Title Page
The Author
A Strange Christmas Story
Walnut-Tree House
The Open Door
Nut Bush Farm
The Old House in Vauxhall Walk
Sandy the Tinker
Old Mrs. Jones
About the Publisher
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CHARLOTTE ELIZA LAWSON Riddell (née Cowan) was born in 1832 in County Antrim, the daughter of a flax and cotton spinner. After her father died, she and her mother eked out a meagre existence before moving to London in 1855.
She tried to earn money for herself and her dying mother by writing, an experience which inspired her later novel, A Struggle for Life (1883). Her mother did not live to see her major successes, which included George Geith of Fen Court(1864), for which the publisher William Tinsley paid her an impressive £800.
In 1857 she married a patent agent by the name of Joseph Hadley Riddell. His business and health had collapsed by 1871, causing severe financial difficulties. This situation would explain Charlotte’s prodigious output during the 1860s, when she was editing St. James’s Magazine, in addition to writing fiction.
She is best known for her ghost stories, published as Weird Stories in 1882. Their success is partly due to the atmospheric setting which Riddell had drawn from her own experiences in Ireland and London. Although a popular author, she struggled to earn an adequate income. She was eventually paid a small pension by the newly-formed Society of Authors, before dying of breast cancer in 1906.
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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.
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THE NEW OWNER
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MANY YEARS AGO THERE stood at the corner of a street leading out of Upper Kennington Lane a great red brick house, covering a goodly area of ground, and surrounded by gardens magnificent in their proportions when considered in relation to the populous neighbourhood mentioned.
Originally a place of considerable pretention; a gentleman's seat in the country probably when Lambeth Marsh had not a shop in the whole of it; when Vauxhall Gardens were still in nubilus; when no South-Western Railway was planned or thought of; when London was comparatively a very small place, and its present suburbs were mere country villages—hamlets lying quite remote from the heart of the city.
Once, the house in question had been surrounded by a small park, and at that time there were fish-ponds in the grounds, and quite a stretch of meadow-land within the walls. Bit by bit, however, the park had been cut up into building ground and let off on building leases; the meadows were covered with bricks and mortar, shops were run up where cows once chewed the cud, and the roar and rumble of London traffic sounded about the old house and the deserted garden, formerly quiet and silent as though situated in some remote part of the country.
Many a time in the course of the generations that had come and gone, been born and buried, since the old house was built, the freehold it covered changed hands. On most estates of this kind round London there generally is a residence, which passes like a horse from buyer to buyer. When it has served one man's need it is put up for sale and bid for by another. When rows and rows of houses, and line after line of streets, have obliterated all the familiar marks, it is impossible to cultivate a sentiment as regards property; and it is unlikely that the descendants of the first possessors of Walnut-Tree House who had grown to be country folk and lived in great state, oblivious of business people, and entertaining a great contempt for trade, knew that in a very undesirable part of London there still stood the residence where the first successful man of their family went home each day from his counting-house over against St. Mildred's Church, in The Poultry.
One very wet evening, in an autumn the leaves of which have been dead and gone this many a year, Walnut-Tree House, standing grim and lonely in the mournful twilight, looked more than ordinarily desolate and deserted.
There was not a sign of life about it; the shutters were closed—the rusty iron gates were fast locked—the approach was choked up with grass and weeds—through no chink did the light of a single candle flicker. For seven years it had been given over to rats and mice and blackbeetles; for seven years no one had been found to live in it; for seven years it had remained empty, while its owner wore out existence in fits of moody dejection or of wild frenzy in the madhouse close at hand; and now that owner was dead and buried and forgotten, and the new owner was returning to take possession. This new owner had written to his lawyers, or rather he had written to the lawyers of his late relative, begging them to request the person in charge of the house to have rooms prepared for his arrival; and, when the train drew into the station at Waterloo, he was met by one of the clerks in Messrs Timpson and Co.'s office, who, picking out Mr. Stainton, delivered to that gentleman a letter from the firm, and said he would wait and hear if there were any message in reply.
Mr. Stainton read the letter—looked at the blank flyleaf—and then, turning back to the first words, read what his solicitors had to say all through once again, this time aloud.
