_By_ ⸺ ⸺
_I._
It was with a little alarm and a good deal of pleasurable excitement
that I looked forward to my first grown-up visit to Mervyn Grange. I
had been there several times as a child, but never since I was twelve
years old, and now I was over eighteen. We were all of us very proud
of our cousins the Mervyns: it is not everybody that can claim kinship
with a family who are in full and admitted possession of a secret, a
curse, and a mysterious cabinet, in addition to the usual surplusage of
horrors supplied in such cases by popular imagination. Some declared that
a Mervyn of the days of Henry VIII had been cursed by an injured abbot
from the foot of the gallows. Others affirmed that a dissipated Mervyn
of the Georgian era was still playing cards for his soul in some remote
region of the Grange. There were stories of white ladies and black imps,
of bloodstained passages and magic stones. We, proud of our more intimate
acquaintance with the family, naturally gave no credence to these wild
inventions. The Mervyns, indeed, followed the accepted precedent in such
cases, and greatly disliked any reference to the reputed mystery being
made in their presence; with the inevitable result that there was no
subject so pertinaciously discussed by their friends in their absence.
My father’s sister had married the late Baronet, Sir Henry Mervyn, and
we always felt that she ought to have been the means of imparting to us
a very complete knowledge of the family secret. But in this connection
she undoubtedly failed of her duty. We knew that there had been a
terrible tragedy in the family some two or three hundred years ago—that
a peculiarly wicked owner of Mervyn, who flourished in the latter part
of the sixteenth century, had been murdered by his wife who subsequently
committed suicide. We knew that the mysterious curse had some connection
with this crime, but what the curse exactly was we had never been able
to discover. The history of the family since that time had indeed in
one sense been full of misfortune. Not in every sense. A coal mine had
been discovered in one part of the estate, and a populous city had grown
over the corner of another part; and the Mervyns of today, in spite of
the usual percentage of extravagant heirs and political mistakes, were
three times as rich as their ancestors had been. But still their story
was full of bloodshed and shame, of tales of duels and suicides, broken
hearts and broken honor. Only these calamities seemed to have little
or no relation to each other, and what the precise curse was that was
supposed to connect or account for them we could not learn. When she
first married, my aunt was told nothing about it. Later on in life,
when my father asked her for the story, she begged him to talk upon a
pleasanter subject; and being unluckily a man of much courtesy and little
curiosity, he complied with her request. This, however, was the only
part of the ghostly traditions of her husband’s home upon which she was
so reticent. The haunted chamber, for instance—which, of course, existed
at the Grange—she treated with the greatest contempt. Various friends and
relations had slept in it at different times, and no approach to any kind
of authenticated ghost-story, even of the most trivial description, had
they been able to supply. Its only claim to respect, indeed, was that it
contained the famous Mervyn cabinet, a fascinating puzzle of which I will
speak later, but which certainly had nothing haunting or horrible about
its appearance.
My uncle’s family consisted of three sons. The eldest, George, the
present baronet, was now in his thirties, married, and with children of
his own. The second, Jack, was the black-sheep of the family. He had
been in the Guards, but, about five years back, had got into some very
disgraceful scrape, and had been obliged to leave the country. The sorrow
and the shame of this had killed his unhappy mother, and her husband had
not long afterwards followed her to the grave. Alan, the youngest son,
probably because he was the nearest to us in age, had been our special
favorite in earlier years. George was grown up before I had well left the
nursery, and his hot, quick temper had always kept us youngsters somewhat
in awe of him. Jack was four years older than Alan, and, besides, his
profession had, in a way, cut his boyhood short. When my uncle and aunt
were abroad, as they frequently were for months together on account of
her health, it was Alan, chiefly, who had to spend his holidays with us,
both as school-boy and as undergraduate. And a brighter, sweeter-tempered
comrade, or one possessed of more diversified talents for the invention
of games or the telling of stories, it would have been difficult to find.
