UNDER none of the accredited ghostly circumstances, and environed by none
of the conventional ghostly surroundings, did I first make acquaintance
with the house which is the subject of this Christmas piece. I saw it in
the daylight, with the sun upon it. There was no wind, no rain, no
lightning, no thunder, no awful or unwonted circumstance, of any kind, to
heighten its effect. More than that: I had come to it direct from a
railway station: it was not more than a mile distant from the railway
station; and, as I stood outside the house, looking back upon the way I
had come, I could see the goods train running smoothly along the
embankment in the valley. I will not say that everything was utterly
commonplace, because I doubt if anything can be that, except to utterly
commonplace people—and there my vanity steps in; but, I will take it on
myself to say that anybody might see the house as I saw it, any fine
autumn morning.
The manner of my lighting on it was this.
I was travelling towards London out of the North, intending to stop by
the way, to look at the house. My health required a temporary residence
in the country; and a friend of mine who knew that, and who had happened
to drive past the house, had written to me to suggest it as a likely
place. I had got into the train at midnight, and had fallen asleep, and
had woke up and had sat looking out of window at the brilliant Northern
Lights in the sky, and had fallen asleep again, and had woke up again to
find the night gone, with the usual discontented conviction on me that I
hadn’t been to sleep at all;—upon which question, in the first imbecility
of that condition, I am ashamed to believe that I would have done wager
by battle with the man who sat opposite me. That opposite man had had,
through the night—as that opposite man always has—several legs too many,
and all of them too long. In addition to this unreasonable conduct
(which was only to be expected of him), he had had a pencil and a
pocket-book, and had been perpetually listening and taking notes. It had
appeared to me that these aggravating notes related to the jolts and
bumps of the carriage, and I should have resigned myself to his taking
them, under a general supposition that he was in the civil-engineering
way of life, if he had not sat staring straight over my head whenever he
listened. He was a goggle-eyed gentleman of a perplexed aspect, and his
demeanour became unbearable.
It was a cold, dead morning (the sun not being up yet), and when I had
out-watched the paling light of the fires of the iron country, and the
curtain of heavy smoke that hung at once between me and the stars and
between me and the day, I turned to my fellow-traveller and said:
“I _beg_ your pardon, sir, but do you observe anything particular in me?”
For, really, he appeared to be taking down, either my travelling-cap or
my hair, with a minuteness that was a liberty.
The goggle-eyed gentleman withdrew his eyes from behind me, as if the
back of the carriage were a hundred miles off, and said, with a lofty
look of compassion for my insignificance:
“In you, sir?—B.”
“B, sir?” said I, growing warm.
“I have nothing to do with you, sir,” returned the gentleman; “pray let
me listen—O.”
He enunciated this vowel after a pause, and noted it down.
At first I was alarmed, for an Express lunatic and no communication with
the guard, is a serious position. The thought came to my relief that the
gentleman might be what is popularly called a Rapper: one of a sect for
(some of) whom I have the highest respect, but whom I don’t believe in.
I was going to ask him the question, when he took the bread out of my
mouth.
“You will excuse me,” said the gentleman contemptuously, “if I am too
much in advance of common humanity to trouble myself at all about it. I
have passed the night—as indeed I pass the whole of my time now—in
spiritual intercourse.”
“O!” said I, somewhat snappishly.
“The conferences of the night began,” continued the gentleman, turning
several leaves of his note-book, “with this message: ‘Evil communications
corrupt good manners.’”
“Sound,” said I; “but, absolutely new?”
“New from spirits,” returned the gentleman.
I could only repeat my rather snappish “O!” and ask if I might be
favoured with the last communication.
“‘A bird in the hand,’” said the gentleman, reading his last entry with
great solemnity, “‘is worth two in the Bosh.’”
“Truly I am of the same opinion,” said I; “but shouldn’t it be Bush?”
“It came to me, Bosh,” returned the gentleman.
The gentleman then informed me that the spirit of Socrates had delivered
this special revelation in the course of the night. “My friend, I hope
you are pretty well. There are two in this railway carriage. How do you
do? There are seventeen thousand four hundred and seventy-nine spirits
here, but you cannot see them. Pythagoras is here. He is not at liberty
to mention it, but hopes you like travelling.” Galileo likewise had
dropped in, with this scientific intelligence. “I am glad to see you,
_amico_. _Come sta_? Water will freeze when it is cold enough.
