Having thus remembered the legend, and remembered it with a shiver of which I was ashamed, I could not do otherwise than walk up towards the altar, just to look at the figures – as I said to myself; really what I wanted was to assure myself, first, that I did not believe the legend, and, secondly, that it was not true. I was rather glad that I had come. I thought that now I could tell Mrs Dorman how vain her fancies were, and how peacefully the marble figures slept on through the ghostly hour. With my hands in my pockets, I passed up the aisle. In the grey, dim light, the eastern end of the church looked larger than usual, and the arches above the tombs looked larger too. The moon came out and showed me the reason. I stopped short, my heart gave a great leap that nearly choked me, and then sank sickeningly.
The ‘bodies drawed out man-size’ were gone, and their marble slabs lay wide and bare in the vague moonlight that slanted through the west window.
Were they really gone? or was I mad? Clenching my nerves, I stooped and passed my hand over the smooth slabs and felt their flat unbroken surface. Had someone taken the things away? Was it some vile practical joke? I would make sure, anyway. In an instant I had made a torch of a newspaper which happened to be in my pocket, and lighting it held it high above my head. Its yellow glare illumined the dark arches and those slabs. The figures were gone. And I was alone in the church; or was I alone?
And then a horror seized me, a horror indefinable and indescribable – an overwhelming certainty of supreme and accomplished calamity. I flung down the torch and tore along the aisle and out through the door, biting my lips as I ran to keep myself from shrieking aloud. Was I mad – or what was this that possessed me? I leaped the churchyard wall and took the straight cut across the fields, led by the light from our windows. Just as I got over the first stile, a dark figure seemed to spring out of the ground. Mad still with the certainty of misfortune, I made for the thing that stood in my path, shouting ‘Get out of the way, can’t you?’
But my push met with a very vigorous resistance. My arms were caught just above the elbow and held as in a vice, and the raw-boned Irish doctor actually shook me.
‘Would ye?’ he cried in his own unmistakable accents – ‘would ye, then?’
‘Let me go, you fool,’ I gasped. ‘The marble figures have gone from the church; I tell you they’ve gone.’
He broke into a ringing laugh. ‘I’ll have to give ye a draught tomorrow, I see. Ye’ve been smoking too much and listening to old wives’ tales.’
‘I’ll tell you I’ve seen the bare slabs.’
‘Well, come back with me. I’m going up to old Palmer’s – his daughter’s ill – it’s only hysteria, but it’s as bad as it can be; we’ll look in at the church and let me see the bare slabs.’
‘You go if you like,’ I said, a little less frantic for his laughter, ‘I’m going home to my wife.’
‘Rubbish, man,’ said he; ‘D’ye think I’ll permit of that? Are ye to go saying all yer life that ye’ve seen solid marble endowed with vitality, and me to go all my life saying ye were a coward? No, sir – ye shan’t do ut!’
The quiet night – a human voice – and I think also the physical contact with this six feet of solid common sense, brought me back a little to my ordinary self, and the word ‘coward’ was a shower-bath.
‘Come on, then,’ I said sullenly, ‘perhaps you’re right.’
He still held my arm tightly. We got over the stile and back to the church. All was still as death. The place smelt very damp and earthy. We walked up the aisle. I am not ashamed to confess I shut my eyes; I knew the figures would not be there, I heard Kelly strike a match.
‘Here they are, ye see, right enough; ye’ve been dreaming or drinking, asking yer pardon for the imputation.’
I opened my eyes. By Kelly’s expiring vesta I saw two shapes lying ‘in their marble’ on their slabs. I drew a deep breath and caught his hand.
‘I’m awfully indebted to you,’ I said. ‘It must have been some trick of the light, or I have been working rather hard, perhaps that’s it. Do you know, I was quite convinced they were gone.’
‘I’m aware of that,’ he answered rather grimly; ‘ye’ll have to be careful of that brain of yours, my friend, I assure you.’