“The house has stood empty for more than seven years,” he said, half addressing the clerk and half speaking to himself. “Must be damp and uninhabitable; there is no one living on the premises. Under these circumstances we have been unable to comply with your directions, and can only recommend you to go to an hotel till we are able personally to discuss future arrangements.”
“Humph,” said the new owner, after he had finished. “I'll go and take a look at the place, anyhow. Is it far from here, do you know?” he asked, turning to the young man from Timpsons'.
“No, sir; not very far.”
“Can you spare time to come over there with me?” continued Mr. Stainton. The young man believed that he could, adding, “If you want to go into the house we had better call for the key. It is at an estate agent's in the Westminster Bridge Road.”
“I cannot say I have any great passion for hotels,” remarked the new owner, as he took his seat in the cab.
“Indeed, sir?”
“No; either they don't suit me, or I don't suit them. I have led a wild sort of life: not much civilisation in the bush, or at the goldfields, I can tell you. Rooms full of furniture, houses where a fellow must keep to the one little corner he has hired, seem to choke me. Then I have not been well, and I can't stand noise and the trampling of feet. I had enough of that on board ship; and I used to lie awake at nights and think how pleasant it would be to have a big house all to myself, to do as I liked in.”
“Yes, sir,” agreed the clerk.
“You see, I have been used to roughing it, and I can get along very well for a night without servants.”
“No doubt, sir.”
“I suppose the house is in substantial repair—roof tight, and all that sort of thing?”
“I can't say, I am sure, sir.”
“Well, if there is a dry corner where I can spread a rug, I shall sleep there to-night.”
The clerk coughed. He looked out of the window, and then he looked at Messrs. Timpsons' client.
“I do not think—” he began, apologetically, and then stopped.
“You don't think what?” asked the other.
“You'll excuse me, sir, but I don't think—I really do not think, if I were you, I'd go to that house to-night.”
“Why not?”
“Well, it has not been slept in for nearly seven years, and it must be blue mouldy with damp; and if you have been ill, that is all the more reason you should not run such a risk. And, besides—”
“Besides?” suggested Mr. Stainton. “Out with it! Like a postscript, no doubt, that 'besides' holds the marrow of the argument.”
“The house has stood empty for years, sir, because—there is no use in making any secret of it—the place has a bad name.”
“What sort of a bad name—unhealthy?”
“Oh, no!”
“Haunted?”
The clerk inclined his head. “You have hit it, sir,” he said.
“And that is the reason no one has lived there?”
“We have been quite unable to let the house on that account.”
“The sooner it gets unhaunted, then, the better,” retorted Mr. Stainton. “I shall certainly stop there to-night. You are not disposed to stay and keep me company, I suppose?”
With a little gesture of dismay the clerk drew back. Certainly, this was one of the most unconventional of clients. The young man from Timpsons' did not at all know what to make of him.
“A rough sort of fellow,” he said afterwards, when describing the new owner; “boorish; never mixed with good society, that sort of thing.”
He did not in the least understand this rich man, who treated him as an equal, who objected to hotels, who didn't mind taking up his abode in a house where not even a drunken charwoman could be induced to stop, and who calmly asked a stranger on whom he had never set eyes before—a clerk in the respectable office of Timpson and Co., a young fellow anxious to rise in the world, careful as to his associates, particular about the whiteness of his shirts and the sit of his collar and the cut of his coats—to “rough” things with him in that dreadful old dungeon, where, perhaps, he might even be expected to light a fire.
Still, he did not wish to offend the new owner. Messrs. Timpson expected him to be a profitable client; and to that impartial firm the money of a boor would, he knew, seem as good as the money of a count.
“I am very sorry,” he stammered; “should only have felt too much honoured; but the fact is—previous engagement—”
Mr. Stainton laughed.
“I understand,” he said. “Adventures are quite as much out of your line as ghosts. And now tell me about this apparition. Does the 'old man' walk?”
“Not that I ever heard of,” answered the other.
“Is it, then, the miserable beggar who tried to do for himself?”
“It is not the late Mr. Stainton, I believe,” said the young man, in tone which mildly suggested that reference to a client of Timpsons' as a “miserable beggar” might be considered bad taste.
