In the Dark: Tales of Terror by E. Nesbit

‘Oh, but what a place!’ said she; ‘this must be much older than the rest of it—’

‘Evidently. About 1300, I should say.’

‘Oh, let us explore the rest,’ she cried; ‘it is really a comfort not to have a guide, but only a person like you who just guesses comfortably at dates. I should hate to be told exactly when this hall was built.’

We explored ballroom and picture gallery, white parlour and library. Most of the rooms were furnished – all heavily, some magnificently – but everything was dusty and faded.

It was in the white parlour, a spacious panelled room on the first floor, that she told me the ghost story, substantially the same as my porter’s tale, only in one respect different.

‘And so, just as she was leaving this very room – yes, I’m sure it’s this room, because the woman at the inn pointed out this double window and told me so – just as the poor lovers were creeping out of the door, the cruel father came quickly out of some dark place and killed them both. So now they haunt it.’

‘It is a terrible thought,’ said I gravely. ‘How would you like to live in a haunted house?’

‘I couldn’t,’ she said quickly.

‘Nor I; it would be too—’ my speech would have ended flippantly, but for the grave set of her features.

‘I wonder who will live here?’ she said. ‘The owner is just dead. They say it is an awful house, full of ghosts. Of course one is not afraid now’ – the sunlight lay golden and soft on the dusty parquet of the floor – ‘but at night, when the wind wails, and the doors creak, and the things rustle, oh, it must be awful!’

‘I hear the house has been left to two people, or rather one is to have the house, and the other a sum of money,’ said I. ‘It’s a beautiful house, full of beautiful things, but I should think at least one of the heirs would rather have the money.’

‘Oh yes, I should think so. I wonder whether the heirs know about the ghost? The lights can be seen from the inn, you know, at twelve o’clock, and they see the ghost in white at the window.’

‘Never the black one?’

‘Oh yes, I suppose so.’

‘The ghosts don’t appear together?’

‘No.’

‘I suppose,’ said I, ‘whoever it is that manages such things knows that the poor ghosts would like to be together, so it won’t let them.’

She shivered.

‘Come,’ she said, ‘we have seen all over the house; let us get back into the sunshine. Now I will go out, and you shall bolt the door after me, and then you can come out by the window. Thank you so much for all the trouble you have taken. It has really been quite an adventure …’

I rather liked that expression, and she hastened to spoil it.

‘… Quite an adventure going all over this glorious old place, and looking at everything one wanted to see, and not just at what the housekeeper didn’t mind one’s looking at.’

She passed through the door, but when I had closed it and prepared to lock it, I found that the key was no longer in the lock. I looked on the floor – I felt in my pockets, and at last, wandering back into the kitchen, discovered it on the table, where I swear I never put it.

When I had fitted that key into the lock and turned it, and got out of the window and made that fast, I dropped into the yard. No one shared its solitude with me. I searched garden and pleasure grounds, but never a glimpse of pink rewarded my anxious eyes. I found the sundial again, and stretched myself along the warm brick of the wide step where she had sat: and called myself a fool.

I had let her go. I did not know her name; I did not know where she lived; she had been at the inn, but probably only for lunch. I should never see her again, and certainly in that event I should never see again such dark, soft eyes, such hair, such a contour of cheek and chin, such a frank smile – in a word, a girl with whom it would be so delightfully natural for me to fall in love. For all the time she had been talking to me of architecture and archaeology, of dates and periods, of carvings and mouldings, I had been recklessly falling in love with the idea of falling in love with her. I had cherished and adored this delightful possibility, and now my chance was over. Even I could not definitely fall in love after one interview with a girl I was never to see again! And falling in love is so pleasant! I cursed my lost chance, and went back to the inn. I talked to the waiter.

‘Yes, a lady in pink had lunched there with a party. Had gone on to the Castle. A party from Tonbridge it was.’

Barnhurst Castle is close to Sefton Manor. The inn lays itself out to entertain persons who come in brakes and carve their names on the walls of the Castle keep. The inn has a visitors’ book. I examined it. Some twenty feminine names. Any one might be hers. The waiter looked over my shoulder. I turned the pages.

