It was the middle of November
when we arrived at Martingdale, and found the place anything but romantic or
pleasant. The walks were wet and sodden, the trees were leafless, there were no
flowers save a few late pink roses blooming in the garden. It had been a wet
season, and the place looked miserable. Clare would not ask Alice down to keep
her company in the winter months, as she had intended; and for myself, the
Cronsons were still absent in New Norfolk, where they meant to spend Christmas
with old Mrs. Cronson, now recovered.
Altogether, Martingdale seemed
dreary enough, and the ghost stories we had laughed at while sunshine flooded
the room, became less unreal, when we had nothing but blazing fires and wax
candles to dispel the gloom. They became more real also when servant after
servant left us to seek situations elsewhere! when “noises” grew frequent in
the house; when we ourselves, Clare and I, with our own ears heard the tramp,
tramp, the banging and the chattering which had been described to us.
My dear reader, you doubtless are
free from superstitious fancies. You pooh-pooh the existence of ghosts, and
“only wish you could find a haunted house in which to spend a night,” which is
all very brave and praiseworthy, but wait till you are left in a dreary,
desolate old country mansion, filled with the most unaccountable sounds,
without a servant, with none save an old care-taker and his wife, who, living
at the extremest end of the building, heard nothing of the tramp, tramp, bang,
bang, going on at all hours of the night.
At first I imagined the noises
were produced by some evil-disposed persons, who wished, for purposes of their
own, to keep the house uninhabited; but by degrees Clare and I came to the
conclusion the visitation must be supernatural, and Martingdale by consequence
untenantable. Still being practical people, unlike our predecessors, not having
money to live where and how we liked, we decided to watch and see whether we
could trace any human influence in the matter. If not, it was agreed we were to
pull down the right wing of the house and the principal staircase.
For nights and nights we sat up
till two or three o’clock in the morning, Clare engaged in needlework, I
reading, with a revolver lying on the table beside me; but nothing, neither
sound nor appearance rewarded our vigil. This confirmed my first ideas that the
sounds were not supernatural; but just to test the matter, I determined on
Christmas-eve, the anniversary of Mr. Jeremy Lester’s disappearance, to keep
watch myself in the red bed chamber. Even to Clare I never mentioned my
intention.
About 10, tired out with our
previous vigils, we each retired to rest. Somewhat ostentatiously, perhaps, I
noisily shut the door of my room, and when I opened it half-an-hour afterwards,
no mouse could have pursued its way along the corridor with greater silence and
caution than myself. Quite in the dark I sat in the red room. For over an hour
I might as well have been in my grave for anything I could see in the
apartment; but at the end of that time the moon rose and cast strange lights
across the floor and upon the wall of the haunted chamber.
Hitherto I kept my watch opposite
the window, now I changed my place to a corner near the door, where I was
shaded from observation by the heavy hangings of the bed, and an antique
wardrobe. Still I sat on, but still no sound broke the silence. I was weary
with many nights’ watching, and tired of my solitary vigil, I dropped at last
into a slumber from which I awakened by hearing the door softly opened.
“John,” said my sister, almost in
a whisper; “John, are you here?”
“Yes, Clare,” I answered; “but
what are you doing up at this hour?”
“Come downstairs,” she replied;
“they are in the oak parlor.”
I did not need any explanation as
to whom she meant, but crept downstairs after her, warned by an uplifted hand
of the necessity for silence and caution. By the door — by the open door of the
oak parlor, she paused, and we both looked in.
There was the room we left in
darkness overnight, with a bright wood fire blazing on the hearth, candles on
the chimney-piece, the small table pulled out from its accustomed corner, and
two men seated beside it, playing, at cribbage. We could see the face of the
younger player; it was that of a man about five and twenty, of a man who had
lived hard and wickedly; who had wasted his substance and his health; who had
been while in the flesh Jeremy Lester.
It would be difficult for me to
say how I knew this, how in a moment I identified the features of the player
with those of the man who had been missing for forty-one years — forty-one
years that very night.
He was dressed in the costume of
a bygone period; his hair was powdered, and round his wrists there were ruffles
of lace. He looked like one who, having come from some great party, had sat
down after his return home to play cards with an intimate friend. On his little
finger there sparkled a ring, in the front of his shirt there gleamed a
valuable diamond. There were diamond buckles in his shoes, and, according to
the fashion of his time, he wore knee breeches and silk stockings, which showed
off advantageously the shape of a remarkably good leg and ankle. He sat
opposite the door, but never once lifted his eyes to it. His attention seemed
concentrated on the cards.