“Then who on earth is it?” persisted Mr. Stainton.
“If you must know, sir, it is a child—a child who has driven every tenant in succession out of the house.”
The new owner burst into a hearty laugh—a laugh which gave serious offence to Timpsons' clerk.
“That is too good a joke,” said Mr. Stainton. “I do not know when I heard anything so delicious.”
“It is a fact, whether it be delicious or not,” retorted the young man, driven out of all his former propriety of voice and demeanour by the contemptuous ridicule this “digger” thought fit to cast on his story; “and I, for one, would not, after all I have heard about your house, pass a night in it—no, not if anybody offered me fifty pounds down.”
“Make your mind easy, my friend,” said the new owner, quietly. “I am not going to bid for your company. The child and I can manage, I'll be bound, to get on very comfortably by ourselves.”
THE CHILD
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IT WAS LATER ON IN the same evening; Mr. Stainton had an hour previously taken possession of Walnut-Tree House, dismissed his cab, bidden Timpsons' clerk good evening, and, having ordered in wood and coals from the nearest greengrocer, besides various other necessary articles from various other tradesmen, he now stood by the front gate waiting the coming of the goods purchased.
As he waited, he looked up at the house, which in the uncertain light of the street lamps appeared gloomier and darker than had been the case even in the gathering twilight.
The long rows of shuttered windows, the silent solemnity of the great trees, remnants of a once goodly avenue that had served to give its name to Walnut-Tree House; the appalling silence of everything within the place, when contrasted with the noise of passing cabs and whistling street boys, and men trudging home with unfurled umbrellas and women scudding along with draggled petticoats, might well have impressed even an unimpressionable man, and Edgar Stainton, spite of his hard life and rough exterior, was impressionable and imaginative.
“It has an 'uncanny' look, certainly,” he considered; “but is not so cheerless for a lonely man as the 'bush'; and though I am not over-tired, I fancy I shall sleep more soundly in my new home than I did many a night at the goldfields. When once I can get a good fire up I shall be all right. Now, I wonder when those coals are coming!”
As he turned once again towards the road, he beheld on its way the sack of fuel with which the nearest greengrocer said he thought he could—indeed, said he would—“oblige” him. A ton—half a ton—quarter of a ton, the greengrocer affirmed would be impossible until the next day; but a sack—yes—he would promise that. Bill should bring it round; and Bill was told to put his burden on the truck, and twelve bundles of wood, “and we'll make up the rest to-morrow,” added Bill's master, with the air of one who has conferred a favour.
In the distance Mr. Stainton descried a very grimy Bill, and a very small boy, coming along with the truck leisurely, as though the load had been Herculean.
Through the rain he watched the pair advancing and greeted Bill with a glad voice of welcome.
“So you've come at last; that's right. Better late than never. Bring them this way. I'll have this small lot shot in the kitchen for the night.”
“Begging your pardon, sir,” answered Bill, “I don't think you will—that is to say, not by me. As I told our governor, I'll take 'em to the house as you've sold 'em to the house, but I won't set a foot inside it.”
“Do you mean to say you are going to leave them out on the pavement?” asked Mr. Stainton.
“Well, sir, I don't mind taking them to the front door if it'll be a convenience.”
“That will do. You are a brave lot of people in these parts I must say.”
“As for that,” retorted Bill, with sack on back and head bent forward, “I dare say we're as brave about here as where you come from.”
“It is not impossible,” retorted Mr. Stainton; “there are plenty of cowards over there too.”
With a feint of being very much afraid, Bill, after he had shot his coals on the margin of the steps, retreated from the door, which stood partly open, and when the boy who brought up the wood was again out with the truck, said, putting his knuckles to his eyebrows:
“Beg pardon, sir, but I suppose you couldn't give us a drop of beer? Very wet night, sir.”
“No, I could not,” answered Mr. Stainton, very decidedly. “I shall have to shovel these coals into the house myself; and, as for the night, it is as wet for me as it is for you.”
Nevertheless, as Bill shuffled along the short drive—shuffling wearily—like a man who, having nearly finished one day's hard work, was looking forward to beginning another hard day in the morning, the new owner relented.
