A little fat man sat smoking in a chair near the fire. When I entered he was in his shirt sleeves, reading a newspaper, but when a footman announced my name the little man, in a state of great nervousness, jumped to his feet and threw on a coat, fidgeting painfully with the armholes. As he came toward me, I noticed that he was perfectly bald. He looked dyspeptic and discontented, like a practical man trying vainly to adjust his busy habits to a lazy life. Obviously he didn"t go with the rest of the furniture.
"Pleased to see you, Mr. Pierrepont," he said, looking me over carefully as if he thought of buying me. "Geoffray Pierrepont--tut, tut!--ain"t it queer!"
"Queer!" I said rather peevishly. "What"s queer about it?"
"Excuse me, did I say queer? I didn"t mean to be impolite, sir--I was just thinking, that"s all."
You could hear the demon Army of the Winds scaling the walls outside.
"Maybe you thought it kind of abrupt, Mr. Pierrepont, me asking you up here so unceremonious," he said. "My daughter Annie, she tells me I ought to live up to the looks of the place; but I"ve got my notions. To tell you the truth, I"m in an awful quandary about this Antique Castle business and when I heard you was at the hotel, I thought you might help me out some way. You see you----"
He led me to a chair and offered me a fat cigar.
"Young man," he said, "when you get your head above water and make good in the world--if you ever do--don"t fool with curios, don"t monkey with antiques. Keep away from castles. They"re like everything else sold by curio dealers--all humbug. Look nice, yes. But get "em over to America and they either fall to pieces or the paint comes off. Whether it"s a chair or a castle--same old story. The sly scalawags that sell you the goods won"t live up to their contracts."
"Hasn"t Gauntmoor all the ancient inconveniences a Robber Baron could wish?" I asked.
"It ain"t," announced Mr. Hobson. "Though it looks all right to a stranger, perhaps. There may be castles in the Old World got it on Gauntmoor for size--thank G.o.d I didn"t buy "em!--but for looks you can"t beat Gauntmoor."
"Comfortable?" I asked.
"Can"t complain. Modern plumbed throughout. Hard to heat, but I put an electric-light plant in the cellar. Daughter Annie"s got a Colonial suite in the North Tower."
"Well," I suggested, "if there"s anything the castle lacks, you can buy it."
"There"s one thing money _can"t_ buy," said Mr. Hobson, leaning very close and speaking in a sibilant whisper. "And that"s ghosts!"
"But who wants ghosts?" I inquired.
"Now look here," said Mr. Hobson. "I"m a business man. When I bought Gauntmoor, the London scalawags that sold it to me gave me distinctly to understand that this was a Haunted Castle. They showed me a haunted chamber, showed me the haunted wall where the ghost walks, guaranteed the place to be the Spook Headquarters of the British Isles--and see what I got!" He snapped his fingers in disgust.
"No results?"
"Results? Stung! I"ve slept in that haunted room upstairs for a solid year. I"ve gazed night after night over the haunted rampart. I"ve even hired spiritualists to come and cut their didoes in the towers and donjon keep. No use. You can"t get ghosts where they ain"t."
I expressed my sympathy.
"I"m a plain man," said Hobson. "I ain"t got any ancestors back of father, who was a blacksmith, and a good one, when sober. Somebody else"s ancestors is what I looked for in this place--and I"ve got "em, too, carved in wood and stone in the chapel out back of the tower. But statues and carvings ain"t like ghosts to add tone to an ancient lineage."
"Is there any legend?" I asked.
"Haven"t you heard it?" he exclaimed, looking at me sharply out of his small gray eyes. "It seems, "way back in the sixteenth century, there was a harum-scarum young feller living in a neighboring castle, and he took an awful shine to Lady Katherine, daughter of the Earl of c.u.mmyngs, who was boss of this place at that time. Now the young man who loved Miss--I mean Lady--Katherine was a sort of wild proposition. Old man wouldn"t have him around the place; but young man kept hanging on till Earl ordered him off. Finally the old gent locked Lady Kitty in the donjon tower," said Mr. Hobson.
"Too much shilly-shallying in _this_ generation," he went on. "Every house that"s got a pretty girl ought to have a donjon keep. I"ve got both." He paused and wiped his brow.
"This fresh young kid I"m telling you about, he thought he knew more than the old folks, so he got a rope ladder and climbed up the masonry one night, intending to bust into the tower where the girl was. But just as he got half across the wall--out yonder--his foot slipped and he broke his neck in the moat below. Consequence, Lady Kitty goes crazy and old Earl found dead a week later in his room. It was Christmas Eve when the boy was killed. That"s the night his ghost"s supposed to walk along the ramparts, give a shriek, and drop off--but the irritating thing about it all is, it don"t ever happen."
"And now, Mr. Hobson," I said, throwing away the b.u.t.t of my cigar, "why am _I_ here? What have _I_ got to do with all this ghost business?"
