Chapter V (4)

“Be seated, señor,” said the old man, with dignity. “I do not forget my obligations.”

He went round, bent and stiffly, taking a shred from each dish, a sippet dipped in the gravy.

“Bella premunt hostilia,” he expostulated. “Intestine wars invade our breast. What a task for our old digestion!”

His roguery pleased and reassured his company. They attacked the viands with a will. He never ceased to encourage them, going about the board with garrulous cheer.

“And ye come over the hills?” said he. “A hungry journey and a dangerous. It was the mountains, and the spirits of the mountains, that were alone invincible when the Moorish dogs overran all Spain—all but the mountains. The heathen crests were lowered there—rolled back in a bloody foam. Dear God! I’m old.”

“Not so ancient, father,” cried de Regnac, “but that good liquor will revitalize you. There remains the wine.”

“Ah me!” sighed the Prior; “must I?”

They swore him to the toast by every bond of honour. Their throats were ragged with drought.

“Well, well,” he said. “I’ll first dismiss these witnesses to their father’s shame. I’ll be no Noah to my children.”

He drove the servitors, with feeble playfulness, into the passage; pursued them a pace or two. In a moment he was back alone, his cowl pulled about his face.

“Give me the draught,” he said hoarsely, “nor look ye upon the old man’s abasement. I am soon to answer for my frailties.”

Cheering and bantering, they mixed him a cup from every flagon, and put it into his hand, which gripped it through the cloth. He turned his back on them, and took the liquor down by slow degrees, chuckling and gasping and protesting. Then, still coughing, he handed the cup, backwards, to the nearest.

“Bumpers, all!” roared de Regnac. “We toast old Noah for our king of hosts!”

Even as he drank, as they all drank, thirsty and uproarious, the great door of the refectory clanged to, and the Prior spun with a scream to the floor. De Regnac’s cup fell from his hand; a dead silence succeeded.

Suddenly the Colonel was on his feet, ghastly and terrible.

“Something foul!” he whispered; “something foul!”

Staggering, he swerved out, and drove with all his weight against the door. It had been locked and bolted upon them. Not a massive panel creaked. They were entombed!

Hush!

Solemn, low, mystic, arose without the chaunt of voices in unison—the prayers for one sick unto death: “Receive, O Lord, the sacrifice we offer for thy servant, who is near the end of her life.”

With a scream, de Regnac threw himself towards the body on the floor, and lifted it with huge strength in his arms. As he did so, the cowl fell away, and revealed the face of Pepino. The shadow of death was already fallen on it; but she spoke, and with a smile.

“When he pursued them, I was waiting and took his place. Curse him not. He observed the letter. ’Twas I poisoned the wine. Take back thy wages, dog! O, I go to find my Luc—if thou darest follow me!”

He roared out—a spasm took his throat. He tried to crush her in his arms. They relaxed in the effort. Howling, he dropped her, and fell beside in a heap.

Then, from out a mortal paralysis, arose sobbing and wailing at the table. Some seized salt, some the wet mustard from the fish, and swallowed it by handfuls. Others ran hither and thither aimlessly, screeching, blaspheming, beating the walls, the obdurate door. There was a regimental doctor among them; he was the first dead. None found help or hope in that ghastly trap. The venom had been swift, gripping, ineradicable. Within half an hour it was all a silent company, and the Miserere long had ceased.

Somewhere in a book I read of a tale like this, which was headed “Patriotic Fanaticism.” Those were certainly the deadly days of retaliation; but in this case Love, as always, was the principal fanatic.

THE GHOST-LEECH

Kelvin, not I, is responsible for this story, which he told me sitting smoking by his study window.

It was a squalid night, I remember, wet and fretful—the sort of night which seems to sojourners in the deep country (as we then were) to bring rumours of plashy pavements, and the roar of rain-sodden traffic, and the wailing and blaspheming of women lost and crying out of a great darkness. No knowledge of our rural isolation could allay this haunting impression in my mind that night. I felt ill at ease, and, for some reason, out of suits with life. It mattered nothing that a belt of wild woodland separated us from the country station five miles away. That, after all, by the noises in it, might have been a very causeway, by which innumerable spectres were hurrying home from their business in the distant cities. The dark clouds, as long as we could see them labouring from the south, appeared freighted with the very burden of congregated dreariness. They glided up, like vast electric tramcars, and seemed to pause overhead, as if to discharge into the sanctuary of our quiet pastures their loads of aggressive vulgarity. My nerves were all jangled into disorder, I fear, and inclining me to imaginative hyperbole.

Kelvin, for his part, was very quiet. He was a conundrum, that man. Once the keenest of sportsmen, he was now for years become an almost sentimental humanitarian—and illogical, of necessity. He would not consent to kill under any circumstances—wilfully, that is to say; but he enjoyed his mutton with the best of us. However, I am not quarrelling with his point of view. He, for one—by his own admission, anyhow—owed a life to “the blind Fury with th’ abhorred shears,” and he would not, from the date of his debt, cross her prerogatives. The same occasion, it appeared, had opened in him an unstanchable vein of superstition, which was wont to gush—bloodily, I might say—in depressing seasons of the mind. It provoked me, on the evening of the present anecdote, to a sort of peevish protest.

“Why the devil,” I said, “are spectral manifestations—at least, according to you fellows—everlastingly morbid and ugly? Are there no gentle disembodied things, who, of their love and pity, would be rather more anxious than the wicked, one would think, to communicate with their survivors?”

