In the Dark: Tales of Terror by E. Nesbit. E. Nesbit
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 has 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? And what had come into the room behind her? 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.
‘No, my dear,’ my Uncle Abraham answered me, ‘no – nothing romantic ever happened to me – unless – but no; that wasn’t romantic either—’
I was. To me, I being eighteen, romance was the world. My Uncle Abraham was old and lame. I followed the gaze of his faded eyes, and my own rested on a miniature that hung at his elbow-chair’s right hand, a portrait of a woman, whose loveliness even the miniature painter’s art had been powerless to disguise – a woman with large eyes that shone, and face of that alluring oval which one hardly sees nowadays.
I rose to look at it. I had looked at it a hundred times. Often enough in my baby days I had asked, ‘Who’s that, uncle?’ and always the answer was the same: ‘A lady who died long ago, my dear.’
As I looked again at this picture, I asked, ‘Was she like this?’
‘Who?’
‘Your – your romance!’
Uncle Abraham looked hard at me. ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘Very – very like.’
I sat down on the floor by him. ‘Won’t you tell me about her?’
‘There’s nothing to tell,’ he said. ‘I think it was fancy mostly, and folly; but it’s the realest thing in my life, my dear.’
A long pause. I kept silent. You should always give people time, especially old people.
‘I remember,’ he said in the dreamy tone always promising so well to the ear that loves a story – ‘I remember, when I was a young man, I was very lonely indeed. I never had a sweetheart. I was always lame, my dear, from quite a boy; and the girls used to laugh at me.’
Silence again. Presently he went on:
‘And so I got into the way of mooning off by myself in lonely places, and one of my favourite walks was up through our churchyard, which was set on a hill in the middle of the marsh country. I liked that because I never met anyone there. It’s all over, years ago. I was a silly lad; but I couldn’t bear of a summer evening to hear a rustle and a whisper from the other side of the hedge, or maybe a kiss, as I went by.
‘Well, I used to go and sit all by myself in the churchyard, which was always sweet with the thyme and quite light (on account of its being so high) long after the marshes were dark. I used to watch the bats flitting about in the red light, and wonder why God didn’t make everyone’s legs straight and strong, and wicked follies like that. But by the time the light was gone I had always worked it off, so to speak, and could go home quietly, and say my prayers without bitterness.
‘Well, one hot night in August, when I had watched the sunset fade and the crescent moon grow golden, I was just stepping over the low stone wall of the churchyard when I heard a rustle behind me. I turned round, expecting it to be a rabbit or a bird. It was a woman.’
He looked at the portrait. So did I.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘that was her very face. I was a bit scared and said something – I don’t know what – she laughed and said, did I think she was a ghost? and I answered back; and I stayed talking to her over the churchyard wall till ’twas quite dark, and the glow-worms were out in the wet grass all along the way home.
‘Next night, I saw her again; and the next, and the next. Always at twilight time; and if I passed any lovers leaning on the stiles in the marshes it was nothing to me now.’
Again my uncle paused. ‘It was very long ago,’ he said shyly, ‘and I’m an old man; but I know what youth means, and happiness, though I was always lame, and the girls used to laugh at me. I don’t know how long it went on – you don’t measure time in dreams – but at last your grandfather said I looked as if I had one foot in the grave, and he would be sending me to stay with our kin at Bath, and take the waters. I had to go. I could not tell my father why I would rather die than go.’
‘What was her name, uncle?’ I asked.
‘She never would tell me her name, and why should she? I had names enough in my heart to call her by. Marriage? My dear, even then I knew marriage was not for me. But I met her night after night, always in our churchyard where the yew trees were, and the old crooked gravestones so thick in the grass. It was there we always met and always parted. The last time was the night before I went away. She was very sad, and dearer than life itself. And she said:
‘“If you come back before the new moon, I shall meet you here just as usual. But if the new moon shines on this grave and you are not here – you will never see me again any more.”
‘She laid her hand on the tomb against which we had been leaning. It was an old, lichened weather-worn stone, and its inscription was just
SUSANNAH KINGSNORTH,
Ob. 1723.
‘“I shall be here,” I said.
‘“I mean it,” she said, very seriously