Classic Ghost Stories (11 page)

“Can you tell me if I am near to Crabb Cot—Squire Todhetley's?” he asked, reining-in his horse.

“You will reach it in a minute or two. I live there. Squire Todhetley is not at home. What do you want with him?”

“It's only to give in an official paper, sir. I have to leave one personally upon all the county magistrates.”

He rode on. When I got in I saw the folded paper upon the hall-table; the man and horse had already gone onwards. It was worse indoors than out; less to be done. Tod had disappeared after church; the Squire was abroad; Mrs.Todhetley sat upstairs with Lena; and I strolled out again. It was only three o'clock then.

An hour, or more, was got through somehow; meeting one, talking to another, throwing at the ducks and geese; anything. Mrs. Lease had her head, smothered in a yellow shawl, stretched out over the palings as I passed her cottage.

“Don't catch cold, mother.”

“I am looking for Maria, sir. I can't think what has come to her today, Master Johnny,” she added, dropping her voice to a confidential tone. “The girl seems demented: she has been going in and out ever since daylight like a dog in a fair.”

“If I meet her I will send her home.”

And in another minute I did meet her. For she was coming out of Daniel Ferrar's yard. I supposed he was at home again.

“No,” she said, looking more wild, worn, haggard than before; “that's what I have been to ask. I am just out of my senses, sir. He has gone for certain. Gone!”

I did not think it. He would not be likely to go away without clothes.

“Well, I know he is, Master Johnny; something tells me. I've been all about everywhere. There's a great dead upon me, sir; I never felt anything like it.”

“Wait until night, Maria; I dare say he will go home then. Your mother is looking out for you; I said if I met you I'd send you in.”

Mechanically she turned towards the cottage, and I went on. Presently, as I was sitting on a gate watching the sunset, Harriet Roe passed towards the withy walk, and gave me a nod in her free but good-natured way.

“Are you going there to look out for the ghosts this evening?” I asked: and I wished not long afterwards I had not said it. “It will soon be dark.”

“So it will,” she said, turning to the red sky in the west. “But I have no time to give to the ghosts tonight.”

“Have you seen Ferrar today?” I cried, an idea occurring to me.

“No. And I can't think where he has got to; unless he is off to Worcester. He told me he should have to go there some day this week.”

She evidently knew nothing about him, and went on her way with another free-and-easy nod. I sat on the gate till the sun had gone down, and then thought it was time to be getting homewards.

Close against the yellow barn, the scene of last night's trouble, whom should I come upon but Maria Lease. She was standing still, and turned quickly at the sound of my footsteps. Her face was bright again, but had a puzzled look upon it.

“I have just seen him: he has not gone,” she said in a happy whisper. “You were right, Master Johnny, and I was wrong.”

“Where did you see him?”

“Here; not a minute ago. I saw him twice. He is angry, very, and will not let me speak to him; both times he got away before I could reach him. He is close by somewhere.”

I looked round, naturally; but Ferrar was nowhere to be seen. There was nothing to conceal him except the barn, and that was locked up. The account she gave was this—and her face grew puzzled again as she related it.

Unable to rest indoors, she had wandered up here again, and saw Ferrar standing at the corner of the barn, looking very hard at her. She thought he was waiting for her to come up, but before she got close to him he had disappeared, and she did not see which way. She hastened past the front of the barn, ran round to the back, and there he was. He stood near the steps looking out for her; waiting for her, as it again seemed; and was gazing at her with the same fixed stare. But again she missed him before she could get quite up; and it was at that moment that I arrived on the scene.

I went all round the barn, but could see nothing of Ferrar. It was an extraordinary thing where he could have got to. Inside the barn he could not be: it was securely locked; and there was no appearance of him in the open country. It was, so to say, broad daylight yet, or at least not far short of it; the red light was still in the west. Beyond the field at the back of the barn, was a grove of trees in the form of a triangle; and this grove was flanked by Crabb Ravine, which ran right and left. Crabb Ravine had the reputation of being haunted; for a light was sometimes seen dodging about its deep descending banks at night that no one could account for. A lively spot altogether for those who liked gloom.

“Are you sure it was Ferrar, Maria?”

“Sure!” she returned in surprise. “You don't think I could mistake him, Master Johnny, do you? He wore that ugly seal-skin winter-cap of his tied over his ears, and his thick grey coat. The coat was buttoned closely round him. I have not seen him wear either since last winter.”

That Ferrar must have gone into hiding somewhere seemed quite evident; and yet there was nothing but the ground to receive him. Maria said she lost sight of him the last time in a moment; both times in fact; and it was absolutely impossible that he could have made off to the triangle or elsewhere, as she must have seen him cross the open land. For that matter I must have seen him also.