“Of course,” said Kelvin; “but their brief sweet little reassurances pass unnoticed. Their forms are insignificant, their voices inarticulate; they can only appeal by symbol, desperately clinging to the earth the while. On the other hand, the world tethers its worldlings by the foot, so that they cannot take flight when they will. There remains, so to speak, too much earth in their composition, and it keeps ’em subject to the laws of gravitation.”

I laughed; then shrugged impatiently.

“What a rasping night it is! The devil take that moth!”

The window was shut, and the persistent whirring and tapping of a big white insect on the glass outside jarred irritably on my nerves.

“Let it in, for goodness’ sake,” I said, “if it _will_ insist on making a holocaust of itself!”

Kelvin had looked up when I first spoke. Now he rose, with shining eyes, and a curious little sigh of the sort that one vents on the receipt of wonderful news coming out of suspense.

“Yes, I’ll open the window,” he said low; and with the word threw up the casement. The moth whizzed in, whizzed round, and settled on his hand. He lifted it, with an odd set smile, into the intimate range of his vision, and scrutinized it intently. Suddenly and quickly, then, as if satisfied about something, he held it away from him.

“_Ite missa est!_” he murmured, quoting some words of the Mass (he was a Catholic); and the moth fluttered and rose. Now, you may believe it or not; but there was a fire burning on the hearth, and straight for that fire went the moth, and seemed to go up with the smoke into the chimney. I was so astonished that I gasped; but Kelvin appeared serenely unconcerned as he faced round on me.

“Well,” I exploded, “if a man mayn’t kill, he may persuade to suicide, it seems.”

He answered good-humouredly, “All right; but it wasn’t suicide.”

Then he resumed his seat by me, and relighted his pipe. I sat stolidly, with an indefinable feeling of grievance, and said nothing. But the silence soon grew unbearable.

“Kelvin,” I said, suddenly and viciously; “what the deuce do you mean?”

“You wouldn’t believe,” he answered, at once and cheerily, “even if I told you.”

“Told me what?”

“Well, this. There was the soul of little Patsy that went up in the smoke.”

“The village child you are so attached to?”

“Yes; and who has lain dying these weeks past.”

“Why should it come to you?”

“It was a compact between us—if she were summoned, in a moment, without time for a good-bye. We were close friends.”

“Kelvin—excuse me—you are getting to be impossible.”

“All right. Look at your watch. Time was made for unbelievers. There’s no convincing a sceptic but by foot-rule. Look at your watch.”

“I did, I confess—covertly—in the instant of distraction caused by Kelvin’s little son, who came to bid his father good night. He was a quiet, winning little fellow, glowing with health and beauty.

“Good night, Bobo,” said Kelvin, kissing the child fondly. “Ask God to make little Patsy’s bed comfy, before you get into your own.”

I kissed the boy also; but awkwardly, for some reason, under his frank courteousness. After he was gone, I sank back in my chair and said, grudging the concession—

“Very well. It’s half-past eight.”

Kelvin nodded, and said nothing more for a long time. Then, all of a sudden, he broke out—

“I usen’t to believe in such things myself, once upon a time; but Bobo converted me. Would you like to hear the story?”

“O, yes!” I said, tolerantly superior. “Fire away!”

He laughed, filling his pipe—the laugh of a man too surely self-convinced to regard criticism of his faith.

“Patsy,” he said, “had no Ghost-Leech to touch her well. Poor little Patsy! But she’s better among the flowers.”

“Of Paradise, I suppose you mean? Well, if she is, she is,” I said, as if I were deprecating the inevitably undesirable. “But what is a Ghost-Leech?”

“A Ghost-Leech,” he said—“the sort, anyhow, that I’ve knowledge of—is one who has served seven years goal-keeper in the hurling-matches of the dead.”

I stared at him. Was he really going, or gone, off his head? He laughed again, waving his hand to reassure me.

“You may accept my proof or not. Anyhow, Bobo’s recovery was proof enough for me. A sense of humour, I admit, is outside our conception of the disembodied. We lay down laughter with life, don’t we? You’d count it heresy to believe otherwise. Yet have you ever considered how man’s one great distinctive faculty must be admitted into all evidence of his deeds upon earth, as minuted by the recording angel? It must be admitted, of course, and appreciatively by the final assessor. How could he judge laughter who had never laughed? The cachinnatory nerve is touched off from across the Styx—wireless telegraphy; and man will laugh still, though he be damned.”

“Kelvin! my good soul!”

“The dead, I tell you, do not put off their sense of humour with their flesh. They laugh beyond the grave. They are full of a sense of fun, and not necessarily the most transcendent.”

“No, indeed, by all the testimony of spiritualism.”

“Well; now listen. I was staying once in a village on the west coast of Ireland. The people of my hamlet were at deadly traditional feud with the people of a neighbouring hamlet. Traditional, I say, because the vendetta (it almost amounted to one) derived from the old days of rivalry between them in the ancient game of hurling, which was a sort of primitive violent “rugger” played with a wooden ball. The game itself was long fallen into disuse in the district, and had been supplanted, even in times out of memory, by sports of a gentler, more modern cast. But it, and the feud it had occasioned, were still continued unabated beyond the grave. How do I know this? Why, on the evidence of my Ghost-Leech.

“He was a strange, moody, solitary man, pitied, though secretly dreaded, by his neighbours. They might have credited him with possession—particularly with a bad local form of possession; to suspect it was enough in itself to keep their mouths shut from questioning him, or their ears from inviting confession of his sufferings. For, so their surmise were correct, and he in the grip of the hurlers, a word wrung from him out of season would have brought the whole village under the curse of its dead.”

I broke in here. “Kelvin, for the Lord’s sake! you are too cimmerian. Titillate your glooms with a touch of that spiritual laughter.”

