_The old-fashioned housekeeper--A ghost which fought the servant--
Jealously guarding the family secret--An adventure while primrose
gathering--A silent dinner-party--Dwarfs who live with the children_
|IN the days of romance the Secret Chamber was part of every mansion
that had any claim to antiquity. Every old castle, every nobleman's
seat, had in it a room which could be used on an emergency for the
stowing away of something or somebody that it was not considered
advisable for the visitors or the retainers to see.
Many of these secret chambers still exist, and the families to whom they
belong are rather proud of them. The housekeeper who takes you over
an ancient seat will conduct you to a room at the end of a
passage--sometimes you can approach it through a sliding panel--and tell
you in parrot fashion the tragedy connected with it. Occasionally there
is a ghost attached to the story, and the housekeeper assures you that
many members of the family have seen it.
The gruesomeness of the room in which a murder was committed three
hundred years ago is heightened when your guide points to a stain on
the floor and tells you that all the processes of modern scrubbing and
cleaning have failed to remove it.
There is a house in the North of England which has a secret room, the
exact position of which is only revealed to two people--the heir-at-law
and the family solicitor. Hundreds of visitors have tried in vain to
find it.
There is a country house which has a secret room in which there lives an
old lady--a very ghostly old lady, for she died and was buried a
hundred years ago. Only on rare occasions does she appear to the other
occupants, and then she is attired in an old-fashioned brown dress, with
a lace cap on her head and a bunch of keys in her hand.
My friend and collaborator, the late Frederic Clay, went to stay at this
house. He knew nothing of the story. After he had been shown to his room
to dress for dinner an old lady, attired in brown, and carrying a bunch
of keys in her hand, came in.
He thought she was the housekeeper, and said he was quite comfortable
and wanted nothing. Then she went away.
At dinner he said to his hostess--a relative: "What a dear old lady your
housekeeper is! But what an old-fashioned way she dresses!--she looks as
if she had stepped out of an old romance."
There was dead silence at the table. The next morning he learned that
the old lady of the secret room had paid him a visit.
That was a modern instance; but most of the stories and tales of old
romance are associated with family traditions, and the mystery of them
belongs to a day that is long since dead.
But here in the heart of London, in the midst of the traffic of the
crowded capital, even where the omnibuses pass the door, there are
secret chambers and uncanny sights hidden away from prying eyes.
As a rule the old retainers, the servants who have been with the
family for years, share the knowledge; but it is carefully guarded from
new-corners.
Not long ago a young servant came to seek a place in London. She had
been housemaid at a rectory, and the rector's wife gave her an excellent
character. She went to a West End agency, and after a few days she was
engaged as third housemaid by a dear, white-headed old lady, who said
she was the housekeeper to Lord and Lady --------. The girl went to her
situation. The house was in an aristocratic square, and the girl, from
what she saw of her surroundings, thought she was fortunate in getting
the place.
She had to share a bedroom with another servant, a middle-aged woman,
who had been with the family for many years.
In the middle of the night the country girl was aroused by a strange
sound. She started up. The moonlight streaming in through the window
fell upon a tall, gaunt woman with dishevelled hair, who was standing at
the foot of the bed.
The girl uttered a cry, and the servant sleeping in the same room woke
up and sprang out of bed. She seized the "apparition" by the arms and
held her. In a moment another woman, partially dressed, entered the
room, and the two dragged the "apparition," fighting and screaming, out
into the passage.
When her fellow-servant returned, the girl, who was paralyzed with fear,
asked her what had happened.
"Nothing," was the reply. "I thought I heard one of the girls in the
other room calling out, and I went to see if she was ill."
"But I saw a woman--a woman standing here--here by the bed," gasped the
terrified girl. "I saw you help to drag her out of the room."
"Nonsense, my dear; you've been dreaming. That's nightmare. Go to sleep
and don't talk such foolishness."
The girl lay awake all night. In the morning she went to the housekeeper
and said that she must go. She couldn't stop another night in the place
after what she had seen.
The housekeeper heard her story and told her she was fancying
things--there was nobody of that sort in the house. But, of course, if
the girl wanted to go she could.
The girl left, and went to the agency to explain matters, and to ask
them to get her another situation.
The manageress of the agency listened to her story and said nothing. But
she remembered that two years previously a servant on their books had
left through seeing something of the same sort. On that occasion the
girl had described it as a ghost.
