Here and Hereafter Part 28

Netta's hair was grey; her face was worn and ascetic. But one would have said rightly that she must have been a handsome woman in her time. She had never married. At seventeen she had been in love with a man whom she could not marry, a hopeless affair, and horrible enough for her while it lasted. It lasted three years. It was all forgotten now, or only the vague memory of a bad dream. Jimmy had been a care to her, too; she never knew while he lived what might not be the next news that she would hear of him. She had become a learned, lonely woman now, had taken the degree of doctor of medicine, practised a little, and wrote very often. She wrote mostly on her own special subject, but occasionally for less technical and more widely-read journals.

She had been writing for one of them, this afternoon, in her poorly-furnished study upstairs. It was growing dark, and her reading-lamp by her side was lit; but she had not yet had the curtains drawn, and through the windows she could see the white snow falling slowly into the dirty street. She had stopped writing in the middle of a sentence:

"And, whether the sentimentalist--"

She had flung down her pen impatiently. She had been teased all day by an effort to remember something--to explain what was after all a perfectly trivial thing. In turning over a cupboardful of papers, which had belonged to her father and been left practically untouched ever since they had been sent to her house, she had come across three old curtain rings carefully tied together. A label was attached to them, and on it was written--the ink was faded and yellow--"Netta, the Make-Believer." Underneath were a few words of Greek. She remembered vaguely that when she was a child there was something about curtain-rings--she had played with them, possibly. But if that was all, why had her father thought it worth while to keep them? What was it exactly that she used to do with those rings?

These silly questions would keep coming into her head and distracting her attention from her work. She s.h.i.+vered a little--the room was chilly--and took up her pen again. She wrote:

"And, whether the sentimentalist believes it or whether he does not, this religious pa.s.sion which he admires so vastly in his nuns and martyrs is but a perversion of an instinct which--"

Once more she paused. The room was really too cold. Looking round, she saw that the fire was almost out. She was accustomed to do things for herself, and she set to work to revive it at once. She opened the cupboard where she generally kept a few sticks for the purpose, but this afternoon there was none there. The curtain-rings lay on her writing-table, still tied together. Why, of course, they would do as well.

In a few minutes the fire was blazing brightly She warmed her hands at it, gazing abstractedly into the red embers. Then she went back to her work and wrote rapidly until the article was finished.

THE UNSEEN POWER

Winter walked restlessly about the room as he told his story. He was a slender young man, with very smooth hair worn rather too long, a gold-mounted pince-nez, and an expression which showed that vanity was not wholly absent from his composition. It was the story of a haunted house. The man who owned it, and was now unable to let it, had asked Winter to investigate.

"And the whole point of it is that you've got to come along and help me," he concluded.

"Thank you," said Mr Arden, "but I will not go."

Arden was a man of fifty, white-haired, thin, heavily lined.

"Well, why not?" said Winter, peevishly. "I want to know why not. It seems to me it would be rather interesting. You can choose any night you like, and--"

Arden waved the subject away with one hand. "It's useless to talk about it," he said, "I'm not going."

"But what do you mean?" said Winter. "You are not going to tell me that you're superst.i.tious or afraid?"

"I should say," said Arden, "that I am what you would call superst.i.tious. You, I presume, are not."

"Emphatically not," said Winter.

"Nor afraid?"

"Nor afraid," Winter echoed.

"Then why don't you go alone?" said Arden.

Winter murmured of sociability; it was no great fun to sit up all night by one's self. Besides, in the detection of a practical joke, which was probably all that it was, two would be better than one. Arden must see for himself that--

Arden broke in impetuously. "Look here," he said. "Stop wandering about the room and sit down. I'll tell you why I won't come. Did you ever hear of Minnerton Priory?"

"Of course I've heard about it. I don't know the whole story, and I don't suppose anybody does. A man lost his life over it, didn't he?"

"Two men lost their lives. I was the third man. Now, you know why I won't play with these things any more."

"Tell me about it," said Winter. "I've only heard sc.r.a.ps here and there, and reports are always inaccurate. So you were actually one of them. I should never have guessed it."

"I will tell you the story if you wish. Will you have it now, or will you wait till you have finished your investigation of the house at Falmouth?"

"I will hear it now," said Winter.

This is the story that Arden told.

