Ghosts in the House Page 3

  The priest heard the story with a fierce shame and anger, and turning to Henry he said, ‘But why did you not resist your father, and save the poor sailor?’ ‘I dared not,’ said Henry shuddering, ‘though I would have done so if I could; but my father has a power over me, and I am used to obey him.’ Then said the priest, ‘This is a dark matter. But you have told the story bravely, and now will I shrive you, my son.’ So he gave him shrift. Then he said to Henry, ‘And have you seen aught that would connect the beast that visits you with this thing?’ ‘Ay, that I have,’ said Henry, ‘for I watched it with my father skip and leap in the water over the place where the man lies buried.’ Then the priest said, ‘Your father must tell me the tale too, and he must make submission to the law.’ ‘He will not,’ said Henry. ‘Then I will compel him,’ said the priest. ‘Not out of my mouth,’ said Henry, ‘or he will slay me too.’ And then the priest said that he was in a strait place for he could not use the words of confession of one man to convict another of his sin. So he gathered his things in haste, and walked back to the church; but Henry went another way, saying, ‘I made excuse to come away, and said I went elsewhere; but I fear my father much – he sees very deep; and I would not have him suspect me of having made confession.’

  Then the Father met the other two at the church gate; and they went down to the house in silence, the Father pondering heavily; and at the door Henry joined them, and it seemed to the Father that old Master Grimston regarded him not. So they entered the house in silence, and ate in silence, listening earnestly for any sound. And the Father looked oft on Master Grimston, who ate and drank and said nothing, never raising his eyes. But once the Father saw him laugh secretly to himself, so that the blood came cold in the Father’s veins, and he could hardly contain himself from accusing him. Then the Father had them to prayers, and prayed earnestly against the evil, and that they should open their hearts to God, if he would show them why this misery came upon them.

  Then they went to bed; and Henry asked that he might lie in the priest’s room, which he willingly granted. And so the house was dark, and they made as though they would sleep; but the Father could not sleep, and he heard Henry weeping silently to himself like a little child.

  But at last the Father slept – how long he knew not – and suddenly brake out of his sleep with a horror of darkness all about him, and knew that there was some evil thing abroad. He looked upon the room. He heard Henry mutter heavily in his sleep as though there was a dark terror upon him; and then, in the light of the dying embers, the Father saw a thing rise upon the hearth, as though it had slept there, and woken to stretch itself. And then in the half-light it seemed softly to gambol and play; but whereas when an innocent beast does this it seems a fond and pretty sight, the Father thought he had never seen so ugly a sight as the beast gambolling all by itself, as if it could not contain its own dreadful joy; it looked viler and more wicked every moment; then, too, there spread in the room the sharp scent of the sea, with the foul smell underneath it, that gave the Father a deadly sickness; he tried to pray, but no words would come, and he felt indeed that the evil was too strong for him. Presently the beast desisted from its play, and looking wickedly about it, came near to the Father’s bed, and seemed to put up its hairy forelegs upon it; he could see its narrow and obscene eyes, which burned with a dull yellow light, and were fixed upon him. And now the Father thought that his end was near, for he could stir neither hand nor foot, and the sweat rained down his brow; but he made a mighty effort, and in a voice which shocked himself, so dry and husky and withal of so loud and screaming a tone it was, he said three holy words. The beast gave a great quiver of rage, but it dropped down on the floor, and in a moment was gone. Then Henry woke, and raising himself on his arm, said somewhat; but there broke out in the house a great outcry and the stamping of feet, which seemed very fearful in the silence of the night. The priest leapt out of his bed all dizzy, and made a light, and ran to the door, and went out, crying whatever words came to his head. The door of Master Grimston’s room was open, and a strange and strangling sound came forth; the Father made his way in, and found Master Grimston lying upon the floor, his wife bending over him; he lay still, breathing pitifully, and every now and then a shudder ran through him. In the room there seemed a strange and shadowy tumult going forward; but the Father saw that no time could be lost, and kneeling down beside Master Grimston, he prayed with all his might.

  Presently Master Grimston ceased to struggle and lay still, like a man who had come out of a sore conflict. Then he opened his eyes, and the Father stopped his prayers, and looking very hard at him he said, ‘My son, the time is very short – give God the glory.’ Then Master Grimston, rolling his haggard eyes upon the group, twice strove to speak and could not; but the third time the Father, bending down his head, heard him say in a thin voice, that seemed to float from a long way off, ‘I slew him … my sin.’ Then the Father swiftly gave him shrift, and as he said the last word, Master Grimston’s head fell over on the side, and the Father said, ‘He is gone.’ And Bridget broke out into a terrible cry, and fell upon Henry’s neck, who had entered unseen.