‘Only parties staying in the house in this part of the book,’ said the waiter.

My eye caught one name. ‘Selwyn Sefton’, in a clear, round, black handwriting.

‘Staying here?’ I pointed to the name.

‘Yes, sir; came today, sir.’

‘Can I have a private sitting-room?’

I had one. I ordered my dinner to be served in it, and I sat down and considered my course of action. Should I invite my cousin Selwyn to dinner, ply him with wine, and exact promises? Honour forbade. Should I seek him out and try to establish friendly relations? To what end?

Then I saw from my window a young man in a light-checked suit, with a face at once pallid and coarse. He strolled along the gravel path, and a woman’s voice in the garden called ‘Selwyn’.

He disappeared in the direction of the voice. I don’t think I ever disliked a man so much at first sight.

‘Brute,’ said I, ‘why should he have the house? He’d stucco it all over as likely as not; perhaps let it! He’d never stand the ghosts, either—’

Then the inexcusable, daring idea of my life came to me, striking me rigid – a blow from my other self. It must have been a minute or two before my muscles relaxed and my arms fell at my sides.

‘I’ll do it,’ I said.

I dined. I told the people of the house not to sit up for me. I was going to see friends in the neighbourhood, and might stay the night with them. I took my Inverness cape with me on my arm and my soft felt hat in my pocket. I wore a light suit and a straw hat.

Before I started I leaned cautiously from my window. The lamp at the bow window next to mine showed me the pallid young man, smoking a fat, reeking cigar. I hoped he would continue to sit there smoking. His window looked the right way; and if he didn’t see what I wanted him to see some one else in the inn would. The landlady had assured me that I should disturb no one if I came in at half-past twelve.

‘We hardly keep country hours here, sir,’ she said, ‘on account of so much excursionist business.’

I bought candles in the village, and, as I went down across the park in the soft darkness, I turned again and again to be sure that the light and the pallid young man were still at that window. It was now past eleven.

I got into the house and lighted a candle, and crept through the dark kitchens, whose windows, I knew, did not look towards the inn. When I came to the hall I blew out my candle. I dared not show light prematurely, and in the unhaunted part of the house.

I gave myself a nasty knock against one of the long tables, but it helped me to get my bearings, and presently I laid my hand on the stone balustrade of the great staircase. You would hardly believe me if I were to tell you truly of my sensations as I began to go up these stairs. I am not a coward – at least, I had never thought so till then – but the absolute darkness unnerved me. I had to go slowly, or I should have lost my head and blundered up the stairs three at a time, so strong was the feeling of something – something uncanny – just behind me.

I set my teeth. I reached the top of the stairs, felt along the walls, and after a false start, which landed me in the great picture gallery, I found the white parlour, entered it, closed the door, and felt my way to a little room without a window, which we had decided must have been a powdering-room.

Here I ventured to re-light my candle.

The white parlour, I remembered, was fully furnished. Returning to it I struck one match, and by its flash determined the way to the mantelpiece.

Then I closed the powdering-room door behind me. I felt my way to the mantelpiece and took down the two brass twenty-lighted candelabra. I placed these on a table a yard or two from the window, and in them set up my candles. It is astonishingly difficult in the dark to do anything, even a thing so simple as the setting up of a candle.

Then I went back into my little room, put on the Inverness cape and the slouch hat, and looked at my watch. Eleven-thirty. I must wait. I sat down and waited. I thought how rich I was – the thought fell flat; I wanted this house. I thought of my beautiful pink lady; but I put that thought aside; I had an inward consciousness that my conduct, more heroic than enough in one sense, would seem mean and crafty in her eyes. Only ten minutes had passed. I could not wait till twelve. The chill of the night and of the damp, unused house, and, perhaps, some less material influence, made me shiver.

I opened the door, crept on hands and knees to the table, and, carefully keeping myself below the level of the window, I reached up a trembling arm, and lighted, one by one, my forty candles. The room was a blaze of light. My courage came back to me with the retreat of the darkness. I was far too excited to know what a fool I was making of myself. I rose boldly, and struck an attitude over against the window, where the candle-light shone upon as well as behind me. My Inverness was flung jauntily over my shoulder, my soft, black felt twisted and slouched over my eyes.

