THE FURNITURE BEGINS TO TALK
He read Aunt Dinah’s letters over again, and marked the passage with his
pencil, and read again,
“Do remember, dear boy, all told you, dear, about the five years. I
dreamed much since. If you think of such a thing I must do it.”
This last sentence he underlined, “_If you think of such a thing, I must
do it._ Sorry I shoul” (she means _should_) “fear or dislike me. I
should haunt, torment Willie. But you will do right.” _Do right._ She
meant wait for five years, of course. My poor darling aunt! I wish you
had never seen one of those odious books of American bosh—Elihu Bung! I
wish Elihu Bung was sunk in a barrel at the bottom of the sea.
Then William looked to his diary, for about that period of his life he
kept one for two years and seven months, and he read these entries:
“⸺Dear Aunt Dinah pressed me very much to give her a distinct promise
not to marry for five years—marry indeed! I—poor, penniless William
Maubray! I shall never marry—yet I can’t make this vow—and she
threatened me saying, ‘If I’m dead there’s nothing that spirit can do,
if you so much as harbour the thought, be I good, or evil, or mocking,
I’ll not do to prevent it. I’ll trouble you, I’ll torment you, I’ll pick
your eyes out, but I won’t suffer you to ruin yourself.’ And she said
very often that she expected to be a _mocking_ spirit; and said again,
‘Mind I told you, though I be dead, you sha’n’t escape me.’ That night I
had an odious nightmare. An apparition like my aunt came to my bedside,
and caught my arm with its hand, and said quite distinctly, ‘Oh! my God!
William, I am dead; don’t let me go.’ I fancied I saw the impression of
fingers on my arm; and think I never was so horrified in my life. And
afterwards in her own bed-room, my aunt having heard my dream, returned
to the subject of her warning and said, ‘If I die before the time, I’ll
watch you as an old gray cat watches a mouse, if you so much as think of
it. I’ll plague you; I’ll save you in spite of yourself, and mortal was
never haunted and tormented as you will be, till you give it up.’ And
saying this she laughed.
“The whole of this new fancy turns out to be one of the Henbane
delusions. How I wish all those cursed books of spiritualism were with
Don Quixote’s library.”
William had now the facts pretty well before him. He had moreover a very
distinct remembrance of that which no other person had imagined or
seen—the face of the apparition of Aunt Dinah, and the dark and pallid
stare she had actually turned upon him, as he recounted the particulars
of his vision. It had grown very late, and he was quite alone, communing
in these odd notes, and with these strange remembrances with the dead.
Perhaps all the strong tea he had drunk with old Winnie that night
helped to make him nervous. One of his candles had burnt out by this
time, and as he raised his eyes from these curious records, the room
looked dark and indistinct, and the slim, black cabinet that stood
against the wall at the further end of the room startled him, it looked
so like a big muffled man.
I dare say he began to wish that he had postponed his scrutiny of his
papers until the morning. At all events he began to experience those
sensations, which in morbid moods of this kind, dispose us to change of
scene. What was it that made that confounded cabinet, and its shadow,
again look so queer, as he raised his eyes and the candle; just like a
great fellow in a loose coat extending his arm to strike?
That was the cabinet which once, in a confidential mood, poor Aunt Dinah
had described as the spiritual tympanum on which above all other
sympathetic pieces of furniture in the house she placed her trust. Such
a spirit-gauge was in no other room of Gilroyd. It thrummed so
oracularly; it cracked with such a significant emphasis.
“Oh! I see; nothing but the shadow, as I move the candle. Yes, only that
and nothing more. I wish it was out of that, it _is_ such an ugly black
beast of a box.”
Now William put poor Aunt Dinah’s letter carefully back in its place, as
also his diary, and locked his desk; and just then the cabinet uttered
one of those cracks which poor Aunt Dinah so much respected. In the
supernatural silence it actually made him bounce. It was the first time
in his life he had ever fancied such things could have a meaning.
“The fire’s gone out; the room is cooling, and the wood of that
ridiculous cabinet is contracting. What can it do but crack? I think I’m
growing as mad as”—he was on the point of saying as poor Aunt Dinah, but
something restrained him, and he respectfully substituted “as a March
hare.”
Here the cabinet uttered a fainter crack, which seemed to say, “I hear
you;” and William paused, expecting almost to see something sitting on
the top of it, or emerging through its doors, and he exclaimed, “Such
disgusting nonsense!” and he looked round the room, and over his
shoulder, as he placed his keys in his pocket.
His strong tea, and his solitude, and the channel into which he had
turned his thoughts; the utter silence, the recent death, and the
lateness of the hour, made the disgusted philosopher rise to take the
candle which had not a great deal of life left in it, and shutting the
door on the cabinet, whose loquacity he detested, he got to his bed-room
in a suspicious and vigilant state; and he was glad when he got into his
room. William locked his door on the inside. He lighted his candles,
poked his fire, violently wrested his thoughts from uncomfortable
themes, sat himself down by the fire and thought of Violet Darkwell. “Oh
that I dare think it was for my sake she refused Vane Trevor!” and so
on, building many airy castles, and declaiming eloquently over his work.
The old wardrobe in the room made two or three warning starts and
cracks, but its ejaculations were disrespectfully received.
“Fire away, old fool, much I mind _you_! A gentlemanlike cabinet may be
permitted, but a vulgar cupboard, impudence.”
So William got to his bed, and fell asleep: in no mood I think to submit
to a five years’ wait, if a chance of acceptance opened; and in the
morning he was astonished.
Again, my reader’s incredulity compels me to aver in the most solemn
manner that the particulars I now relate of William Maubray’s history
are strictly true. He is living to depose to all. My excellent friend
Doctor Drake can certify to others, and as I said, the rector of the
parish, to some of the oddest. Upon this evidence, not doubting, I found
my narrative.
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