The Rector was a tall man and stalwart, who had already acquired that convex curve which indicates incipient corpulence, and who, though younger than his brother, looked half a dozen years his senior. With a broad bald forehead, projecting eyebrows, a large coa.r.s.e mouth, and with what I may term the rudiments of a double chin--altogether an ugly and even repulsive face, but with no lack of energy and decision--one looked with wonder from this gross, fierce, clerical countenance to the fine outlines and proportions of the Baronet"s face, and wondered how the two men could really be brothers.
The cleric shook his brother"s hand in pa.s.sing, and smiled and nodded briefly here and there, right and left, and across the table his recognition, and chuckled a harsher chuckle than his brother"s, as he took his place, extemporized with the quiet legerdemain of a consummate butler by Ridley; and answered in a brisk, abrupt voice the smiling inquiries of friends.
"Hope you have picked up an appet.i.te on the way, Dives," said the Baronet. Dives generally carried a pretty good one about with him. "Good air on the way, and pretty good mutton here, too--my friends tell me."
"Capital air--capital mutton--capital fish," replied the ecclesiastic, in a brisk, business-like tone, while being a man of nerve, he got some fish, although that esculent had long vanished, and even the entrees had pa.s.sed into history, and called over his shoulder for the special sauces which his soul loved, and talked, and compounded his condiments with energy and precision.
The Rector was a shrewd and gentlemanlike, though not a very pretty, apostle, and had made a sufficient toilet before presenting himself, and snapped and gobbled his fish, in a glossy, single-breasted coat, with standing collar; a ribbed silk waistcoat, covering his ample chest, almost like a ca.s.sock, and one of those transparent muslin dog-collars which High Churchmen affect.
"Well, Dives," cried Sir Jekyl, "how do the bells ring? I gave them a chime, poor devils" (this was addressed to Lady Blunket at his elbow), "by way of compensation, when I sent them Dives."
"Pretty well; they don"t know how to pull "em, I think, quite," answered Dives, dabbing a bit of fish in a pool of sauce, and punching it into shape with his bit of bread. "And how is old Parson Moulders?" continued the Baronet, pleasantly.
"I haven"t heard," said the Hector, and drank off half his gla.s.s of hock.
"Can"t believe it, Dives. Here"s Lady Blunket knows. He"s the aged inc.u.mbent of Droughton. A devilish good living in my gift; and of course you"ve been asking how the dear old fellow is."
"I haven"t, upon my word; not but I ought, though," said the Rev. Dives Marlowe, as if he did not see the joke.
"He"s very severe on you," simpered fat Lady Blunket, faintly, across the table, and subsided with a little cough, as if the exertion hurt her.
"Is he? Egad! I never perceived it." The expression was not clerical, but the speaker did not seem aware he had uttered it. "How dull I must be! Have you ever been in this part of the world before, Lady Jane?"
continued he, turning towards General Lennox"s wife, who sat beside him.
"I"ve been to Wardlock, a good many years ago; but that"s a long way from this, and I almost forget it," answered Lady Jane, in her languid, haughty way.
"In what direction is Wardlock," she asked of Beatrix, raising her handsome, unfathomable eyes for a moment.
"You can see it from the bow-window of your room--I mean that oddly-shaped hill to the right."
"That"s from the green chamber," said the Rector. "I remember the view.
Isn"t it?"
"Yes. They have put Lady Jane in the haunted room," said Beatrix, smiling and nodding to Lady Jane.
"And what fool, pray, told you that," said the Baronet, perhaps just a little sharply.
"Old Gwynn seems to think so," answered Beatrix, with the surprised and frightened look of one who fancies she has made a blunder. "I--of course we know it is all folly."
"You must not say that--you shan"t disenchant us," said Lady Jane.
"There"s nothing I should so like as a haunted room; it"s a charming idea--isn"t it, Arthur?" she inquired of the General.
