Harry Caston looked about the supper-room, with its walls of white and gold, its cl.u.s.ters of bright faces, its flash of silver, its running noise of merriment. His fingers twitched restlessly.
"Yes, I am going," he said. "I shall leave London to-morrow. I have a house."
"I know that too--in the Isle of Wight."
"Not so very far, after all, is it?" he said.
"As far as Timbuctoo when you are there," replied Mrs. Wordingham. Her great dark eyes rested wistfully upon his face; she leaned the least little bit towards him. Harry Caston was silent for a moment. Then he turned to her with a smile of apology.
"You know me----"
"Oh, don"t I!" she cried in a low voice. "We shall see you no more for--how many months?"
Harry Caston did not answer. His memories were busy with an afternoon of early summer in that same year, when, as his motor-car slid down a long straight slope into a village of red-brick cottages, he had seen, on the opposite incline, a row of tall stone-pines, and glowing beneath their shade the warm brown roof of a small and ancient house.
"Tell me about it," said Mrs. Wordingham, once more interpreting his silence.
"There was a bridge at the bottom of the hill--a bridge across the neck of a creek, with an old flour mill and a tiny roof at one side of it. Inland of the bridge was a reach of quiet water running back towards the downs through woods and meadows. Already I seemed to have dropped from the crest of the hill into another century. Beyond the bridge the road curved upwards. I went up on my second speed between the hedge of a field which sloped down to the creek upon the one side, and a low brick wall topped by a bank of gra.s.s upon the other. The incline of the hill brought my head suddenly above the bank, and I looked straight across a smooth lawn broken by great trees on to the front of a house. And I stopped my car, believe me, almost with a gasp. There was no fence or hedge to impede my view. I had come at last across the perfect house, and I sat in the car and stared and stared at it, not at first with any conscious desire to possess it, but simply taken by the sheer beauty of the thing, just as one may gaze at a jewel."
The lights went suddenly out in the supper-room, as a gentle warning that time was up, and then were raised again. Harry Caston, however, seemed unaware of any change. He was at the moment neither of that party nor of that room.
"It was a small house of the E shape, raised upon a low parapet and clothed in ivy. The middle part, set back a few feet behind flowers, had big flat windows; the gabled ends had smaller ones and more of them. Oh, I can"t describe to you what I saw! The house in detail?
Yes. But that would not give you an idea of it. The woodwork of the windows was painted white, and, where they stood open to the sunlight and the air, they showed you deep embrasures of black oak within."
He stumbled on awkwardly, impelled to describe the house, yet aware that his description left all unsaid. The tiles of the roof were mellowed by centuries, so that shade ran into shade; and here they were almost purple, and there brown with a glint of gold. Two great chimney stacks stood high, not rising from the roof, but from the sides of the house, flanking it like sentinels, and over these, too, the ivy climbed.
But what had taken Caston by the throat was the glamour of repose on that old house. Birds flickered about the lawn, and though the windows stood open, and the gra.s.s was emerald green and smooth, no smoke rose from any of the chimney-tops.
"I ran on for a few yards," he went on, "until I saw a road which branched off to the right. I drove up it, and came to a gate with a notice that the house was to be sold. I went in, and at the back of the house, in a second queer little gra.s.s garden, screened by big trees upon three sides and a low red-brick wall upon the fourth, over which you could see the upper reach of the estuary and the woods on the further hill, I found a garrulous old gardener."
Mrs. Wordingham leaned forward.
"And what story had he to tell?"
"Oh, none!" answered Caston with a laugh. "There"s no tragic or romantic history connected with the house. Of course, it"s haunted--that goes without saying. There"s hardly a bedroom window where the ivy does not tap upon the panes. But for history! Four old ladies took it for a summer, and remained in it for forty years. The last one of them died two years ago. That"s all the history the gardener knew. But he showed me over the house, the quaintest place you ever dreamed of--a small stone-flagged hall, little staircases rising straight and enclosed in the walls, great polished oak beams, rooms larger than you would expect, and a great one on the first floor, occupying the middle of the house and looking out upon the gra.s.s garden at the back, and over the sunk road to the creek in front. Anyway"--and he broke off abruptly--"I bought the house, and I"ve furnished it, and now----"
"Now you are going to shut yourself up in it," said Mrs. Wordingham.