Agreeably to my banter, he smiled.

“There’s fun in it,” he said; “only it’s rather ghastly fun. What do you say to the rival teams meeting in one or other of the village graveyards, and whacking a skull about with long shank-bones?”

“I should say, It doesn’t surprise me in the least. Anything turning upon a more esoteric psychology would. What pitiful imaginations you Christmas-number seers are possessed of!”

“I dare say. But I’m not imagining. It’s you practical souls that imagine—that common sense, for instance, is reason; that the top-hat is the divinely-inspired shibboleth of the chosen; and so on. But you don’t disappoint me. Shall I go on?”

“O, yes! go on.”

“The hurlers meet under the full moon, they say, in one or other of the rival graveyards; _but they must have a living bachelor out of each parish to keep goal for them_.”

“I see! ‘They say’? I see!”

“The doom of the poor wretch thus chosen is, as you may suppose, an appalling one. He must go, or suffer terrors damning out of reason. There is no power on earth can save him. One night he is sitting, perhaps, in his cabin at any peaceful work. The moor, mystic under the moonlight, stretches from miles away up to his walls, surrounding and isolating them. His little home is an ark, anchored amid a waste and silent sea of flowers. Suddenly the latch clinks up, advances, falls. The night air breathing in passes a presence standing in the opening, and quivers and dies. Stealthily the door gapes, ever so little, ever so softly, and a face, like the gliding rim of the moon, creeps round its edge. It is the face, he recognizes appalled, of one long dead. The eyeplaces are black hollows; but there is a movement in them like the glint of water in a deep well. A hand lifts and beckons. The goal-keeper is chosen, and must go. For seven years, it is said, he must serve the hurling-matches of the dead.”

“State it for a fact. Don’t hedge on report.”

“I don’t. This man served his time. If he hadn’t, Bobo wouldn’t be here.”

“O? Poor Bobo!”

“This man, I say, survived the ghastly ordeal—one case out of a dozen that succumb. Then he got his fee.”

“O, a fee! What was that? A Rachel of the bogs?”

“The power to cure by touch any human sickness, even the most humanly baffling.”

“Really a royal reward. It’s easy to see a fortune in it.”

“He would have been welcome to mine; but he would take nothing. He made my little boy whole again.”

“Kelvin! I dare say I’m a brute. What had been the matter with him?”

“Ah, what! He simply moaned and wasted—moaned eternally. Atrophy; meningitis; cachexy—they gave it a dozen names, but not a single cure. He was dying under slow torture—a heavy sight for a father.

“One day an old Shaman of the moors called upon me. He was ancient, ancient—as dry as his staff, and so bent that, a little more, and he had tripped over his long beard in walking. I can’t reproduce his brogue; but this is the substance of what it conveyed to me:—

“Had I ever heard speak of Baruch of the lone shebeen—him that had once kept an illicit still, but that the ghosts had got hold of for his sins? No? Well, he, the Shaman, was come too near the end of his own living tether to fear ghoulish reprisals if he told me. And he told me.

“Baruch, he said, was suspected in the village of keeping the dead’s hurling-goal—had long been suspected—it was an old tale by now. But, och, wirrastrue! if, as he calculated, Baruch was nearing the close of his seven years’ service, Baruch was the man for me, and could do for my child what no other living man, barring a ghosts’ goal-keeper, could do likewise.

“I humoured him when he was present; laughed at him when he was gone; but—I went to see Baruch. It’s all right: you aren’t a father.”

“You went to see Baruch. Go on.”

“He lived remote in such a little cabin as I have described. Lord! what a thing it was!—a living trophy of damnation—a statue inhabiting the human vestment! His face was young enough; but sorrow stricken into stone—unearthly suffering carved out of a block. It is astonishing what expression can be conveyed without a line. There was not a wrinkle in Baruch’s face.

“All scepticism withered in me at the sight—all the desperate effrontery with which I had intended to challenge his gift. I asked him simply if he would cure my child.

“He answered, in a voice as hoarse and feeble as an old man’s, but with a queer little promise of joy in it, like a sound of unborn rain, ‘Asthore! for this I’ve lived me lone among the peats, and bid me time, and suffered what I know. In a good hour be it spoken! Wance more, and come again when the moon has passed its full.’

“I went, without another question, or the thought of one. That was a bad week for me—a mortal struggle for the child. The dead kept pulling him to draw him down; but he fought and held on, the little plucked one. On the day following the night of full moon, I carried him in my arms to the cabin—myself, all the way. I wouldn’t let on to a soul; I went roundabout, and I got to Baruch unnoticed. I knew it was kill or cure for Bobo. He couldn’t have survived another night.

“I tell you, it was a laughing spirit that greeted me. Have you ever seen Doré’s picture of the ‘Wandering Jew,’ at the end of his journey, having his boots pulled off? There is the same release depicted, the same sweet comedy of redemption—the same figure of fun, if you like, that Baruch presented.

“He put his hands on Bobo’s head, and——”

“Well?”

“Bobo walked home with me, that’s all.”

Kelvin got up from his chair to relight his pipe at the fire. As he moved, the door of the room opened, and a decent woman, his housekeeper, stood, with a grave face, in the entrance.

“Patsy’s dead?” said Kelvin.

“Ah, the poor mite!” answered the woman, with a burst of tears. “She passed but now, sir, at half after eight, in her little bed.”

POOR LUCY RIVERS

The following story was told to a friend—with leave, conditionally, to make it public—by a well-known physician who died last year.

