garden-gate. There was no one there. He was evidently rather early.
The moon was shining brightly now, and the country round was as clear
as day. Abe looked past the little villa at the road which ran like a
white winding streak over the brow of the hill. A watcher behind could
have seen his square athletic figure standing out sharp and clear. Then
he gave a start as if he had been shot, and staggered up against the
little gate beside him.
He had seen something which caused even his sunburned face to become
a shade paler as he thought of the girl so near him. Just at the bend
of the road, not two hundred yards away, he saw a dark moving mass
coming round the curve, and lost in the shadow of the hill. It was but
for a moment; yet in that moment the quick perception of the practised
woodman had realized the whole situation. It was a band of horsemen
bound for the villa; and what horsemen would ride so by night save the
terror of the woodlands--the dreaded rangers of the bush?
It is true that on ordinary occasions Abe was as sluggish in his
intellect as he was heavy in his movements. In the hour of danger,
however, he was as remarkable for cool deliberation as for prompt and
decisive action. As he advanced up the garden he rapidly reckoned up
the chances against him. There were half a dozen of the assailants
at the most moderate computation, all desperate and fearless men.
The question was whether he could keep them at bay for a short time
and prevent their forcing a passage into the house. We have already
mentioned that sentinels had been placed in the main street of the
town. Abe reckoned that help would be at hand within ten minutes of the
firing of the first shot.
Were he inside the house he could confidently reckon on holding his
own for a longer period than that. Before he could rouse the sleepers
and gain admission, however, the rangers would be upon him. He must
content himself with doing his utmost. At any rate he would show Carrie
that if he could not talk to her he could at least die for her. The
thought gave him quite a glow of pleasure, as he crept under the shadow
of the house. He cocked his revolver. Experience had taught him the
advantage of the first shot.
The road along which the rangers were coming ended at a wooden gate
opening into the upper part of the assayer’s little garden. This gate
had a high acacia hedge on either side of it, and opened into a short
walk also lined by impassable thorny walls. Abe knew the place well.
One resolute man might, he thought, hold the passage for a few minutes
until the assailants broke through elsewhere and took him in the rear.
At any rate, it was his best chance. He passed the front door, but
forbore to give any alarm. Sinclair was an elderly man, and would be
of little assistance in such a desperate struggle as was before him,
and the appearance of lights in the house would warn the rangers of
the resistance awaiting them. O for his partner the Boss, for Chicago
Bill, for any one of twenty gallant men who would have come at his call
and stood by him in such a quarrel! He turned into the narrow pathway.
There was the well-remembered wooden gate; and there, perched upon the
gate, languidly swinging his legs backward and forward, and peering
down the road in front of him, was Mr. John Morgan, the very man for
whom Abe had been longing from the bottom of his heart.
There was short time for explanations. A few hurried words announced
that the Boss, returning from his little tour, had come across
the rangers riding on their mission of darkness, and overhearing
their destination, had managed, by hard running and knowledge of
the country, to arrive before them. “No time to alarm any one,”
he explained, still panting from his exertions; “must stop them
ourselves--not come for swag--come for your girl. Only over our bodies,
Bones;” and with these few broken words the strangely assorted friends
shook hands and looked lovingly into each other’s eyes, while the tramp
of the horses came down to them on the fragrant breeze of the woods.
There were six rangers in all. One who appeared to be leader rode in
front, while the others followed in a body. They flung themselves
off their horses when they were opposite the house, and after a few
muttered words from their captain, tethered the animals to a small
tree, and walked confidently toward the gate.
Boss Morgan and Abe were crouching down under the shadow of the hedge,
at the extreme end of the narrow passage. They were invisible to the
rangers, who evidently reckoned on meeting little resistance in this
isolated house. As the first man came forward and half turned to give
some order to his comrades, both the friends recognized the stern
profile and heavy mustache of Black Ferguson, the rejected suitor of
Miss Carrie Sinclair. Honest Abe made a mental vow that he at least
should never reach the door alive.
The ruffian stepped up to the gate and put his hand upon the latch. He
started as a stentorian “Stand back!” came thundering out from among
the bushes. In war, as in love, the miner was a man of few words.