For five years together now our ancient custom of an annual visit to
Mervyn had been broken. First there had been the seclusion of mourning
for my aunt, and a year later for my uncle; then George and his wife,
Lucy—she was a connection of our own on our mother’s side, and very
intimate with us all—had been away for nearly two years on a voyage round
the world; and since then sickness in our own family had kept us in our
turn a good deal abroad. So that I had not seen my cousins since all the
calamities which had befallen them in the interval, and as I steamed
northwards I wondered a good deal as to the changes I should find. I
was to have come out that year in London, but ill-health had prevented
me; and as a sort of consolation Lucy had kindly asked me to spend a
fortnight at Mervyn, and be present at a shooting-party, which was to
assemble there in the first week of October.
I had started early, and there was still an hour of the short autumn
day left when I descended at the little wayside station, from which a
six-mile drive brought me to the Grange. A dreary drive I found it—the
round, gray, treeless outline of the fells stretching around me on every
side beneath the leaden, changeless sky. The night had nearly fallen as
we drove along the narrow valley in which the Grange stood: it was too
dark to see the autumn tints of the woods which clothed and brightened
its sides, almost too dark to distinguish the old tower—Dame Alice’s
tower as it was called—which stood some half mile farther on at its head.
But the light shown brightly from the Grange windows, and all feeling of
dreariness departed as I drove up to the door. Leaving maid and boxes to
their fate, I ran up the steps into the old, well remembered hall, and
was informed by the dignified man-servant that her ladyship and the tea
were awaiting me in the morning room.
I found that there was nobody staying in the house except Alan, who
was finishing the long vacation there: he had been called to the bar a
couple of years before. The guests were not to arrive for another week,
so that I had plenty of opportunity in the interval to make up for lost
time with my cousins. I began my observations that evening as we sat
down to dinner, a cozy party of four. Lucy was quite unchanged—pretty,
foolish, and gentle as ever. George showed the full five years’ increase
of age, and seemed to have acquired a somewhat painful control of his
temper. Instead of the old petulant outbursts, there was at times an air
of nervous, irritable self-restraint, which I found the less pleasant of
the two. But it was in Alan that the most striking alteration appeared.
I felt it the moment I shook hands with him, and the impression deepened
that evening with every hour. I told myself that it was only the natural
difference between boy and man, between twenty and twenty-five, but I
don’t think that I believed it. Superficially the change was not great.
The slight-built, graceful figure; the deep gray eyes, too small for
beauty; the clear-cut features, the delicate, sensitive lips, close
shaven now, as they had been hairless then—all were as I remembered
them. But the face was paler and thinner than it had been, and there
were lines round the eyes and at the corners of the mouth which were no
more natural to twenty-five than they would have been to twenty. The old
charm indeed—the sweet friendliness of manner, which was his own peculiar
possession—was still there. He talked and laughed almost as much as
formerly, but the talk was manufactured for our entertainment, and the
laughter came from his head and not from his heart. And it was when he
was taking no part in the conversation that the change showed most. Then
the face, on which in the old time every passing emotion had expressed
itself in a constant, living current, became cold and impassive—without
interest, and without desire. It was at such times that I knew most
certainly that here was something which had been living and was dead.
Was it only his boyhood? This question I was unable to answer.
Still, in spite of all, that week was one of the happiest in my life. The
brothers were both men of enough ability and cultivation to be pleasant
talkers, and Lucy could perform adequately the part of conversational
accompanist which, socially speaking, is all that is required of a woman.
The meals and evenings passed quickly and agreeably; the mornings I spent
in unending gossips with Lucy, or in games with the children, two bright
boys of five and six years old. But the afternoons were the best part
of the day. George was a thorough squire in all his tastes and habits,
and every afternoon his wife dutifully accompanied him round farms and
coverts, inspecting new buildings, trudging along half-made roads, or
marking unoffending trees for destruction. Then Alan and I would ride
by the hour together over moor and meadowland, often picking our way
homewards down the glen-side long after the autumn evenings had closed
in. During these rides I had glimpses many a time into depths in Alan’s
nature of which I doubt whether in the old days he had himself been
aware. To me certainly they were as a revelation. A prevailing sadness,
occasionally a painful tone of bitterness, characterized these more
serious moods of his, but I do not think that, at the end of that week,
I would, if I could, have changed the man, whom I was learning to revere
and to pity, for the light-hearted playmate whom I felt was lost to me
forever.
