In Ghostly Company (Tales of Mystery & The Supernatural) (5 page)

‘Who are you,’ exclaimed Mr Kershaw, ‘and why do you come with this message to me? I cannot call on Mr Wilcox. He is – ’ he stopped himself in time. ‘We have quarrelled,’ he added lamely.

‘My name is not important,’ answered the other, ‘but I come as a friend and I urge you to follow my advice; I know of your quarrel, but quarrels can be made up.’

Mr Kershaw’s mind was labouring like a mill, but the idea suddenly flashed over him that this might be Wilcox’s solicitor, who, ashamed of his client’s action, was now seeking to repair the breach between him and himself.

‘I can never make up with Mr Wilcox,’ he said, ‘it is too late.’

The stranger bowed. ‘I have given my message,’ he said. ‘Think it over and act upon it.’ Without another word he turned and left the room.

Almost as he closed the door the recollection of what he had said flashed across Mr Kershaw. ‘It is too late’; he had given himself away, he was a lost man. He sprang from his chair and rushed into the hall. The stranger was not there.

‘Mary,’ he cried, ‘has that gentleman gone?’

‘Isn’t he with you, sir?’ said the maid. ‘I didn’t see him go out.’

Mr Kershaw hurried to the front door and went out into the road, at that hour nearly empty of traffic. He gazed up and down: the stranger was not to be seen. Crushed by the sense of his own folly and dumbfounded at the amazing message, Mr Kershaw returned to his study and endeavoured to think out his position.

Clearly the stranger knew something, but what and how much and why did he adopt this friendly attitude? Perhaps be, too, was a victim of Wilcox’s and sought in an indefinite way to warn him. Perhaps he was a madman, perhaps he really was Wilcox’s solicitor, bent on a peacemaking errand. Mr Kershaw could reach no conclusion, but presently the value of the advice began to dawn on him. He would call on Wilcox; he had had no intimation of the latter’s murder and it would be surely an unusual thing for a murderer to go and pay a social call on his victim. It would help to mislead the police.

But no time was to be lost. At any moment his servant might burst in on him with the dreadful news; he marvelled she had not done so before.

Putting on his hat he left the house and, with as much composure as he could command, walked over to Mr Wilcox’s house and rang the bell.

The butler, calm and dignified as usual, opened the door. ‘Good morning, Mr Kershaw,’ he said. ‘Will you walk in; Mr Wilcox said you were to be shown in to him if you called.’

Mr Kershaw was staggered. What did all this mean? Wilcox was dead, he himself had killed him. He recovered himself as best he might and followed the butler. The latter threw open the library door. ‘Mr Kershaw, sir,’ he announced.

Mr Kershaw entered the library. Mr Wilcox, fully dressed, was sitting in front of his desk, on which lay various papers. He was deathly pale and trembling violently; his right hand lay half concealed in a partly opened drawer. As Mr Kershaw entered his hand moved, and Mr Kershaw heard a heavy metal object rattle against the side of the drawer.

‘Good morning, Kershaw,’ said Mr Wilcox in a low voice; and as his visitor advanced across the room towards him, ‘No nearer,’ he screamed. ‘Sit in that chair by you. Don’t come any nearer.’

He partly withdrew his hand from the drawer and Mr Kershaw saw that it held a revolver.

Mr Kershaw seated himself and there was silence. Presently Mr Wilcox began in a thin, quavering voice: ‘I am glad you have called, Kershaw, very glad, I – I wanted to see you – I wanted to talk things over a bit with you. Perhaps I was a little hasty yesterday, but it was a joke, a bad joke, if you like.’ He went on with a sickly smile, ‘But now it is different. I am sure we can come to an agreement – I am so sorry for what happened yesterday afternoon.’

He stopped. Mr Kershaw gazed at him.

‘I hardly understand you,’ he said, ‘Yesterday afternoon?’