“There’s no road this way,” explained another voice, with an infinite
sadness and gentleness about it which was characteristic of its owner
when the devil was rampant in his soul. The ranger recognized it. He
remembered the soft languid address which he had listened to in the
billiard-room of the Buckhurst Arms, and which had wound up by the mild
orator putting his back against the door, drawing a derringer, and
asking to see the sharper who would dare to force a passage. “It’s that
infernal fool Durton,” he said, “and his white-faced friend.”
Both were well-known names in the country round. But the rangers were
reckless and desperate men. They drew up to the gate in a body.
“Clear out of that!” said their leader, in a grim whisper; “you can’t
save the girl. Go off with whole skins while you have the chance.”
The partners laughed.
“Then curse you, come on!”
The gate was flung open and the party fired a straggling volley, and
made a fierce rush toward the gravelled walk.
The revolvers cracked merrily in the silence of the night from the
bushes at the other end. It was hard to aim with precision in the
darkness. The second man sprang convulsively into the air, and fell
upon his face with his arms extended, writhing horribly in the
moonlight. The third was grazed in the leg and stopped. The others
stopped out of sympathy. After all, the girl was not for them, and
their heart was hardly in the work. Their captain rushed madly on, like
a valiant blackguard as he was, but was met by a crashing blow from
the butt of Abe Durton’s pistol, delivered with a fierce energy which
sent him reeling back among his comrades with the blood streaming from
his shattered jaw, and his capacity for cursing cut short at the very
moment when he needed to draw upon it most.
“Don’t go yet,” said the voice in the darkness.
However, they had no intention of going yet. A few minutes must
elapse, they knew, before Harvey’s Sluice could be upon them. There was
still time to force the door if they could succeed in mastering the
defenders. What Abe had feared came to pass. Black Ferguson knew the
ground as well as he did. He ran rapidly along the hedge, and the five
crashed through it where there was some appearance of a gap. The two
friends glanced at each other. Their flank was turned. They stood up
like men who knew their fate and did not fear to meet it.
There was a wild medley of dark figures in the moonlight, and a ringing
cheer from well-known voices. The humorists of Harvey’s Sluice had
found something even more practical than the joke which they had come
to witness. The partners saw the faces of friends beside them--Shamus,
Struggles, McCoy. There was a desperate rally, a sweeping fiery rush, a
cloud of smoke, with pistol-shots and fierce oaths ringing out of it,
and when it lifted, a single dark shadow flying for dear life to the
shelter of the broken hedge was the only ranger upon his feet within
the little garden. But there was no sound of triumph among the victors;
a strange hush had come over them, and a murmur as of grief--for there,
lying across the threshold which he had fought so gallantly to defend,
lay poor Abe, the loyal and simple-hearted, breathing heavily with a
bullet through his lungs.
He was carried inside with all the rough tenderness of the mines. There
were men there, I think, who would have borne his hurt to have had the
love of that white girlish figure, which bent over the blood-stained
bed and whispered so softly and so tenderly in his ear. Her voice
seemed to rouse him. He opened his dreamy blue eyes and looked about
him. They rested on her face.
“Played out,” he murmured; “pardon, Carrie, morib----” and with a faint
smile he sank back upon the pillow.
However, Abe failed for once to be as good as his word. His hardy
constitution asserted itself, and he shook off what might in a weaker
man have proved a deadly wound. Whether it was the balmy air of the
woodlands which came sweeping over a thousand miles of forest into the
sick man’s room, or whether it was the little nurse who tended him
so gently, certain it is that within two months we heard that he had
realized his shares in the Conemara, and gone from Harvey’s Sluice and
the little shanty upon the hill forever.
I had the advantage, a short time afterward, of seeing an extract
from the letter of a young lady named Amelia, to whom we have made a
casual allusion in the course of our narrative. We have already broken
the privacy of one feminine epistle, so we shall have fewer scruples
in glancing at another. “I was bridesmaid,” she remarks, “and Carrie
looked charming” (underlined) “in the vail and orange blossoms. Such
a man, he is, twice as big as your Jack, and he was so funny, and
blushed, and dropped the prayer-book. And when they asked the question
you could have heard him roar ‘I do!’ at the other end of George
Street. His best man was a darling” (twice underlined). “So quiet and
handsome and nice. Too gentle to take care of himself among those rough
men, I am sure.” I think it quite possible that in the fulness of time
Miss Amelia managed to take upon herself the care of our old friend Mr.