I was in Paul’s type-writing exchange (says the professional narrator), seeing about some circulars I required, when a young lady came in bearing a box, the weight of which seemed to tax her strength severely. She was a very personable young woman, though looking ill, I fancied—in short, with those diathetic symptoms which point to a condition of hysteria. The manager, who had been engaged elsewhere, making towards me at the moment, I intimated to him that he should attend to the new-comer first. He turned to her.

“Now, madam?” said he.

“I bought this machine second-hand of you last week,” she began, after a little hesitation. He admitted his memory of the fact. “I want to know,” she said, “if you’ll change it for another.”

“Is there anything wrong with it, then?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said; “No!” she said; “Everything!” she said, in a crescendo of spasms, looking as if she were about to cry. The manager shrugged his shoulders.

“Very reprehensible of us,” said he; “and hardly our way. It is not customary; but, of course—if it doesn’t suit—to give satisfaction——” he cleared his throat.

“I don’t want to be unfair,” said the young woman. “It doesn’t suit _me_. It might another person.”

He had lifted, while speaking, its case off the type-writer, and now, placing the machine on a desk, inserted a sheet or two of paper, and ran his fingers deftly over the keys.

“Really, madam,” said he, removing and examining the slip, “I can detect nothing wrong.”

“I said—perhaps—only as regards myself.”

She was hanging her head, and spoke very low.

“But!” said he, and stopped—and could only add the emphasis of another deprecatory shrug.

“Will you do me the favour, madam, to try it in my presence?”

“No,” she murmured; “please don’t ask me. I’d really rather not.” Again the suggestion of strain—of suffering.

“At least,” said he, “oblige me by looking at this.”

He held before her the few lines he had typed. She had averted her head during the minute he had been at work; and it was now with evident reluctance, and some force put upon herself, that she acquiesced. But the moment she raised her eyes, her face brightened with a distinct expression of relief.

“Yes,” she said; “I know there’s nothing wrong with it. I’m sure it’s all my fault. But—but, if you don’t mind. So much depends on it.”

Well, the girl was pretty; the manager was human. There were a dozen young women, of a more or less pert type, at work in the front office. I dare say he had qualified in the illogic of feminine moods. At any rate, the visitor walked off in a little with a machine presumably another than that she had brought.

“Professional?” I asked, to the manager’s resigned smile addressed to me.

“So to speak,” said he. “She’s one of the ‘augment her income’ class. I fancy it’s little enough without. She’s done an occasional job for us. We’ve got her card somewhere.”

“Can you find it?”

He could find it, though he was evidently surprised at the request—scarce reasonably, I think, seeing how he himself had just given me an instance of that male inclination to the attractive, which is so calculated to impress woman in general with the injustice of our claims to impartiality.

With the piece of pasteboard in my hand, I walked off then and there to commission “Miss Phillida Gray” with the job I had intended for Paul’s. Psychologically, I suppose, the case interested me. Here was a young person who seemed, for no _practical_ reason, to have quarrelled with her unexceptionable means to a livelihood.

It raised more than one question; the incompleteness of woman as a wage earner, so long as she was emancipated from all but her fancifulness; the possibility of the spontaneous generation of soul—the _divina particula auræ_—in man-made mechanisms, in the construction of which their makers had invested their whole of mental capital. Frankenstein loathed the abortion of his genius. Who shall say that the soul of the inventor may not speak antipathetically, through the instrument which records it, to that soul’s natural antagonist? Locomotives have moods, as any engine-driver will tell you; and any shaver, that his razor, after maltreating in some fit of perversity one side of his face, will repent, and caress the other as gently as any sucking-dove.

I laughed at this point of my reflections. Had Miss Gray’s type-writer, embodying the soul of a blasphemer, taken to swearing at her?

It was a bitterly cold day. Snow, which had fallen heavily in November, was yet lying compact and unthawed in January. One had the novel experience in London of passing between piled ramparts of it. Traffic for some two months had been at a discount; and walking, for one of my years, was still so perilous a business that I was long in getting to Miss Gray’s door.

She lived West Kensington way, in a “converted flat,” whose title, like that of a familiar type of Christian exhibited on platforms, did not convince of anything but a sort of paying opportunism. That is to say, at the cost of some internal match-boarding, roughly fitted and stained, an unlettable private residence, of the estimated yearly rental of forty pounds, had been divided into two “sets” at thirty-five apiece—whereby fashion, let us hope, profited as greatly as the landlord.

Miss Gray inhabited the upper section, the door to which was opened by a little Cockney drab, very smutty, and smelling of gas stoves.

“Yes, she was in.” (For all her burden, “Phillida,” with her young limbs, had outstripped me.) “Would I please to walk up?”

It was the dismallest room I was shown into—really the most unattractive setting for the personable little body I had seen. She was not there at the moment, so that I could take stock without rudeness. The one curtainless window stared, under a lid of fog, at the factory-like rear of houses in the next street. Within was scarce an evidence of dainty feminine occupation. It was all an illustration of the empty larder and the wolf at the door. How long would the bolt withstand him? The very walls, it seemed, had been stripped for sops to his ravening—stripped so nervously, so hurriedly, that ribbons of paper had been flayed here and there from the plaster. The ceiling was falling; the common grate cold; there was a rag of old carpet on the floor—a dreary, deadly place! The type-writer—the new one—laid upon a little table placed ready for its use, was, in its varnished case, the one prominent object, quite healthy by contrast. How would the wolf moan and scratch to hear it desperately busy, with click and clang, building up its paper rampart against his besieging!