For a time there was utter
silence in the room, broken only by the momentous counting of the game. In the
doorway we stood, holding our breath, terrified and yet fascinated by the scene
which was being acted before us. The ashes dropped on the hearth softly and
like the snow; we could hear the rustle of the cards as they were dealt out and
fell upon the table; we listened to the count — fifteen two, fifteen-four, and
so forth, — but there was no other word spoken till at length the player, whose
face we could not see, exclaimed, ” I win; the game is mine.”
Then his opponent took up the
cards, sorted them over negligently in his hand, put them close together, and
flung the whole pack in his guest’s face, exclaiming, “Cheat; liar; take that.”
There was a bustle and confusion
— a flinging over of chairs, and fierce gesticulation, and such a noise of
passionate voices mingling, that we could not hear a sentence which was
uttered. All at once, however, Jeremy Lester strode out of the room in so great
a hurry that he almost touched us where we stood; out of the room, and tramp,
tramp up the staircase to the red room, whence he descended in a few minutes
with a couple of rapiers under his arm. When he re-entered the room he gave, as
it seemed to us, the other man his choice of the weapons, and then he flung
open the window, and after ceremoniously giving place for his opponent to pass
out first, he walked forth into the night air, Clare and I following.
We went through the garden and
down a narrow winding walk to a smooth piece of turf, sheltered from the north
by a plantation of young fir trees. It was a bright moonlight night by this
time, and we could distinctly see Jeremy Lester measuring off the ground.
“When you say ‘three,’” he said
at last to the man whose back was still towards us.
They had drawn lots for the
ground, and the lot had fallen against Mr. Lester. He stood thus with the
moonbeams falling upon him, and a handsomer fellow I would never desire to
behold.
“One,” began the other; ” two,”
and before our kinsman had the slightest suspicion of his design, he was upon
him, and his rapier through Jeremy Lester’s breast.
At the sight of that cowardly
treachery, Clare screamed aloud. In a moment the combatants had disappeared,
the moon was obscured behind a cloud, and we were standing in the shadow of the
fir-plantation, shivering with cold and terror. But we knew at last what had
become of the late owner of Martingdale, that he had fallen, not in fair fight,
but foully murdered by a false friend.
When late on Christmas morning I
awoke, it was to see a white world, to behold the ground, and trees, and shrubs
all laden and covered with snow. There was snow everywhere, such snow as no
person could remember having fallen for forty-one years.
“It was on just such a Christmas
as this that Mr. Jeremy disappeared,” remarked the old sexton to my sister who
had insisted on dragging me through the snow to church, whereupon Clare fainted
away and was carried into the vestry, where I made a full confession to the
Vicar of all we had beheld the previous night.
At first that worthy individual
rather inclined to treat the matter lightly, but when, a fortnight after, the
snow melted away and the fir-plantation came to be examined, he confessed there
might be more things in heaven and earth than his limited philosophy had
dreamed of. In a little clear space just within the plantation, Jeremy Lester’s
body was found. We knew it by the ring and the diamond buckles, and the
sparkling breast-pin; and Mr. Cronson, who in his capacity as magistrate came
over to inspect these relics, was visibly perturbed at my narrative.
“Pray, Mr. Lester, did you in
your dream see the face of — of the gentleman — your kinsman’s opponent?”
“No,” I answered, “he sat and
stood with his back to us all the time.”
“There is nothing more, of
course, to be done in the matter,” observed Mr. Cronson.
“Nothing,” I replied; and there
the affair would doubtless have terminated, but that a few days afterwards,
when we were dining at Cronson Park, Clare all of a sudden dropped the glass of
water she was carrying to her lips, and exclaiming, “Look, John, there he is!”
rose from her seat, and with a face as white as the table cloth, pointed to a
portrait hanging on the wall. “I saw him for an instant when he turned his head
towards the door as Jeremy Lester left it,” she explained; “that is he.”
Of what followed after this
identification I have only the vaguest recollection. Servants rushed hither and
thither; Mrs. Cronson dropped off her chair into hysterics; the young ladies
gathered round their mamma; Mr. Cronson, trembling like one in an ague fit,
attempted some kind of an explanation, while Clare kept praying to be taken
away, — only to be taken away. I took her away, not merely from Cronson Park
but from Martingdale.
Before we left the latter place,
however, I had an interview with Mr. Cronson, who said the portrait Clare had
identified was that of his wife’s father, the last person who saw Jeremy Lester
alive.
“He is an old man now,” finished
Mr. Cronson, “a man of over eighty, who has confessed everything to me. You
won’t bring further sorrow and disgrace upon us by making this matter public?”
I promised him I would keep
silence, but the story gradually oozed out, and the Cronsons left the country.
My sister never returned to Martingdale; she married and is living in London.
Though I assure her there are no strange noises in my house, she will not visit
Bedfordshire, where the “little girl” she wanted me so long ago to “think of
seriously,” is now my wife and the mother of my children.
