In the Dark: Tales of Terror by E. Nesbit

‘She was nothing to you,’ cried the woman, walking faster up and down between the rush chairs and the table; ‘any fool can see that with half an eye. You didn’t love her, so you don’t feel nothin’ now; but some day you’ll care for someone, and then you shall know what she felt – if there’s any justice in Heaven.’

I, too, rose, walked across the room, and leaned against the wall. I heard her words without understanding them.

‘Can’t you feel nothin? Are you mader stone? Come an’ look at ’er lyin’ there so quiet. She don’t fret arter the likes o’ you no more now. She won’t sit no more a-lookin’ outer winder an’ sayin’ nothin’ – only droppin’ ’er tears one by one, slow, slow on ’er lap. Come an’ see ’er; come an’ see what you done to my pretty – an’ then you can go. Nobody wants you ’ere. She don’t want you now. But p’raps you’d like to see ’er safe under ground afore yer go? I’ll be bound you’ll put a big stone slab on ’er – to make sure she don’t rise again.’

I turned on her. Her thin face was white with grief and rage. Her claw-like hands were clenched.

‘Woman,’ I said, ‘have mercy.’

She paused and looked at me.

‘Eh?’ she said.

‘Have mercy!’ I said again.

‘Mercy! You should ’a thought o’ that before. You ’adn’t no mercy on ’er. She loved you – she died loving you. An’ if I wasn’t a Christian woman, I’d kill you for it – like the rat you are! That I would, though I ’ad to swing for it afterwards.’

I caught the woman’s hands and held them fast, though she writhed and resisted.

‘Don’t you understand?’ I said savagely. ‘We loved each other. She died loving me. I have to live loving her. And it’s her you pity. I tell you it was all a mistake – a stupid, stupid mistake. Take me to her, and for pity’s sake, let me be left alone with her.’

She hesitated; then said, in a voice only a shade less hard: ‘Well, come along, then.’

We moved towards the door. As she opened it, a faint, weak cry fell on my ear. My heart stood still.

‘What’s that?’ I asked, stopping on the threshold.

‘Your child,’ she said shortly.

That too! Oh, my love! oh, my poor love! All these long months!

‘She allus said she’d send for you when she’d got over ’er trouble,’ the woman said, as we climbed the stairs. ‘“I’d like him to see his little baby, nurse,” she says; “our little baby. It’ll be all right when the baby’s born,” she says. “I know he’ll come to me then. You’ll see.” And I never said nothin’, not thinkin’ you’d come if she was your leavin’s, and not dreamin’ you could be ’er ’usband an’ could stay away from ’er a hour – ’er bein’ as she was. Hush!’

She drew a key from her pocket and fitted it to a lock. She opened the door, and I followed her in. It was a large, dark room, full of old-fashioned furniture and a smell of lavender, camphor, and narcissus.

The big four-poster bed was covered with white.

‘My lamb – my poor, pretty lamb!’ said the woman, beginning to cry for the first time as she drew back the sheet. ‘Don’t she look beautiful?’

I stood by the bedstead. I looked down on my wife’s face. Just so I had seen it lie on the pillow beside me in the early morning, when the wind and the dawn came up from beyond the sea. She did not look like one dead. Her lips were still red, and it seemed to me that a tinge of colour lay on her cheek. It seemed to me, too, that if I kissed her she would awaken, and put her slight hand on my neck, and lay her cheek against mine – and that we should tell each other everything, and weep together, and understand, and be comforted.

So I stooped and laid my lips to hers as the old nurse stole from the room.

But the red lips were like marble, and she did not waken. She will not waken now ever anymore.

I tell you again there are some things that cannot be written.

III

I lay that night in a big room, filled with heavy dark furniture, in a great four-poster hung with heavy, dark curtains – a bed, the counterpart of that other bed from whose side they had dragged me at last.

They fed me, I believe, and the old nurse was kind to me. I think she saw now that it is not the dead who are to be pitied most.

I lay at last in the big, roomy bed, and heard the household noises grow fewer and die out, the little wail of my child sounding latest. They had brought the child to me, and I had held it in my arms, and bowed my head over its tiny face and frail fingers. I did not love it then. I told myself it had cost me her life. But my heart told me it was I who had done that. The tall clock at the stair-head sounded the hours – eleven, twelve, one, and still I could not sleep. The room was dark and very still.