The truth of the matter was this. The apparition was that of a mad
woman--the daughter of the house, a woman of five-and-thirty. Her father
and mother had engaged a female keeper, and kept the poor demented
creature at home. Ordinarily she was quiet enough. But at times she
became cunning or violent, and, escaping from the apartment at the top
of the house in which she was kept, made her way into a room occupied by
others.
The family entertained and had frequent visitors, but only the most
intimate of their relatives knew that in the upper part of the house
there was a mad woman under restraint.
There is a fine house standing in its own grounds in the northern part
of London. It is occupied by a wealthy family, and none of the large
staff of servants are presumably aware of the secret that the family
jealously guard.
All they know is that the upper part of one wing of the house, which
they never enter, is occupied by their mistress's father, an old
gentleman, who is bedridden, and is rather eccentric and dislikes
strange faces. For this reason he has his own valet and an aged
man-servant to attend to him, and these are the only people, with the
exception of the master and mistress, who ever go into that part of the
house.
But the mistress's bedridden father is a fiction. The rooms in reality
are occupied by the son of the house--a son whom, owing to his terrible
disfigurement, it would have been more merciful to have strangled at his
birth, but who has been loved and reared and tended to live apart from
his fellow-men.
The unhappy young man's sisters have never seen him. It would not be
right that they should be allowed to look upon a terrible affliction
which, in common parlance, is called "a freak of nature." Only the
father and mother, the two attendants, and the family doctor know how
terrible the affliction is, or how shocking is the tragedy the unhappy
parents are guarding in the "secret chambers" of their home.
All the "freaks," all the strange deformities, are not the offspring of
poor parents, who permit them to be seen or exhibited. The joined twins,
the side-show phenomena of nature, are born in all ranks of society.
Only now and again does the world know of the tragedy--for tragedy it
is--in the family circle of the well-to-do.
The "misfortune" is concealed. Every precaution is taken against
publicity.
Sometimes the "afflicted" member of the family is sent away to be
guarded and cared for in a medically-superintended home specially
arranged for the reception of such "patients."
There is a London doctor who has a home of this sort. If you were
conducted over it, and saw its inmates, you would think that he must
have nerves of iron to pass his life in such weird companionship. Young,
middle-aged, and old, the patients are every one of them so marred by
nature that ordinary life among their fellow-creatures is impossible.
Once in my life, trespassing in a private wood in search of primroses,
I came suddenly upon a group of human beings so strange in their
appearance, so awful, that for a moment I believed that I was the victim
of an hallucination.
It was only when a gentleman came hurriedly up to me, demanding to know
what I wanted, and I had explained that I had only trespassed in search
of wild flowers, that I learnt the wood formed part of the grounds of a
private asylum in which the "afflicted" members of wealthy families
were received. I understood then what the terrible scene I had witnessed
meant, and I hastened to apologize for my unintentional intrusion.
But a mother's love is not for beauty of form or soundness of mind, and
so it frequently happens that the suffering one is dearer to her than
all, and is never allowed to be taken from her fostering care.
Still, she cannot expect that it will be looked on by strangers--not
always by its own kith and kin--with the eyes of love through which she
sees it, and so there is a portion of the dwelling-place set apart--a
room, or rooms, where no one but herself and one trusted attendant ever
enters.
There the sufferer lives, cut off from the world--a prisoner, in a
sense--and passes from childhood to youth, sometimes from youth to
middle-age, its very existence unknown to the friends who from time to
time visit the house and join the family circle.
Because the secret is so carefully guarded, this phase of our poor
humanity is unfamiliar to us. Its existence is hardly suspected. But it
is the lifelong sorrow in many a home that the world thinks a happy one.
When the sorrow is that of a noble family, and the afflicted one is the
heir to a proud name and a vast estate, we hear of it. The secret cannot
in such circumstances always be guarded. A whisper of it is certain to
get about. But with those less conspicuously before the world the secret
may be kept until the grave hides it for ever.
Into the more painful--I will not say repulsive--phase of this subject I
do not desire to enter; it is right that that which shocks and horrifies
should be kept from the public gaze.
But on certain phases which are sad and pathetic, without being
repulsive, it may be permissible to dwell for a moment.
From his vast establishment in the City a prosperous merchant returns
nightly to his beautiful home in the environs of London. He is a widower
with four grown-up daughters. He receives no company. Every evening
he dines alone with his daughters. All four are deaf mutes, and the
dinner-party is one of unbroken silence. He has never heard the sound of
his children's voices. They have never heard a word that fell from
his lips. He does not talk of his trouble. Few people, except his near
relatives, know of it. It is a family secret carefully guarded. These
deaf mutes are women, the youngest is five-and-twenty. They will never
marry. To the end of his days the prosperous city merchant will live his
family life with the four daughters, who can neither hear nor speak.
