"You were complaining," I remarked, "of something like aphasia?"
"I was," he replied. "You know what aphasia is in the human subject? A
paralysis of certain nervous centres, which prevents the patient, though
perfectly sane, from getting at the words which he intends to use, and
forces others upon him. He may wish to observe that it is a fine
morning, and may discover that his idea has taken the form of an
observation about the Roman Calendar under the Emperor Justinian. That
is aphasia, and we suffer from what, I presume, is a spiritual
modification of that disorder."
"Yet to-night," I responded, "you are speaking like a printed book."
"To-night," said the spectre, acknowledging the compliment with a bow,
"the conditions are peculiarly favourable."
"Not to _me_," I thought, with a sigh.
"And I am able to manifest myself with unusual clearness."
"Then you are not always in such form as I am privileged to find you in?"
I inquired.
"By no means," replied the spectre. "Sometimes I cannot appear worth a
cent. Often I am invisible to the naked eye, and even quite
indiscernible by any of the senses. Sometimes I can only rap on the
table, or send a cold wind over a visitor's face, or at most pull off his
bedclothes (like the spirit which appeared to Caligula, and is mentioned
by Suetonius) and utter hollow groans."
"That's exactly what you _did_," I said, "when you wakened me. I thought
I should have died."
"I can't say how distressed I am," answered the spectre. "It is just an
instance of what I was trying to explain. We don't know how we are going
to manifest ourselves."
"Don't apologize," I replied, "for a constitutional peculiarity. To what
do you attribute your success to night?"
"Partly to your extremely receptive condition, partly to the whisky you
took in the smoking-room, but chiefly to the magnetic environment."
"Then you do not suffer at all from aphasia just now?"
"Not a touch of it at this moment, thank you; but, as a rule, we all _do_
suffer horribly. This accounts for everything that you embodied spirits
find remarkable and enigmatic in our conduct. We _mean_ something,
straight enough; but our failure is in expression. Just think how often
you go wrong yourselves, though _your_ spirits have a brain to play on,
like the musician with a piano. Now _we_ have to do as well as we can
without any such mechanical advantage as a brain of cellular tissue"--here
he suddenly took the form of a white lady with a black sack over her
head, and disappeared in the wainscot.
"Excuse me," he said a moment afterwards, quite in his ordinary voice, "I
had a touch of it, I fancy. I lost the thread of my argument, and am
dimly conscious of having expressed myself in some unusual and more or
less incoherent fashion. I hope it was nothing at all vulgar or
distressing?"
"Nothing out of the way in haunted houses, I assure you," I replied,
"merely a white lady with a black sack over her head."
"Oh, _that_ was it," he answered with a sigh; "I often am afflicted in
that way. Don't mind me if I turn into a luminous boy, or a very old man
in chains, or a lady in a green gown and high-heeled shoes, or a headless
horseman, or a Mauth hound, or anything of that sort. They are all quite
imperfect expressions of our nature,--symptoms, in short, of the malady I
mentioned."
"Then the appalling manifestations to which you allude are not the
apparitions of the essential ghost? It is not in those forms that he
appears among his friends?"
"Certainly not," said the spectre; "and it would be very promotive of
good feeling between men and disembodied spirits if this were more
generally known. I myself--"
Here he was interrupted by an attack of spirit rappings. A brisk series
of sharp faint taps, of a kind I never heard before, resounded from all
the furniture of the room. {265} While the disturbance continued, the
spectre drummed nervously with his fingers on his knee. The sounds ended
as suddenly as they had begun, and he expressed his regrets. "It is a
thing I am subject to," he remarked; "nervous, I believe, but, to persons
unaccustomed to it, alarming."
"It _is_ rather alarming," I admitted.
"A mere fit of sneezing," he went on; "but you are now able to judge,
from the events of to-night, how extremely hard it is for us, with the
best intentions, to communicate coherently with the embodied world. Why,
there is the Puddifant ghost--in Lord Puddifant's family, you know: _he_
has been trying for generations to inform his descendants that the
drainage of the castle is execrable. Yet he can never come nearer what
he means than taking the form of a shadowy hearse-and-four, and driving
round and round Castle Puddifant at midnight. And old Lady Wadham's
ghost, what a sufferer that woman is! She merely desires to remark that
the family diamonds, lost many years ago, were never really taken abroad
by the valet and sold. He only had time to conceal them in a secret
drawer behind the dining-room chimney-piece. Now she can get no nearer
expressing herself than producing a spirited imitation of the music of
the bagpipes, which wails up and down the house, and frightens the
present Sir Robert Wadham and his people nearly out of their wits. And
that's the way with almost all of us: there is literally no connection
(as a rule) between our expressions and the things we intend to express.
