Miss Charlotte had been used on occasions to indulge in
rapturous demonstrations of the sort, and the remembrance of Mrs Braggett
located in Violet Villa would have been no obstacle whatever to her. She
believed she had a prior claim to Mr Braggett. However, nothing of the
kind happened, and the perjured publisher was becoming strongly imbued
with the idea that he must go out to Hammersmith and see if he could not
make his peace with her in person, particularly as he had several odd
jobs for Christmas-tide, which no one could undertake so well as herself,
when a letter with a black-edged border was put into his hand. He opened
it mechanically, not knowing the writing; but its contents shocked him
beyond measure.
‘HONOURED SIR,—I am sorry to tell you that Miss Cray died at my
house a week ago, and was buried yesterday. She spoke of you
several times during her last illness, and if you would like to
hear any further particulars, and will call on me at the old
address, I shall be most happy to furnish you with them.—Yours
respectfully,
‘MARY THOMPSON.’