GREENFIELD MANOR was a very old house about ten miles out of Oxford. It
lay in a secluded spot, but the road to London ran past the high walls
of its park. A heavy growth of trees surrounded the house itself, which
was in a state of neglect and disrepair.
A gloomy and forbidding place enough. The very atmosphere which
invested this mass of decaying stonework seemed to invite ghosts to
walk. Its chimneys rocked continually; its windows rattled. When the
vane over the decrepit stables swung in the wind of the summer night,
it was as if some lost soul was seeking to escape out of Hades.
As a fact, the house was certainly inhabited by a lost soul. Simon
Heriot, its master, lay in the belief that he had done his nephew to
death by a subtle, mean and cruel device. And no worthier purpose
than greed had been in his heart. It had been his life-long passion
to hold the fair manor and the broad lands in the west country, which
generations of his name had held before him. These, however, had
descended to the son of his elder brother. And the knowledge that there
was only one life intervening between him and his great ambition, in
the end, became too much for him.
The means to do ill deeds oft makes ill deeds done. It was by chance
that the design was unfolded to Simon Heriot of swearing away his
nephew’s life. But when occasion came to him he did not resist the
call. The pent-up forces of his covetous envy rose up and slew him.
If ever a man might be said to have sold himself to the devil, that
man was Simon Heriot. He had a cunning and subtle mind; moreover, he
was very well acquainted with the world in which he lived. He was
clever enough to make the entail of his nephew’s estates the price of
his testimony. And, indeed, it was no uncommon thing in that day to
reward those who brought and proved charges of high treason with the
property of the people they had hounded to the scaffold. The times
were very perilous for all men. The life of no man was safe. Black
hatred and superstitious fear of the Pope, and his emissaries were rife
throughout the land. In such circumstances, it was easy for a cunning
and unscrupulous man to remove a rival from his path by some form of
legal process. The character of the evidence was seldom tested. It was
enough if it served the purpose it had in view. Gervase Heriot was not
the first by many who had been done to death under the ready sanctions
of the law.
Howbeit, Simon Heriot, with all his knowledge of men and of the world,
was without knowledge of the power of God. As soon as the news was
brought to him that his nephew was condemned to the block, a singular
change came over his life. The success of his design gave him not
a crumb of satisfaction; indeed he took a morbid, an overmastering
distaste for the society of his fellows. He shut himself up in his
gloomy manor house with his old and stupid servants. He shunned the
light of day. His one desire was to avert his face from all men and
from the sight of Heaven.
A brooding lethargy fixed itself upon his soul. A kind of slow horror
stole into his brain. He could not settle his mind to anything. Asleep
or awake, he knew no peace. He would have undone his deed could he have
found the courage that such an act demanded.
This night was as many others. After a solitary meal in a large, dim,
comfortless room, Simon Heriot sat long at the table, staring straight
before him at the huge open fireplace, whose emptiness was like a
yawning chasm. At his elbow had been set a large flagon of wine, of
which he drank continually.
There was not a sound in the old house, save that made by an occasional
mouse behind the paneling. The servants had gone to bed; it was near
eleven o’clock of a perfectly still and moonless summer’s evening; and
Simon Heriot was alone with his thoughts.
Wine, it is true, did a little to soften their sting. But when the hand
of God has been laid upon a man, it is not amenable to human resources.
Behind that dull lethargy of spirit was a never-ceasing pressure.
Strange phantoms had begun to lurk on the edge of the outer darkness,
away beyond the flickering half-light of the candles on the table.
At last, in sheer fatigue, the unhappy man began to doze. Worn out
in mind and body, he fell presently into a troubled sleep. But his
unquietness of spirit would not let him rest. He awoke with a start.
There was a sense of a continual presence, unseen but all-pervading, in
the room.
He strained his eyes beyond the circle of light made by the candles set
on the table at which he sat. But away in the ghostly outer darkness
of the large room, he could discern no visible shape. He strove to fix
some faint and remote sound that thrilled in his ears. But, after all,
it was only the little sound of the summer wind stirring in the trees.
Again the jaded brain tried to pierce together the slender core of will
that might disperse these phantoms and perhaps enable it to sleep. But
it was not to be. Each night as he sat there, besieged by this horror
that had entered his soul, the will grew more inert. There was a faint
voice within that had begun to whisper to him that he would never sleep
again.
Yes, it was true. He would never sleep again. He was tormented by
unseen phantoms. Never again would he know peace in this life and
perhaps never in the life to come.
Once again he strained his ears to listen. It was only the little voice
of the summer wind in the wide chimney-place. All was silence save
for that. Yet there was an abiding sense of an unseen, all-pervading
presence in the room. And then, quite suddenly, without warning of any
kind, a thing happened that made the very soul of Simon Heriot recoil.
He was sitting at the table, his head resting on his hand. His back
was to the wide chimney-place, but as he sat his body was half turned
towards it. On his right hand was a long, low casement. It was
curtainless, but was covered on the outside by a wooden shutter. On
his left hand, at the opposite end of the room, was another casement
precisely similar except that it was smaller.