"We had a haunted room in my quarters at Puttypoor," observed the General, twiddling the point of one of his moustaches. "It was the store-room where we kept pickles, and olives, and preserves, and plates, and jars, and gla.s.s bottles. And every night there was a confounded noise there; jars, and bottles, and things tumbling about, made a devil of a row, you know. I got Smith--my servant Smith, you know, a very respectable man--uncommon steady fellow, Smith--to watch, and he did. We kept the door closed, and Smith outside. I gave him half-a-crown a night and his supper--very well for Smith, you know. Sometimes he kept a light, and sometimes I made him sit in the dark with matches ready."
"Was not he very much frightened?" asked Beatrix, who was deeply interested in the ghost.
"I hope you gave him a smelling-bottle?" inquired Tom Linnett, with a tender concern.
"Well, I don"t suppose he was," said the General, smiling good-humouredly on pretty Beatrix, while he loftily pa.s.sed by the humorous inquiry of the young gentleman. "He was, in fact, on dooty, you know; and there were occasional noises and damage done in the store-room--in fact, just the same as if Smith was not there."
"Oh, possibly Smith himself among the bottles!" suggested Linnett.
"He always got in as quick as he could," continued the General; "but could not see anyone. Things were broken--bottles sometimes."
"How very strange," exclaimed Beatrix, charmed to hear the tale of wonder.
"We could not make it out; it was very odd, you know," resumed the narrator.
"_You_ weren"t frightened, General?" inquired Linnett.
"_No_, sir," replied the General, who held that a soldier"s courage, like a lady"s reputation, was no subject for jesting, and conveyed that sentiment by a slight pause, and a rather alarming stare from under his fierce grey eyebrows. "No one was frightened, I suppose; we were all men in the house, sir."
"At home, I think, we"d have suspected a rat or a cat," threw in the Rector.
"Some did, sir," replied the General; "and we made a sort of a search; but it wasn"t. There was a capital tiled floor, not a hole you could put a ramrod in; and no cat, neither--high windows, grated; and the door always close; and every now and then something broken by night."
"Delightful! That"s what Mrs. Crowe, in that charming book, you know, "The Night Side of Nature," calls, I forget the name; but it"s a German word, I think--the noisy ghost it means. Racket--something, isn"t it, Beet?" (the short for Beatrix). "I do so _devour_ ghosts!" cried sharp old Miss Blunket, who thought Beatrix"s enthusiasm became her; and chose to exhibit the same pretty fanaticism.
"I didn"t _say_ it was a ghost, mind ye," interposed the General, with a grave regard for his veracity; "only we were puzzled a bit. There _was_ something there we all knew; and something that could reach up to the high shelves, and break things on the floor too, you see. We had been watching, off and on, I think, some three or four weeks, and I heard one night, early, a row in the store-room--a devil of a row it was; but Smith was on dooty, as we used to say, that night, so I left it to him; and he could have sung out, you know, if he wanted help--poor fellow!
And in the morning my native fellow told me that poor Smith was dead in the store-room; and, egad! so he was, poor fellow!"
"How awful!" exclaimed Beatrix.
And Miss Blunket, in girlish horror, covered her fierce black eyes with her lank fingers.
"A bite of a cobra, by Jove! above the knee, and another on the hand. A fattish fellow, poor Smith, the natives say they go faster--that sort of man; but no one can stand a fair bite of a cobra--I defy you. We killed him after."
"What! _Smith?_" whispered Linnett in his neighbour"s ear.
"He lay in a basket; you never saw such a brute," continued the General; "he was very near killing another of my people."
"So _there_ was your ghost?" said Doocey, archly.
"Worse than a ghost," observed Sir Paul Blunket.
"A dooced deal," acquiesced the General gravely.
"You"re very much annoyed with vermin out there in India?" remarked Sir Paul.
"So we are, sir," agreed the General.
"It"s very hard, you see, to meet with a genuine ghost, Miss Marlowe; they generally turn out impostors," said Doocey.
"I should like to think my room was haunted," said Lady Jane.
"Oh! _dear_ Lady Jane, how _can_ you be so _horribly_ brave?" cried Miss Blunket.
"We have no cobras here, at all events," said Sir Paul, nodding to Sir Jekyl, with the gravity becoming such a discovery.