WILLIAM MAUBRAY IS TORMENTED
On the little table at his bedside, where his candle stood, to his
surprise, on awakening, he saw one of the boots which he had put off in
the passage on the previous night. There it was, no possible mistake
about it; and what was more it was placed like one of his ornamental
bronze weights; one of those indeed was fashioned like a buskin upon
some papers.
What were these papers? With growing amazement he saw that they were
precisely those which he had been reading the night before, and had
carefully locked up in his desk—poor Aunt Dinah’s warning letter—and his
own notes of her threatening words!
It was little past seven now; he had left his shutters open as usual.
Had he really locked his door? No doubt upon that point. The key was
inside, and the door locked. The keys of his desk, what of them? There
they were precisely where he had left them, on the chimney-piece. This
certainly was _very_ odd. Who was there in the house to play him such a
trick? No one could have opened his door; his key stuck in the lock on
the inside; and how else could anyone have entered? Who was there to
conceive such a plot? and by what ingenuity could any merry devil play
it off? And who could know what was passing in his mind? Here was a
symbol such as he could not fail to interpret. The heel of his boot on
the warnings and entreaties of his poor dead aunt! could anything be
more expressive?
William began to feel very oddly. He got on his clothes quickly, and
went down to the drawing-room. His desk was just as he had placed it; he
unlocked it; his papers were not disturbed; nothing apparently had been
moved but the letter and his diary.
William sat down utterly puzzled, and looked at the black japanned
cabinet, with its straggling bass-reliefs of golden Chinamen, pagodas,
and dragons glimmering in the cold morning light, with more real
suspicion than he had ever eyed it before.
Old Winnie thought that day that Mr. William was unusually “dull.” The
fact is, that he was beginning to acquire, not a hatred, but a fear of
Gilroyd, and to revolve in his mind thoughts of selling the old house
and place, or letting it, and getting out of reach of its ambiguous
influences. He was constantly thinking over these things, puzzling his
brain over an inscrutable problem, still brooding over the strange words
of Aunt Dinah, “A mocking spirit; I’ll trouble; I’ll torment you. You
shan’t escape me. Though I be dead, I’ll watch you as an old gray cat
watches a mouse. If you so much as think of it, I’ll plague you!” and so
forth.
William walked over to the Rectory. He asked first for Miss Wagget—she
was out; then for the rector—so was he.
“Are you _quite_ sure the ladies are out—_both_?” he inquired,
lingering.
“Yes, Sir. Miss Darkwell drove down with the mistress to the church,
about the new cushions, I think.”
“Oh! then I’ll call another time;” and William’s countenance brightened
as he looked down on the pretty spire, and away he went on the wings of
hope.
The church door was open, and sexton and clerk were there, and William,
looking round the empty pews and up to the galleries, inquired for Miss
Wagget. He was not lucky. The sexton mistook the inquiry for Mr. Wagget,
and directed William to the vestry-room, at whose door he knocked with a
beating heart, and entering, found the rector examining the register for
the year ’48.
“Ha!—found me out? Tracked to my lair,” said he, saluting William with a
wave of his hand, and a kindly smiling. “Not a word, though, till this
is done—just a minute or two. Sit down.”
“I’ll wait in the church, Sir,” said William, and slipped out to renew
his search. But his news was disappointing. The ladies had driven away,
neither clerk nor sexton could tell whither, except that it was through
High Street; and William mounted the elevated ground about the yew tree,
and gazed along the High Street, but all in vain, and along the upward
road to Treworth, but equally without result: and the voice of the
rector, who thought he was admiring the landscape, recalled him.
Mr. Wagget was not only an honourable and a religious man—he was kindly
and gay; he enjoyed everything—his trees and his flowers, his dinner,
his friends, even his business, but, above all things, his books; and
herein was a powerful sympathy with the younger student, who was won
besides to confidence by the genial spirits of the good man.
The loneliness of Gilroyd, too—insupportable, had it not been for the
vicinity of Violet—made his company very welcome. So, falling into
discourse, it naturally befell that William came to talk of that which
lay nearest his heart at that moment—his unaccountable adventure of the
night before.