Jack Morgan, commonly known as the Boss.
A tree is still pointed out at the bend as Ferguson’s gum-tree. There
is no need to enter into unsavory details. Justice is short and sharp
in primitive colonies, and the dwellers in Harvey’s Sluice were a
serious and practical race.
It is still the custom for a select party to meet on a Saturday evening
in the snuggery of the Colonial Bar. On such occasions, if there be a
stranger or guest to be entertained, the same solemn ceremony is always
observed. Glasses are charged in silence; there is a tapping of the
same upon the table, and then, with a deprecating cough, Jim Struggles
comes forward and tells the tale of the April joke, and of what came of
it. There is generally conceded to be something very artistic in the
way in which he breaks off suddenly at the close of his narrative, by
waving his bumper in the air with “An’ here’s to Mr. and Mrs. Bones.
God bless ’em!” a sentiment in which the stranger, if he be a prudent
man, will most cordially acquiesce.
SELECTING A GHOST.
THE GHOSTS OF GORESTHORPE GRANGE.
I am sure that Nature never intended me to be a self-made man. There
are times when I can hardly bring myself to realize that twenty years
of my life were spent behind the counter of a grocer’s shop in the East
End of London, and that it was through such an avenue that I reached
a wealthy independence and the possession of Goresthorpe Grange. My
habits are Conservative, and my tastes refined and aristocratic. I have
a soul which spurns the vulgar herd. Our family, the D’Odds, date back
to a prehistoric era, as is to be inferred from the fact that their
advent into British history is not commented on by any trustworthy
historian. Some instinct tells me that the blood of a Crusader runs in
my veins. Even now, after the lapse of so many years, such exclamations
as “By’r Lady!” rise naturally to my lips, and I feel that, should
circumstances require it, I am capable of rising in my stirrups and
dealing an infidel a blow--say with a mace--which would considerably
astonish him.
Goresthorpe Grange is a feudal mansion--or so it was termed in the
advertisement which originally brought it under my notice. Its right
to this adjective had a most remarkable effect upon its price, and the
advantages gained may possibly be more sentimental than real. Still,
it is soothing to me to know that I have slits in my staircase through
which I can discharge arrows; and there is a sense of power in the
fact of possessing a complicated apparatus by means of which I am
enabled to pour molten lead upon the head of the casual visitor. These
things chime in with my peculiar humor, and I do not grudge to pay
for them. I am proud of my battlements and of the circular uncovered
sewer which girds me round. I am proud of my portcullis and donjon
and keep. There is but one thing wanting to round off the mediævalism
of my abode, and to render it symmetrically and completely antique.
Goresthorpe Grange is not provided with a ghost.
Any man with old-fashioned tastes and ideas as to how such
establishments should be conducted, would have been disappointed at
the omission. In my case it was particularly unfortunate. From my
childhood I had been an earnest student of the supernatural, and a
firm believer in it. I have revelled in ghostly literature until there
is hardly a tale bearing upon the subject which I have not perused. I
learned the German language for the sole purpose of mastering a book
upon demonology. When an infant I have secreted myself in dark rooms
in the hope of seeing some of those bogies with which my nurse used to
threaten me; and the same feeling is as strong in me now as then. It
was a proud moment when I felt that a ghost was one of the luxuries
which my money might command.
It is true that there was no mention of an apparition in the
advertisement. On reviewing the mildewed walls, however, and the
shadowy corridors, I had taken it for granted that there was such a
thing on the premises. As the presence of a kennel presupposes that
of a dog, so I imagined that it was impossible that such desirable
quarters should be untenanted by one or more restless shades. Good
heavens, what can the noble family from whom I purchased it have
been doing during these hundreds of years! Was there no member of it
spirited enough to make away with his sweetheart, or take some other
steps calculated to establish a hereditary spectre? Even now I can
hardly write with patience upon the subject.