He was leaning over and looking at the right-hand figure, whose stone face was the most villainous and deadly in expression. He struck another match.
‘By Jove!’ he said, ‘something has been going on here – this hand is broken.’
And so it was. I was certain that it had been perfect the last time Laura and I had been there.
‘Perhaps someone had tried to remove them,’ said the young doctor.
‘That won’t account for my impression,’ I objected.
‘Too much painting and tobacco will account for what you call your impression,’ he said.
‘Come along,’ I said, ‘or my wife will be getting anxious. You’ll come in and have a drop of whisky, and drink confusion to ghosts and better sense to me.’
‘I ought to go up to Palmer’s but it’s so late now, I’d best leave it till the morning,’ he replied. ‘I was kept late at the Union, and I’ve had to see a lot of people since. All right, I’ll come back with ye.’
I think he fancied I needed him more than did Palmer’s girl, so, discussing how such an illusion could have been possible, and deducing from this experience large generalities concerning ghostly apparitions, we saw, as we walked up the garden path, that bright light streamed out of the front door, and presently saw that the parlour door was open too. Had she gone out?
‘Come in,’ I said, and Dr Kelly followed me into the parlour. It was all ablaze with candles, not only the wax ones, but at least a dozen guttering, glaring, tallow dips, stuck in vases and ornaments in unlikely places. Light, I knew, was Laura’s remedy for nervousness. Poor child! Why had I left her? Brute that I was.
We glanced round the room, and at first we did not see her. The window was open and the draught set all the candles flaring one way. Her chair was empty, and her handkerchief and book lay on the floor. I turned to the window. There, in the recess of the window, I saw her. Oh, my child, my love, had she gone to that window to watch for me? To what had she turned with that look of frantic fear and horror? Had she thought that it was my step she heard and turned to meet – what?
She had fallen back against a table in the window, and her body lay half on it and half on the window-seat, and her head hung down over the table, the brown hair loosened and fallen to the carpet. Her lips were drawn back and her eyes wide, wide open. They saw nothing now. What had they last seen?
The doctor moved towards her. But I pushed him aside and sprang to her; caught her in my arms, and cried – ‘It’s all right, Laura! I’ve got you safe, dear!’
She fell into my arms in a heap. I clasped her and kissed her, and called her by all her pet names, but I think I knew all the time that she was dead. Her hands were tightly clenched. In one of them she held something fast. When I was quite sure that she was dead, and that nothing mattered at all any more, I let him open her hand to see what she held.
It was a grey marble finger.
The Violet Car
Do you know the downs – the wide windy spaces, the rounded shoulders of the hills leaned against the sky, the hollows where farms and homesteads nestle sheltered, with trees round them pressed close and tight as a carnation in a button-hole? On long summer days it is good to lie on the downs, between short turf and pale, clear sky, to smell the wild thyme, and hear the tiny tinkle of the sheep-bells and the song of the skylark. But on winter evenings when the wind is waking up to its work, spitting rain in your eyes, beating the poor, naked trees and shaking the dusk across the hills like a grey pall, then it is better to be by a warm fireside, in one of the farms that lie lonely where shelter is, and oppose their windows glowing with candlelight and firelight to the deepening darkness, as faith holds up its love-lamp in the night of sin and sorrow that is life.
I am unaccustomed to li
terary effort – and I feel that I shall not say what I have to say, nor that it will convince you, unless I say it very plainly. I thought I could adorn mystery with pleasant words, prettily arranged. But as I pause to think of what really happened, I see that the plainest words will be the best. I do not know how to weave a plot, nor how to embroider it. It is best not to try. These things happened. I have no skill to add to what happened; nor is any adding of mine needed.
