A “Mixed Double” of young people were contesting a game of lawn tennis at
the Rectory garden party; for the past five-and-twenty years at least
mixed doubles of young people had done exactly the same thing on exactly
the same spot at about the same time of year. The young people changed
and made way for others in the course of time, but very little else
seemed to alter. The present players were sufficiently conscious of the
social nature of the occasion to be concerned about their clothes and
appearance, and sufficiently sport-loving to be keen on the game. Both
their efforts and their appearance came under the fourfold scrutiny of a
quartet of ladies sitting as official spectators on a bench immediately
commanding the court. It was one of the accepted conditions of the
Rectory garden party that four ladies, who usually knew very little about
tennis and a great deal about the players, should sit at that particular
spot and watch the game. It had also come to be almost a tradition that
two ladies should be amiable, and that the other two should be Mrs. Dole
and Mrs. Hatch-Mallard.
“What a singularly unbecoming way Eva Jonelet has taken to doing her hair
in,” said Mrs. Hatch-Mallard; “it’s ugly hair at the best of times, but
she needn’t make it look ridiculous as well. Some one ought to tell
her.”
Eva Jonelet’s hair might have escaped Mrs. Hatch-Mallard’s condemnation
if she could have forgotten the more glaring fact that Eva was Mrs.
Dole’s favourite niece. It would, perhaps, have been a more comfortable
arrangement if Mrs. Hatch-Mallard and Mrs. Dole could have been asked to
the Rectory on separate occasions, but there was only one garden party in
the course of the year, and neither lady could have been omitted from the
list of invitations without hopelessly wrecking the social peace of the
parish.
“How pretty the yew trees look at this time of year,” interposed a lady
with a soft, silvery voice that suggested a chinchilla muff painted by
Whistler.
“What do you mean by this time of year?” demanded Mrs. Hatch-Mallard.
“Yew trees look beautiful at all times of the year. That is their great
charm.”
“Yew trees never look anything but hideous under any circumstances or at
any time of year,” said Mrs. Dole, with the slow, emphatic relish of one
who contradicts for the pleasure of the thing. “They are only fit for
graveyards and cemeteries.”
Mrs. Hatch-Mallard gave a sardonic snort, which, being translated, meant
that there were some people who were better fitted for cemeteries than
for garden parties.
“What is the score, please?” asked the lady with the chinchilla voice.
The desired information was given her by a young gentleman in spotless
white flannels, whose general toilet effect suggested solicitude rather
than anxiety.
“What an odious young cub Bertie Dykson has become!” pronounced Mrs.
Dole, remembering suddenly that Bertie was a favourite with Mrs.
Hatch-Mallard. “The young men of to-day are not what they used to be
twenty years ago.”
“Of course not,” said Mrs. Hatch-Mallard; “twenty years ago Bertie Dykson
was just two years old, and you must expect some difference in appearance
and manner and conversation between those two periods.”
“Do you know,” said Mrs. Dole, confidentially, “I shouldn’t be surprised
if that was intended to be clever.”
“Have you any one interesting coming to stay with you, Mrs. Norbury?”
asked the chinchilla voice, hastily; “you generally have a house party at
this time of year.”
“I’ve got a most interesting woman coming,” said Mrs. Norbury, who had
been mutely struggling for some chance to turn the conversation into a
safe channel; “an old acquaintance of mine, Ada Bleek—”
“What an ugly name,” said Mrs. Hatch-Mallard.
“She’s descended from the de la Bliques, an old Huguenot family of
Touraine, you know.”
“There weren’t any Huguenots in Touraine,” said Mrs. Hatch-Mallard, who
thought she might safely dispute any fact that was three hundred years
old.
“Well, anyhow, she’s coming to stay with me,” continued Mrs. Norbury,
bringing her story quickly down to the present day, “she arrives this
evening, and she’s highly clairvoyante, a seventh daughter of a seventh
daughter, you now, and all that sort of thing.”
“How very interesting,” said the chinchilla voice; “Exwood is just the
right place for her to come to, isn’t it? There are supposed to be
several ghosts there.”
“That is why she was so anxious to come,” said Mrs. Norbury; “she put off
another engagement in order to accept my invitation. She’s had visions
and dreams, and all those sort of things, that have come true in a most
marvellous manner, but she’s never actually seen a ghost, and she’s
longing to have that experience. She belongs to that Research Society,
you know.”
“I expect she’ll see the unhappy Lady Cullumpton, the most famous of all
the Exwood ghosts,” said Mrs. Dole; “my ancestor, you know, Sir Gervase
Cullumpton, murdered his young bride in a fit of jealousy while they were
on a visit to Exwood. He strangled her in the stables with a stirrup
leather, just after they had come in from riding, and she is seen
sometimes at dusk going about the lawns and the stable yard, in a long
green habit, moaning and trying to get the thong from round her throat.
I shall be most interested to hear if your friend sees—”
“I don’t know why she should be expected to see a trashy, traditional
apparition like the so-called Cullumpton ghost, that is only vouched for
by housemaids and tipsy stable-boys, when my uncle, who was the owner of
Exwood, committed suicide there under the most tragical circumstances,
and most certainly haunts the place.”