The lights were turned out now for the last time. The party sat almost in darkness. Caston turned towards his companion. He could just see the soft gleam of her dark eyes.
"For a little," he replied. "I have to, you know. I can"t help it. I enjoy all this. I like running about London as much as any man; I--I am fond of my friends." The lady smiled with a little bitterness, and Caston went on: "But the time comes when everything suddenly jars on me--noise, company, everything--when I must get away with my books into some refuge of my own, when I must take my bath of solitude without anyone having a lien upon a single minute of my time. The need has come on me to-night. The house is ready--waiting. I shall go to-morrow."
Mrs. Wordingham glanced at him with a quick anxiety. There was a trifle of exasperation in his voice. He was suddenly on wires.
"Yes, you look tired," she said. The head waiter approached the table, and the party broke up and mounted the steps into the hall. Caston handed Mrs. Wordingham into her carriage.
"I shall see you when I come back?" said he, and Mrs. Wordingham answered with a well-a.s.sumed carelessness:
"I shall be in London in the autumn. Perhaps you will have some story to tell me of your old house. Has it a name?"
"Oh, yes--Hawk Hill," replied Caston. "But there"s no story about that house," he repeated, and the carriage rolled away. Later on, however, he was inclined to doubt the accuracy of his statement, confidently though he had made it. And a little later still be became again aware of its truth.
Here, at all events, is what occurred. Harry Caston idled through his mornings over his books, sailed his sloop down the creek and out past the black booms into the Solent in the afternoon, and came back to a solitary dinner in the cool of the evening. Thus he pa.s.sed a month. He was not at all tired with his own company. The inevitable demand for comrades and a trifle of gaiety had not yet been whispered to his soul. The fret of his nerves ceased; London sank away into the mists.
Even the noise of the motor-horns in the hidden road beneath his lawn merely reminded him pleasantly that he was free of that whirlpool and of all who whirled in it. If he needed conversation, there were the boatmen on the creek, with their interest in tides and shoals, or the homely politics of the village. But Caston needed very little. He drifted back, as it seemed to him, into the reposeful, lavender-scented life of a century and a half ago. For though the house was of the true E shape, and had its origin in Tudor times, it was with that later period that Caston linked it in his thoughts.
Tudor times were stirring, and the recollection of them uncongenial to Caston"s mood.
He had furnished the house to suit his mood, and the room which he chiefly favoured--a room at the back, with a great bay window thrown out upon the gra.s.s, and the floor just a step below the level of the garden--had the very look of some old parlour where Mr. Hardcastle might have sipped his port, and Kate st.i.tched at her samplers. Here he was sitting at ten o"clock in the evening, about a month after he had left London, when the first of the incidents occurred. It was nothing very startling in itself--merely the sound of some small thing falling upon the boards of the floor and rolling into a corner--a crisp, sharp sound, as though a pebble had dropped.
Caston looked up from his book, at the first hardly curious. But in a minute or so, it occurred to him that he was alone, and that he had dropped nothing. Moreover, the sound had travelled from the other side of the room. He was not as yet curious enough to rise from his chair, and a round satin-wood table impeded his view. But he looked about the room, and could see nothing from which an ornament could have dropped.
He turned back to his book, but his attention wandered. Once or twice he looked sharply up, as though he expected to find another occupant in the room. Finally he rose, and walking round the table, he saw what seemed to be a big gla.s.s bead sparkling in the lamplight on the dark-stained boards in a corner of the room. He picked the object up, and found it to be not a large bead, but a small k.n.o.b or handle of cut-gla.s.s. He knew now whence it had come.
Against the wall stood a small Louis Seize table in white and gold, which he remembered to have picked up at a sale, with some other furniture, at some old mansion, across the water, in the New Forest.
He had paid no particular attention to the table, had never even troubled to look inside of it. It had the appearance of being a lady"s secretaire or something of the kind. But there were three shallow drawers, one above the other, in the middle part of it--it was what is inelegantly called a kidney table--and these drawers were fitted with small gla.s.s k.n.o.bs such as that which he held in his hand.