For a long time I hoped against hope. Never did rat squeak behind the
wainscot, or rain drip upon the attic floor, without a wild thrill
shooting through me as I thought that at last I had come upon traces
of some unquiet soul. I felt no touch of fear upon these occasions.
If it occurred in the night-time, I would send Mrs. D’Odd--who is a
strong-minded woman--to investigate the matter, while I covered up my
head with the bedclothes and indulged in an ecstasy of expectation.
Alas, the result was always the same! The suspicious sound would be
traced to some cause so absurdly natural and commonplace that the most
fervid imagination could not clothe it with any of the glamour of
romance.
I might have reconciled myself to this state of things, had it not
been for Jorrocks of Havistock Farm. Jorrocks is a coarse, burly,
matter-of-fact fellow, whom I only happened to know through the
accidental circumstance of his fields adjoining my demesne. Yet this
man, though utterly devoid of all appreciation of archæological
unities, is in possession of a well-authenticated and undeniable
spectre. Its existence only dates back, I believe, to the reign of the
Second George, when a young lady cut her throat upon hearing of the
death of her lover at the battle of Dettingen. Still, even that gives
the house an air of respectability, especially when coupled with blood
stains upon the floor. Jorrocks is densely unconscious of his good
fortune; and his language when he reverts to the apparition is painful
to listen to. He little dreams how I covet everyone of those moans and
nocturnal wails which he describes with unnecessary objurgation. Things
are indeed coming to a pretty pass when democratic spectres are allowed
to desert the landed proprietors and annul every social distinction by
taking refuge in the houses of the great unrecognized.
I have a large amount of perseverance. Nothing else could have raised
me into my rightful sphere, considering the uncongenial atmosphere in
which I spent the earlier part of my life. I felt now that a ghost must
be secured, but how to set about securing one was more than either Mrs.
D’Odd or myself was able to determine. My reading taught me that such
phenomena are usually the outcome of crime. What crime was to be done,
then, and who was to do it? A wild idea entered my mind that Watkins,
the house-steward, might be prevailed upon--for a consideration--to
immolate himself or someone else in the interests of the establishment.
I put the matter to him in a half-jesting manner; but it did not seem
to strike him in a favorable light. The other servants sympathized with
him in his opinion--at least, I cannot account in any other way for
their having left the house in a body the same afternoon.
“My dear,” Mrs. D’Odd remarked to me one day after dinner, as I sat
moodily sipping a cup of sack--I love the good old names--“my dear,
that odious ghost of Jorrocks’ has been gibbering again.”
“Let it gibber!” I answered, recklessly.
Mrs. D’Odd struck a few chords on her virginal and looked thoughtfully
into the fire.
“I’ll tell you what it is, Argentine,” she said at last, using the pet
name which we usually substituted for Silas, “we must have a ghost
sent down from London.”
“How can you be so idiotic, Matilda?” I remarked, severely. “Who could
get us such a thing?”
“My cousin, Jack Brocket, could,” she answered, confidently.
Now, this cousin of Matilda’s was rather a sore subject between us.
He was a rakish, clever young fellow, who had tried his hand at many
things, but wanted perseverance to succeed at any. He was, at that
time, in chambers in London, professing to be a general agent, and
really living, to a great extent, upon his wits. Matilda managed
so that most of our business should pass through his hands, which
certainly saved me a great deal of trouble; but I found that Jack’s
commission was generally considerably larger than all the other items
of the bill put together. It was this fact which made me feel inclined
to rebel against any further negotiations with the young gentleman.
“O yes, he could,” insisted Mrs. D., seeing the look of disapprobation
upon my face. “You remember how well he managed that business about the
crest?”
“It was only a resuscitation of the old family coat-of-arms, my dear,”
I protested.
Matilda smiled in an irritating manner. “There was a resuscitation of
the family portraits, too, dear,” she remarked. “You must allow that
Jack selected them very judiciously.”