_Addio_!” In the course of the night, also, the following phenomena had
occurred. Bishop Butler had insisted on spelling his name, “Bubler,” for
which offence against orthography and good manners he had been dismissed
as out of temper. John Milton (suspected of wilful mystification) had
repudiated the authorship of Paradise Lost, and had introduced, as joint
authors of that poem, two Unknown gentlemen, respectively named Grungers
and Scadgingtone. And Prince Arthur, nephew of King John of England, had
described himself as tolerably comfortable in the seventh circle, where
he was learning to paint on velvet, under the direction of Mrs. Trimmer
and Mary Queen of Scots.
If this should meet the eye of the gentleman who favoured me with these
disclosures, I trust he will excuse my confessing that the sight of the
rising sun, and the contemplation of the magnificent Order of the vast
Universe, made me impatient of them. In a word, I was so impatient of
them, that I was mightily glad to get out at the next station, and to
exchange these clouds and vapours for the free air of Heaven.
By that time it was a beautiful morning. As I walked away among such
leaves as had already fallen from the golden, brown, and russet trees;
and as I looked around me on the wonders of Creation, and thought of the
steady, unchanging, and harmonious laws by which they are sustained; the
gentleman’s spiritual intercourse seemed to me as poor a piece of
journey-work as ever this world saw. In which heathen state of mind, I
came within view of the house, and stopped to examine it attentively.
It was a solitary house, standing in a sadly neglected garden: a pretty
even square of some two acres. It was a house of about the time of
George the Second; as stiff, as cold, as formal, and in as bad taste, as
could possibly be desired by the most loyal admirer of the whole quartet
of Georges. It was uninhabited, but had, within a year or two, been
cheaply repaired to render it habitable; I say cheaply, because the work
had been done in a surface manner, and was already decaying as to the
paint and plaster, though the colours were fresh. A lop-sided board
drooped over the garden wall, announcing that it was “to let on very
reasonable terms, well furnished.” It was much too closely and heavily
shadowed by trees, and, in particular, there were six tall poplars before
the front windows, which were excessively melancholy, and the site of
which had been extremely ill chosen.
It was easy to see that it was an avoided house—a house that was shunned
by the village, to which my eye was guided by a church spire some half a
mile off—a house that nobody would take. And the natural inference was,
that it had the reputation of being a haunted house.
[Picture: The haunted house]
No period within the four-and-twenty hours of day and night is so solemn
to me, as the early morning. In the summer-time, I often rise very
early, and repair to my room to do a day’s work before breakfast, and I
am always on those occasions deeply impressed by the stillness and
solitude around me. Besides that there is something awful in the being
surrounded by familiar faces asleep—in the knowledge that those who are
dearest to us and to whom we are dearest, are profoundly unconscious of
us, in an impassive state, anticipative of that mysterious condition to
which we are all tending—the stopped life, the broken threads of
yesterday, the deserted seat, the closed book, the unfinished but
abandoned occupation, all are images of Death. The tranquillity of the
hour is the tranquillity of Death. The colour and the chill have the
same association. Even a certain air that familiar household objects
take upon them when they first emerge from the shadows of the night into
the morning, of being newer, and as they used to be long ago, has its
counterpart in the subsidence of the worn face of maturity or age, in
death, into the old youthful look. Moreover, I once saw the apparition
of my father, at this hour. He was alive and well, and nothing ever came
of it, but I saw him in the daylight, sitting with his back towards me,
on a seat that stood beside my bed. His head was resting on his hand,
and whether he was slumbering or grieving, I could not discern. Amazed
to see him there, I sat up, moved my position, leaned out of bed, and
watched him. As he did not move, I spoke to him more than once. As he
did not move then, I became alarmed and laid my hand upon his shoulder,
as I thought—and there was no such thing.
For all these reasons, and for others less easily and briefly statable, I
find the early morning to be my most ghostly time. Any house would be
more or less haunted, to me, in the early morning; and a haunted house
could scarcely address me to greater advantage than then.