_II._
The only feature of the family life which jarred on me was the attitude
of the two brothers towards the children. I did not notice this much at
first, and at all times it was a thing to be felt rather than to be seen.
George himself never seemed quite at ease with them. The boys were strong
and well grown, healthy in mind and body; and one would have thought
that the existence of two such representatives to carry on his name and
inherit his fortune would have been the very crown of pride and happiness
to their father. But it was not so. Lucy indeed was devoted to them, and
in all practical matters no one could have been kinder to them than was
George. They were free of the whole house, and every indulgence that
money could buy for them they had. I never heard him give them a harsh
word. But there was something wrong. A constraint in their presence, a
relief in their absence, an evident dislike of discussing them and their
affairs, a total want of that enjoyment of love and possession which in
such a case one might have expected to find. Alan’s state of mind was
even more marked. Never did I hear him willingly address his nephews, or
in any way allude to their existence. I should have said that he simply
ignored it, but for the heavy gloom which always overspread his spirits
in their company, and for the glances which he would now and again cast
in their direction—glances full of some hidden painful emotion, though of
what nature it would have been hard to define. Indeed, Alan’s attitude
towards her children I soon found to be the only source of friction
between Lucy and this otherwise much-loved member of her husband’s
family. I asked her one day why the boys never appeared at luncheon.
“Oh, they come when Alan is away,” she answered; “but they seem to annoy
him so much that George thinks it is better to keep them out of sight
when he is here. It is very tiresome. I know that it is the fashion to
say that George has got the temper of the family; but I assure you that
Alan’s nervous moods and fancies are much more difficult to live with.”
That was on the morning—a Friday it was—of the last day which we were to
spend alone. The guests were to arrive soon after tea; and I think that
with the knowledge of their approach Alan and I prolonged our ride that
afternoon beyond its usual limits. We were on our way home, and it was
already dusk, when a turn of the path brought us face to face with the
old ruined tower, of which I have already spoken as standing at the head
of the valley. I had not been close up to it yet during this visit at
Mervyn. It had been a very favorite haunt of ours as children, and partly
on that account, partly perhaps in order to defer the dreaded close of
our ride to the last possible moment, I proposed an inspection of it. The
only portion of the old building left standing in any kind of entirety
was two rooms, one above the other. The tower room, level with the bottom
of the moat, was dark and damp, and it was the upper one, reached by a
little outside staircase, which had been our rendezvous of old. Alan
showed no disposition to enter, and said that he would stay outside and
hold my horse, so I dismounted and ran up alone.
The room seemed in no way changed. A mere stone shell, littered with
fragments of wood and mortar. There was the rough wooden block on which
Alan used to sit while he first frightened us with bogey-stories, and
then calmed our excited nerves by rapid sallies of wild nonsense. There
was the plank from behind which, erected as a barrier across the doorway,
he would defend the castle against our united assault, pelting us with
fir cones and sods of earth. This and many a bygone scene thronged on
me as I stood there, and the room filled again with the memories of
childish mirth. And following close came those of childish terrors.
Horrors which had oppressed me then, wholly imagined or dimly apprehended
from half-heard traditions, and never thought of since, flitted around
me in the gathering dusk. And with them it seemed to me as if there came
other memories too,—memories which had never been my own, of scenes whose
actors had long been with the dead, but which, immortal as the spirit
before whose eyes they had dwelt, still lingered in the spot where their
victim had first learnt to shudder at their presence. Once the ghastly
notion came to me, it seized on my imagination with irresistible force.
It seemed as if from the darkened corners of the room vague, ill-defined
shapes were actually peering out at me. When night came they would show
themselves in that form, livid and terrible, in which they had been burnt
into the brain and heart of the long ago dead.