"I _want_ you to stay," said Hobson, beseechingly. "To-morrow night"s Christmas Eve. I"ve figured it out that your influence, somehow, you being of the same blood, as it were, might encourage the ghost to come out and save the reputation of the castle."
A servant brought candles, and Hobson turned to retire.
"The same blood!" I shouted after him. "What on earth is the _name_ of the ghost?"
"When he was alive his name was--Sir Geoffray de Pierrepont," said Thaddeus Hobson, his figure fading into the dimness beyond.
I followed the servant with the candle aloft through chill and carven corridors, through galleries lined with faded portraits of forgotten lords. "Wheels!" I kept saying to myself. "The old man evidently thinks it takes a live Pierrepont to coax a dead one," and I laughed nervously as I entered the vast brown bedroom. I had to get on a chair in order to climb into the four-poster, a cheerful affair that looked like a royal funeral barge. At my head I noticed a carved device, seven mailed hands s.n.a.t.c.hing at a sword with the motto: "CAVE ADSUM!"
"Beware, I am here!" I translated. Who was here? Ghosts? Fudge! What hideous scenes had this chamber beheld of yore? What might not happen here now? Where, by the way, was old Hobson"s daughter, Anita? Might not anything be possible? I covered my head with the bedclothes.
Next morning being mild and bright for December, and Thaddeus Hobson and his mysterious daughter not having showed up for breakfast, I amused myself by inspecting the exterior of the castle. In daylight I could see that Gauntmoor, as now restored, consisted of only a portion of the original structure. On the west side, near a sheer fall of forty or fifty feet, stood the donjon tower, a fine piece of medieval barbarism with a peaked roof. And, sure enough! I saw it all now. Running along the entire west side of the castle was a wonderful wall, stretching above the moat to a dizzy height. It was no difficult matter to mount this wall from the courtyard, above which it rose no more than eight or ten feet. I ascended by a rude sentry"s staircase, and once on top I gazed upward at the tall medieval prison-place, which reared above me like a clumsy stone chimney. Just as I stood, at the top of the wall, I was ten or twelve feet below the lowest window of the donjon tower.
This, then, was the wall that the ancient Pierrepont had scaled, and yonder was the donjon window that he had planned to plunder on that fatal night so long ago. And this was where Pierrepont the Ghost was supposed to appear!
How the lover of spectral memory had managed to scale that wall from the outside, I could not quite make out. But once _on_ the wall, it was no trick to s.n.a.t.c.h the damsel from her durance vile. Just drop a long rope ladder from the wall to the moat, then crawl along the narrow ledge--got to be careful with a job like that--then up to the window of the donjon keep, and away with the Lady Fair. Why, that window above the ramparts would be an easy climb for a fellow with strong arms and a little nerve, as the face of the tower from the wall to the window was studded with ancient spikes and the projecting ends of beams.
I counted the feet, one, two, three--and as I looked up at the window, a small, white hand reached out and a pink slip of paper dropped at my feet. It read:
DEAR SIR: I"m Miss Hobson. I"m locked in the donjon tower. Father always locks me here when there"s a young man about. It"s a horrid, uncomfortable place. Won"t you hurry and go?
Yours respectfully,
A. HOBSON.
I knew it was easy. I swung myself aloft on the spikes and stones leading to the donjon window. When I was high enough I gazed in, my chin about even with the sill. And there I saw the prettiest girl I ever beheld, gazing down at a book tranquilly, as though gentlemanly rescuers were common as toads around that tower. She wore something soft and golden; her hair was night-black, and her eyes were that peculiar shade of gray that--but what"s the use?
"Pardon," I said, holding on with my right hand, lifting my hat with my left. "Pardon, am I addressing Miss Annie Hobson?"
"You are not," she replied, only half looking up. "You are addressing Miss Anita Hobson. Calling me Annie is another little habit father ought to break himself of." She went on reading.
"Is that a very interesting book?" I asked, because I didn"t like to go without saying something more.
"It isn"t!" She arose suddenly and hurled the book into a corner. "It"s Anthony Hope--and if there"s anything I hate it"s him. Father always gives me _Prisoner of Zenda_ and _Ivanhoe_ to read when he locks me into this donjon. Says I ought to read up on the situation. Do you think so?"
"There are some other books in the library," I suggested. "Bernard Shaw and Kipling, you know. I"ll run over and get you one."
"That"s fine--but no!" she besought, reaching out her hand to detain me.
"No, don"t go! If you went away you"d never come back. They never do."
"Who never do?"
"The young men. The very instant father sees one coming he pops me in the tower and turns the key. You see," she explained, "when I was in Italy I was engaged to a duke--he was a silly little thing and I was glad when he turned out bogus. But father took the deception awfully to heart and swore I should never be married for my money. Yet I don"t see what else a young girl can expect," she added quite simply.
I could have mentioned several hundred things.
"He has no right!" I said sternly. "It"s barbarous for him to treat a girl that way--especially his daughter."