I had not yet been able to look at my life quietly. I had been full of the intoxication of grief – a real drunkenness, more merciful than the sober calm that comes afterwards.

Now I lay still as the dead woman in the next room, and looked at what was left of my life. I lay still, and thought, and thought, and thought. And in those hours I tasted the bitterness of death. It must have been about three when I first became aware of a slight sound that was not the ticking of a clock. I say I first became aware, and yet I knew perfectly that I had heard that sound more than once before, and had yet determined not to hear it, because it came from the next room – the room where the corpse lay.

And I did not wish to hear that sound, because I knew it meant that I was nervous – miserably nervous – a coward, and a brute. It meant that I, having killed my wife as surely as though I had put a knife in her breast, had now sunk so low as to be afraid of her dead body – the dead body that lay in the next room to mine. The heads of the beds were placed against the same wall: and from that wall I had fancied that I heard slight, slight, almost inaudible sounds. So that when I say I became aware of them, I mean that I, at last, heard a sound so definite as to leave no room for doubt or question. It brought me to a sitting position in the bed, and the drops of sweat gathered heavily on my forehead and fell on my cold hands, as I held my breath and listened.

I don’t know how long I sat there – there was no further sound – and at last my tense muscles relaxed, and I fell back on the pillow.

‘You fool!’ I said to myself; ‘dead or alive, is she not your darling, your heart’s heart? Would you not go near to die of joy, if she came back to you? Pray God to let her spirit come back and tell you she forgives you!’

‘I wish she would come,’ myself answered in words, while every fibre of my body and mind shrank and quivered in denial.

I struck a match, lighted a candle, and breathed more freely as I looked at the polished furniture – the commonplace details of an ordinary room. Then I thought of her, lying alone so near me, so quiet under the white sheet. She was dead; she would not wake or move. But suppose she did move? Suppose she turned back the sheet and got up and walked across the floor, and turned the door-handle?

As I thought it, I heard – plainly, unmistakably heard – the door of the chamber of death open slowly. I heard slow steps in the passage, slow, heavy steps. I heard the touch of hands on my door outside, uncertain hands that felt for the latch.

Sick with terror, I lay clenching the sheet in my hands.

I knew well enough what would come in when that door opened – that door on which my eyes were fixed. I dreaded to look, yet dared not turn away my eyes. The door opened slowly, slowly, slowly, and the figure of my dead wife came in. It came straight towards the bed, and stood at the bed foot in its white grave-clothes, with the white bandage under its chin. There was a scent of lavender and camphor and white narcissus. Its eyes were wide open, and looked at me with love unspeakable.

I could have shrieked aloud.

My wife spoke. It was the same dear voice that I had loved so to hear, but it was very weak and faint now; and now I trembled as it listened.

‘You aren’t afraid of me, darling, are you, though I am dead? I heard all you said to me when you came, but I couldn’t answer. But now I’ve come back from the dead to tell you. I wasn’t really so bad as you thought me. Elvira had told me she loved Oscar. I only wrote the letter to make it easier for you. I was too proud to tell you when you were so angry, but I am not proud anymore now. You’ll love again now, won’t you, now I am dead. One always forgives dead people.’

The poor ghost’s voice was hollow and faint. Abject terror paralysed me. I could answer nothing.

‘Say you forgive me,’ the thin, monotonous voice went on, ‘say you love me again.’

I had to speak. Coward as I was, I did manage to stammer:

‘Yes; I love you. I have always loved you, God help me.’

The sound of my own voice reassured me, and I ended more firmly than I began. The figure by the bed swayed a little, unsteadily.

‘I suppose,’ she said wearily, ‘you would be afraid, now I am dead, if I came round to you and kissed you?’

She made a movement as though she would have come to me.

Then I did shriek aloud, again and again, and covered my face with all my force. There was a moment’s silence. Then I heard my door close, and then a sound of feet and of voices, and I heard something heavy fall. I disentangled my head from the sheet. My room was empty. Then reason came back to me. I leaped from the bed.

‘Ida, my darling, come back! I am not afraid! I love you. Come back! Come back!’