You know how the Psychical Society make quite a study of rappings, and
try to interpret them by the alphabet? Well, these, as I told you, are
merely a nervous symptom; annoying, no doubt, but not dangerous. The
only spectres, almost, that manage to hint what they really mean are
Banshees."
"_They_ intend to herald an approaching death?" I asked.
"They do, and abominably bad taste I call it, unless a man has neglected
to insure his life, and _then_ I doubt if a person of honour could make
use of information from--from that quarter. Banshees are chiefly the
spectres of attached and anxious old family nurses, women of the lower
orders, and completely destitute of tact. I call a Banshee rather a
curse than a boon and a blessing to men. Like most old family servants,
they are apt to be presuming."
It occurred to me that the complacent spectre himself was not an unmixed
delight to the inhabitants of Castle Perilous, or at least to their
guests, for they never lay in the Green Chamber themselves.
"Can nothing be done," I asked sympathetically, "to alleviate the
disorders which you say are so common and distressing?"
"The old system of spiritual physic," replied the spectre, "is obsolete,
and the holy-water cure, in particular, has almost ceased to number any
advocates, except the Rev. Dr F. G. Lee, whose books," said this candid
apparition, "appear to me to indicate superstitious credulity. No, I
don't know that any new discoveries have been made in this branch of
therapeutics. In the last generation they tried to bolt me with a
bishop: like putting a ferret into a rabbit-warren, you know. Nothing
came of _that_, and lately the Psychical Society attempted to ascertain
my weight by an ingenious mechanism. But they prescribed nothing, and
made me feel so nervous that I was rapping at large, and knocking
furniture about for months. The fact is that nobody understands the
complaint, nor can detect the cause that makes the ghost of a man who was
perfectly rational in life behave like an uneducated buffoon afterwards.
The real reason, as I have tried to explain to you, is a solution of
continuity between subjective thought and will on the side of the
spectre, and objective expression of them--confound it--"
Here he vanished, and the sound of heavy feet was heard promenading the
room, and balls of incandescent light floated about irresolutely,
accompanied by the appearance of a bearded man in armour. The door
(which I had locked and bolted before going to bed) kept opening and
shutting rapidly, so as to cause a draught, and my dog fled under the bed
with a long low howl.
"I do hope," remarked the spectre, presently reappearing, "that these
interruptions (only fresh illustrations of our malady) have not
frightened your dog into a fit. I have known very valuable and attached
dogs expire of mere unreasoning terror on similar unfortunate occasions."
"I'm sure I don't wonder at it," I replied; "but I believe Bingo is still
alive; in fact, I hear him scratching himself."
"Would you like to examine him?" asked the spectre.
"Oh, thanks, I am sure he is all right," I answered (for nothing in the
world would have induced me to get out of bed while he was in the room).
"Do you object to a cigarette?"
"Not at all, not at all; but Lady Perilous, I assure you, is a very old
fashioned chatelaine. However, if _you_ choose to risk it--"
I found my cigarette-case in my hand, opened it, and selected one of its
contents, which I placed between my lips. As I was looking round for a
match-box, the spectre courteously put his forefinger to the end of the
cigarette, which lighted at once.
"Perhaps you wonder," he remarked, "why I remain at Castle Perilous, the
very one of all my places which I never could bear while I was alive--as
you call it?"
"I had a delicacy about asking," I answered.
"Well," he continued, "I am the family genius."
"I might have guessed _that_," I said.
He bowed and went on. "It is hereditary in our house, and I hold the
position of genius till I am relieved. For example, when the family want
to dig up the buried treasure under the old bridge, I thunder and lighten
and cause such a storm that they desist."
"Why on earth do you do _that_?" I asked. "It seems hardly worth while
to have a genius at all."
"In the interests of the family morality. The money would soon go on the
turf, and on dice, drink, etc., if they excavated it; and then I work the
curse, and bring off the prophecies, and so forth."
"What prophecies?"
