The Oxford Book of Victorian Ghost Stories (63 page)

I rushed to the door and tore it open, with that awful despairing cry still ringing in my ears. The verandah was empty; there was not a soul to be seen or a sound to be heard, save the rain on the roof.

'Aggie,' I screamed, 'come here! Someone has gone over the verandah and down the khud! You heard him.'

'Yes,' she said, following me out; 'but come in—come in.'

'I believe it was Charlie Chalmers'—shaking her as I spoke. 'He has been killed—killed—killed! And you stand and do nothing. Send people! Let us go ourselves! Bearer! Ayah! Khidmatgar!' I cried, raising my voice.

'Hush! It was not Charlie Chalmers,' she said, vainly endeavouring to draw me into the drawing-room. 'Come in—come in.'

'No, no!'—pushing her away and wringing my hands. 'How cruel you are! How inhuman! There is a path. Let us go at once—at once!'

'You need not trouble yourself, Susan,' she interrupted; 'and you need not cry and tremble—they will bring him up. What you heard was supernatural; it was not real.'

'No—no—no! It was all real. Oh! that scream is in my ears still.'

'I will convince you,' said Aggie, taking my hand as she spoke. 'Feel all along the verandah. Are the railings broken?'

I did as she bade me. No, though very wet and clammy, the railing was intact.

'Where is the broken place?' she asked.

Where, indeed?

'Now,' she continued, 'since you will not come in, look over, and you will see something more presently.'

Shivering with fear and cold, drifting rain, I gazed down as she bade me, and there far below I saw lights moving rapidly to and fro, evidently in search of something. After a little delay they congregated in one place. There was a low, booming murmur—they had found him—and presently they commenced to ascend the hill, with the 'hum-hum' of coolies carrying a burden. Nearer and nearer the lights and sounds came up to the very brink of the khud, past the end of the verandah. Many steps and many torches—faint blue torches held by invisible hands—invisible but heavy-footed bearers carried their burden slowly upstairs and along the passage, and deposited it with a dump in Aggie's bedroom! As we stood clasped in one another's arms and shaking all over, the steps descended, the ghostly lights passed up the avenue and disappeared in the gathering darkness. The repetition of the tragetly was over for that day.

'Have you heard it before?' I asked with chattering teeth, as I bolted the drawing-room window.

'Yes, the evening of the picnic and twice since. That is the reason I have always tried to stay out till late and to keep you out. I was hoping and praying you might never hear it. It always happens just before dark. I am afraid you have thought me very queer of late. I have told no end of stories to keep you and the children from harm—I have-'

'I think you have been very kind,' I interrupted. 'Oh, Aggie, shall you ever get that crash and that awful cry out of your head?'

'Never!' hastily lighting the candles as she spoke.

'Is there anything more?' I asked tremulously.

'Yes; sometimes at night the most terrible weeping and sobbing in my bedroom,' and she shuddered at the mere recollection.

'Do the servants know?' I asked anxiously.

'The ayah Muma has heard it, and the khansamah says his mother is sick and he must go, and the bearer wants to attend his brother's wedding. They will all leave.'

'I suppose most people know too?' I suggested dejectedly.

'Yes, don't you remember Mrs Starkey's warnings and her saying that without the verandah the house was worth double rent? We understand that dark speech of hers novo, and we have not come to Cooper's Hotel yet.'

'No, not yet. I wish we had. I wonder what Tom will say? He will be here in another fortnight. Oh, I wish he was here now.'

In spite of our heart-shaking experience, we managed to eat and drink and sleep, yea, to play tennis—somewhat solemnly, it is true— and go to the club, where we remained to the very last moment; needless to mention that I now entered into Aggie's manoeuvre con amore. Mrs Starkey evidently divined the reason of our loitering in Kantia, and said in her most truculent manner, as she squared up to us:

'You keep your children out very late, Mrs. Shandon.' 'Yes, but we like to have them with us,' rejoined Aggie in a meek apologetic voice.

'Then why don't you go home earlier?'

'Because it is so stupid and lonely,' was the mendacious answer.

'Lonely is not the word I should use. I wonder if you are as wise as your neighbours now? Come now, Mrs. Shandon.'

'About what?' said Aggie with ill-feigned innocence.

'About Briarwood. Haven't you heard it yet? The ghastly precipice and horse affair?'

'Yes, I suppose we may as well confess that we have.'

'Humph! you are a brave couple to stay on. The Tombs tried it last year for three weeks. The Paxtons took it the year before, and then sub-let it, not that they believed in ghosts—oh, dear no,' and she laughed ironically.

'And what is the story?' I enquired eagerly.

'Well, the story is this. An old retired officer and his wife and their pretty niece lived at Briarwood a good many years ago. The girl was engaged to be married to a fine young fellow in the Guides. The day before the wedding what you know of happened, and has happened every monsoon ever since. The poor girl went out of her mind and destroyed herself, and the old colonel and his wife did not long survive her. The house is uninhabitable in the monsoon, and there seems nothing for it but to auction off the furniture and pull it down; it will always be the same as long as it stands. Take my advice and come into Cooper's Hotel. I believe you can have that small set of rooms at the back. The sitting-room smokes, but beggars can't be choosers.'

'That will only be our very last resource,' said Aggie hotly.

'It's not very grand, I grant you, but any port in a storm.'

Tom arrived, was doubly welcome, and was charmed with Briarwood. Chaffed us unmercifully and derided our fears until he himself had a similar experience, and he heard the phantom horse plunging in the verandah and that wild, unearthly and utterly appalling shriek. No, he could not laugh that away, and seeing that we had now a mortal abhorrence of the place, that the children had to be kept abroad in the damp till long after dark, that Aggie was a mere hollow-eyed spectre, and that we had scarcely a servant left, that—in short, one day we packed up precipitately and fled in a body to Cooper's Hotel. But we did not basely endeavour to sub-let, nor advertise Briarwood as 'a delightfully situated pucka built house, containing all the requirements of a gentleman's family'. No, no. Tom bore the loss of the rent and—a more difficult feat—Aggie bore Mrs Starkey's insufferable, 'I told you so.'