I walked on into the village, with the desertion of this house upon my
mind, and I found the landlord of the little inn, sanding his door-step.
I bespoke breakfast, and broached the subject of the house.
“Is it haunted?” I asked.
The landlord looked at me, shook his head, and answered, “I say nothing.”
“Then it _is_ haunted?”
“Well!” cried the landlord, in an outburst of frankness that had the
appearance of desperation—“I wouldn’t sleep in it.”
“Why not?”
“If I wanted to have all the bells in a house ring, with nobody to ring
’em; and all the doors in a house bang, with nobody to bang ’em; and all
sorts of feet treading about, with no feet there; why, then,” said the
landlord, “I’d sleep in that house.”
“Is anything seen there?”
The landlord looked at me again, and then, with his former appearance of
desperation, called down his stable-yard for “Ikey!”
The call produced a high-shouldered young fellow, with a round red face,
a short crop of sandy hair, a very broad humorous mouth, a turned-up
nose, and a great sleeved waistcoat of purple bars, with mother-of-pearl
buttons, that seemed to be growing upon him, and to be in a fair way—if
it were not pruned—of covering his head and overunning his boots.
“This gentleman wants to know,” said the landlord, “if anything’s seen at
the Poplars.”
“’Ooded woman with a howl,” said Ikey, in a state of great freshness.
“Do you mean a cry?”
“I mean a bird, sir.”
“A hooded woman with an owl. Dear me! Did you ever see her?”
“I seen the howl.”
“Never the woman?”
“Not so plain as the howl, but they always keeps together.”
“Has anybody ever seen the woman as plainly as the owl?”
“Lord bless you, sir! Lots.”
“Who?”
“Lord bless you, sir! Lots.”
“The general-dealer opposite, for instance, who is opening his shop?”
“Perkins? Bless you, Perkins wouldn’t go a-nigh the place. No!”
observed the young man, with considerable feeling; “he an’t overwise,
an’t Perkins, but he an’t such a fool as _that_.”
(Here, the landlord murmured his confidence in Perkins’s knowing better.)
“Who is—or who was—the hooded woman with the owl? Do you know?”
“Well!” said Ikey, holding up his cap with one hand while he scratched
his head with the other, “they say, in general, that she was murdered,
and the howl he ’ooted the while.”
This very concise summary of the facts was all I could learn, except that
a young man, as hearty and likely a young man as ever I see, had been
took with fits and held down in ’em, after seeing the hooded woman.
Also, that a personage, dimly described as “a hold chap, a sort of
one-eyed tramp, answering to the name of Joby, unless you challenged him
as Greenwood, and then he said, ‘Why not? and even if so, mind your own
business,’” had encountered the hooded woman, a matter of five or six
times. But, I was not materially assisted by these witnesses: inasmuch
as the first was in California, and the last was, as Ikey said (and he
was confirmed by the landlord), Anywheres.
Now, although I regard with a hushed and solemn fear, the mysteries,
between which and this state of existence is interposed the barrier of
the great trial and change that fall on all the things that live; and
although I have not the audacity to pretend that I know anything of them;
I can no more reconcile the mere banging of doors, ringing of bells,
creaking of boards, and such-like insignificances, with the majestic
beauty and pervading analogy of all the Divine rules that I am permitted
to understand, than I had been able, a little while before, to yoke the
spiritual intercourse of my fellow-traveller to the chariot of the rising
sun. Moreover, I had lived in two haunted houses—both abroad. In one of
these, an old Italian palace, which bore the reputation of being very
badly haunted indeed, and which had recently been twice abandoned on that
account, I lived eight months, most tranquilly and pleasantly:
notwithstanding that the house had a score of mysterious bedrooms, which
were never used, and possessed, in one large room in which I sat reading,
times out of number at all hours, and next to which I slept, a haunted
chamber of the first pretensions. I gently hinted these considerations
to the landlord. And as to this particular house having a bad name, I
reasoned with him, Why, how many things had bad names undeservedly, and
how easy it was to give bad names, and did he not think that if he and I
were persistently to whisper in the village that any weird-looking, old
drunken tinker of the neighbourhood had sold himself to the Devil, he
would come in time to be suspected of that commercial venture! All this
wise talk was perfectly ineffective with the landlord, I am bound to
confess, and was as dead a failure as ever I made in my life.