  Then the Father bade him lead her away, and put the poor body on the bed; as he did so he noticed that the face of the dead man was strangely bruised and battered, as though it had been stamped upon by the hoofs of some beast. Then Father Thomas knelt, and prayed until the light came filtering in through the shutters and the cocks crowed in the village, and presently it was day. But that night the Father learnt strange secrets, and something of the dark purpose of God was revealed to him.

  In the morning there came one to find the priest, and told him that another body had been thrown up on the shore, which was strangely smeared with sand, as though it had been rolled over and over in it; and the Father took order for its burial.

  Then the priest had long talk with Bridget and Henry. He found them sitting together, and she held her son’s hand and smoothed his hair, as though he had been a little child; and Henry sobbed and wept, but Bridget was very calm. ‘He hath told me all,’ she said, ‘and we have decided that he shall do whatever you bid him; must he be given to justice?’ and she looked at the priest very pitifully. ‘Nay, nay,’ said the priest. ‘I hold not Henry to account for the death of the man; it was his father’s sin, who hath made heavy atonement – the secret shall be buried in our hearts.’

  Then Bridget told him how she had waked suddenly out of her sleep, and heard her husband cry out; and that then followed a dreadful kind of struggling, with the scent of the sea over all; and then he had all at once fallen to the ground and she had gone to him – and that then the priest had come.

  Then Father Thomas said with tears that God had shown them deep things and visited them very strangely; and they would henceforth live humbly in His sight, showing mercy.

  Then lastly he went with Henry to the store-room; and there, in the box that had dripped with water, lay the coat of the dead man, full of money, and the bag of money too; and Henry would have cast it back into the sea, but the priest said that this might not be, but that it should be bestowed plentifully upon shipwrecked mariners unless the heirs should be found. But the ship appeared to be a foreign ship, and no search ever revealed whence the money had come, save that it seemed to have been violently come by.

  Master Grimston was found to have left much wealth. But Bridget sold the house and the land, and it mostly went to rebuild the church to God’s glory. Then Bridget and Henry moved to the vicarage and served Father Thomas faithfully, and they guarded their secret. And beside the nave is a little high turret built, where burns a lamp in a lantern at the top, to give light to those at sea.

  Now the beast troubled those of whom I write no more; but it is easier to raise up evil than to lay it; and there are those that say that to this day that a man or a woman with an evil thought in their hearts may see on a certain evening in November, at the ebb of the tide, a goatlike thing wade in the water, snuffing at the sand, as though it sought b
ut found not. But of this I know nothing.

  MR PERCIVAL’S TALE

  R.H. Benson

  When I came in from Mass into the refectory one morning, I found a layman breakfasting there with the Father Rector. We were introduced to one another, and I learned that Mr Percival was a barrister who had arrived from England that morning on a holiday and was to stay at S. Filippo for a fortnight.

  I yield to none in my respect for the clergy; at the same time a layman feels occasionally something of a pariah among them: I suppose this is bound to be so; so I was pleased then to find another dog of my breed with whom I might consort, and even howl, if I so desired. I was pleased, too, with his appearance. He had that trim academic air that is characteristic of the Bar, in spite of his twenty-two hours journey; and was dressed in an excellently made grey suit. He was very slightly bald on his forehead, and had those sharp-cut mask-like features that mark a man as either lawyer, priest, or actor; he had besides delightful manners and even, white teeth. I do not think I could have suggested any improvements in person, behaviour, or costume.

  By the time that my coffee had arrived, the Father Rector had run dry of conversation and I could see that he was relieved when I joined in.

  In a few minutes I was telling Mr Percival about the symposium we had formed for the relating of preternatural adventures; and I presently asked him whether he had ever had any experience of the kind.

  He shook his head.

  ‘I have not,’ he said in his virile voice; ‘my business takes my time.’

  ‘I wish you had been with us earlier,’ put in the Rector. ‘I think you would have been interested.’

  ‘I am sure of it,’ he said. ‘I remember once – but you know, Father, frankly I am something of a sceptic.’

  ‘You remember—?’ I suggested.

  He smiled very pleasantly with eyes and mouth.

  ‘Yes, Mr Benson; I was once next door to such a story. A friend of mine saw something; but I was not with him at the moment.’

  ‘Well; we thought we had finished last night,’ I said, ‘but do you think you would be too tired to entertain us this evening?’

  ‘I shall be delighted to tell the story,’ he said easily. ‘But indeed I am a sceptic in this matter; I cannot dress it up.’

  ‘We want the naked fact,’ I said.

  I went sight-seeing with him that day; and found him extremely intelligent and at the same time accurate. The two virtues do not run often together; and I felt confident that whatever he chose to tell us would be salient and true. I felt, too, that he would need few questions to draw him out; he would say what there was to be said unaided.

  When we had taken our places that night, he began by again apologising for his attitude of mind.