I sprang to my door and flung it open. Someone was bringing a light along the passage. On the floor, outside the door of the death chamber, was a huddled heap – the corpse, in its grave-clothes. Dead, dead, dead.

She is buried in Mellor churchyard, and there is no stone over her.

Now, whether it was catalepsy, as the doctor said, or whether my love came back, even from the dead, to me who loved her, I shall never know; but this I know, that if I had held out my arms to her as she stood at my bed-foot – if I had said, ‘Yes, even from the grave, my darling – from hell itself, come back, come back to me!’ – if I had had room in my coward’s heart for anything but the unreasoning terror that killed love in that hour, I should not now be here alone. I shrank from her – I feared her – I would not take her to my heart. And now she will not come to me anymore.

Why do I go on living?

You see, there is the child. It is four years old now, and it has never spoken and never smiled.

THE HAUNTED INHERITANCE

The most extraordinary thing that ever happened to me was my going back to town on that day. I am a reasonable being; I do not do such things. I was on a bicycling tour with another man. We were far from the mean cares of an unremunerative profession; we were men not fettered by any given address, any pledged date, any preconcerted route. I went to bed weary and cheerful, fell asleep a mere animal – a tired dog after a day’s hunting – and awoke at four in the morning that creature of nerves and fancies which is my other self, and which has driven me to all the follies I have ever kept company with. But even that second self of mine, whining beast and traitor as it is, has never played me such a trick as it played then. Indeed, something in the result of that day’s rash act sets me wondering whether after all it could have been I, or even my other self, who moved in the adventure; whether it was not rather some power outside both of us … but this is a speculation as idle in me as uninteresting to you, and so enough of it.

From four to seven I lay awake, the prey of a growing detestation of bicycling tours, friends, scenery, physical exertion, holidays. By seven o’clock I felt that I would rather perish than spend another day in the society of the other man – an excellent fellow, by the way, and the best of company.

At half-past seven the post came. I saw the postman through my window as I shaved. I went down to get my letters – there were none, naturally.

At breakfast I said: ‘Edmundson, my dear fellow, I am extremely sorry; but my letters this morning compel me to return to town at once.’

‘But I thought,’ said Edmundson – then he stopped, and I saw that he had perceived in time that this was no moment for reminding me that, having left no address, I could have had no letters.

He looked sympathetic, and gave me what there was left of the bacon. I suppose he thought that it was a love affair or some such folly. I let him think so; after all, no love affair but would have seemed wise compared with the blank idiocy of this unseen determination to cut short a delightful holiday and go back to those dusty, stuffy rooms in Gray’s Inn.

After that first and almost pardonable lapse, Edmundson behaved beautifully. I caught the 9.17 train, and by half-past eleven I was climbing my dirty staircase.

I let myself in and waded through a heap of envelopes and wrappered circulars that had drifted in through the letter-box, as dead leaves drift into the areas of houses in squares. All the windows were shut. Dust lay thick on everything. My laundress had evidently chosen this as a good time for her holiday. I wondered idly where she spent it. And now the close, musty smell of the rooms caught at my senses, and I remembered with a positive pang the sweet scent of the earth and the dead leaves in that wood through which, at this very moment, the sensible and fortunate Edmundson would be riding.

The thought of dead leaves reminded me of the heap of correspondence. I glanced through it. Only one of all those letters interested me in the least. It was from my mother:

Elliot’s Bay, Norfolk, 17th August.

DEAR LAWRENCE: I have wonderful news for you. Your great-uncle Sefton has died, and left you half his immense property. The other half is left to your second cousin Selwyn. You must come home at once. There are heaps of letters here for you, but I dare not send them on, as goodness only knows where you may be. I do wish you would remember to leave an address. I send this to your rooms, in case you have had the forethought to instruct your charwoman to send your letters on to you. It is a most handsome fortune, and I am too happy about your accession to it to scold you as you deserve, but I hope this will be a lesson to you to leave an address when next you go away. Come home at once.

Your loving Mother, MARGARET SEFTON.

P.S.: It is the maddest will; everything divided evenly between you two except the house and estate. The will says you and your cousin Selwyn are to meet there on the 1st of September following his death, in presence of the family, and decide which of you is to have the house. If you can’t agree, it’s to be presented to the county for a lunatic asylum. I should think so! He was always so eccentric. The one who doesn’t have the house, etc., gets £20,000 extra. Of course you will choose that.