“Here,” he said, picking out a sixpence to give him, “it isn't your fault, I suppose, that you believe in old women's tales.”
“Thank you kindly, sir,” Bill answered; “I am sure I am extremely obliged; but if I was in your shoes I wouldn't stop in that house—you'll excuse me, sir, meaning no offence—but I wouldn't; indeed I wouldn't.”
“It seems to have got a good name, at any rate,” thought Mr. Stainton, while retracing his steps to the banned tenement. “Let us see what effect a fire will have in routing the shadows.”
He entered the house, and, striking a match, lighted some candles he had brought in with him from a neighbouring oil-shop.
Years previously the gas company, weary of receiving no profit from the house, had taken away their meter and cut off their connections. The water supply was in the same case, as Mr. Stainton, going round the premises before it grew quite dark, had discovered.
Of almost all small articles of furniture easily broken by careless tenants, easily removed by charwomen, the place was perfectly bare; and as there were no portable candlesticks in which to place the lights the new tenant was forced to make his illumination by the help of some dingy mirrors provided with sconces, and to seek such articles as he needed by the help of a guttering mould candle stuck in the neck of a broken bottle. After an inspection of the ground-floor rooms he decided to take up his quarters for the night in one which had evidently served as a library.
In the centre of the apartment there was the table covered with leather. Around the walls were bookcases, still well filled with volumes, too uninviting to borrow, too valueless in the opinion of the ignorant to steal. In one corner stood a bureau, where the man, who for so many years had been dead even while living, kept his letters and papers.
The floor was bare. Once a Turkey carpet had been spread over the centre of the polished oak boards, but it lay in its wonted place no longer; between the windows hung a convex mirror, in which the face of any human being looked horrible and distorted; whilst over the mantle-shelf, indeed, forming a portion of it, was a long, narrow glass, bordered by a frame ornamented with a tracery of leaves and flowers. The ceiling was richly decorated, and, spite of the dust and dirt and neglect of years, all the appointments of the apartment he had selected gave Edgar Stainton the impression that it was a good thing to be the owner of such a mansion, even though it did chance to be situated as much out of the way of fashionable London as the diggings whence he had come.
“And there is not a creature but myself left to enjoy it all,” he mused, as he sat looking into the blazing coals. “My poor mother, how she would have rejoiced to-night, had she lived to be the mistress of so large a place! And my father, what a harbour this would have seemed after the storms that buffeted him! Well, they are better off, I know; and yet I cannot help thinking how strange it all is—that I, who went away a mere beggar, should come home rich, to be made richer, and yet stand so utterly alone that in the length and breadth of England I have not a relative to welcome me or to say I wish you joy of your inheritance.”
He had eaten his frugal supper, and now, pushing aside the table on which the remains of his repast were spread, he began walking slowly up and down the room, thinking over the past and forming plans for the future.
As he was buried in reflection, the fire began to die down without his noticing the fact; but a sudden feeling of chilliness at length causing him instinctively to look towards the hearth, he threw some wood into the grate, and, while the flames went blazing up the wide chimney, piled on coals as though he desired to set the house alight.
While he was so engaged there came a knock at the door of the room—a feeble, hesitating knock, which was repeated more than once before it attracted Mr. Stainton's attention.
When it did, being still busy with the fire, and forgetting he was alone in the house, he called out, “Come in.”
Along the panels there stole a rustling sort of touch, as if someone were feeling uncertainly for the handle—a curious noise, as of a weak hand fumbling about the door in the dark; then, in a similar manner, the person seeking admittance tried to turn the lock.
“Come in, can't you?” repeated Mr. Stainton; but even as he spoke he remembered he was, or ought to be, the sole occupant of the mansion.
He was not alarmed; he was too much accustomed to solitude and danger for that; but he rose from his stooping position and instinctively seized his revolver, which he had chanced, while unpacking some of his effects, to place on the top of the bureau.
“Come in, whoever you are,” he cried; but seeing the door remained closed, though the intruder was evidently making futile efforts to open it, he strode half-way across the room, and then stopped, amazed.
