Here is a story from Troy, containing two ghosts and a moral.
I found it, only last week, in front of a hump-backed cottage that
the masons are pulling down to make room for the new Bank.
Simon Hancock, the outgoing tenant, had fetched an empty cider-cask,
and set it down on the opposite side of the road; and from this
Spartan seat watched the work of demolition for three days, without
exhaustion and without emotion. In the interval between two
avalanches of dusty masonry, he spoke to this effect:--
Once upon a time the cottage was inhabited by a man and his wife.
The man was noticeable for the extreme length of his upper lip and
gloom of his religious opinions. He had been a mate in the coasting
trade, but settled down, soon after his marriage, and earned his
living as one of the four pilots in the port. The woman was
unlovely, with a hard eye and a temper as stubborn as one of St.
Nicholas's horns. How she had picked up with a man was a mystery,
until you looked at _him_.
After six years of wedlock they quarrelled one day, about nothing at
all: at least, Simon Hancock, though unable to state the exact cause
of strife, felt himself ready to swear it was nothing more serious
than the cooking of the day's dinner. From that date, however, the
pair lived in the house together and never spoke. The man happened
to be of the home-keeping sort--possessed no friends and never put
foot inside a public-house. Through the long evenings he would sit
beside his own fender, with his wife facing him, and never a word
flung across the space between them, only now and then a look of cold
hate. The few that saw them thus said it was like looking on a pair
of ugly statues. And this lasted for four years.
Of course the matter came to their minister's ears--he was a
"Brianite"--and the minister spoke to them after prayer-meeting, one
Wednesday night, and called at the cottage early next morning, to
reconcile them. He stayed fifteen minutes and came away, down the
street, with a look on his face such as Moses might have worn on his
way down from Mount Sinai, if only Moses had seen the devil there,
instead of God.
At the end of four years, the neighbours remarked that for two days
no smoke had issued from the chimney of this cottage, nor had anyone
seen the front door opened. There grew a surmise that the quarrel
had flared out at last, and the wedded pair were lying within, in
their blood. The anticipated excitement of finding the bodies was
qualified, however, by a very present sense of the manner in which
the bodies had resented intrusion during life. It was not until
sunset on the second day that the constable took heart to break in
the door.
There were no corpses. The kitchen was tidy, the hearth swept, and
the house empty. On the table lay a folded note, addressed, in the
man's handwriting, to the minister.
"Dear Friend in Grace," it began, "we have been married ten
years, and neither has broken the other; until which happens,
it must be hell between us. We see no way out but to part for
ten years more, going our paths without news of each other.
When that time's up, we promise to meet here, by our door, on
the morning of the first Monday in October month, and try
again. And to this we set our names."--here the two names
followed.
They must have set out by night; for an extinguished candle stood by
the letter, with ink-pot and pen. Probably they had parted just
outside the house, the one going inland up the hill, the other down
the street towards the harbour. Nothing more was heard of them.
Their furniture went to pay the quarter's rent due to the Squire, and
the cottage, six months later, passed into the occupation of Simon
Hancock, waterman.