P.P.S.: Be sure to bring your under-shirts with you – the air here is very keen of an evening.

I opened both the windows and lit a pipe. Sefton Manor, that gorgeous old place – I knew its picture in Hasted, cradle of our race, and so on – and a big fortune. I hoped my cousin Selwyn would want the £20,000 more than he wanted the house. If he didn’t – well, perhaps my fortune might be large enough to increase that £20,000 to a sum that he would want.

And then suddenly, I became aware that this was the 31st of August, and that tomorrow was the day on which I was to meet my cousin Selwyn and ‘the family’, and come to a decision about the house. I had never, to my knowledge, heard of my cousin Selwyn. We were a family rich in collateral branches. I hoped he would be a reasonable young man. Also, I had never seen Sefton Manor House, except in a print. It occurred to me that I would rather see the house before I saw the cousin.

I caught the next train to Sefton.

‘It’s but a mile by the field way,’ said the railway porter. ‘You take the stile – the first on the left – and follow the path till you come to the wood. Then skirt along the left of it, cater across the meadow at the end, and you’ll see the place right below you in the vale.’

‘It’s a fine old place, I hear,’ said I.

‘All to pieces, though,’ said he. ‘I shouldn’t wonder if it cost a couple o’ hundred to put it to rights. Water coming through the roof and all.’

‘But surely the owner—’

‘Oh, he never lived there; not since his son was taken. He lived in the lodge; it’s on the brow of the hill looking down on the Manor House.’

‘Is the house empty?’

‘As empty as a rotten nutshell, except for the old sticks o’ furniture. Anyone who likes,’ added the porter, ‘can lie there o’ nights. But it wouldn’t be me!’

‘Do you mean there’s a ghost?’ I hope I kept any note of undue elation out of my voice.

‘I don’t hold with ghosts,’ said the porter firmly, ‘but my aunt was in service at the lodge, and there’s no doubt but something walks there.’

‘Come,’ I said, ‘this is very interesting. Can’t you leave the station, and come across to where beer is?’

‘I don’t mind if I do,’ said he. ‘That is so far as your standing a drop goes. But I can’t leave the station, so if you pour my beer you must pour it dry, sir, as the saying is.’

So I gave the man a shilling, and he told me about the ghost at Sefton Manor House. Indeed, about the ghosts, for there were, it seemed, two; a lady in white, and a gentleman in a slouch hat and black riding cloak.

‘They do say,’ said my porter, ‘as how one of the young ladies once on a time was wishful to elope, and started so to do – not getting further than the hall door; her father, thinking it to be burglars, fired out of the window, and the happy pair fell on the doorstep, corpses.’

‘Is it true, do you think?’

The porter did not know. At any rate there was a tablet in the church to Maria Sefton and George Ballard – ‘and something about in their death them not being divided.’

I took the stile, I skirted the wood, I ‘catered’ across the meadow – and so I came out on a chalky ridge held in a net of pine roots, where dog violets grew. Below stretched the green park, dotted with trees. The lodge, stuccoed but solid, lay below me. Smoke came from its chimneys. Lower still lay the Manor House – red brick with grey lichened mullions, a house in a thousand, Elizabethan – and from its twisted beautiful chimneys no smoke arose. I hurried across the short turf towards the Manor House.

I had no difficulty in getting into the great garden. The bricks of the wall were everywhere displaced or crumbling. The ivy had forced the coping stones away; each red buttress offered a dozen spots for foothold. I climbed the wall and found myself in a garden – oh! but such a garden. There are not half a dozen such in England – ancient box hedges, rosaries, fountains, yew tree avenues, bowers of clematis (now feathery in its seeding time), great trees, grey-grown marble balustrades and steps, terraces, green lawns, one green lawn, in especial, girt round with a sweet briar hedge, and in the middle of this lawn a sundial. All this was mine, or, to be more exact, might be mine, should my cousin Selwyn prove to be a person of sense. How I prayed that he might not be a person of taste! That he might be a person who liked yachts or racehorses or diamonds, or motor-cars, or anything that money can buy, not a person who liked beautiful Elizabethan houses, and gardens old beyond belief.

