Could one of the domestics have expired, and was it the intention of my host to have the body thus honourably removed without casting a gloom over his guests?
Wild as these hypotheses appeared, I could think of nothing better, and was just about to leave the window, and retire to bed, when the driver of the strange carriage, who had hitherto sat motionless, turned, and looked me full in the face. Never shall I forget the appearance of this man, whose sallow countenance, close-shaven dark chin, and small, black moustache, combined with I know not what of martial in his air, struck into me a certain indefinable alarm. No sooner had he caught my eye, than he gathered up his reins, just raised his whip, and started the mortuary vehicle at a walk down the road. I followed it with my eyes till a bend in the avenue hid it from my sight. So wrapt up was my spirit in the exercise of the single sense of vision that it was not till the hea.r.s.e became lost to view that I noticed the entire absence of sound which accompanied its departure. Neither had the bridles and trappings of the white horses jingled as the animals shook their heads, nor had the wheels of the hea.r.s.e crashed upon the gravel of the avenue. I was compelled by all these circ.u.mstances to believe that what I had looked upon was not of this world, and, with a beating heart, I sought refuge in sleep.
"Next morning, feeling far from refreshed, I arrived among the latest at a breakfast which was a desultory and movable feast. Almost all the men had gone forth to hill, forest, or river, in pursuit of the furred, finned, or feathered denizens of the wilds--"
"You speak," interrupted the schoolboy, "like a printed book! I like to hear you speak like that. Drive on, old man! Drive on your hea.r.s.e!"
The Bachelor of Arts "drove on," without noticing this interruption. "I tried to "lead up" to the hea.r.s.e," he said, "in conversation with the young ladies of the castle. I endeavoured to a.s.sume the languid and preoccupied air of the guest who, in ghost-stories, has had a bad night with the family spectre. I drew the conversation to the topic of apparitions, and even to warnings of death. I knew that every family worthy of the name has its omen: the Oxenhams a white bird, another house a bra.s.s band, whose airy music is poured forth by invisible performers, and so on. Of course I expected some one to cry, "Oh, _we"ve_ got a hea.r.s.e with white horses," for that is the kind of heirloom an ancient house regards with complacent pride. But n.o.body offered any remarks on the local omen, and even when I drew near the topic of _hea.r.s.es_, one of the girls, my cousin, merely quoted, "Speak not like a death"s-head, good Doll" (my name is Adolphus), and asked me to play at lawn-tennis.
In the evening, in the smoking-room, it was no better, n.o.body had ever heard of an omen in this particular castle. Nay, when I told my story, for it came to that at last, they only laughed at me, and said I must have dreamed it. Of course I expected to be wakened in the night by some awful apparition, but nothing disturbed me. I never slept better, and hea.r.s.es were the last things I thought of during the remainder of my visit. Months pa.s.sed, and I had almost forgotten the vision, or dream, for I began to feel apprehensive that, after all, it _was_ a dream. So costly and elaborate an apparition as a hea.r.s.e with white horses and plumes complete, could never have been got up, regardless of expense, for one occasion only, and to frighten one undergraduate, yet it was certain that the hea.r.s.e was not "the old family coach." My entertainers had undeniably never heard of it in their lives before. Even tradition at the castle said nothing of a spectral hea.r.s.e, though the house was credited with a white lady deprived of her hands, and a luminous boy.
Here the Bachelor of Arts paused, and a shower of chaff began.
"Is that really all?" asked the Girton girl.
"Why, this is the third ghost-story to-night without any ghost in it!"
"I don"t remember saying that it _was_ a ghost-story," replied the Bachelor of Arts; "but I thought a little anecdote of a mere "warning"
might not be unwelcome."
"But where does the warning come in?" asked the schoolboy.
"That"s just what I was arriving at," replied the narrator, "when I was interrupted with as little ceremony as if I had been Mr. Gladstone in the middle of a most important speech. I was going to say that, in the Easter Vacation after my visit to the castle, I went over to Paris with a friend, a fellow of my college. We drove to the Hotel d"Alsace (I believe there is no hotel of that name; if there is, I beg the spirited proprietor"s pardon, and a.s.sure him that nothing personal is intended).
We marched upstairs with our bags and baggage, and jolly high stairs they were. When we had removed the soil of travel from our persons, my friend called out to me, "I say, Jones, why shouldn"t we go down by the lift."
{256} "All right," said I, and my friend walked to the door of the mechanical apparatus, opened it, and got in. I followed him, when the porter whose business it is to "personally conduct" the inmates of the hotel, entered also, and was closing the door.
"His eyes met mine, and I knew him in a moment. I had seen him once before. His sallow face, black, closely shaven chin, furtive glance, and military bearing, were the face and the glance and bearing of the driver of that awful hea.r.s.e!
"In a moment--more swiftly than I can tell you--I pushed past the man, threw open the door, and just managed, by a violent effort, to drag my friend on to the landing. Then the lift rose with a sudden impulse, fell again, and rushed, with frightful velocity, to the bas.e.m.e.nt of the hotel, whence we heard an appalling crash, followed by groans. We rushed downstairs, and the horrible spectacle of destruction that met our eyes I shall never forget. The unhappy porter was expiring in agony; but the warning had saved my life and my friend"s."
"_I was that friend_," said I--the collector of these anecdotes; "and so far I can testify to the truth of Jones"s story."
At this moment, however, the gong for dressing sounded, and we went to our several apartments, after this emotional specimen of "Evenings at Home."
IN CASTLE PERILOUS.