I am a nurse – and I was sent for to go to Charlestown – a mental case. It was November – and the fog was thick in London, so that my cab went at a foot’s pace, so I missed the train by which I should have gone. I sent a telegram to Charlestown, and waited in the dismal waiting room at London Bridge. The time was passed for me by a little child. Its mother, a widow, seemed too crushed to be able to respond to its quick questionings. She answered briefly, and not, as it seemed, to the child’s satisfaction. The child itself presently seemed to perceive that its mother was not, so to speak, available. It leaned back on the wide, dusty seat and yawned. I caught its eye, and smiled. It would not smile, but it looked. I took out of my bag a silk purse, bright with beads and steel tassels, and turned it over and over. Presently, the child slid along the seat and said, ‘Let me’ – After that all was easy. The mother sat with eyes closed. When I rose to go, she opened them and thanked me. The child, clinging, kissed me. Later, I saw them get into a first class carriage in my train. My ticket was a third class one.
I expected, of course, that there would be a conveyance of some sort to meet me at the station – but there was nothing. Nor was there a cab or a fly to be seen. It was by this time nearly dark, and the wind was driving the rain almost horizontally along the unfrequented road that lay beyond the door of the station. I looked out, forlorn and perplexed.
‘Haven’t you engaged a carriage?’ It was the widow lady who spoke.
I explained.
‘My motor will be here directly,’ she said, ‘you’ll let me drive you? Where is it you are going?’
‘Charlestown,’ I said, and as I said it, I was aware of a very odd change in her face. A faint change, but quite unmistakable.
‘Why do you look like that?’ I asked her bluntly. And, of course, she said, ‘Like what?’
‘There’s nothing wrong with the house?’ I said, for that, I found, was what I had taken that faint change to signify; and I was very young, and one has heard tales. ‘No reason why I shouldn’t go there, I mean?’
‘No – oh no –’ she glanced out through the rain, and I knew as well as though she had told me that there was a reason why she should not wish to go there.
‘Don’t trouble,’ I said, ‘it’s very kind of you – but it’s probably out of your way and … ’
‘Oh – but I’ll take you – of course I’ll take you,’ she said, and the child said ‘Mother, here comes the car.’
And come it did, though neither of us heard it till the child had spoken. I know nothing of motor cars, and I don’t know the names of any of the parts of them. This was like a brougham – only you got in at the back, as you do in a waggonette; the seats were in the corners, and when the door was shut there was a little seat that pulled up, and the child sat on it between us. And it moved like magic – or like a dream of a train.
We drove quickly through the dark – I could hear the wind screaming, and the wild dashing of the rain against the windows, even through the whirring of the machinery. One could see nothing of the country – only the black night, and the shafts of light from the lamps in front.
After, as it seemed, a very long time, the chauffeur got down and opened a gate. We went through it, and after that the road was very much rougher. We were quite silent in the car, and the child had fallen asleep.
We stopped, and the car stood pulsating, as though it were out of breath, while the chauffeur hauled down my box. It was so dark that I could not see the shape of the house, only the lights in the downstairs windows, and the low-walled front garden faintly revealed by their light and the light of the motor lamps. Yet I felt that it was a fair-sized house, that it was surrounded by big trees, and that there was a pond or river close by. In daylight next day I found that all this was so. I have never been able to tell how I knew it that first night, in the dark, but I did know it. Perhaps there was something in the way the rain fell on the trees and on the water. I don’t know.
The chauffeur took my box up a stone path, whereon I got out, and said my goodbyes and thanks.
‘Don’t wait, please, don’t,’ I said. ‘I’m all right now. Thank you a thousand times!’
The car, however, stood pulsating till I had reached the doorstep, then it caught its breath, as it were, throbbed more loudly, turned, and went.
And still the door had not opened. I felt for the knocker, and rapped smartly. Inside the door I was sure I heard whispering. The car light was fast diminishing to a little distant star, and its panting sounded now hardly at all. When it ceased to sound at all, the place was quiet as death. The lights glowed redly from curtained windows, but there was no other sign of life. I wished I had not been in such a hurry to part from my escort, from human companionship, and from the great, solid, competent presence of the motor car.
I knocked again, and this time I followed the knock by a shout.