I had fallen of a sudden so depressed, into a spirit of such premonitory haunting, that for a moment I almost thought I could hear the brute of my own fancy snuffling outside. Surely there was something breathing, rustling near me—something——

I grunted, shook myself, and walked to the mantelpiece. There was nothing to remark on it but a copy of some verses on a sheet of notepaper; but the printed address at the top, and the signature at the foot of this, immediately caught my attention. I trust, under the circumstances (there was a coincidence here), that it was not dishonest, but I took out my glasses, and read those verses—or, to be strictly accurate, the gallant opening quatrain—with a laudable coolness. But inasmuch as the matter of the second and third stanzas, which I had an opportunity of perusing later, bears upon one aspect of my story, I may as well quote the whole poem here for what it is worth.

Phyllis, I cannot woo in rhyme,
As courtlier gallants woo,
With utterances sweet as thyme
And melting as the dew.

An arm to serve; true eyes to see;
Honour surpassing love;
These, for all song, my vouchers be,
Dear love, so thou’lt them prove.

Bid me—and though the rhyming art
I may not thee contrive—
I’ll print upon thy lips, sweetheart,
A poem that shall live.

It may have been derivative; it seemed to me, when I came to read the complete copy, passable. At the first, even, I was certainly conscious of a thrill of secret gratification. But, as I said, I had mastered no more than the first four lines, when a rustle at the door informed me that I was detected.

She started, I could see, as I turned round. I was not at the trouble of apologizing for my inquisitiveness.

“Yes,” I said; “I saw you at Paul’s Exchange, got your address, and came on here. I want some circulars typed. No doubt you will undertake the job?”

I was conning her narrowly while I spoke. It was obviously a case of neurasthenia—the tendril shooting in the sunless vault. But she had more spirit than I calculated on. She just walked across to the empty fireplace, collared those verses, and put them into her pocket. I rather admired her for it.

“Yes, with pleasure,” she said, sweetening the rebuke with a blush, and stultifying it by affecting to look on the mantelpiece for a card, which eventually she produced from another place. “These are my terms.”

“Thank you,” I replied. “What do you say to a contra account—you to do my work, and I to set my professional attendance against it? I am a doctor.”

She looked at me mute and amazed.

“But there is nothing the matter with me,” she murmured, and broke into a nervous smile.

“O, I beg your pardon!” I said. “Then it was only your instrument which was out of sorts?”

Her face fell at once.

“You heard me—of course,” she said. “Yes, I—it was out of sorts, as you say. One gets fancies, perhaps, living alone, and typing—typing.”

I thought of the discordant clack going on hour by hour—the dead words of others made brassily vociferous, until one’s own individuality would become merged in the infernal harmonics.

“And so,” I said, “like the dog’s master in the fable, you quarrelled with an old servant.”

“O, no!” she answered. “I had only had it for a week—since I came here.”

“You have only been here a week?”

“Little more,” she replied. “I had to move from my old rooms. It is very kind of you to take such an interest in me. Will you tell me what I can do for you?”

My instructions were soon given. The morrow would see them attended to. No, she need not send the copies on. I would myself call for them in the afternoon.

“I hope _this_ machine will be more to the purpose,” I said.

“_I_ hope so, too,” she answered.

“Well, she seems a lady,” I thought, as I walked home; “a little anæmic flower of gentility.” But sentiment was not to the point.

That evening, “over the walnuts and the wine,” I tackled Master Jack, my second son. He was a promising youth; was reading for the Bar, and, for all I knew, might have contributed to the “Gownsman.”

“Jack,” I said, when we were alone, “I never knew till to-day that you considered yourself a poet.”

He looked at me coolly and inquiringly, but said nothing.

“Do you consider yourself a marrying man, too?” I asked.

He shook his head, with a little amazed smile.

“Then what the devil do you mean by addressing a copy of love verses to Miss Phillida Gray?”

He was on his feet in a moment, as pale as death.

“If you were not my father”—he began.

“But I am, my boy,” I answered, “and an indulgent one, I think you’ll grant.”

He turned, and stalked out of the room; returned in a minute, and flung down a duplicate draft of _the_ poem on the table before me. I put down the crackers, took up the paper, and finished my reading of it.

“Jack,” I said, “I beg your pardon. It does credit to your heart—you understand the emphasis? You are a young gentleman of some prospects. Miss Gray is a young lady of none.”

He hesitated a moment; then flung himself on his knees before me. He was only a great boy.

“Dad,” he said; “dear old Dad; you’ve seen them—you’ve seen her?”

I admitted the facts. “But that is not at all an answer to me,” I said.

“Where is she?” he entreated, pawing me.

“You don’t know?”

“Not from Adam. I drove her hard, and she ran away from me. She said she would, if I insisted—not to kill those same prospects of mine. My prospects! Good God! What are they without her? She left her old rooms, and no address. How did you get to see her—and my stuff?”

I could satisfy him on these points.

“But it’s true,” he said; “and—and I’m in love, Dad—Dad, I’m in love.”

He leaned his arms on the table, and his head on his arms.

“Well,” I said, “how did _you_ get to know her?”

“Business,” he muttered, “pure business. I just answered her advertisement—took her some of my twaddle. She’s an orphan—daughter of a Captain Gray, navy man; and—and she’s an angel.”

“I hope he is,” I answered. “But anyhow, that settles it. There’s no marrying and giving in marriage in heaven.”

He looked up.

“You don’t mean it? No! you dearest and most indulgent of old Dads! Tell me where she is.”

I rose.

“I may be all that; but I’m not such a fool. I shall see her to-morrow. Give me till after then.”

“O, you perfect saint!”

“I promise absolutely nothing.”