"Oh, the rigmarole the old family seer came out with before they burned
him for an unpalatable prediction at the time of the '15. He was very
much vexed about it, of course, and he just prophesied any nonsense of a
disagreeable nature that came into his head. You know what these crofter
fellows are--ungrateful, vindictive rascals. He had been in receipt of
outdoor relief for years. Well, he prophesied stuff like this: 'When the
owl and the eagle meet on the same blasted rowan tree, then a lassie in a
white hood from the east shall make the burn of Cross-cleugh run full
red,' and drivel of that insane kind. Well, you can't think what trouble
that particular prophecy gave me. It had to be fulfilled, of course, for
the family credit, and I brought it off as near as, I flatter myself, it
could be done."
"Lady Perilous was telling me about it last night," I said, with a
shudder. "It was a horrible affair,"
"Yes, no doubt, no doubt; a cruel business! But how I am to manage some
of them I'm sure _I_ don't know. There's one of them in rhyme. Let me
see, how does it go?
"'When Mackenzie lies in the perilous ha',
The wild Red Cock on the roof shall craw,
And the lady shall flee ere the day shall daw,
And the land shall girn in the deed man's thraw.'
"The 'crowing of the wild Red Cock' means that the castle shall be burned
down, of course (I'm beginning to know his style by this time), and the
lady is to elope, and the laird--that's Lord Perilous--is to expire in
the 'deed man's thraw': that is the name the old people give the Secret
Room. And all this is to happen when a Mackenzie, a member of a clan
with which we are at feud, sleeps in the Haunted Chamber--where we are
just now. By the way, what is _your_ name?"
I don't know what made me reply, "Allan Mackenzie." It was true, but it
was not politic.
"By Jove!" said the spectre, eagerly. "Here's a chance! I don't suppose
a Mackenzie has slept here for those hundred years. And now, how is it
to be done? Setting fire to the castle is simple"--here I remembered how
he had lighted my cigarette--"but who on earth is to elope with Lady
Perilous? She's fifty if she's a day, and evangelical a tout casser! Oh
no; the thing is out of the question. It really must be put off for
another generation or two. There is no hurry."
I felt a good deal relieved. He was clearly a being of extraordinary
powers, and might, for anything I knew, have made _me_ run away with Lady
Perilous. And then, when the pangs of remorse began to tell on her
ladyship, never a very lively woman at the best of times--However, the
spectre seemed to have thought better of it.
"Don't you think it is rather hard on a family," I asked, "to have a
family genius, and prophecies, and a curse, and--"
"And everything handsome about them," he interrupted me by exclaiming;
"and you call yourself a Mackenzie of Megasky! What has become of family
pride? Why, you yourselves have Gruagach of the Red Hand in the hall,
and he, I can tell you, is a very different sort of spectre from _me_.
Pre-Christian, you know--one of the oldest ghosts in Ross-shire. But as
to 'hard on a family,' why, noblesse oblige."
"Considering that you are the family genius, you don't seem to have
brought them much luck," I put in, for the house of Perilous is neither
rich in gold nor very distinguished in history.
"Yes, but just think what they would have been without a family genius,
if they are what they are with one! Besides, the prophecies are really
responsible," he added, with the air of one who says, "I have a
partner--Mr. Jorkins."
"Do you mind telling me one thing?" I asked eagerly. "What is the
mystery of the Secret Chamber--I mean the room whither the heir is taken
when he comes of age, and he never smiles again, nor touches a card
except at baccarat?"
"Never smiles _again_!" said the spectre. "Doesn't he? Are you quite
certain that he ever smiled _before_?"
This was a new way of looking at the question, and rather disconcerted
me.
"I did not know the Master of Perilous before he came of age," said I;
"but I have been here for a week, and watched him and Lord Perilous, and
I never observed a smile wander over their lips. And yet little
Tompkins" (he was the chief social buffoon of the hour) "has been in
great force, and I may say that I myself have occasionally provoked a
grin from the good-natured."
"That's just it," said the spectre. "The Perilouses have no sense of
humour--never had. I am entirely destitute of it myself. Even in
Scotland, even _here_, this family failing has been remarked--been the
subject, I may say, of unfavourable comment. The Perilous of the period
lost his head because he did not see the point of a conundrum of
Macbeth's. We felt, some time in the fifteenth century, that this
peculiarity needed to be honourably accounted for, and the family
developed that story of the Secret Chamber, and the Horror in the house.
There is nothing in the chamber whatever,--neither a family idiot aged
three hundred years, nor a skeleton, nor the devil, nor a wizard, nor
missing title-deeds. The affair is a mere formality to account
creditably for the fact that we never see anything to laugh at--never see
the joke. Some people can't see ghosts, you know" (lucky people! thought
I), "and some can't see jokes."
"This is very disappointing," I said.