Caston went over to the table, and saw that one of the k.n.o.bs was missing. He stooped to replace it, and at once stood erect again, with the k.n.o.b in his hand and a puzzled expression upon his face. He had expected that the handles would fit on to projecting screws. But he found that they were set into bra.s.s rings, and firmly set. This one which he held seemed to have been wrenched out of its setting by some violent jerk. He tried the drawers, but they were locked. There were some papers and books spread upon the top. He removed them, and found upon the white polish a half-erased crest. It was plain that the middle part of the top was a lid and lifted up, but it was now locked down. Caston did not replace the books and papers. He returned to his chair. The servants probably had been curious. No doubt they had tried to open the drawers, and in the attempt had loosened one of the handles.
Caston was content with the explanation--for that night. But the next evening, at the same hour, the legs of the table rattled on the wooden floor. He sprang up from his seat. The table was shaking. He stepped quickly across to it, and then stopped with his heart leaping in his breast. The books and papers had not been replaced, and he had seen--it might be that his eyes had played him a trick, but he had _seen_--a small slim hand suddenly withdrawn from the lid of the table. The hand had been lying flat upon its palm--Caston had just time enough to see that--and it was the left hand.
"That"s exactly the position," he said to himself, "in which one would place the left hand to hold the table steady while one tried to force the drawers open with one"s right."
He stood without a movement, but the hand did not appear again; and then he found himself saying in a quiet voice of rea.s.surance:
"Can I help at all?"
The sound of his own words stirred him abruptly to laughter. Common sense rea.s.serted itself; his eyes had played him a trick. Too much tobacco, very likely, was the cause and origin of his romantic vision.
But, none the less, he remained standing quite still, with his eyes fixed upon the table"s polished lid, for some minutes; and when he went back at last to his chair, from time to time he glanced abruptly from his book, in the hope that he might once more detect the hand upon the table. But he was disappointed.
The next morning he saw the old gardener sweeping the leaves from the front lawn, and he at once and rather eagerly went out to him.
"I think you told me, Hayes, that this house is supposed to be haunted," he said, with a laugh at the supposition.
The gardener took off his hat and scratched his head reflectively.
"Well, they do say, sir, as it is. But I"ve never seen anything myself, nor can I rightly say that I"ve ever come across anyone who has. A pack o" nonsense, I call it."
"Very likely, Hayes," said Caston. "And what sort of a person is it who"s supposed to walk?"
"An old man in grey stockings," replied the gardener. "That"s what I"ve heard. But what he"s supposed to be doing I don"t know, sir, any more than I know why there should be so much fuss about his wearing grey stockings. Live men do that, after all."
"To be sure," replied Caston. "You may count them by dozens on bicycles if you stand for an hour or two above the road here." And he went back to the house. It was quite clear that his visitant of last night, if there had been one, was not the native spectre of this small old manor-house.
"The slim white hand I saw," Caston argued, "belonged to no old man in grey stockings or out of them. It was the hand of a quite young woman.
But if she doesn"t belong to the house, if she isn"t one of the fixtures to be taken on by the incoming tenant--if, in a word, she"s a trespa.s.ser--how in the world did she find her way here?"
Caston suddenly saw an answer to the question--a queer and a rather attractive answer, especially to a man who had fed for a month on solitude and had grown liable to fancies. He had all through this lonely month been gradually washing from his body and his mind the dust of his own times. He had sought to reproduce the quiet of an older age, and in the seeking had perhaps done more than reproduce.
That was his thought. He had, perhaps, by ever so little, penetrated the dark veil which hides from men all days but their own--just enough, say, to catch a glimpse of a hand. He himself was becoming more and more harmonious with his house; the cries of the outer world hardly reached his ears in that little parlour which opened on to the hidden garden. It seemed to him that other times, through some thinning out of the thick curtain of his senses, were becoming actual and real just to him.
"The first month pa.s.sed," he said to himself. "I was undisturbed; no sign was made. I was still too near to what I had left behind--London and the rest of it. But now I pa.s.s more and more over the threshold into that other century. First of all, I was only aware of a movement, a presence; then I was able to see--nothing much, it is true--only a small hand. But tonight I may see her to whom the hand belongs. In a week I may be admitted into her company."