“I don’t want you to. I leave you to her. She could beguile a Saint Anthony.”

“Hey!”

“I mean as a Christian woman should.”

“O! that explains it.”

The following afternoon I went to West Kensington. The little drab was snuffling when she opened the door. She had a little hat on her head.

“Missus wasn’t well,” she said; “and she hadn’t liked to leave her, though by rights she was only engaged for an hour or two in the day.”

“Well,” I said, “I’m a doctor, and will attend to her. You can go.”

She gladly shut me in and herself out. The clang of the door echoed up the narrow staircase, and was succeeded, as if it had started it, by the quick toing and froing of a footfall in the room above. There was something inexpressibly ghostly in the sound, in the reeling dusk which transmitted it.

I perceived, the moment I set eyes on the girl, that there was something seriously wrong with her. Her face was white as wax, and quivered with an incessant horror of laughter. She tried to rally, to greet me, but broke down at the first attempt, and stood as mute as stone.

I thank my God I can be a sympathetic without being a fanciful man. I went to her at once, and imprisoned her icy hands in the human strength of my own.

“What is it? Have you the papers ready for me?”

She shook her head, and spoke only after a second effort.

“I am very sorry.”

“You haven’t done them, then? Never mind. But why not? Didn’t the new machine suit either?”

I felt her hands twitch in mine. She made another movement of dissent.

“That’s odd,” I said. “It looks as if it wasn’t the fault of the tools, but of the workwoman.”

All in a moment she was clinging to me convulsively, and crying—

“You are a doctor—you’ll understand—don’t leave me alone—don’t let me stop here!”

“Now listen,” I said; “listen, and control yourself. Do you hear? I have come _prepared_ to take you away. I’ll explain why presently.”

“I thought at first it was my fault,” she wept distressfully, “working, perhaps, until I grew light-headed” (Ah, hunger and loneliness and that grinding labour!); “but when I was sure of myself, still it went on, and I could not do my tasks to earn money. Then I thought—how can God let such things be!—that the instrument itself must be haunted. It took to going at night; and in the morning”—she gripped my hands—“I burnt them. I tried to think I had done it myself in my sleep, and I always burnt them. But it didn’t stop, and at last I made up my mind to take it back and ask for another—another—you remember?”

She pressed closer to me, and looked fearfully over her shoulder.

“It does the same,” she whispered, gulping. “It wasn’t the machine at all. It’s the place—itself—that’s haunted.”

I confess a tremor ran through me. The room was dusking—hugging itself into secrecy over its own sordid details. Out near the window, the type-writer, like a watchful sentient thing, seemed grinning at us with all its ivory teeth. She had carried it there, that it might be as far from herself as possible.

“First let me light the gas,” I said, gently but resolutely detaching her hands.

“There is none,” she murmured.

None. It was beyond her means. This poor creature kept her deadly vigils with a couple of candles. I lit them—they served but to make the gloom more visible—and went to pull down the blind.

“O, take care of it!” she whispered fearfully, meaning the type-writer. “It is awful to shut out the daylight so soon.”

God in heaven, what she must have suffered! But I admitted nothing, and took her determinedly in hand.

“Now,” I said, returning to her, “tell me plainly and distinctly what it is that the machine does.”

She did not answer. I repeated my question.

“It writes things,” she muttered—“things that don’t come from me. Day and night it’s the same. The words on the paper aren’t the words that come from my fingers.”

“But that is impossible, you know.”

“So _I_ should have thought once. Perhaps—what is it to be possessed? There was another type-writer—another girl—lived in these rooms before me.”

“Indeed! And what became of her?”

“She disappeared mysteriously—no one knows why or where. Maria, my little maid, told me about her. Her name was Lucy Rivers, and—she just disappeared. The landlord advertised her effects, to be claimed, or sold to pay the rent; and that was done, and she made no sign. It was about two months ago.”

“Well, will you now practically demonstrate to me this reprehensible eccentricity on the part of your instrument?”

“Don’t ask me. I don’t dare.”

“I would do it myself; but of course you will understand that a more satisfactory conclusion would be come to by my watching your fingers. Make an effort—you needn’t even look at the result—and I will take you away immediately after.”

“You are very good,” she answered pathetically; “but I don’t know that I ought to accept. Where to, please? And—and I don’t even know your name.”

“Well, I have my own reasons for withholding it.”

“It is all so horrible,” she said; “and I am in your hands.”

“They are waiting to transfer you to mamma’s,” said I.

The name seemed an instant inspiration and solace to her. She looked at me, without a word, full of wonder and gratitude; then asked me to bring the candles, and she would acquit herself of her task. She showed the best pluck over it, though her face was ashy, and her mouth a line, and her little nostrils pulsing the whole time she was at work.

I had got her down to one of my circulars, and, watching her fingers intently, was as sure as observer could be that she had followed the text verbatim.

“Now,” I said, when she came to a pause, “give me a hint how to remove this paper, and go you to the other end of the room.”

She flicked up a catch. “You have only to pull it off the roller,” she said; and rose and obeyed. The moment she was away I followed my instructions, and drew forth the printed sheet and looked at it.

It may have occupied me longer than I intended. But I was folding it very deliberately, and putting it away in my pocket when I walked across to her with a smile. She gazed at me one intent moment, and dropped her eyes.

“Yes,” she said; and I knew that she had satisfied herself. “Will you take me away now, at once, please?”

The idea of escape, of liberty once realized, it would have been dangerous to balk her by a moment. I had acquainted mamma that I might possibly bring her a visitor. Well, it simply meant that the suggested visit must be indefinitely prolonged.