‘Yes, yes,’ broke in the other, ‘our quarrel, you know. Now we must not quarrel; we must be friends again. Look – No, don’t come nearer; I’ll throw you the papers; here is a copy of a letter and a telegram to my lawyers, sent off this morning to stop all proceedings; and here,’ he threw over another paper, ‘is a letter to you agreeing to go back to our old understanding and saying that I’ll find the money you want. It is not quite in legal shape yet,’ he went on, ‘but it will serve, yes, it will serve till we can get a new agreement drawn.’

Mr Kershaw took up the papers and gazed dully at them.

‘They seem to be all in order,’ he said, ‘but I don’t understand. Am I mad? Are you Wilcox? Why are you sitting there? Did I dream last night?’

The other turned even more ghastly than before. ‘Then did you dream it too?’ he cried. ‘Did you dream, as I dreamed, that you came into my bedroom last night and throttled me to death?’

In the Woods

The old woman raised herself from stooping among her vegetables, and looked upwards towards the wood topping the hill above her. Her glance was arrested by a pair of moving figures. Shading her eyes with her hand against the westering sun, the old woman gazed more attentively at them, and distinguished, outlined against the blackness of the fir-trees, the figures of a young girl and a large dog. Slowly they mounted the grassy slope, and as they drew near the wood its shadow seemed to her to stretch itself forward to meet them. They passed on, and vanished in its recesses. The old woman bent again to her task.

* * *

The girl was tired, tired and unhappy. She was tired with that tiredness that at seventeen seems hopeless and unending. It is a tiredness of the mind, an ill far worse than any physical fatigue. She was unhappy with an unhappiness that, being in a sense causeless, is all the more unbearable. She felt herself to be neglected, to be misunderstood. Not, be it remarked, that she was neglected in the sense in which we apply it to those in poverty and distress. On the contrary, she was doubtless, and she herself knew it, an object of envy to many. She lacked for no bodily comfort, she owned to no neglect of the mind. Governesses had implanted that which we call knowledge in her, affectionate parents had lavished their love and care upon her. She had been watched, guided, advised, taught with all possible care. She knew all this; and she knew that if she expressed a reasonable wish for any concrete thing she would promptly possess it. But yet she felt herself neglected. A lonely child, without brother or sister, and lacking the power or the will to find close friends among the other girls of her neighbourhood, she had been compelled to rely on her parents and their friends. In childhood she had been happy, but now, with the passing of the years, she felt, dimly and indistinctly perhaps, that she was isolated and alone.

She moved onwards into the recesses of the wood, the great St Bernard beside her, treading with familiar steps the well-known track, letting her eyes rest on the stately beauty of the trees and her tired thoughts draw repose from their profound calm. Her way led gradually upwards over the crest of a ridge covered with the dark grandeur of Scotch firs. In a few moments after entering the wood the trees, closing their ranks behind her, blotted out every glimpse of the valley whence she had come. In front and on each side of her they rose, towering, straight and tall, with clean stems, upwards to where their dark-green foliage branched out and almost hid the sky. Here and there rare gaps appeared, and in these open spaces the bracken leapt up to gaze upon the sun, and waved its green fronds in the gentle breeze. Her footsteps fell noiseless on the smooth dry pine-needles as she hurried on, drinking in the first feelings of rest, the rest and peace of the great woods.

Presently the trees began to thin in front of her, the gaps among them became more frequent and larger, and soon, passing out of the fir-wood, she gazed down on to a happy valley between two ridges. Beyond the valley the fir-trees recommenced, black and formidable-looking against the slowly setting sun, except away to her left, where the declining ridge opposite sank gently into more open country, and she could descry beyond the trees a fair prospect of unwooded fields. In front of her, as she emerged from among the pines, was a pool of still water, fed by a little brook, which meandered down a green and wooded valley, a valley of osiers and willow and hazel, carpeted at this season with buttercups and ragged-robin, and fringed by tall fox-gloves, by flowering elder and mountain ash. Among these lesser plants an occasional oak towered up, gnarled and misshapen, resembling, beside the stately firs, some uncouth giant of a bygone age.