On the whole, not two minutes had elapsed since I came up, though it seems to have been longer in telling it: when, before we could look further, voices were heard approaching from the direction of Crabb Cot; and Maria, not caring to be seen, went away quickly. I was still puzzling about Ferrar's hiding-place, when they reached me—the Squire, Tod, and two or three men. Tod came slowly up, his face dark and grave.

“I say, Johnny, what a shocking thing this is!”

“What is a shocking thing?”

“You have not heard of it?—But I don't see how you could hear of it.”

I had heard nothing. I did not know what there was to hear. Tod told me in a whisper.

“Daniel Ferrar is dead, lad.”

“What?”

“He has destroyed himself. Not more than half-an-hour ago. Hung himself in the grove.”

I turned sick, taking one thing with another, comparing this recollection with that; which I dare say you will think no one but a muff would do.

Ferrar was indeed dead. He had been hiding all day in the three-cornered grove: perhaps waiting for night to get away—perhaps only waiting for night to go home again. Who can tell? About half-past two, Luke Macintosh, a man who sometimes worked for us, sometimes for old Coney, happening to go through the grove, saw him there, and talked with him. The same man, passing back a little before sunset, found him hanging from a tree, dead. Macintosh ran with the news to Crabb Cot, and they were now flocking to the scene. When facts came to be examined there appeared only too much reason to think that the unfortunate appearance of the galloping policeman had terrified Ferrar into the act; perhaps—we all hoped it!—had scared his senses quite away. Look at it as we would, it was very dreadful.

But what of the appearance Maria Lease saw? At that time, Ferrar had been dead at least half-an-hour. Was it reality or delusion? That is (as the Squire put it), did her eyes see a real, spectral Daniel Ferrar; or were they deceived by some imagination of the brain? Opinions were divided. Nothing can shake her own steadfast belief in its reality; to her it remains an awful certainty, true and sure as heaven.

If I say that I believe in it too, I shall be called a muff and a double muff. But there is no stumbling-block difficult to be got over. Ferrar, when found, was wearing the seal-skin cap tied over the ears and the thick grey coat buttoned up round him, just as Maria Lease had described to me; and he had never worn them since the previous winter, or taken them out of the chest where they were kept. The old woman at his home did not know he had done it then. When told that he died in these things, she protested that they were in the chest, and ran up to look for them. But the things were gone.

AMELIA B. EDWARDS

THE CIRCUMSTANCES I am about to relate happened just four autumns ago, when I was travelling in Switzerland with my old school and college friend, Egerton Wolfe.

Before going further, however, I wish to observe that this is no dressed-up narrative. I am a plain, prosaic man, by name Francis Legrice; by profession a barrister; and I think it would be difficult to find many persons less given to look upon life from a romantic or imaginative point of view. By my enemies, and sometimes, perhaps, by my friends, I am supposed to push my habit of incredulity to the verge of universal scepticism; and indeed I admit that I believe in very little that I do not hear and see for myself. But for these things that I am going to relate, I can vouch; and in so far as mine is a personal narrative, I am responsible for its truth. What I saw, I saw with my own eyes in the broad daylight. I offer nothing, therefore, in the shape of a story; but simply a plain statement of facts, as they happened to myself.

I was travelling, then, in Switzerland with Egerton Wolfe. It was not our first joint long-vacation tour by a good many, but it promised to be our last; for Wolfe was engaged to be married the following Spring to a very beautiful and charming girl, the daughter of a north-country baronet.

He was a handsome fellow, tall, graceful, dark-haired, dark-eyed; a poet, a dreamer, an artist—as thoroughly unlike myself, in short, as one man having arms, legs, and a head, can be unlike another. And yet we suited each other capitally, and were the fastest friends and best travelling companions in the world.

We had begun our holiday on this occasion with a week's idleness at a place which I will call Oberbrunn—a delightful place, wholly Swiss, consisting of one huge wooden building, half water-cure establishment, half hotel; two smaller buildings called
Dépendances;
a tiny church with a bulbous steeple painted green; and a handful of village—all perched together on a breezy mountain-plateau some three thousand feet above the lake and valley. Here, far from the haunts of the British tourist and the Alpine Club-man, we read, smoked, climbed, rose with the dawn, rubbed up our rusty German, and got ourselves into training for the knapsack work to follow.

At length, our week being up, we started—rather later on the whole than was prudent, for we had a thirty miles' walk before us, and the sun was already high.

It was a glorious morning, however; the sky flooded with light, and a cool breeze blowing. I see the bright scene now, just as it lay before us when we came down the hotel steps and found our guide waiting for us outside. There were the water-drinkers gathered round the fountain on the lawn; the usual crowd of itinerant vendors of stag-horn ornaments and carved toys in wood and ivory squatted in a semi-circle about the door; some half-dozen barefooted little mountain children running to and fro with wild raspberries for sale; the valley so far below, dotted with hamlets and traversed by a winding stream, like a thread of flashing silver; the black pine-wood half-way down the slope; the frosted peaks glittering on the horizon.