The sundial stood on a mass of masonry, too low and wide to be called a pillar. I mounted the two brick steps and leaned over to read the date and the motto:

Tempus fugit manet amor.

The date was 1617, the initials S.S. surmounted it. The face of the dial was unusually ornate – a wreath of stiffly drawn roses was traced outside the circle of the numbers. As I leaned there a sudden movement on the other side of the pedestal compelled my attention. I leaned over a little further to see what had rustled – a rat – a rabbit? A flash of pink struck at my eyes. A lady in a pink dress was sitting on the step at the other side of the sundial.

I suppose some exclamation escaped me – the lady looked up. Her hair was dark, and her eyes; her face was pink and white, with a few little gold-coloured freckles on nose and on cheek bones. Her dress was of pink cotton stuff, thin and soft. She looked like a beautiful pink rose.

Our eyes met.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said I, ‘I had no idea—’ there I stopped and tried to crawl back to firm ground. Graceful explanations are not best given by one sprawling on his stomach across a sundial.

By the time I was once more on my feet she too was standing.

‘It is a beautiful old place,’ she said gently, and, as it seemed, with a kindly wish to relieve my embarrassment. She made a movement as if to turn away.

‘Quite a show place,’ said I stupidly enough, but I was still a little embarrassed, and I wanted to say something – anything – to arrest her departure. You have no idea how pretty she was. She had a straw hat in her hand, dangling by soft black ribbons. Her hair was all fluffy-soft – like a child’s. ‘I suppose you have seen the house?’ I asked.

She paused, one foot still on the lower step of the sundial, and her face seemed to brighten at the touch of some idea as sudden as welcome.

‘Well – no,’ she said. ‘The fact is – I wanted frightfully to see the house; in fact, I’ve come miles and miles on purpose, but there’s no one to let me in.’

‘The people at the lodge?’ I suggested.

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘I – the fact is I – I don’t want to be shown round. I want to explore!’

She looked at me critically. Her eyes dwelt on my right hand, which lay on the sundial. I have always taken reasonable care of my hands, and I wore a good ring, a sapphire, cut with the Sefton arms: an heirloom, by the way. Her glance at my hand preluded a longer glance at my face. Then she shrugged her pretty shoulders.

‘Oh well,’ she said, and it was as if she had said plainly, ‘I see that you are a gentleman and a decent fellow. Why should I not look over the house in your company? Introductions? Bah!’

All this her shrug said without ambiguity as without words.

‘Perhaps,’ I hazarded, ‘I could get the keys.’

‘Do you really care very much for old houses?’

‘I do,’ said I; ‘and you?’

‘I care so much that I nearly broke into this one. I should have done it quite if the windows had been an inch or two lower.’

‘I am an inch or two higher,’ said I, standing squarely so as to make the most of my six-feet beside her five-feet-five or thereabouts.

‘Oh – if you only would!’ she said.

‘Why not?’ said I.

She led the way past the marble basin of the fountain, and along the historic yew avenue, planted, like all old yew avenues, by that industrious gardener our Eighth Henry. Then across a lawn, through a winding, grassy, shrubbery path, that ended at a green door in the garden wall.

‘You can lift this latch with a hairpin,’ said she, and therewith lifted it.

We walked into a courtyard. Young grass grew green between the grey flags on which our steps echoed.

‘This is the window,’ said she. ‘You see there’s a pane broken. If you could get on to the window-sill, you could get your hand in and undo the hasp, and—’

‘And you?’

‘Oh, you’ll let me in by the kitchen door.’

I did it. My conscience called me a burglar – in vain. Was it not my own, or as good as my own house?

I let her in at the back door. We walked through the big dark kitchen where the old three-legged pot towered large on the hearth, and the old spits and firedogs still kept their ancient place. Then through another kitchen where red rust was making its full meal of a comparatively modern range.

Then into the great hall, where the old armour and the buff-coats and round-caps hang on the walls, and where the carved stone staircases run at each side up to the gallery above.

The long tables in the middle of the hall were scored by the knives of the many who had eaten meat there – initials and dates were cut into them. The roof was groined, the windows low-arched.