To cut this part of the story short, I was piqued about the haunted
house, and was already half resolved to take it. So, after breakfast, I
got the keys from Perkins’s brother-in-law (a whip and harness maker, who
keeps the Post Office, and is under submission to a most rigorous wife of
the Doubly Seceding Little Emmanuel persuasion), and went up to the
house, attended by my landlord and by Ikey.
Within, I found it, as I had expected, transcendently dismal. The slowly
changing shadows waved on it from the heavy trees, were doleful in the
last degree; the house was ill-placed, ill-built, ill-planned, and
ill-fitted. It was damp, it was not free from dry rot, there was a
flavour of rats in it, and it was the gloomy victim of that indescribable
decay which settles on all the work of man’s hands whenever it’s not
turned to man’s account. The kitchens and offices were too large, and
too remote from each other. Above stairs and below, waste tracts of
passage intervened between patches of fertility represented by rooms; and
there was a mouldy old well with a green growth upon it, hiding like a
murderous trap, near the bottom of the back-stairs, under the double row
of bells. One of these bells was labelled, on a black ground in faded
white letters, MASTER B. This, they told me, was the bell that rang the
most.
“Who was Master B.?” I asked. “Is it known what he did while the owl
hooted?”
“Rang the bell,” said Ikey.
I was rather struck by the prompt dexterity with which this young man
pitched his fur cap at the bell, and rang it himself. It was a loud,
unpleasant bell, and made a very disagreeable sound. The other bells
were inscribed according to the names of the rooms to which their wires
were conducted: as “Picture Room,” “Double Room,” “Clock Room,” and the
like. Following Master B.’s bell to its source I found that young
gentleman to have had but indifferent third-class accommodation in a
triangular cabin under the cock-loft, with a corner fireplace which
Master B. must have been exceedingly small if he were ever able to warm
himself at, and a corner chimney-piece like a pyramidal staircase to the
ceiling for Tom Thumb. The papering of one side of the room had dropped
down bodily, with fragments of plaster adhering to it, and almost blocked
up the door. It appeared that Master B., in his spiritual condition,
always made a point of pulling the paper down. Neither the landlord nor
Ikey could suggest why he made such a fool of himself.
Except that the house had an immensely large rambling loft at top, I made
no other discoveries. It was moderately well furnished, but sparely.
Some of the furniture—say, a third—was as old as the house; the rest was
of various periods within the last half-century. I was referred to a
corn-chandler in the market-place of the county town to treat for the
house. I went that day, and I took it for six months.
It was just the middle of October when I moved in with my maiden sister
(I venture to call her eight-and-thirty, she is so very handsome,
sensible, and engaging). We took with us, a deaf stable-man, my
bloodhound Turk, two women servants, and a young person called an Odd
Girl. I have reason to record of the attendant last enumerated, who was
one of the Saint Lawrence’s Union Female Orphans, that she was a fatal
mistake and a disastrous engagement.
The year was dying early, the leaves were falling fast, it was a raw cold
day when we took possession, and the gloom of the house was most
depressing. The cook (an amiable woman, but of a weak turn of intellect)
burst into tears on beholding the kitchen, and requested that her silver
watch might be delivered over to her sister (2 Tuppintock’s Gardens,
Liggs’s Walk, Clapham Rise), in the event of anything happening to her
from the damp. Streaker, the housemaid, feigned cheerfulness, but was
the greater martyr. The Odd Girl, who had never been in the country,
alone was pleased, and made arrangements for sowing an acorn in the
garden outside the scullery window, and rearing an oak.
We went, before dark, through all the natural—as opposed to
supernatural—miseries incidental to our state. Dispiriting reports
ascended (like the smoke) from the basement in volumes, and descended
from the upper rooms. There was no rolling-pin, there was no salamander
(which failed to surprise me, for I don’t know what it is), there was
nothing in the house, what there was, was broken, the last people must
have lived like pigs, what could the meaning of the landlord be? Through
these distresses, the Odd Girl was cheerful and exemplary. But within
four hours after dark we had got into a supernatural groove, and the Odd
Girl had seen “Eyes,” and was in hysterics.