“Bon voyage
!” said our good host, Dr. Steigl, with a last hearty shake of the hand.

“Bon voyage!”
echoed the waiters and miscellaneous hangers-on.

Some three or four of the water-drinkers at the fountain raised their hats—the ragged children pursued us with their wild fruits as far as the gate—and so we departed.

For some distance our path lay along the mountain side, through pine woods and by cultivated slopes where the Indian corn was ripening to gold, and the late hay-harvest was waiting for the mower. Then the path wound gradually downwards—for the valley lay between us and the pass we had laid out for our day's work—and then, through a succession of soft green slopes and ruddy apple-orchards, we came to a blue lake fringed with rushes, where we hired a boat with a striped awning, like the boats on Lago Maggiore, and were rowed across by a boatman who rested on his oars and sang a
jodel-
song when we were halfway across.

Being landed on the opposite bank, we found our road at once begin to trend upwards; and here, as the guide informed us, the ascent of the Hohenhorn might be said to begin.

“This, however,
meine Herren,”
said he, “is only part of the old pass. It is ill-kept; for none but country folks and travellers from Oberbrunn come this way now. But we shall strike the New Pass higher up. A grand road,
meine Herren
—as fine a road as the Simplon, and good for carriages all the way. It has only been open since the Spring.”

“The old pass is good enough for me, anyhow!” said Egerton, crowding a handful of wild forget-me-nots under the ribbon of his hat. “It's like a stray fragment of Arcadia.”

And in truth it was wonderfully lovely and secluded—a mere rugged path winding steeply upwards in a soft green shade, among large forest trees and moss-grown rocks covered with patches of velvety lichen. A little streamlet ran singing beside it all the way—now gurgling deep in ferns and grasses; now feeding a rude trough made of a hollow trunk; now crossing our road like a broken flash of sunlight; now breaking away in a tiny fall and foaming out of sight, only to reappear a few steps further on.

Then overhead, through the close roof of leaves, we saw patches of blue sky and golden shafts of sunshine, and small brown squirrels leaping from bough to bough; and in the deep rich grass on either hand, thick ferns, and red and golden mosses, and blue campanulas, and now and then a little wild strawberry, ruby red. By-and-by, when we had been following this path for nearly an hour, we came upon a patch of clearing, in the midst of which stood a rough upright monolith, antique, weather-stained, covered with rude carvings like a Runic monument—the primitive boundary-stone between the Cantons of Uri and Unterwalden.

“Let us rest here!” cries Egerton, flinging himself at full length on the grass.
“Eheu, fugaces
!—and the hours are shorter than the years. Why not enjoy them?”

But the guide, whose name is Peter Kauffmann, interposes after the manner of guides in general, and will by no means let us have our own way. There is a mountain inn, he urges, now only five minutes distant—“ an excellent little inn, where they sell good red wine.” So we yield to fate and Peter Kauffmann and pursue our upward way, coming presently, as he promised and predicted, upon a bright open space and a brown chalet on a shelf of plateau overhanging a giddy precipice. Here, sitting under a vine-covered trellis built out on the very brink of the cliff, we find three mountaineers discussing a flask of the good red wine aforesaid.

In this picturesque eyrie we made our mid-day halt. A smiling
Mädchen
brought us coffee, brown bread, and goats'-milk cheese; while our guide, pulling out a huge lump of the dry black bread from his wallet, fraternized with the mountaineers over a half-flask of his favourite vintage.

The men chattered merrily in their half-intelligible patois. We sat silent, looking down into the deep misty valley and across to the great amethyst mountains, streaked here and there with faint blue threads of slender waterfalls.

“There must surely be moments,” said Egerton Wolfe after a while, “when even such men as you, Frank—men of the world, and lovers of it—feel within them some stirrings of the primitive Adam; some vague longing for that idyllic life of the woods and fields that we dreamers are still, in our inmost souls, insane enough to sigh after as the highest good.”

“You mean, don't I sometimes wish to be a Swiss peasant-farmer, with
sabots;
a
goître;
a wife without form as regards her person, and void as regards her head; and a
crétin
grandfather a hundred and three years old? Why, no. I prefer myself as I am.”

My friend smiled, and shook his head.

“Why take it for granted,” said he, “that no man can cultivate his brains and his paternal acres at the same time? Horace, with none of the adjuncts you name, loved a country life and turned it to immortal poetry.”

“The world has gone round once or twice since then, my dear fellow,” I replied, philosophically. “The best poetry comes out of cities nowadays.”

“And the worst. Do you see those avalanches over yonder?”