There I stood for the world, and particularly for my cousin Selwyn, to see, the very image of the ghost that haunted that chamber. And from my window I could see the light in that other window, and indistinctly the lounging figure there. Oh, my cousin Selwyn, I wished many things to your address in that moment! For it was only a moment that I had to feel brave and daring in. Then I heard, deep down in the house, a sound, very slight, very faint. Then came silence. I drew a deep breath. The silence endured. And I stood by my lighted window.

After a very long time, as it seemed, I heard a board crack, and then a soft rustling sound that drew near and seemed to pause outside the very door of my parlour.

Again I held my breath, and now I thought of the most horrible story Poe ever wrote – ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ – and I fancied I saw the handle of that door move. I fixed my eyes on it. The fancy passed: and returned.

Then again there was silence. And then the door opened with a soft, silent suddenness, and I saw in the doorway a figure in trailing white. Its eyes blazed in a death-white face. It made two ghostly, gliding steps forward, and my heart stood still. I had not thought it possible for a man to experience so sharp a pang of sheer terror. I had masqueraded as one of the ghosts in this accursed house. Well, the other ghost – the real one – had come to meet me. I do not like to dwell on that moment. The only thing which it pleases me to remember is that I did not scream or go mad. I think I stood on the verge of both.

The ghost, I say, took two steps forward; then it threw up its arms, the lighted taper it carried fell on the floor, and it reeled back against the door with its arms across its face.

The fall of the candle woke me as from a nightmare. It fell solidly, and rolled away under the table.

I perceived that my ghost was human. I cried incoherently: ‘Don’t, for Heaven’s sake – it’s all right.’

The ghost dropped its hands and turned agonised eyes on me. I tore off my cloak and hat.

‘I – didn’t – scream,’ she said, and with that I sprang forward and caught her in my arms – my poor, pink lady – white now as a white rose.

I carried her into the powdering-room, and left one candle with her, extinguishing the others hastily, for now I saw what in my extravagant folly had escaped me before, that my ghost exhibition might bring the whole village down on the house. I tore down the long corridor and double locked the doors leading from it to the staircase, then back to the powdering-room and the prone white rose. How, in the madness of that night’s folly, I had thought to bring a brandy-flask passes my understanding. But I had done it. Now I rubbed her hands with the spirit. I rubbed her temples, I tried to force it between her lips, and at last she sighed and opened her eyes.

‘Oh – thank God – thank God!’ I cried, for indeed I had almost feared that my mad trick had killed her. ‘Are you better? oh, poor little lady, are you better?’

She moved her head a little on my arm.

Again she sighed, and her eyes closed. I gave her more brandy. She took it, choked, raised herself against my shoulder.

‘I’m all right now,’ she said faintly. ‘It served me right. How silly it all is!’ Then she began to laugh, and then she began to cry.

It was at this moment that we heard voices on the terrace below. She clutched at my arm in a frenzy of terror, the bright tears glistening on her cheeks.

‘Oh! not any more, not any more,’ she cried. ‘I can’t bear it.’

‘Hush,’ I said, taking her hands strongly in mine. ‘I’ve played the fool; so have you. We must play the man now. The people in the village have seen the lights – that’s all. They think we’re burglars. They can’t get in. Keep quiet, and they’ll go away.’

But when they did go away they left the local constable on guard. He kept guard like a man till daylight began to creep over the hill, and then he crawled into the hayloft and fell asleep, small blame to him.

But through those long hours I sat beside her and held her hand. At first she clung to me as a frightened child clings, and her tears were the prettiest, saddest things to see. As we grew calmer we talked.

‘I did it to frighten my cousin,’ I owned. ‘I meant to have told you today, I mean yesterday, only you went away. I am Lawrence Sefton, and the place is to go either to me or to my cousin Selwyn. And I wanted to frighten him off it. But you, why did you—?’

Even then I couldn’t see. She looked at me.

‘I don’t know how I ever could have thought I was brave enough to do it, but I did want the house so, and I wanted to frighten you—’

‘To frighten me. Why?’