“Mrs. Hatch-Mallard has evidently never read _Popple’s County History_,”
said Mrs. Dole icily, “or she would know that the Cullumpton ghost has a
wealth of evidence behind it—”
“Oh, Popple!” exclaimed Mrs. Hatch-Mallard scornfully; “any rubbishy old
story is good enough for him. Popple, indeed! Now my uncle’s ghost was
seen by a Rural Dean, who was also a Justice of the Peace. I should
think that would be good enough testimony for any one. Mrs. Norbury, I
shall take it as a deliberate personal affront if your clairvoyante
friend sees any other ghost except that of my uncle.”
“I daresay she won’t see anything at all; she never has yet, you know,”
said Mrs. Norbury hopefully.
“It was a most unfortunate topic for me to have broached,” she lamented
afterwards to the owner of the chinchilla voice; “Exwood belongs to Mrs.
Hatch-Mallard, and we’ve only got it on a short lease. A nephew of hers
has been wanting to live there for some time, and if we offend her in any
way she’ll refuse to renew the lease. I sometimes think these
garden-parties are a mistake.”
The Norburys played bridge for the next three nights till nearly one
o’clock; they did not care for the game, but it reduced the time at their
guest’s disposal for undesirable ghostly visitations.
“Miss Bleek is not likely to be in a frame of mind to see ghosts,” said
Hugo Norbury, “if she goes to bed with her brain awhirl with royal spades
and no trumps and grand slams.”
“I’ve talked to her for hours about Mrs. Hatch-Mallard’s uncle,” said his
wife, “and pointed out the exact spot where he killed himself, and
invented all sorts of impressive details, and I’ve found an old portrait
of Lord John Russell and put it in her room, and told her that it’s
supposed to be a picture of the uncle in middle age. If Ada does see a
ghost at all it certainly ought to be old Hatch-Mallard’s. At any rate,
we’ve done our best.”
The precautions were in vain. On the third morning of her stay Ada Bleek
came down late to breakfast, her eyes looking very tired, but ablaze with
excitement, her hair done anyhow, and a large brown volume hugged under
her arm.
“At last I’ve seen something supernatural!” she exclaimed, and gave Mrs.
Norbury a fervent kiss, as though in gratitude for the opportunity
afforded her.
“A ghost!” cried Mrs. Norbury, “not really!”
“Really and unmistakably!”
“Was it an oldish man in the dress of about fifty years ago?” asked Mrs.
Norbury hopefully.
“Nothing of the sort,” said Ada; “it was a white hedgehog.”
“A white hedgehog!” exclaimed both the Norburys, in tones of disconcerted
astonishment.
“A huge white hedgehog with baleful yellow eyes,” said Ada; “I was lying
half asleep in bed when suddenly I felt a sensation as of something
sinister and unaccountable passing through the room. I sat up and looked
round, and there, under the window, I saw an evil, creeping thing, a sort
of monstrous hedgehog, of a dirty white colour, with black, loathsome
claws that clicked and scraped along the floor, and narrow, yellow eyes
of indescribable evil. It slithered along for a yard or two, always
looking at me with its cruel, hideous eyes, then, when it reached the
second window, which was open it clambered up the sill and vanished. I
got up at once and went to the window; there wasn’t a sign of it
anywhere. Of course, I knew it must be something from another world, but
it was not till I turned up Popple’s chapter on local traditions that I
realised what I had seen.”
She turned eagerly to the large brown volume and read: “’Nicholas
Herison, an old miser, was hung at Batchford in 1763 for the murder of a
farm lad who had accidentally discovered his secret hoard. His ghost is
supposed to traverse the countryside, appearing sometimes as a white owl,
sometimes as a huge white hedgehog.”
“I expect you read the Popple story overnight, and that made you _think_
you saw a hedgehog when you were only half awake,” said Mrs. Norbury,
hazarding a conjecture that probably came very near the truth.
Ada scouted the possibility of such a solution of her apparition.
“This must be hushed up,” said Mrs. Norbury quickly; “the servants—”
“Hushed up!” exclaimed Ada, indignantly; “I’m writing a long report on it
for the Research Society.”
It was then that Hugo Norbury, who is not naturally a man of brilliant
resource, had one of the really useful inspirations of his life.
“It was very wicked of us, Miss Bleek,” he said, “but it would be a shame
to let it go further. That white hedgehog is an old joke of ours;
stuffed albino hedgehog, you know, that my father brought home from
Jamaica, where they grow to enormous size. We hide it in the room with a
string on it, run one end of the string through the window; then we pull
if from below and it comes scraping along the floor, just as you’ve
described, and finally jerks out of the window. Taken in heaps of
people; they all read up Popple and think it’s old Harry Nicholson’s
ghost; we always stop them from writing to the papers about it, though.
That would be carrying matters too far.”
Mrs. Hatch-Mallard renewed the lease in due course, but Ada Bleek has
never renewed her friendship.