My sister and I had agreed to keep the haunting strictly to ourselves,
and my impression was, and still is, that I had not left Ikey, when he
helped to unload the cart, alone with the women, or any one of them, for
one minute. Nevertheless, as I say, the Odd Girl had “seen Eyes” (no
other explanation could ever be drawn from her), before nine, and by ten
o’clock had had as much vinegar applied to her as would pickle a handsome
salmon.
I leave a discerning public to judge of my feelings, when, under these
untoward circumstances, at about half-past ten o’clock Master B.’s bell
began to ring in a most infuriated manner, and Turk howled until the
house resounded with his lamentations!
I hope I may never again be in a state of mind so unchristian as the
mental frame in which I lived for some weeks, respecting the memory of
Master B. Whether his bell was rung by rats, or mice, or bats, or wind,
or what other accidental vibration, or sometimes by one cause, sometimes
another, and sometimes by collusion, I don’t know; but, certain it is,
that it did ring two nights out of three, until I conceived the happy
idea of twisting Master B.’s neck—in other words, breaking his bell short
off—and silencing that young gentleman, as to my experience and belief,
for ever.
But, by that time, the Odd Girl had developed such improving powers of
catalepsy, that she had become a shining example of that very
inconvenient disorder. She would stiffen, like a Guy Fawkes endowed with
unreason, on the most irrelevant occasions. I would address the servants
in a lucid manner, pointing out to them that I had painted Master B.’s
room and balked the paper, and taken Master B.’s bell away and balked the
ringing, and if they could suppose that that confounded boy had lived and
died, to clothe himself with no better behaviour than would most
unquestionably have brought him and the sharpest particles of a
birch-broom into close acquaintance in the present imperfect state of
existence, could they also suppose a mere poor human being, such as I
was, capable by those contemptible means of counteracting and limiting
the powers of the disembodied spirits of the dead, or of any spirits?—I
say I would become emphatic and cogent, not to say rather complacent, in
such an address, when it would all go for nothing by reason of the Odd
Girl’s suddenly stiffening from the toes upward, and glaring among us
like a parochial petrifaction.
Streaker, the housemaid, too, had an attribute of a most discomfiting
nature. I am unable to say whether she was of an unusually lymphatic
temperament, or what else was the matter with her, but this young woman
became a mere Distillery for the production of the largest and most
transparent tears I ever met with. Combined with these characteristics,
was a peculiar tenacity of hold in those specimens, so that they didn’t
fall, but hung upon her face and nose. In this condition, and mildly and
deplorably shaking her head, her silence would throw me more heavily than
the Admirable Crichton could have done in a verbal disputation for a
purse of money. Cook, likewise, always covered me with confusion as with
a garment, by neatly winding up the session with the protest that the
Ouse was wearing her out, and by meekly repeating her last wishes
regarding her silver watch.
As to our nightly life, the contagion of suspicion and fear was among us,
and there is no such contagion under the sky. Hooded woman? According
to the accounts, we were in a perfect Convent of hooded women. Noises?
With that contagion downstairs, I myself have sat in the dismal parlour,
listening, until I have heard so many and such strange noises, that they
would have chilled my blood if I had not warmed it by dashing out to make
discoveries. Try this in bed, in the dead of the night: try this at your
own comfortable fire-side, in the life of the night. You can fill any
house with noises, if you will, until you have a noise for every nerve in
your nervous system.
I repeat; the contagion of suspicion and fear was among us, and there is
no such contagion under the sky. The women (their noses in a chronic
state of excoriation from smelling-salts) were always primed and loaded
for a swoon, and ready to go off with hair-triggers. The two elder
detached the Odd Girl on all expeditions that were considered doubly
hazardous, and she always established the reputation of such adventures
by coming back cataleptic. If Cook or Streaker went overhead after dark,
we knew we should presently hear a bump on the ceiling; and this took
place so constantly, that it was as if a fighting man were engaged to go
about the house, administering a touch of his art which I believe is
called The Auctioneer, to every domestic he met with.