Aggie was at Kantia again last season. She walked out early one morning to see our former abode. The chowkidar and parrot are still in possession, and are likely to remain the sole tenants on the premises. The parrot suns and dusts his ancient feathers in the empty verandah, which

re-echoes with his cry of 'Lucy, where are you, pretty Lucy?' The chowkidar inhabits a secluded go-down at the back, where he passes most of the day in sleeping, or smoking the soothing 'huka'. The place has a forlorn, uncared-for appearance now. The flowers are nearly all gone; the paint has peeled off the doors and windows; the avenue is grass-grown. Briarwood appears to have resigned itself to emptiness, neglect and decay, although outside the gate there still hangs a battered board on which, if you look very closely you can decipher the words 'To Let'.

John Charrington's Wedding

E. NESBIT

No one ever thought that May Forster would marry John Charrington; but he thought differently, and things which John Charrington intended had a queer way of coming to pass. He asked her to marry him before he went up to Oxford. She laughed and refused him. He asked her again next time he came home. Again she laughed, tossed her dainty blonde head, and again refused. A third time he asked her; she said it was becoming a confirmed bad habit, and laughed at him more than ever.

John was not the only man who wanted to marry her: she was the belle of our village coterie, and we were all in love with her more or less; it was a sort of fashion, like masher collars or Inverness capes. Therefore we were as much annoyed as surprised when John Charrington walked into our little local Club—we held it in a loft over the saddler's, I remember—and invited us all to his wedding.

'Your wedding?'

'You don't mean it?'

'Who's the happy fair? When's it to be?'

John Charrington filled his pipe and lighted it before he replied. Then he said—

'I'm sorry to deprive you fellows of your only joke—but Miss Forster and I are to be married in September.' 'You don't mean it?'

'He's got the mitten again, and its turned his head.'

'No,' 1 said, rising, 'I see it's true. Lend me a pistol someone—or a first-class fare to the other end of Nowhere. Charrington has bewitched the only pretty girl in our twenty-mile radius. Was it mesmerism, or a love-potion, Jack?'

'Neither, sir, but a gift you'll never have—perseverance—and the best luck a man ever had in this world.'

There was something in his voice that silenced me, and all chaff of the other fellows failed to draw him further.

The queer thing about it was that when we congratulated Miss Forster, she blushed and smiled, and dimpled, for all the world as though she were in love with him, and had been in love with him all the time. Upon my word, I think she had. Women are strange creatures.

We were all asked to the wedding. In Brixham everyone who was anybody knew everybody else who was anyone. My sisters were, I truly believe, more interested in the trousseau than the bride herself, and I was to be best man. The coming marriage was much canvassed at afternoon tea-tables, and at our little Club over the saddler's, and the question was always asked: 'Does she care for him?'

I used to ask that question myself in the early days of their engagement, but after a certain evening in August I never asked it again. I was coming home from the Club through the churchyard. Our church is on a thyme-grown hill, and the turf about it is so thick and soft that one's footsteps are noiseless.

I made no sound as I vaulted the low lichened wall, and threaded my way between the tombstones. It was at the same instant that I heard John Charrington's voice, and saw her face. May was sitting on a low flat gravestone with the full splendour of the western sun upon her mignonne face. Its expression ended, at once and for ever, any question of her love for him; it was transfigured to a beauty I should not have believed possible, even to that beautiful little face.

John lay at her feet, and it was his voice that broke the stillness of the golden August evening.

'My dear, my dear, I believe I should come back from the dead if you wanted me!'

I coughed at once to indicate my presence, and passed on into the shadow fully enlightened.

The wedding was to be early in September. Two days before I had to run up to town on business. The train was late, of course, for we are on the South-Eastern, and as I stood grumbling with my watch in my hand, whom should I see but John Charrington and May Forster. They were walking up and down the unfrequented end of the platform, arm in arm, looking into each other's eyes, careless of the sympathetic interest of the porters.

Of course I knew better than to hesitate a moment before burying myself in the booking-office, and it was not till the train drew up at the platform, that I obtrusively passed the pair with my Gladstone, and took the corner in a first-class smoking-carriage. I did this with as good an air of not seeing them as I could assume. I pride myself on my discretion, but if John were travelling alone I wanted his company. I had it.

'Hullo, old man,' came his cheery voice as he swung his bag into my carriage; 'here's luck; I was expecting a dull journey!'

'Where are you off to?' I asked, discretion still bidding me turn my eyes away, though I saw, without looking, that hers were red-rimmed.

'To old Branbridge's,' he answered, shutting the door and leaning out for a last word with his sweetheart.

'Oh, I wish you wouldn't go, John,' she was saying in a low, earnest voice. 'I feel certain something will happen.'

'Do you think I should let anything happen to keep me, and the day after tomorrow our wedding-day?'

'Don't go,' she answered, with a pleading intensity which would have sent my Gladstone on to the platform and me after it. But she wasn't speaking to me. John Charrington was made differently; he rarely changed his opinions, never his resolutions.

He only stroked the little ungloved hands that lay on the carriage door.

'I must, May. The old boy's been awfully good to me, and now he's dying I must go and see him, but I shall come home in time for-' the rest of the parting was lost in a whisper and in the rattling lurch of the starting train.

'You're sure to come?' she spoke as the train moved.

'Nothing shall keep me,' he answered; and we steamed out. After he had seen the last of the little figure on the platform he leaned back in his corner and kept silence for a minute.