‘Hullo!’ I cried. ‘Let me in. I’m the nurse!’
There was a pause, such a pause as would allow time for whisperers to exchange glances on the other side of a door.
Then a bolt ground back, a key turned, and the doorway framed no longer cold, wet wood, but light and a welcoming warmth – and faces.
‘Come in, oh, come in,’ said a voice, a woman’s voice, and the voice of a man said: ‘We didn’t know there was anyone there.’
And I had shaken the very door with my knockings!
I went in, blinking at the light, and the man called a servant, and between them they carried my box upstairs.
The woman took my arm and led me into a low, square room, pleasant, homely, and comfortable, with solid mid-Victorian comfort – the kind that expressed itself in rep and mahogany. In the lamplight I turned to look at her. She was small and thin, her hair, her face, and her hands were of the same tint of greyish yellow.
‘Mrs Eldridge?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ said she, very softly. ‘Oh! I am so glad you’ve come. I hope you won’t be dull here. I hope you’ll stay. I hope I shall be able to make you comfortable.’
She had a gentle, urgent way of speaking that was very winning.
‘I’m sure I shall be very comfortable,’ I said; ‘but it’s I that am to take care of you. Have you been ill long?’
‘It’s not me that’s ill, really,’ she said, ‘it’s him –’
Now, it was Mr Robert Eldridge who had written to engage me to attend on his wife, who was, he said, slightly deranged.
‘I see,’ said I. One must never contradict them, it only aggravates their disorder.
‘The reason … ’ she was beginning, when his foot sounded on the stairs, and she fluttered off to get candles and hot water.
He came in and shut the door. A fair bearded, elderly man, quite ordinary.
‘You’ll take care of her,’ he said. ‘I don’t want her to get talking to people. She fancies things.’
‘What form do the illusions take?’ I asked, prosaically.
‘She thinks I’m mad,’ he said, with a short laugh.
‘It’s a very usual form. Is that all?’
‘It’s about enough. And she can’t hear things that I can hear, see things that I can see, and she can’t smell things. By the way, you didn’t see or hear anything of a motor as you came up, did you?’
‘I came up in a motor car,’ I said shortly. ‘You never sent to meet me, and a lady gave me a lift.’ I was going to explain about my missing the earlier train, when I found that he was not listening to me. He was watching the door. When his wife came in, with a steaming jug in one hand and a flat candlestick in the other, h
e went towards her, and whispered eagerly. The only words I caught were: ‘She came in a real motor.’
Apparently, to these simple people a motor was as great a novelty as to me. My telegram, by the way, was delivered next morning.
They were very kind to me; they treated me as an honoured guest. When the rain stopped, as it did late the next day, and I was able to go out, I found that Charlestown was a farm, a large farm, but even to my inexperienced eyes it seemed neglected and unprosperous. There was absolutely nothing for me to do but to follow Mrs Eldridge, helping her where I could in her household duties, and to sit with her while she sewed in the homely parlour. When I had been in the house a few days, I began to put together the little things that I had noticed singly, and the life at the farm seemed suddenly to come into focus, as strange surroundings do after a while.
I found that I had noticed that Mr and Mrs Eldridge were very fond of each other, and that it was a fondness, and their way of showing it was a way that told that they had known sorrow, and had borne it together. That she showed no sign of mental derangement, save in the persistent belief of hers that he was deranged. That the morning found them fairly cheerful; that after the early dinner they seemed to grow more and more depressed; that after the ‘early cup of tea’ – that is just as dusk was falling – they always went for a walk together. That they never asked me to join them in this walk, and that it always took the same direction – across the downs towards the sea. That they always returned from this walk pale and dejected; that she sometimes cried afterwards alone in their bedroom, while he was shut up in the little room they called the office, where he did his accounts, and paid his men’s wages, and where his hunting-crops and guns were kept. After supper, which was early, they always made an effort to be cheerful. I knew that this effort was for my sake, and I knew that each of them thought it was good for the other to make it.