"What we suffer from most," said the spectre, when I had partly recovered from my fright, "is a kind of aphasia."
The spectre was sitting on the armchair beside my bed in the haunted room of Castle Perilous.
"I don"t know," said I, as distinctly as the chattering of my teeth would permit, "that I quite follow you. Would you mind--excuse me--handing me that flask which lies on the table near you. . . . Thanks."
The spectre, without stirring, so arranged the a priori sensuous schemata of time and s.p.a.ce {261} that the silver flask, which had been well out of my reach, was in my hand. I poured half the contents into a cup and offered it to him.
"No spirits," he said curtly.
I swallowed eagerly the heady liquor, and felt a little more like myself.
"You were complaining," I remarked, "of something like aphasia?"
"I was," he replied. "You know what aphasia is in the human subject? A paralysis of certain nervous centres, which prevents the patient, though perfectly sane, from getting at the words which he intends to use, and forces others upon him. He may wish to observe that it is a fine morning, and may discover that his idea has taken the form of an observation about the Roman Calendar under the Emperor Justinian. That is aphasia, and we suffer from what, I presume, is a spiritual modification of that disorder."
"Yet to-night," I responded, "you are speaking like a printed book."
"To-night," said the spectre, acknowledging the compliment with a bow, "the conditions are peculiarly favourable."
"Not to _me_," I thought, with a sigh.
"And I am able to manifest myself with unusual clearness."
"Then you are not always in such form as I am privileged to find you in?"
I inquired.
"By no means," replied the spectre. "Sometimes I cannot appear worth a cent. Often I am invisible to the naked eye, and even quite indiscernible by any of the senses. Sometimes I can only rap on the table, or send a cold wind over a visitor"s face, or at most pull off his bedclothes (like the spirit which appeared to Caligula, and is mentioned by Suetonius) and utter hollow groans."
"That"s exactly what you _did_," I said, "when you wakened me. I thought I should have died."
"I can"t say how distressed I am," answered the spectre. "It is just an instance of what I was trying to explain. We don"t know how we are going to manifest ourselves."
"Don"t apologize," I replied, "for a const.i.tutional peculiarity. To what do you attribute your success to night?"
"Partly to your extremely receptive condition, partly to the whisky you took in the smoking-room, but chiefly to the magnetic environment."
"Then you do not suffer at all from aphasia just now?"
"Not a touch of it at this moment, thank you; but, as a rule, we all _do_ suffer horribly. This accounts for everything that you embodied spirits find remarkable and enigmatic in our conduct. We _mean_ something, straight enough; but our failure is in expression. Just think how often you go wrong yourselves, though _your_ spirits have a brain to play on, like the musician with a piano. Now _we_ have to do as well as we can without any such mechanical advantage as a brain of cellular tissue"--here he suddenly took the form of a white lady with a black sack over her head, and disappeared in the wainscot.
"Excuse me," he said a moment afterwards, quite in his ordinary voice, "I had a touch of it, I fancy. I lost the thread of my argument, and am dimly conscious of having expressed myself in some unusual and more or less incoherent fashion. I hope it was nothing at all vulgar or distressing?"
"Nothing out of the way in haunted houses, I a.s.sure you," I replied, "merely a white lady with a black sack over her head."
"Oh, _that_ was it," he answered with a sigh; "I often am afflicted in that way. Don"t mind me if I turn into a luminous boy, or a very old man in chains, or a lady in a green gown and high-heeled shoes, or a headless horseman, or a Mauth hound, or anything of that sort. They are all quite imperfect expressions of our nature,--symptoms, in short, of the malady I mentioned."
"Then the appalling manifestations to which you allude are not the apparitions of the essential ghost? It is not in those forms that he appears among his friends?"
"Certainly not," said the spectre; "and it would be very promotive of good feeling between men and disembodied spirits if this were more generally known. I myself--"
Here he was interrupted by an attack of spirit rappings. A brisk series of sharp faint taps, of a kind I never heard before, resounded from all the furniture of the room. {265} While the disturbance continued, the spectre drummed nervously with his fingers on his knee. The sounds ended as suddenly as they had begun, and he expressed his regrets. "It is a thing I am subject to," he remarked; "nervous, I believe, but, to persons unaccustomed to it, alarming."
"It _is_ rather alarming," I admitted.
"A mere fit of sneezing," he went on; "but you are now able to judge, from the events of to-night, how extremely hard it is for us, with the best intentions, to communicate coherently with the embodied world. Why, there is the Puddifant ghost--in Lord Puddifant"s family, you know: _he_ has been trying for generations to inform his descendants that the drainage of the castle is execrable. Yet he can never come nearer what he means than taking the form of a shadowy hea.r.s.e-and-four, and driving round and round Castle Puddifant at midnight. And old Lady Wadham"s ghost, what a sufferer that woman is! She merely desires to remark that the family diamonds, lost many years ago, were never really taken abroad by the valet and sold. He only had time to conceal them in a secret drawer behind the dining-room chimney-piece. Now she can get no nearer expressing herself than producing a spirited imitation of the music of the bagpipes, which wails up and down the house, and frightens the present Sir Robert Wadham and his people nearly out of their wits. And that"s the way with almost all of us: there is literally no connection (as a rule) between our expressions and the things we intend to express.
You know how the Psychical Society make quite a study of rappings, and try to interpret them by the alphabet? Well, these, as I told you, are merely a nervous symptom; annoying, no doubt, but not dangerous. The only spectres, almost, that manage to hint what they really mean are Banshees."
"_They_ intend to herald an approaching death?" I asked.