"I can't help it," said the spectre; "the truth often is. Did you ever
hear the explanation of the haunted house in Berkeley Square?"
"Yes," said I. "The bell was heard to ring thrice with terrific
vehemence, and on rushing to the fatal scene they found him beautiful in
death."
"Fudge!" replied the spectre. "The lease and furniture were left to an
old lady, who was not to underlet the house nor sell the things. She had
a house of her own in Albemarle Street which she preferred, and so the
house in Berkeley Square was never let till the lease expired. That's
the whole affair. The house was empty, and political economists could
conceive no reason for the waste of rent except that it was haunted. The
rest was all Miss Broughton's imagination, in 'Tales for Christmas Eve.'"
He had evidently got on his hobby, and was beginning to be rather
tedious. The contempt which a genuine old family ghost has for mere
parvenus and impostors is not to be expressed in mere words apparently,
for Mauth-hounds of prodigious size and blackness, with white birds, and
other disastrous omens, now began to display themselves profusely in the
Haunted Chamber. Accustomed as I had become to regard all these
appearances as mere automatic symptoms, I confess that I heard with
pleasure the crow of a distant cock.
"You have enabled me to pass a most instructive evening, most agreeable,
too, I am sure," I remarked to the spectre, "but you will pardon me for
observing that the first cock has gone. Don't let me make you too late
for any appointment you may have about this time--anywhere."
"Oh, you still believe in that old superstition about cock-crow, do you?"
he sneered. "'I thought you had been too well educated. 'It faded on
the crowing of the cock,' did it, indeed, and that in Denmark too,--almost
within the Arctic Circle! Why, in those high latitudes, and in summer, a
ghost would not have an hour to himself on these principles. Don't you
remember the cock Lord Dufferin took North with him, which crowed at
sunrise, and ended by crowing without intermission and going mad, when
the sun did not set at all? You must observe that any rule of that sort
about cock-crow would lead to shocking irregularities, and to an early-
closing movement for spectres in summer, which would be ruinous to
business--simply ruinous--and, in these days of competition,
intolerable."
This was awful, for I could see no way of getting rid of him. He might
stay to breakfast, or anything.
"By the way," he asked, "who does the Cock at the Lyceum just now? It is
a small but very exacting part--'Act I. scene I. Cock crows.'"
"I believe Mr. Irving has engaged a real fowl, to crow at the right
moment behind the scenes," I said. "He is always very particular about
these details. Quite right too. 'The Cock, by kind permission of the
Aylesbury Dairy Company,' is on the bills. They have no Cock at the
Francais; Mounet Sully would not hear of it."
I knew nothing about it, but if this detestable spectre was going to
launch out concerning art and the drama there would be no sleep for me.
"Then the glow-worm," he said--"have they a real glow-worm for the
Ghost's 'business' (Act I. scene 5) when he says?--
"'Fare thee well at once,
The glow-worm shows the matin to be near,
And 'gins to pale his ineffectual fire.'
Did it ever strike you how inconsistent that is? Clearly the ghost
appeared in winter; don't you remember how they keep complaining of the
weather?
"'For this relief much thanks; 'tis bitter cold,'
and
"'The air bites shrewdly: it is very cold.'"
"Horatio blows on his hands to warm them, at the Francais," I
interrupted.
"Quite right; good business," said he; "and yet they go on about the glow-
worms in the neighbourhood! Most incongruous. How does Furnivall take
it? An interpolation by Middleton?"
I don't like to be rude, but I admit that I hate being bothered about
Shakespeare, and I yawned.
"Good night," he said snappishly, and was gone.
Presently I heard him again, just as I was dropping into a doze.
"You won't think, in the morning, that this was all a dream, will you?
Can I do anything to impress it on your memory? Suppose I shrivel your
left wrist with a touch of my hand? Or shall I leave 'a sable score of
fingers four' burned on the table? Something of that sort is usually
done."
"Oh, _pray_ don't take the trouble," I said. "I'm sure Lady Perilous
would not like to have the table injured, and she might not altogether
believe my explanation. As for myself, I'll be content with your word
for it that you were really here. Can I bury your bones for you, or
anything? Very well, as you _must_ be off, good night!"
"No, thanks," he replied. "By the way, I've had an idea about my
apparitions in disguise. Perhaps it is my 'Unconscious Self' that does
them. You have read about the 'Unconscious Self' in the Spectator?"
Then he really went.
A nun in grey, who moaned and wrung her hands, remained in the room for a
short time, but was obviously quite automatic.