Miss Gray accompanied me home, where certain surprises, in addition to the tenderest of ministrations, were awaiting her. All that becomes private history, and outside my story. I am not a man of sentiment; and if people choose to write poems and make general asses of themselves, why—God bless them!

The problem I had set _my_self to unravel was what looked deucedly like a tough psychologic poser. But I was resolute to face it, and had formed my plan. It was no unusual thing for me to be out all night. That night, after dining, I spent in the “converted” flat in West Kensington.

I had brought with me—I confess to so much weakness—one of your portable electric lamps. The moment I was shut in and established, I pulled out the paper Miss Gray had typed for me, spread it under the glow and stared at it. Was it a copy of my circular? Would a sober “First Aid Society” Secretary be likely, do you think, to require circulars containing such expressions as “_William! William! Come back to me! O, William, in God’s name! William! William! William!_”—in monstrous iteration—the one cry, or the gist of it, for lines and lines in succession?

I am at the other end from humour in saying this. It is heaven’s truth. Line after line, half down the page, went that monotonous, heart-breaking appeal. It was so piercingly moving, my human terror of its unearthliness was all drowned, absorbed in an overflowing pity.

I am not going to record the experiences of that night. That unchanging mood of mine upheld me through consciousnesses and sub-consciousnesses which shall be sacred. Sometimes, submerged in these, I seemed to hear the clack of the instrument in the window, but at a vast distance. I may have seen—I may have dreamt—I accepted it all. Awaking in the chill grey of morning, I felt no surprise at seeing some loose sheets of paper lying on the floor. “_William! William!_” their text ran down, “_Come back to me!_” It was all that same wail of a broken heart. I followed Miss Gray’s example. I took out my match-box, and reverently, reverently burned them.

An hour or two later I was at Paul’s Exchange, privately interviewing my manager.

“Did you ever employ a Miss Lucy Rivers?”

“Certainly we did. Poor Lucy Rivers! She rented a machine of us. In fact——”

He paused.

“Well?”

“Well—it is a mere matter of business—she ‘flitted,’ and we had to reclaim our instrument. As it happens, it was the very one purchased by the young lady who so interested you here two days ago.”

“The first machine, you mean?”

“The first—_and_ the second.” He smiled. “As a matter of fact, she took away again what she brought.”

“Miss Rivers’s?”

He nodded.

“There was absolutely nothing wrong with it—mere fad. Women start these fancies. The click of the thing gets on their nerves, I suppose. We must protect ourselves, you see; and I’ll warrant she finds it perfection now.”

“Perhaps she does. What was Miss Rivers’s address?”

He gave me, with a positive grin this time, the “converted” flat.

“But that was only latterly,” he said. “She had moved from——”

He directed me elsewhere.

“Why,” said I, taking up my hat, “did you call her ‘poor Lucy Rivers’?”

“O, I don’t know!” he said. “She was rather an attractive young lady. But we had to discontinue our patronage. She developed the most extraordinary—but it’s no business of mine. She was one of the submerged tenth; and she’s gone under for good, I suppose.”

I made my way to the _other_ address—a little lodging in a shabby-genteel street. A bitter-faced landlady, one of the “preordained” sort, greeted me with resignation when she thought I came for rooms, and with acerbity when she heard that my sole mission was to inquire about a Miss Lucy Rivers.

“I won’t deceive you, sir,” she said. “When it come to receiving gentlemen privately, I told her she must go.”

“Gentlemen!”

“I won’t do Miss Rivers an injustice,” she said. “It was _ha_ gentleman.”

“Was that latterly?”

“It was not latterly, sir. But it was the effects of its not being latterly which made her take to things.”

“What things?”

“Well, sir, she grew strange company, and took to the roof.”

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Just precisely what I say, sir; through the trap-door by the steps, and up among the chimney-pots. _He’d_ been there with her before, and perhaps she thought she’d find him hiding among the stacks. He called himself an astronomer; but it’s my belief it was another sort of star-gazing. I couldn’t stand it at last, and I had to give her notice.”

It was falling near a gloomy midday when I again entered the flat, and shut myself in with its ghosts and echoes. I had a set conviction, a set purpose in my mind. There was that which seemed to scuttle, like a little demon of laughter, in my wake, now urging me on, now slipping round and above to trip me as I mounted. I went steadily on and up, past the sitting-room door, to the floor above. And here, for the first time, a thrill in my blood seemed to shock and hold me for a moment. Before my eyes, rising to a skylight, now dark and choked with snow, went a flight of steps. Pulling myself together, I mounted these, and with a huge effort (_the bolt was not shot_) shouldered the trap open. There were a fall and rustle without; daylight entered; and, levering the door over, I emerged upon the roof.

Snow, grim and grimy and knee-deep, was over everything, muffling the contours of the chimneys, the parapets, the irregularities of the leads. The dull thunder of the streets came up to me; a fog of thaw was in the air; a thin drizzle was already falling. I drove my foot forward into a mound, and hitched it on something. In an instant I was down on my knees, scattering the sodden raff right and left, and—my God!—a face!

She lay there as she had been overwhelmed, and frozen, and preserved these two months. She had closed the trap behind her, and nobody had known. Pure as wax—pitiful as hunger—dead! Poor Lucy Rivers!

Who was she, and who the man? We could never learn. She had woven his name, his desertion, her own ruin and despair into the texture of her broken life. Only on the great day of retribution shall he answer to that agonized cry.

THE FAIR WITH GOLDEN HAIR

Ho! bring me some _lovers_, fat or lean, That I may crunch ’em my teeth between! I could eat so many, so many, so many, That in the wide world there would not be left any.