The wood was very still, the afternoon hush lay upon it, there were no sounds save a gentle whispering of the wind among the fir-tops and the occasional harsh cry of a jay, startled by the rare sight of a human form, or the metallic note of a moor-hen swimming across the pool with its queer clockwork-like motion. With these sounds mingled the gentle tinkle of water escaping from the pool over a hoary flood-gate, and trickling away towards the cultivated lands below. All else was silent and moveless, and the girl, seating herself on the stump of a long-vanished tree, relapsed into absolute quiet, the dog lying equally still beside her.

The peacefulness of the scene calmed the vexed thoughts that had perplexed her; gradually the last gift of Pandora reasserted itself. She began to feel more confident in herself and in her future. True, the way was weary and long, lack of sympathy, lack of interest prevented her, but she felt that within herself lay the seeds of great deeds; the world would yet hear of her, success would yet be at her feet. Formless were the dreams, uncertain even in which direction they would be realised, but chief among them was her dream of music, her beloved music. The paths to many an ambition are closed to women, this she bitterly realised, but at any rate music lies open to them. The visions became more clearly defined, the tinkling water, the rustling pines resolved themselves into stirring rhythms and interlacing harmonies. In her excitement she moved slightly; the great dog, opening his eyes, glanced up, and licked the hand of his companion. This recalled her to herself; she looked up with a start, first at the evening sky and then at her watch, and with a little exclamation at the lateness of the hour hastened to retrace her footsteps through the trees. Presently she emerged again on the open hillside, and hurried downwards; the trees, bending to the rising wind, seemed to reach out long arms after her.

The woods enthralled her.

Her days were spent more and more dreaming in their recesses. She was much alone. Her father, a busy man, breakfasted, and was gone till evening, before she came down of a morning, an early tradition of delicate health having made her a late riser. In the evening, on his return, he was usually tired, kind but tired. Her mother, long an invalid, was away from home on an interminable cure, and in her absence even the rare visits of dull, country neighbours ceased. And so she lived, surrounded by comforts, a forgotten girl!

She grew more and more abstracted and dreamy: she neglected her duties, even her personal appearance suffered. The servants, who had long regarded her as eccentric, began to grow anxious, even a little alarmed. She became irregular in all her habits; she would stray away into the woods for hours, careless of time. In her rambles she became familiar with every corner of the woods; she was a familiar figure to the watchful gamekeeper and to the old woodman at his work. With these she was on a friendly footing. Once convinced that the great St Bernard harboured no evil intentions as regards his pheasants, the keeper was civil enough and, after a word or two of salutation, used to stand and watch the lithe, lonely, brown-clad figure slipping away from him among the brown tree trunks with a queer mixture of sympathy and bewilderment. But with the old woodman the young girl made closer friends. She loved to watch him at his solitary toil, and to note in his lined face the look of one who has lived his life in solitude among the beauties of the woods, and who has become cognisant of their glories and of part of their mysteries. She would speak to the old man but little, she spoke to few and rarely in those days, but her watch of him was sympathetic, and she seemed to be trying to draw from him something of that woodland mystery in which he was steeped.

And alone in the woods she grew ever closer to them; the trees began to be for her more than mere living trees: they began to become personalities. At first only certain of them were endowed with personality, but gradually she became aware that each tree was a living and a sentient being. She loved them all, even the distorted oak-trees were her friends. Lying prone in her favourite corner overhanging the pool, the forest become more and more alive, and the firs waving and rustling in the wind were souls lifting up their voices to God. She imagined them each with a living, separate soul, and mourned for a fallen giant as if it were a friend. Ever more and more rapt she became, more and more silent and unresponsive to her fellow-men. At times her father would gaze earnestly at the silent girl, clad in her simple white frock, seated opposite him, but he could discern nothing to disturb him. Her mother wrote, and the girl answered; letters of affection, but covering up within herself all the deep mysteries and yearnings of her heart.

The woods enthralled her.

In them, as she paced to and fro or rested on the stem of some fallen tree, listening to the rustling of the branches around, she became conscious that they were ringing with melody. She felt that here, and here alone among the trees, she could produce that divine music which her soul held expressionless within her. Vainly she would strive in her music room to reach even the lowest terrace of that musical palace whose grandest halls were freely opened to her among the solitudes of the woods.