  ‘I do not know, Reverend Fathers,’ he said, ‘what are your own theories in this matter; but it appears to me that if what seems to be preternatural can possibly be brought within the range of the natural, one is bound scientifically to treat it in that way. Now in this story of mine – for I will give you a few words of explanation first in order to prejudice your minds as much as possible – in this story the whole matter might be accounted for by the imagination. My friend who saw what he saw was under rather theatrical circumstances, and he is an Irishman. Besides that, he knew the history of the place in which he was; and he was quite alone. On the other hand, he has never had an experience of the kind before or since; he is perfectly truthful, and he saw what he saw in moderate daylight. I give you these facts first, and I think you would be perfectly justified in thinking they account for everything. As for my own theory, which is not quite that, I have no idea whether you will agree or disagree with it. I do not say that my judgment is the only sensible one, or anything offensive like that. I merely state what I feel I am bound to accept for the present.’

  There was a murmur of assent. Then he crossed his legs, leaned back and began:

  ‘In my first summer after I was called to the Bar I went down South Wales for a holiday with another man who had been with me at Oxford. His name was Murphy: he is a J.P. now, in Ireland, I think. I cannot think why we went to South Wales; but there it is: we did.

  ‘We took the train to Cardiff; sent on our luggage up the Taff Valley to an inn of which I cannot remember the name; but it was close to where Lord Bute has a vineyard. Then we walked up to Llandaff, saw St Tylo’s tomb; and went on again to this village.

  ‘Next morning we thought we would look about us before going on; and we went out for a stroll. It was one of the most glorious mornings I ever remember, quite cloudless and very hot; and we went up through woods to get a breeze at the top of the hill.

  ‘We found that the whole place was full of iron mines, disused now, as the iron is richer further up the country; but I can tell you that they enormously improved the interest of the place. We found shaft after shaft, some protected and some not, but mostly overgrown with bushes, so we had to walk carefully. We had passed half-a-dozen, I should think, before the thought of going down one of them occurred to Murphy.

  ‘Well, we got down one at last; though I rather wished for a rope once or twice; and I think it was one of the most extraordinary sights I have ever seen. You know perhaps what the cave of a demon-king is like, in the first act of a pantomime. Well, it was like that. There was a kind of blue light that poured down the shafts, refracted from surface to surface; so that the sky was invisible. On all sides passages ran into total darkness; huge reddish rocks stood out fantastically everywhere in the pale light; there was a sound of water falling into a pool from a great height and presently, striking matches as we went, we came upon a couple of lakes of marvellously clear blue water through which we could see the heads of ladders emerging from other black holes of unknown depth below.

  ‘We found our way out after a while into what appeared to be the central hall of the mine. Here we saw plain daylight again, for there was an immense round opening at the top, from the edges of which curved away the sides of the shaft, forming a huge circular chamber.

  ‘Imagine the Albert Hall roofless; or better still, imagine Saint Peter’s with the top half of the dome removed. Of course it was far smaller; but it gave an impression of great size; and it could not have been less than two hundred feet from the edge, over which we saw the trees against the sky, to the tumbled dusty rocky floor where we stood.

  ‘I can only describe it as being like a great, burnt-out hell in the Inferno. Red dust lay everywhere, escape seemed impossible; and vast crags and galleries, with the mouths of passages showing high up, marked by iron bars and chains, jutted out here and there.

  ‘We amused ourselves here for some time, by climbing up the sides, calling to one another, for the whole place was full of echoes, rolling down stones from some of the upper ledges: but I nearly ended my days there.

  ‘I was standing on a path, about seventy feet up, leaning against the wall. It was a path along which feet must have gone a thousand times when the mine was in working order; and I was watching Murphy who was just emerging on to a platform opposite me, on the other side of the gulf.

  ‘I put my hand behind me to steady myself; and the next instant very nearly fell forward over the edge at the violent shock to my nerves given by a wood-pigeon who burst out of a hole, brushing my hand as he passed. I gripped on, however, and watched the bird soar out across space, and then up and out at the opening; and then I became aware that my knees were beginning to shake. So I stumbled along, and threw myself down on the little platform on to which the passage led.

  ‘I suppose I had been more startled than I knew; for I tripped as I went forward; and knocked my knee rather sharply on a stone. I felt for an instant quite sick with the pain on the top of jangling nerves; and lay there saying what I am afraid I ought not to have said.

  ‘Then Murphy came up when I called; and we made our way together through one of the sloping shafts; and came out on to the hillside among the trees.’

  Mr Percival paused; his lips twitched
a moment with amusement.

  ‘I am afraid I must recall my promise,’ he said. ‘I told you all this because I was anxious to give a reason for the feeling I had about the mine, and which I am bound to mention. I felt I never wanted to see the place again – yet in spite of what followed, I do not necessarily attribute my feelings to anything but the shock and the pain that I had had. You understand that?’

  His bright eyes ran round our faces.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ said Monsignor sharply, ‘go on please, Mr Percival.’