"In 1871 my aunt, Lady Wytham, bought Minnerton Priory. The place had been uninhabited for the best part of half a century, and was in very bad repair. It was cheap and it was picturesque, and both cheapness and picturesqueness appealed to Lady Wytham. Of the original Priory there was very little left standing. Frequent additions had been made to it at different periods, and the general effect of the place when I first saw it was rather grim and queer. Lady Wytham was very energetic, had the place surveyed, and in a few months had got her workmen down there. In one wing of the house a secret chamber had been found. It was on the ground floor, and it was a small room of perhaps twelve feet square.

There was one window to it, placed very high up, and this window had been built up on the outside. Opposite to the window was a small fireplace, and the only entrance to the room was from the big dining-hall. The hall was panelled, and one of the panels formed the door into the secret chamber. I believe this kind of thing is fairly common in old houses dating back to the times of religious and political trouble, when hiding-places were constantly wanted.

"The builders had not been at work many months at the Priory before there was trouble. I cannot say exactly what it was. It began with the unbricking of the little window in the secret chamber. I know that the men refused point-blank to do any work whatever in the great dining-hall. Many were dismissed and new hands were taken on, but the trouble still persisted, till finally Lady Wytham herself went down to interview the clerk of works and a foreman or two. On the following day she wrote to me. She said that an idiotic story was being told with reference to the newly-discovered chamber of Minnerton Priory, and she was anxious to have it satisfactorily knocked on the head. Would I, and any friends that I might care to bring down, spend a few nights in the secret chamber? It would probably be very uncomfortable, but she would send over furniture and a servant to wait on us. The postscript explained that the servant would not sleep in the house.

"The idea rather appealed to me, but being, unlike yourself, a little nervous over the business, I determined to take a couple of men down with me. One of them was an intimate friend of mine, Charles Stavold, a good-natured giant, but a useful man in a row. He and I talked it over together, and finally selected as the third man a young doctor, Bernard Ash. Ash was a remarkably brilliant young man, and we looked to him to supply the brains of the trio. If any practical joke were attempted he would be quite certain to find it out, and both Stavold and myself were quite sure that some practical joke would be attempted. Minnerton Priory lies in a very conservative county. The rustics of the village were quite capable of resenting Lady Wytham's intrusion into the Priory. It had always been uninhabited in their father's time, and that would be quite reason enough to determine them that it should not be inhabited now. There were some objections to our choice. Ash led an extremely dissipated life, and Stavold and myself were a little inclined to doubt his nerves. This doubt, by the way, was not justified by results.

"We reached Minnerton in the afternoon. A large staff of men was busy at work at the place, but the only person in or anywhere near the great dining-hall was Lady Wytham's servant, Rudd. She could not have sent us a better man. He could turn his hand to anything. He had already unpacked the beds and other furniture that had been sent and put them in place, and was at present engaged on getting dinner for us. We went through the dining-hall and into the secret chamber.

"'This won't do,' said Ash at once.

"'What don't do?' asked Stavold.

"'Why, there's no furniture in here of any kind. One can't sleep on these stone flags.'

"'Are we going to sleep in here?' I asked.

"'One of us is,' he said.

"I called up Rudd and gave my directions. He brought mattresses and made up a bed on the floor. Then we went round and examined the walls carefully, for, as Ash observed, where there is one trick panel there may be another. But we could find nothing that seemed in any way suspicious.

"We came back into the great hall, and sat down there and talked the thing over. It was now growing dusk. Already the tapping and hammering of the workmen had ceased, and we had heard them laughing as they pa.s.sed the window on their way home. Right away at the other end of the hall came the c.h.i.n.k of plates and the hiss of a frying-pan where Rudd was busy with his preparations. He had brought four big lamps with him, and these he now lit, but there seemed to be something impenetrable about the darkness of this vast room. The light was still dim, with ma.s.ses of dark shadow waving in the far corners and in the vaulted roof above us.

"'Who's going to sleep in the haunted chamber?' Stavold asked.

"'I am,' said Ash.

"We squabbled about it, and finally decided to toss for it. Ash had his own way. He was to sleep there that night, Stavold was to sleep there the second night, and I myself was left the third night. By this time we had little doubt that we should be at the bottom of the mystery.

"Rudd gave us an excellent dinner, and had shown wisdom in his choice of the wine which he had brought with him. The wine made glad the heart of man, and before dinner was over we were treating the whole thing more as an amusing kind of spree than as a serious investigation. At ten o'clock Rudd inquired at what hour we should like breakfast in the morning, and asked if there was anything further he could do for us that night.

"'Aren't you going to stop and see the ghost, Rudd?' I asked.

"'I think not, sir,' he said quietly. 'Her ladys.h.i.+p had arranged, sir, that I should sleep at the inn.'