‘Because I am your cousin Selwyn,’ she said, hiding her face in her hands.

‘And you knew me?’ I asked.

‘By your ring,’ she said. ‘I saw your father wear it when I was a little girl. Can’t we get back to the inn now?’

‘Not unless you want everyone to know how silly we have been.’

‘I wish you’d forgive me,’ she said when we had talked awhile, and she had even laughed at the description of the pallid young man on whom I had bestowed, in my mind, her name.

‘The wrong is mutual,’ I said; ‘we will exchange forgivenesses.’

‘Oh, but it isn’t,’ she said eagerly. ‘Because I knew it was you, and you didn’t know it was me: you wouldn’t have tried to frighten me.’

‘You know I wouldn’t.’ My voice was tenderer than I meant it to be.

She was silent.

‘And who is to have the house?’ she said.

‘Why you, of course.’

‘I never will.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, because!’

‘Can’t we put off the decision?’ I asked.

‘Impossible. We must decide tomorrow – today I mean.’

‘Well, when we meet tomorrow – I mean today – with lawyers and chaperones and mothers and relations, give me one word alone with you.’

‘Yes,’ she answered, with docility.

‘Do you know,’ she said presently, ‘I can never respect myself again? To undertake a thing like that, and then be so horribly frightened. Oh! I thought you really were the other ghost.’

‘I will tell you a secret,’ said I. ‘I thought you were, and I was much more frightened than you.’

‘Oh well,’ she said, leaning against my shoulder as a tired child might have done, ‘if you were frightened too, Cousin Lawrence, I don’t mind so very, very much.’

It was soon afterwards that, cautiously looking out of the parlour window for the twentieth time, I had the happiness of seeing the local policeman disappear into the stable rubbing his eyes.

We got out of the window on the other side of the house, and went back to the inn across the dewy park. The French window of the sitting-room which had let her out let us both in. No one was stirring, so no one save she and I were any the wiser as to that night’s work.

It was like a garden party next day, when lawyers and executors and aunts and relations met on the terrace in front of Sefton Manor House.

Her eyes were downcast. She followed her aunt demurely over the house and the grounds.

‘Your decision,’ said my great-uncle’s solicitor, ‘has to be given within the hour.’

‘My cousin and I will announce it within that time,’ I said, and I at once gave her my arm.

Arrived at the sundial we stopped.

‘This is my proposal,’ I said: ‘We will say that we decide that the house is yours – we will spend the £20,000 in restoring it and the grounds. By the time that’s done we can decide who is to have it.’

‘But how?’

‘Oh, we’ll draw lots, or toss a halfpenny, or anything you like.’

‘I’d rather decide now,’ she said; ‘you take it.’

‘No, you shall.’

‘I’d rather you had it. I – I don’t feel so greedy as I did yesterday,’ she said.

‘Neither do I. Or at any rate not in the same way.’

‘Do – do take the house,’ she said very earnestly.

Then I said: ‘My cousin Selwyn, unless you take the house, I shall make you an offer of marriage.’

‘Oh!’ she breathed.

‘And when you have declined it, on the very proper ground of our too slight acquaintance, I will take my turn at declining. I will decline the house. Then, if you are obdurate, it will become an asylum. Don’t be obdurate. Pretend to take the house and—’

She looked at me rather piteously.

‘Very well,’ she said, ‘I will pretend to take the house, and when it is restored—’

‘We’ll spin the penny.’

So before the waiting relations the house was adjudged to my cousin Selwyn. When the restoration was complete I met Selwyn at the sundial. We had met there often in the course of the restoration, in which business we both took an extravagant interest.

‘Now,’ I said, ‘we’ll spin the penny. Heads you take the house, tails it comes to me.’

I spun the coin – it fell on the brick steps of the sundial, and stuck upright there, wedged between two bricks. She laughed; I laughed.

‘It’s not my house,’ I said.

‘It’s not my house,’ said she.

‘Dear,’ said I, and we were neither of us laughing then, ‘can’t it be our house?’

And, thank God, our house it is.