It was in vain to do anything. It was in vain to be frightened, for the
moment in one’s own person, by a real owl, and then to show the owl. It
was in vain to discover, by striking an accidental discord on the piano,
that Turk always howled at particular notes and combinations. It was in
vain to be a Rhadamanthus with the bells, and if an unfortunate bell rang
without leave, to have it down inexorably and silence it. It was in vain
to fire up chimneys, let torches down the well, charge furiously into
suspected rooms and recesses. We changed servants, and it was no better.
The new set ran away, and a third set came, and it was no better. At
last, our comfortable housekeeping got to be so disorganised and
wretched, that I one night dejectedly said to my sister: “Patty, I begin
to despair of our getting people to go on with us here, and I think we
must give this up.”
My sister, who is a woman of immense spirit, replied, “No, John, don’t
give it up. Don’t be beaten, John. There is another way.”
“And what is that?” said I.
“John,” returned my sister, “if we are not to be driven out of this
house, and that for no reason whatever, that is apparent to you or me, we
must help ourselves and take the house wholly and solely into our own
hands.”
“But, the servants,” said I.
“Have no servants,” said my sister, boldly.
Like most people in my grade of life, I had never thought of the
possibility of going on without those faithful obstructions. The notion
was so new to me when suggested, that I looked very doubtful. “We know
they come here to be frightened and infect one another, and we know they
are frightened and do infect one another,” said my sister.
“With the exception of Bottles,” I observed, in a meditative tone.
(The deaf stable-man. I kept him in my service, and still keep him, as a
phenomenon of moroseness not to be matched in England.)
“To be sure, John,” assented my sister; “except Bottles. And what does
that go to prove? Bottles talks to nobody, and hears nobody unless he is
absolutely roared at, and what alarm has Bottles ever given, or taken!
None.”
This was perfectly true; the individual in question having retired, every
night at ten o’clock, to his bed over the coach-house, with no other
company than a pitchfork and a pail of water. That the pail of water
would have been over me, and the pitchfork through me, if I had put
myself without announcement in Bottles’s way after that minute, I had
deposited in my own mind as a fact worth remembering. Neither had
Bottles ever taken the least notice of any of our many uproars. An
imperturbable and speechless man, he had sat at his supper, with Streaker
present in a swoon, and the Odd Girl marble, and had only put another
potato in his cheek, or profited by the general misery to help himself to
beefsteak pie.
“And so,” continued my sister, “I exempt Bottles. And considering, John,
that the house is too large, and perhaps too lonely, to be kept well in
hand by Bottles, you, and me, I propose that we cast about among our
friends for a certain selected number of the most reliable and
willing—form a Society here for three months—wait upon ourselves and one
another—live cheerfully and socially—and see what happens.”
I was so charmed with my sister, that I embraced her on the spot, and
went into her plan with the greatest ardour.
We were then in the third week of November; but, we took our measures so
vigorously, and were so well seconded by the friends in whom we confided,
that there was still a week of the month unexpired, when our party all
came down together merrily, and mustered in the haunted house.
I will mention, in this place, two small changes that I made while my
sister and I were yet alone. It occurring to me as not improbable that
Turk howled in the house at night, partly because he wanted to get out of
it, I stationed him in his kennel outside, but unchained; and I seriously
warned the village that any man who came in his way must not expect to
leave him without a rip in his own throat. I then casually asked Ikey if
he were a judge of a gun? On his saying, “Yes, sir, I knows a good gun
when I sees her,” I begged the favour of his stepping up to the house and
looking at mine.
“_She’s_ a true one, sir,” said Ikey, after inspecting a double-barrelled
rifle that I bought in New York a few years ago. “No mistake about
_her_, sir.”
“Ikey,” said I, “don’t mention it; I have seen something in this house.”
“No, sir?” he whispered, greedily opening his eyes. “’Ooded lady, sir?”
“Don’t be frightened,” said I. “It was a figure rather like you.”
“Lord, sir?”
“Ikey!” said I, shaking hands with him warmly: I may say affectionately;
“if there is any truth in these ghost-stories, the greatest service I can
do you, is, to fire at that figure. And I promise you, by Heaven and
earth, I will do it with this gun if I see it again!”