I thought of the long line of faces which adorned the walls of my
banqueting-hall, from the burly Norman robber, through every gradation
of casque, plume, and ruff, to the sombre Chesterfieldian individual
who appears to have staggered against a pillar in his agony at the
return of a maiden MS. which he grips convulsively in his right hand.
I was fain to confess that in that instance he had done his work
well, and that it was only fair to give him an order--with the usual
commission--for a family spectre, should such a thing be attainable.
It is one of my maxims to act promptly when once my mind is made up.
Noon of the next day found me ascending the spiral stone staircase
which leads to Mr. Brocket’s chambers, and admiring the succession
of arrows and fingers upon the whitewashed wall, all indicating the
direction of that gentleman’s sanctum. As it happened, artificial
aids of the sort were entirely unnecessary, as an animated flap-dance
overhead could proceed from no other quarter, though it was replaced by
a deathly silence as I groped my way up the stair. The door was opened
by a youth evidently astounded at the appearance of a client, and I was
ushered into the presence of my young friend, who was writing furiously
in a large ledger--upside down, as I afterward discovered.
After the first greetings, I plunged into business at once.
“Look here, Jack,” I said, “I want you to get me a spirit, if you can.”
“Spirits you mean!” shouted my wife’s cousin, plunging his hand into
the waste-paper basket and producing a bottle with the celerity of a
conjuring trick. “Let’s have a drink!”
I held up my hand as a mute appeal against such a proceeding so
early in the day; but on lowering it again I found that I had almost
involuntarily closed my fingers round the tumbler which my adviser
had pressed upon me. I drank the contents hastily off, lest anyone
should come in upon us and set me down as a toper. After all there was
something very amusing about the young fellow’s eccentricities.
“Not spirits,” I explained, smilingly; “an apparition--a ghost. If such
a thing is to be had, I should be very willing to negotiate.”
“A ghost for Goresthorpe Grange?” inquired Mr. Brocket, with as much
coolness as if I had asked for a drawing-room suite.
“Quite so,” I answered.
“Easiest thing in the world,” said my companion, filling up my
glass again in spite of my remonstrance. “Let us see!” Here he took
down a large red note-book, with all the letters of the alphabet in
a fringe down the edge. “A ghost you said, didn’t you? That’s G.
G--gems--gimlets--gas-pipes--gauntlets--guns--galleys. Ah, here we
are. Ghosts. Volume nine, section six, page forty-one. Excuse me!” And
Jack ran up a ladder and began rummaging among a pile of ledgers on a
high shelf. I felt half inclined to empty my glass into the spittoon
when his back was turned; but on second thoughts I disposed of it in a
legitimate way.
“Here it is!” cried my London agent, jumping off the ladder with a
crash, and depositing an enormous volume of manuscript upon the table.
“I have all these things tabulated, so that I may lay my hands upon
them in a moment. It’s all right--it’s quite weak” (here he filled our
glasses again). “What were we looking up, again?”
“Ghosts,” I suggested.
“Of course; page 41. Here we are. ‘J. H. Fowler & Son, Dunkel Street,
suppliers of mediums to the nobility and gentry; charms sold--love
philtres--mummies--horoscopes cast.’ Nothing in your line there, I
suppose.
I shook my head despondently.
“’Frederick Tabb,’” continued my wife’s cousin, “’sole channel of
communication between the living and the dead. Proprietor of the
spirits of Byron, Kirke White, Grimaldi, Tom Cribb, and Inigo Jones.’
That’s about the figure!”
“Nothing romantic enough there,” I objected. “Good heavens! Fancy a
ghost with a black eye and a handkerchief tied round its waist, or
turning summersaults, and saying, ‘How are you to-morrow?’” The very
idea made me so warm that I emptied my glass and filled it again.
“Here is another,” said my companion, “’Christopher McCarthy; bi-weekly
séances--attended by all the eminent spirits of ancient and modern
times. Nativities--charms--abracadabras, messages from the dead.’ He
might be able to help us. However, I shall have a hunt round myself
to-morrow, and see some of these fellows. I know their haunts, and it’s
odd if I can’t pick up something cheap. So there’s an end of business,”
he concluded, hurling the ledger into the corner, “and now we’ll have
something to drink.”