As I write I think of another home I know, in which the father and
mother have three children to keep them company, to listen to them,
to talk with them, to share in the family joys and sorrows. But these
children, though they have not been separated for a single day, have
never seen each other. They are all blind.
There is a gentle lady with silvered hair, renowned for her charity and
the good use she has made of the wealth her husband left her. You will
see her wherever she goes accompanied by her two daughters. There is a
third, who is the eldest. But the eldest daughter is never seen. Even
those who are privileged visitors to the house are not aware of her
existence. She is five-and-thirty. But when there are no visitors,
and she comes and sits with her mother and sisters, this woman of
five-and-thirty behaves like a child of seven. She nurses a doll. She
is fitful and wayward as a child, and has naughty childish ways. She is
spoken to as a child, caressed as a child, reproved as a child.
Hers is a strange and peculiar case. Her mental development ceased when
she attained the age of seven. Her body became that of a woman, her
brain remained that of a child. She reads books intended for the
nursery. She cries like a child at a trivial ill. I have seen few
sights more pathetic than this woman of five-and-thirty, her dark hair
prematurely streaked with grey, nursing her doll and reading the stories
in the child's picture-book that is sometimes given to her to keep her
quiet.
Every Sunday as I walk to the West there passes me a school of
crippled children. In the ranks of the cripples there walk always four
dwarfs--four little old women well past middle-age. They are shorter
than the shortest little girls in the school. They are so small that
children of seven and eight tower above them.
These old ladies hold hands and walk like the little ones. But one of
them is over sixty, and they have passed the greater part of their lives
in the institution which exists for little crippled girls.
These old ladies have left their homes to be tended here among the
children. With the littles ones they do not attract much attention. It
is only when you look at them closely you see that they are not children
themselves.
The dwarfs who are bom in well-to-do families are not put away; they
remain part of the family circle. But because of their presence in it,
there is frequently restraint in the matter of acquaintanceship. The
dwarf, always intelligent, frequently gentle and affectionate, is loved
as dearly as any of the healthy children who thrive and grow. But that
it may be spared pain and the pitying glance the home is not as other
homes. The "secret," if not guarded, is not obtruded. There is one
member of the family who is not seen by the ordinary visitor, who does
not take his or her meals at the table when visitors are under the roof.
Even in humbler homes there are sometimes mysteries. There are those who
are loved and cared for who never leave the house in the daytime, but
see what little of the world may be permitted them after nightfall.
You may sometimes see a woman so closely veiled that her features are
indistinguishable being led along the Embankment by the river in
the dusk of a summer's evening. The story of that veiled woman is a
heartrending one. She was a beautiful girl and about to be married to
the man she loved when a woman mad with jealousy flung vitriol in her
face. Her life was saved, but it would have been almost better had she
died. From that hour only her mother has looked upon her face. From the
rest of the world it is mercifully veiled.
Sometimes the secret chamber hides not a misfortune, but a crime. There
is an insanity of criminality which delights in the torture of the
weak, the suffering, the mentally deficient. Now and again the world
is startled by the narrative of secret cruelty practised on helpless
children, of an afflicted wife kept as a prisoner neglected and
ill-treated. There have been cases in which the presence in a house of
one of these victims of monstrous cruelty has remained unsuspected
for years. The secret of the "prisoner" has only been revealed by an
accident.
Not long ago the mystery of a secret chamber in a humble house in a poor
street in Hoxton was discovered.
The school-board officer goes to every house and enters every home in
order to see that the children are attending school.
In this home there was no child ever to be discovered. But the officer
had information that a little girl of eight was undoubtedly a member of
the family.
One night, "in consequence of information received," as the police say,
he kept watch, and at nine o'clock he saw the mother come out of the
house cautiously, look around, and then return to emerge with a little
girl. The officer, who had taken precautions against recognition,
followed, and then the mystery was solved.
The little girl was earning the living of her parents by performing at
a variety theatre. To prevent the interference of the school authorities
the parents kept her shut up all day in the bedroom, and only brought
her oat of It to take her to the music-hall.
There are secret chambers in London houses still, the mystery of which
has yet to be revealed; some which may remain undiscovered, to be
"mysteries" in the daily press fifty or a hundred years hence. The
bricked-up cellar that thrills us in the pages of Edgar Allan Poe is
playing its part in the criminal tragedies of the twentieth-century
Babylon.