The young man thanked me, and took his leave with some little
precipitation, after declining a glass of liquor. I imparted my secret
to him, because I had never quite forgotten his throwing his cap at the
bell; because I had, on another occasion, noticed something very like a
fur cap, lying not far from the bell, one night when it had burst out
ringing; and because I had remarked that we were at our ghostliest
whenever he came up in the evening to comfort the servants. Let me do
Ikey no injustice. He was afraid of the house, and believed in its being
haunted; and yet he would play false on the haunting side, so surely as
he got an opportunity. The Odd Girl’s case was exactly similar. She
went about the house in a state of real terror, and yet lied monstrously
and wilfully, and invented many of the alarms she spread, and made many
of the sounds we heard. I had had my eye on the two, and I know it. It
is not necessary for me, here, to account for this preposterous state of
mind; I content myself with remarking that it is familiarly known to
every intelligent man who has had fair medical, legal, or other watchful
experience; that it is as well established and as common a state of mind
as any with which observers are acquainted; and that it is one of the
first elements, above all others, rationally to be suspected in, and
strictly looked for, and separated from, any question of this kind.
To return to our party. The first thing we did when we were all
assembled, was, to draw lots for bedrooms. That done, and every bedroom,
and, indeed, the whole house, having been minutely examined by the whole
body, we allotted the various household duties, as if we had been on a
gipsy party, or a yachting party, or a hunting party, or were
shipwrecked. I then recounted the floating rumours concerning the hooded
lady, the owl, and Master B.: with others, still more filmy, which had
floated about during our occupation, relative to some ridiculous old
ghost of the female gender who went up and down, carrying the ghost of a
round table; and also to an impalpable Jackass, whom nobody was ever able
to catch. Some of these ideas I really believe our people below had
communicated to one another in some diseased way, without conveying them
in words. We then gravely called one another to witness, that we were
not there to be deceived, or to deceive—which we considered pretty much
the same thing—and that, with a serious sense of responsibility, we would
be strictly true to one another, and would strictly follow out the truth.
The understanding was established, that any one who heard unusual noises
in the night, and who wished to trace them, should knock at my door;
lastly, that on Twelfth Night, the last night of holy Christmas, all our
individual experiences since that then present hour of our coming
together in the haunted house, should be brought to light for the good of
all; and that we would hold our peace on the subject till then, unless on
some remarkable provocation to break silence.
We were, in number and in character, as follows:
First—to get my sister and myself out of the way—there were we two. In
the drawing of lots, my sister drew her own room, and I drew Master B.’s.
Next, there was our first cousin John Herschel, so called after the great
astronomer: than whom I suppose a better man at a telescope does not
breathe. With him, was his wife: a charming creature to whom he had been
married in the previous spring. I thought it (under the circumstances)
rather imprudent to bring her, because there is no knowing what even a
false alarm may do at such a time; but I suppose he knew his own business
best, and I must say that if she had been _my_ wife, I never could have
left her endearing and bright face behind. They drew the Clock Room.
Alfred Starling, an uncommonly agreeable young fellow of eight-and-twenty
for whom I have the greatest liking, was in the Double Room; mine,
usually, and designated by that name from having a dressing-room within
it, with two large and cumbersome windows, which no wedges _I_ was ever
able to make, would keep from shaking, in any weather, wind or no wind.
Alfred is a young fellow who pretends to be “fast” (another word for
loose, as I understand the term), but who is much too good and sensible
for that nonsense, and who would have distinguished himself before now,
if his father had not unfortunately left him a small independence of two
hundred a year, on the strength of which his only occupation in life has
been to spend six. I am in hopes, however, that his Banker may break, or
that he may enter into some speculation guaranteed to pay twenty per
cent.; for, I am convinced that if he could only be ruined, his fortune
is made. Belinda Bates, bosom friend of my sister, and a most
intellectual, amiable, and delightful girl, got the Picture Room. She
has a fine genius for poetry, combined with real business earnestness,
and “goes in”—to use an expression of Alfred’s—for Woman’s mission,
Woman’s rights, Woman’s wrongs, and everything that is woman’s with a
capital W, or is not and ought to be, or is and ought not to be. “Most
praiseworthy, my dear, and Heaven prosper you!” I whispered to her on the
first night of my taking leave of her at the Picture-Room door, “but
don’t overdo it. And in respect of the great necessity there is, my
darling, for more employments being within the reach of Woman than our
civilisation has as yet assigned to her, don’t fly at the unfortunate
men, even those men who are at first sight in your way, as if they were
the natural oppressors of your sex; for, trust me, Belinda, they do
sometimes spend their wages among wives and daughters, sisters, mothers,
aunts, and grandmothers; and the play is, really, not _all_ Wolf and Red
Riding-Hood, but has other parts in it.” However, I digress.