“Very curious, and, as it seems to me, quite inexplicable,” said Doctor
Wagget, very much interested. “The best authenticated thing I’ve
heard—_much_ the best—of the kind. You must tell it all over again. It’s
the best and most satisfactory case I know.”
Thus oddly encouraged, William again recounted his strange story, and
unfolded something of the horror with which his doubts were fraught.
“You _said_ nothing?” asked the parson.
“Nothing.”
“Ha! It _is_ the very _best_ case I ever heard of or read. Everyone
knows, in fact, there _have_ been such things. _I_ believe in
apparitions. I don’t put them in my sermons, though, because so many
people _don’t_, and it weakens one’s influence to run unnecessarily into
disputed subjects, and it is time enough to talk of such things when
people are visited, as you have been. You must not be frightened,
though; you’ve no need. If these things _be_, they form part of the
great scheme of nature, and any evil that may befall you in consequence
is as much a subject for legitimate prayer as sickness or any other
affliction; indeed, more obviously so, because we are furnished with no
other imaginable means than prayer alone, and a life conformable to
God’s will, to resist them. Poor little thing! She talked very
flightily. I had a great deal of conversation, and latterly she
listened, and I had hoped with some effect. Especially I urged her to
clear her mind of all idea of spiritual action, except such as is
presented for our comfort and warning in the Holy Scriptures. But here,
you _see_, she, poor little thing, is restless, and you troubled. It’s
the oddest case I ever heard of.”
“Pray don’t mention what I’ve told you, Sir, to anyone.”
“Certainly not, for the world—not a human being, not even my sister.
By-the-bye, couldn’t you come over and dine with us, and sleep? you must
sleep to-night by way of experiment.”
So William promised, well pleased, and went; but, alas! this was a day
of disappointments. Violet had gone again to make a short stay at the
Mainwarings.
“What can the Mainwarings want of her? She’s always going there; what
_is_ there about them so charming?” demanded William of himself; and an
outline of the military son of the family, Captain Mainwaring, possibly
on leave and at home, disturbed him.
Now, to the further wonderment, and even delight of Doctor Wagget, a
very curious result followed from the “experiment” of William’s one
night sojourn at the Rectory. At his host’s request, he had locked his
bed-room door, just as he had done at Gilroyd, and in the morning he
found his stick, which he had left in the _hall_, tied fast in the loops
in which in the daytime the curtains were gathered. There it hung across
the bed over his head, an image, as it seemed to him, of suspended
castigation.
The doctor was early at William’s door, and found his guest’s toilet
half completed. In real panic, Maubray pointed out the evidence of this
last freak.
“What an absurd ghost!” thought Mr. Wagget, in a pleasing terror, as he
examined and pondered over the arrangement.
“It only shows that change of place won’t do,” said the rector.
“Consider this, however,” he resumed, after an interval consumed in
search of consolation, “these manifestations, and very characteristic
they are, if we assume they come from my poor friend, are made in
furtherance of what she conceives your interests, in the spirit of that
love which she manifested for you all her life, and you may be well
assured they will never be pushed to such a point as to hurt you.”
William got on the bed, and untied his stick, which on his way home he
broke to pieces, as a thing bewitched, in a nervous paroxysm, and flung
into the little brook that runs by Revington.
At breakfast, Miss Wagget asked of her brother,—
“Did you hear the noise at the hat-stand in the hall last night? Your
hat was knocked down, and rolled all across the hall.” (The parson and
William glanced at one another here.) “It was certainly that horrid gray
cat that comes in at the lobby window.”
At mention of the gray cat the remembrance of poor Aunt Dinah’s simile
struck William.
“By Jove! my stick was at the hat-stand,” exclaimed he.
“Your stick? but this was a hat,” replied Miss Wagget, who did not see
why he should be so floored by the recollection of his stick.
“Ha! your stick? so it was—was it?” exclaimed Doctor Wagget, with a
sudden awe, equally puzzling.
And staring at her brother, and then again at William, Miss Wagget
suffered the water from the tea-urn to overflow her cup and her saucer
in succession.
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