THE THREE DRUGS

I

Roger Wroxham looked round his studio before he blew out the candle, and wondered whether, perhaps, he looked for the last time. It was large and empty, yet his trouble had filled it, and, pressing against him in the prison of those four walls, forced him out into the world, where lights and voices and the presence of other men should give him room to draw back, to set a space between it and him, to decide whether he would ever face it again – he and it alone together. The nature of his trouble is not germane to this story. There was a woman in it, of course, and money, and a friend, and regrets and embarrassments – and all of those reached out tendrils that wove and interwove till they made a puzzle-problem of which heart and brain were now weary. It was as though his life depended on his deciphering the straggling characters traced by some spider who, having fallen into the ink-well, had dragged clogged legs in a black zig-zag across his map of the world.

He blew out the candle and went quietly downstairs. It was nine at night, a soft night of May in Paris. Where should he go? He thought of the Seine, and took – an omnibus. The chestnut trees of the Boulevards brushed against the sides of the one that he boarded blindly in the first light street. He did not know where the omnibus was going. It did not matter. When at last it stopped he got off, and so strange was the place to him that for an instant it almost seemed as though the trouble itself had been left behind. He did not feel it in the length of three or four streets that he traversed slowly. But in the open space, very light and lively, where he recognised the Taverne de Paris and knew himself in Montmartre, the trouble set its teeth in his heart again, and he broke away from the lamps and the talk to struggle with it in the dark quiet streets beyond.

A man braced for such a fight has little thought to spare for the detail of his surroundings. The next thing that Wroxham knew of the outside world was the fact that he had known for some time that he was not alone in the street. There was someone on the other side of the road keeping pace with him – yes, certainly keeping pace, for, as he slackened his own, the feet on the other pavement also went more slowly. And now they were four feet, not two. Where had the other man sprung from? He had not been there a moment ago. And now, from an archway a little ahead of him, a third man came.

Wroxham stopped. Then three men converged upon him, and, like a sudden magic-lantern picture on a sheet prepared, there came to him all that he had heard and read of Montmartre – dark archways, knives, Apaches, and men who went away from homes where they were beloved and never again returned. He, too – well, if he never returned again, it would be quicker than the Seine, and, in the event of ultramundane possibilities, safer.

He stood still and laughed in the face of the man who first reached him.

‘Well, my friend?’ said he, and at that the other two drew close.

‘Monsieur walks late,’ said the first, a little confused, as it seemed, by that laugh.

‘And will walk still later, if it pleases him,’ said Roger. ‘Goodnight, my friends.’

‘Ah!’ said the second, ‘friends do not say adieu so quickly. Monsieur will tell us the hour.’

‘I have not a watch,’ said Roger, quite truthfully.

‘I will assist you to search for it,’ said the third man, and laid a hand on his arm.

Roger threw it off. That was instinctive. One may be resigned to a man’s knife between one’s ribs, but not to his hands pawing one’s shoulders. The man with the hand staggered back.

‘The knife searches more surely,’ said the second.

‘No, no,’ said the third quickly, ‘he is too heavy. I for one will not carry him afterwards.’

They closed round him, hustling him between them. Their pale, degenerate faces spun and swung round him in the struggle. For there was a struggle. He had not meant that there should be a struggle. Someone would hear – someone would come.

But if any heard, none came. The street retained its empty silence, the houses, masked in close shutters, kept their reserve. The four were wrestling, all pressed close together in a writhing bunch, drawing breath hardly through set teeth, their feet slipping, and not slipping, on the rounded cobble-stones.

The contact with these creatures, the smell of them, the warm, greasy texture of their flesh as, in the conflict, his face or neck met neck or face of theirs – Roger felt a cold rage possess him. He wrung two clammy hands apart and threw something off – something that staggered back clattering, fell in the gutter, and lay there.

It was then that Roger felt the knife. Its point glanced off the cigarette-case in his breast pocket and bit sharply at his inner arm. And at the sting of it Roger knew that he did not desire to die. He feigned a reeling weakness, relaxed his grip, swayed sideways, and then suddenly caught the other two in a new grip, crushed their faces together, flung them off, and ran. It was but for an instant that his feet were the only ones that echoed in the street. Then he knew that the others too were running.