Ho! Here is Avenant to be seen, Who comes to draw your teeth so keen; He’s not the greatest man to view, But he’s big enough to conquer you.

Planché’s “D’Aulnoy,” slightly misquoted.

Sir Richard Avenant came home from Abyssinia to an interesting notoriety. He had been associated—a sort of explorative free-lance—with the expedition of Mr. Bruce, who was not yet returned from his adventures up the Nile in quest of the sources of that bewildering water; and, upon his arrival in London, he found himself engaged to a romance which was certainly remote from his deserts.

Now he was a strong, saturnine man, but apt to whimsical decisions, whose consequences, the fruits of whatever odd impulses, he never had a thought but to hold by; and as the self-reserved must suffer the character accorded to their appearance (the only side of them confessed), Sir Richard found himself accredited, by anticipation, with deeds adapted to the countenance he had always addressed to the world.

He was strolling, some days after his return, through the streets, when he was accosted by an acquaintance, a _preux chevalier_ of the highest _ton_, curled, be-ruffed, and imperturbably self-assured.

“Why, strike me silly, Dick!” cried this exquisite, “what do you, wandering unsociable in a shag coat, and all London by the ears to lionize ye?”

“Well, I know not, George. What have I done to be lionized?”

“Done! _Done?_ asks the man that will not devour a steak but ’tis cut raw from the buttock of the living beast! _Done?_ asks Bluebeard (and stap me, Dick, but your chin is as blue as a watchman’s!)—_done_, he says, that brings grass-petticoats in his train enough to furnish the Paradise of the Grand Turk! Prithee, Dick, where hast stowed ’em all? O, thou hast a great famous reputation, I assure thee, to justify thyself of with the women! Such is the report of thy peris—their teeth, their raven hair, their eyes like stars of the night—there’s no virtue in town could resist, if asked, to be thy queen and theirs.”

He was chuckling, and taking a delicate pinch of martinique, with his little finger cocked to display a glittering stone, when his eyes lighted on a house over against which they were standing.

“Hist!” said he, pointing with his cane; “pan my honour, the single reservation.”

“Single reservation?” repeated the explorer. “To what? To this London of frailties?”

“To be sure,” said the other. “The one party, I’ll dare swear, that would not put her nose in a ring for thy sake.”

“Indeed!” said Avenant. “Then she’s the one I must wed.”

The elegant cocked his head, squinting derisive.

“I lay you a double pony to a tester you don’t, within the decade.”

“Done! Tell me about her.”

“I’ll do more. I’ll carry you in to her, here and at once. Tell me about her, quotha! She’s the Fair with Golden Hair, and a guinea and a suitor to every thread of it.”

“Whence comes she?”

“From Arcadia, man, with a fortune of gold and roses. She cuts out hearts raw, as you do steaks, and devours them by the dozen. O, you shall know her!”

“But by what name, George, by what name?”

“Have I not told you? It shall suffice for all your needs. Thou shalt take a pack of Cabriolles, and never hunt her to the death. Come, my friend!”

He led Sir Richard to the house, and had himself announced. They ascended a flight of stairs, going up into a heaven of floating fragrance and melodious sounds. Their feet moved noiseless over silken carpets. They crossed an anteroom ruffling with lackeys, and were ushered into the Fair’s boudoir.

She sat at her mirror, in the hands of her perruquier. She was the most beautiful insolent creature Sir Richard had ever seen. There was not an inch of her which Nature could have altered to its improvement. The very patch on her cheek was a theft from perfection. But to so much loveliness her hair was the glory, a nimbus which, condensing in the heavy atmosphere of adoration, dropped in a melting flood of gold, which, short of the ground only, shrank and curled back from its gross contact.

All round and about her hummed her court—poets, lords, minstrels—suitors straining their wits and their talents for her delectation, while they bled internally. Many of them greeted Sir Richard’s chaperon, many Sir Richard himself—good-humouredly, jealously, satirically, as the case might be—as the two pushed by. A stir went round, however, when the rough new-comer’s name was put about; and some rose in their seats, and all dwelt inquisitively on the explorer’s reception.

It was condescending enough; as was that of his friend, who loved himself too well, and too wittily, to show a heart worth the beauty’s discussing.

“Have you got back your appetite, sir,” said the Fair to Avenant, “for dressed meats?”

“And ladies?” whispered Sir Richard’s friend.

“O, fie!” said madam.

“I will return the question on you,” said Sir Richard, in a low voice.

The Fair lifted her brows.

“Why, I am told, madam,” said Avenant, “that you feed on raw hearts; but I am willing to believe that the one lie is as certain as the other.”

The imperious beauty bit her underlip, and laughed.

“I perceive, Sir Richard,” she said, “that you do not court by flattery.”

“I do not court at all, madam,” he answered.

“Ah, true!” she replied. “You buy in the open market. It must be simpler; though, in the plain lodging where I hear you lie at present, the disposal of so responsible an establishment must exercise your diplomacy.”

She spoke aloud, evoking a general titter; and so aloud Avenant answered her.

“By no means, madam. I have in my sleeping-room a closet with three shelves. On one of these lies Beauty, unspoiled by adulation; on another lies Virtue, that respects her sex too well to traduce it; on the third lies feminine Truth, loveliest of her sisters. These are my whole establishment; and as they are shadows all, existing only in the imagination, they exercise nothing but my fondness for unattainable ideals.”

The company broke into much laughter over this Jeremiad; and the girl joined her young voice to theirs. But a little glow of colour was showing in her cheek, verily as if Sir Richard had flicked that fair surface with his glove.