All at once, without warning and without any apparent cause, the
shutters of the right-hand casement were flung to the ground. Simon
Heriot turned his head with a startled cry. His wild eyes stared out
into the night. At first, he could see nothing but the cavernous
darkness. Yet as he was still gazing, a light was flashed suddenly
across the window, and then he saw that a white, ghostly face was
pressed against the pane and was looking into the room.
The apparition was so real, so vivid, that Simon Heriot rose half
swooning with terror and walked across to the window.
“Who are you?” he gasped.
He had no need to ask. It was the face of the young man, his nephew,
whom, as he believed, he had done to death.
“Who are you?” shrieked the wretched man.
He stumbled forward to the window. But when he came there all was dark
again. The light was gone, and the face of his nephew had vanished.
Like a lost soul, trembling upon the verge of unreason, he stood at the
window gazing far out into the void. But there was only the darkness of
the night and the little voice of the summer wind. Yet if he was not
in a dream, or if he was not yet bereft of his wits, the shutters were
indubitably prone on the ground.
After a moment, the unhappy man turned away from the window, unable
longer to endure that cavern of darkness which confronted him. Yet,
hardly had he done so, when the shutters which covered the window at
the other end of the long room were flung to the ground with a violent
crash.
Simon Heriot screamed with terror. There again was the flash of the
light. There again was the face of his nephew pressed against the
window. Like one possessed, the unhappy man stumbled across the room to
this other window. But by the time he had reached it, the light and the
face were gone.
There was nothing but the night. All was silence. And there was nought
to be seen out in the darkness. He uttered another wild scream of
terror.
Shuddering in every vein, he withdrew his eyes from the window. As he
sought the table for support, he almost fell. And then as he reached
it, his heart seemed to stop beating. For a voice deep and terrible
filled the room, echoing and re-echoing in it, making its spacious
gloom resound.
“Simon Heriot!”
He heard his name.
“Simon Heriot!”
The voice of the unseen re-echoed high in the wide chimney-place. The
heart of the unhappy wretch was already dead within him.
“Simon Heriot has murdered sleep!”
In a frenzy that seemed to tear his soul in pieces, he pressed his
hands to his ears that they might be closed against the sound. But it
was in vain. No human agency had the power to shut out those terrible
words, or the awful voice that gave them utterance.
“Simon Heriot, if ever you would sleep again, attend that which is said
to you.”
With the shred of will that remained to him, the guilty man strung all
his faculties in order to heed the words that were spoken.
“Do you attend, Simon Heriot.” The voice was low, deep and terrible.
“Do you take a candle and sit at yonder table, upon which materials for
writing are set, and do you write as you are now directed.”
It was true that quill, inkhorn and foolscap were laid out on a small
table at the other end of the room. At the beck of that which he was
powerless to disobey, the unhappy man tottered very slowly towards the
table. After a moment of indecision, he sat down and took up the quill.
He was as one in a dream, except that his head seemed to be bursting.
“Simon Heriot, write as you are directed.”
The terrible voice had now grown so loud and so compelling, that
it seemed to tear his brain asunder. When he took up the pen, his
trembling fingers could hardly hold it.
Very slowly and very clearly, the voice then uttered the following:
“I, Simon Heriot, in the presence of Almighty God and with the shadow
of death upon me, hereby solemnly declare, that I have caused to be
borne to our Sovereign Lady the Queen, false testimony in the matter
of my nephew, Gervase Heriot. I further declare that I suborned
three men, Robert Grisewood, John Nixon and Gregory Bannister by
name, to bear false testimony touching the complicity of the said
Gervase Heriot in the Round House Plot, by reason of which alleged
complicity the said Gervase Heriot has been condemned to death. In
the presence of Almighty God, and as I shortly hope for eternal
rest, I do hereby most solemnly avow what I have written to be the
truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Given under my hand
this second day of July, 1599--Simon Heriot.”
Under the goad of terror, the guilty man gathered every fragment of his
crumbling will in order that he might set pen to paper. No less slowly
than the grim voice pronounced the words, Simon Heriot wrote them down
with a kind of automatic precision. It was as if his highly wrought
state had become susceptible to a process of hypnotism.
When at last the task was finished and he had signed the document which
made full confession of his crime, he was commanded to open a window
and to fling out the paper into the night.
He would have had neither the strength nor the courage to do this of
his own volition. But the dread voice compelled him. He rose from the
writing-table, but now such was his condition that he could hardly
stand. A palsy was on his limbs; he was as one who has lost all control
of his mind.
“Take heed, Simon Heriot.”
He knew not whence the voice came, yet a power beyond himself compelled
implicit obedience. Scarcely able to walk, he tottered toward the
casement at the other end of the wide room.
He was destined never to reach it. With a dismal cry, he stopped
midway. The paper fluttered out of his hand. Suddenly, he fell face
down on the stone floor, a slight foam on his lips.