Following the direction of his eyes, I saw something like a tiny puff of white smoke gliding over the shoulder of a huge mountain on the opposite side of the valley. It was followed by another and another. We could see neither whence they came nor whither they went. We were too far away to hear the sullen thunder of their fall. Silently they flashed into sight, and as silently they vanished.

Wolfe sighed heavily.

“Poor Lawrence!” said he. “Switzerland was his dream. He longed for the Alps as ardently as other men long for money or power.”

Lawrence was a younger brother of his whom I had never seen—a lad of great promise whose health had broken down at Addiscombe some ten or twelve years before, and who had soon after died of rapid consumption at Torquay.

“And he never had that longing gratified?”

“Ah, no—he was never out of England. They prescribe bracing climates now, I am told, for lung disease; but not so then. Poor dear fellow! I sometimes fancy he might have lived, if only he had had his heart's desire.”

“I would not let such a painful thought enter my head, if I were you,” said I, hastily.

“But I can't help it! My mind has been running on poor Lawrence all the morning; and, somehow, the grander the scenery gets, the more I keep thinking how he would have exulted in it. Do you remember those lines by Coleridge, written in the Valley of Chamouni? He knew them by heart. ‘Twas the sight of yonder avalanches that reminded me . . . Well! I will try not to think of these things. Let us change the subject.”

Just at this moment, the landlord of the chalet came out—a bright-eyed, voluble young mountaineer about five or six-and-twenty, with a sprig of Edelweiss in his hat.

“Good day,
meine Herren,”
he said, including all alike in his salute, but addressing himself especially to Wolfe and myself. “Fine weather for travelling—fine weather for the grapes. These
Herren
are going on by the New Pass?
Ach, Herr Gott!
a grand work! a wonderful work!—and all begun and completed in less than three years. These
Herren
see it today for the first time? Good. They have probably been over the Tête Noire? No! Over the Splugen. Good—good. If these
Herren
have been over the Splugen, they can form an idea of the New Pass. The New Pass is very like the Splugen. It has a gallery tunnelled in the solid rock, just like the gallery on the Via Mala, with this difference that the gallery in the New Pass is much longer, and lighted by loop-holes at regular intervals. These
Herren
will please to observe the view looking both up and down the pass, before entering the mouth of the tunnel—there is not a finer view in all Switzerland.”

“It must be a great advantage to the people hereabouts, having so good a road carried from valley to valley,” said I, smiling at his enthusiasm.

“Oh, it is a fine thing for us,
mein Herr!
” he replied. “And a fine thing for all this part of the Canton. It will bring visitors—floods of visitors! By the way, these
Herren
must not omit to look out for the waterfall above the gallery. Holy St. Nicholas! the way in which that waterfall has been arranged!”

“Arranged!” echoed Wolfe, who was as much amused as myself.
“Diavolo!
Do you arrange the waterfalls in your country?”

“It was the Herr Becker,” said the landlord, unconscious of banter; “the eminent engineer who planned the New Pass. The waterfall, you see,
meine Herren,
could not be suffered to follow its old course down the face of the rock through which the gallery is tunneled, or it would have flowed in at the loopholes and flooded the road. What, therefore, did the Herr Becker do?”

“Turned the course of the fall, and brought it down a hundred yards further on,” said I somewhat impatiently.

“No so,
mein Herr—
not so! The Herr Becker attempts nothing so expensive. He permits the fall to keep its old coloir and come down its old way—but instead of letting it wash the outside of the gallery, he pierces the rock in another direction—vertically—behind the tunnel; constructs an artificial shoot, or conduit in the heart of the rock, and brings the fall out below the gallery, just where the cliff overhangs the valley. Now what do the English
Herren
say to that?”

“That it must certainly be a clever piece of engineering,” replied Wolfe.

“And that having rested long enough, we will push on and see it,” added I, glad to cut short the thread of our host's native eloquence.

So we paid our reckoning; took a last look at the view; and, plunging back into the woods, went on our way refreshed.

The path still continued to ascend, till we suddenly came upon a burst of daylight and found ourselves on a magnificent high road some thirty feet in breadth, with the forest and the telegraph wires on the one hand, and the precipice on the other. Massive granite posts at close intervals protected the edge of the road, and the cantonniers were still at work here and there, breaking and laying fresh stones, and clearing debris. We did not need to be informed that this was the New Pass.

Always ascending, we continued now to follow the road which at every turn commanded finer and finer views across the valley. Then by degrees the forest dwindled, and was at last left far below; and the giddy precipices to our left grew steeper, and the mountain slopes above became more and more barren, till the last Alp-roses vanished and there remained only a carpet of brown and tan moss scattered over here and there with great boulders—some freshly broken away from the heights above—others thickly coated with lichen, as if they might have been lying there for centuries.