Belinda, as I have mentioned, occupied the Picture Room. We had but
three other chambers: the Corner Room, the Cupboard Room, and the Garden
Room. My old friend, Jack Governor, “slung his hammock,” as he called
it, in the Corner Room. I have always regarded Jack as the
finest-looking sailor that ever sailed. He is gray now, but as handsome
as he was a quarter of a century ago—nay, handsomer. A portly, cheery,
well-built figure of a broad-shouldered man, with a frank smile, a
brilliant dark eye, and a rich dark eyebrow. I remember those under
darker hair, and they look all the better for their silver setting. He
has been wherever his Union namesake flies, has Jack, and I have met old
shipmates of his, away in the Mediterranean and on the other side of the
Atlantic, who have beamed and brightened at the casual mention of his
name, and have cried, “You know Jack Governor? Then you know a prince of
men!” That he is! And so unmistakably a naval officer, that if you were
to meet him coming out of an Esquimaux snow-hut in seal’s skin, you would
be vaguely persuaded he was in full naval uniform.
Jack once had that bright clear eye of his on my sister; but, it fell out
that he married another lady and took her to South America, where she
died. This was a dozen years ago or more. He brought down with him to
our haunted house a little cask of salt beef; for, he is always convinced
that all salt beef not of his own pickling, is mere carrion, and
invariably, when he goes to London, packs a piece in his portmanteau. He
had also volunteered to bring with him one “Nat Beaver,” an old comrade
of his, captain of a merchantman. Mr. Beaver, with a thick-set wooden
face and figure, and apparently as hard as a block all over, proved to be
an intelligent man, with a world of watery experiences in him, and great
practical knowledge. At times, there was a curious nervousness about
him, apparently the lingering result of some old illness; but, it seldom
lasted many minutes. He got the Cupboard Room, and lay there next to Mr.
Undery, my friend and solicitor: who came down, in an amateur capacity,
“to go through with it,” as he said, and who plays whist better than the
whole Law List, from the red cover at the beginning to the red cover at
the end.
I never was happier in my life, and I believe it was the universal
feeling among us. Jack Governor, always a man of wonderful resources,
was Chief Cook, and made some of the best dishes I ever ate, including
unapproachable curries. My sister was pastrycook and confectioner.
Starling and I were Cook’s Mate, turn and turn about, and on special
occasions the chief cook “pressed” Mr. Beaver. We had a great deal of
out-door sport and exercise, but nothing was neglected within, and there
was no ill-humour or misunderstanding among us, and our evenings were so
delightful that we had at least one good reason for being reluctant to go
to bed.
We had a few night alarms in the beginning. On the first night, I was
knocked up by Jack with a most wonderful ship’s lantern in his hand, like
the gills of some monster of the deep, who informed me that he “was going
aloft to the main truck,” to have the weathercock down. It was a stormy
night and I remonstrated; but Jack called my attention to its making a
sound like a cry of despair, and said somebody would be “hailing a ghost”
presently, if it wasn’t done. So, up to the top of the house, where I
could hardly stand for the wind, we went, accompanied by Mr. Beaver; and
there Jack, lantern and all, with Mr. Beaver after him, swarmed up to the
top of a cupola, some two dozen feet above the chimneys, and stood upon
nothing particular, coolly knocking the weathercock off, until they both
got into such good spirits with the wind and the height, that I thought
they would never come down. Another night, they turned out again, and
had a chimney-cowl off. Another night, they cut a sobbing and gulping
water-pipe away. Another night, they found out something else. On
several occasions, they both, in the coolest manner, simultaneously
dropped out of their respective bedroom windows, hand over hand by their
counterpanes, to “overhaul” something mysterious in the garden.
The engagement among us was faithfully kept, and nobody revealed
anything. All we knew was, if any one’s room were haunted, no one looked
the worse for it.