I turned and glanced towards where I had left Alan. I could see his
figure framed in by the window, a black shadow against the gray twilight
of the sky behind. Erect and perfectly motionless he sat, so motionless
as to look almost lifeless, gazing before him down the valley into the
illimitable distance beyond. There was something in that stern immobility
of look and attitude which struck me with a curious sense of congruity.
It was right that he should be thus—right that he should be no longer
the laughing boy who a moment before had been in my memory. The haunting
horrors of that place seemed to demand it, and for the first time I
felt that I understood the change. With an effort I shook myself free
from these fancies, and turned to go. As I did so, my eye fell upon a
queer-shaped painted board, leaning up against the wall, which I well
recollected in old times. Many a discussion had we had about the legend
inscribed upon it, which in our wisdom we had finally pronounced to be
German, chiefly because it was illegible. Though I had loudly professed
my faith in this theory at the time, I had always had uneasy doubts on
the subject, and now half smiling I bent down to verify or remove them.
The language was English, not German; but the badly painted, faded Gothic
letters in which it was written made the mistake excusable. In the dim
light I had difficulty even now in deciphering the words, and felt when
I had done so that neither the information conveyed nor the style of the
composition was sufficient reward for the trouble I had taken. This is
what I read:
“Where the woman sinned the maid shall win;
But God help the maid that sleeps within.”
What the lines could refer to I neither had any notion nor did I pause
then even in my own mind to inquire. I only remember vaguely wondering
whether they were intended for a tombstone or for a doorway. Then,
continuing my way, I rapidly descended the steps and remounted my horse,
glad to find myself once again in the open air and by my cousin’s side.
The train of thought into which he had sunk during my absence was
apparently an absorbing one, for to my first question as to the painted
board he could hardly rouse himself to answer.
“A board with a legend written on it? Yes, he remembered something of the
kind there. It had always been there, he thought. He knew nothing about
it,”—and so the subject was not continued.
The weird feelings which had haunted me in the tower still oppressed me,
and I proceeded to ask Alan about that old Dame Alice whom the traditions
of my childhood represented as the last occupant of the ruined building.
Alan roused himself now, but did not seem anxious to impart information
on the subject. She had lived there, he admitted, and no one had lived
there since. “Had she not,” I inquired, “something to do with the
mysterious cabinet at the house? I remember hearing it spoken of as ‘Dame
Alice’s cabinet.’”
“So they say,” he assented; “she and an Italian artificer who was in her
service, and who, chiefly I imagine on account of his skill, shared with
her the honor of reputed witchcraft.”
“She was the mother of Hugh Mervyn, the man who was murdered by his wife,
was she not?” I asked.
“Yes,” said Alan, briefly.
“And had she not something to do with the curse?” I inquired after a
short pause, and nervously I remembered my father’s experience on that
subject, and I had never before dared to allude to it in the presence
of any member of the family. My nervousness was fully warranted. The
gloom on Alan’s brow deepened, and after a very short “They say so” he
turned full upon me, and inquired with some asperity why on earth I had
developed this sudden curiosity about his ancestress.
I hesitated a moment, for I was a little ashamed of my fancies; but the
darkness gave me courage, and besides I was not afraid of telling Alan—he
would understand. I told him of the strange sensations I had had while
in the tower—sensations which had struck me with all that force and
clearness which we usually associate with a direct experience of fact.
“Of course it was a trick of imagination,” I commented; “but I could not
get rid of the feeling that the person who had dwelt there last must have
had terrible thoughts for the companions of her life.”
Alan listened in silence, and the silence continued for some time after I
had ceased speaking.
“It is strange,” he said at last; “instincts which we do not understand
form the motive-power of most of our life’s actions, and yet we refuse to
admit them as evidence of any external truth. I suppose it is because we
_must_ act somehow, rightly or wrongly; and there are a great many things
which we need not believe unless we choose. As for this old lady, she
lived long—long enough, like most of us, to do evil; unlike most of us,
long enough to witness some of the results of that evil. To say that, is
to say that the last years of her life must have been weighted heavily
enough with tragic thought.”