For suddenly the door opened, and there entered, shyly and timidly, a little child—a child with the saddest face mortal ever beheld; a child with wistful eyes and long, ill-kept hair; a child poorly dressed, wasted and worn, and with the mournfullest expression on its countenance that face of a child ever wore.
“What a hungry little beggar,” thought Mr. Stainton. “Well, young one, and what do you want here?” he added, aloud.
The boy never answered, never took the slightest notice of his questioner, but simply walked slowly round the room, peering into all the corners, as if looking for something. Searching the embrasures of the windows, examining the recesses beside the fire-place, pausing on the hearth to glance under the library table, and finally, when the doorway was reached once more, turning to survey the contents of the apartment with an eager and yet hopeless scrutiny.
“What is it you want, my boy?” asked Mr. Stainton, glancing as he spoke at the child's poor thin legs, and short, shabby frock, and shoes wellnigh worn out, and arms bare and lean and unbeautiful. “Is it anything I can get for you?”
Not a word—not a whisper; only for reply a glance of the wistful brown eyes.
“Where do you come from, and who do you belong to?” persisted Mr. Stainton.
The child turned slowly away.
“Come, you shall not get off so easily as you seem to imagine,” persisted the new owner, advancing towards his visitor. “You have no business to be here at all; and before you go you must tell me how you chance to be in this house, and what you expected to find in this room.”
He was close to the doorway by this time, and the child stood on the threshold, with its back towards him.
Mr. Stainton could see every detail of the boy's attire—his little plaid frock, which he had outgrown, the hooks which fastened it; the pinafore, soiled and crumpled, tied behind with strings broken and knotted; in one place the skirt had given from the body, and a piece of thin, poor flannel showed that the child's under habiliments matched in shabbiness his exterior garments.
“Poor little chap,” thought Mr. Stainton. “I wonder if he would like something to eat. Are you hungry, my lad?”
The child turned and looked at him earnestly, but answered never a word.
“I wonder if he is dumb,” marvelled Mr. Stainton; and, seeing he was moving away, put out a hand to detain him. But the child eluded his touch, and flitted out into the hall and up the wide staircase with swift, noiseless feet.
Only waiting to snatch a candle from one of the sconces, Mr. Stainton pursued as fast as he could follow.
Up the easy steps he ran at the top of his speed; but, fast as he went, the child went faster. Higher and higher he beheld the tiny creature mounting, then, still keeping the same distance between them, it turned when it reached the top storey and trotted along a narrow corridor with rooms opening off to right and left. At the extreme end of this passage a door stood ajar. Through this the child passed, Mr. Stainton still following.
“I have run you to earth at last,” he said, entering and closing the door. “Why, where has the boy gone?” he added, holding the candle above his head and gazing round the dingy garret in which he found himself.
The room was quite empty. He examined it closely, but could find no possible outlet save the door, and a skylight which had evidently not been opened for years.
There was no furniture in the apartment, except a truckle bedstead, a rush-bottomed chair, and a rickety washstand. No wardrobe, or box or press where even a kitten might have lain concealed.
“It is very strange,” muttered Mr. Stainton, as he turned away baffled. “Very strange!” he repeated, while he walked along the corridor. “I don't understand it at all,” he decided, proceeding slowly down the topmost flight of stairs; but then all at once he stopped.
“IT IS THE CHILD!” he exclaimed aloud, and the sound of his own voice woke strange echoes through the silence of that desolate house. “IT IS THE CHILD!” And he descended the principal staircase very slowly, with bowed head, and his grave, thoughtful face graver and more thoughtful than ever.
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SEEKING FOR INFORMATION
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IT WAS ENOUGH TO MAKE any man look grave; and as time went on the new owner of Walnut-Tree House found himself pondering continually as to what the mystery could be which attached to the child he had found in possession of his property, and who had already driven tenant after tenant out of the premises. Inclined at first to regard the clerk's story as a joke, and his own experience on the night of his arrival a delusion, it was impossible for him to continue incredulous when he found, even in broad daylight, that terrible child stealing down the staircase and entering the rooms, looking—looking, for something it never found.
Never after the first horror was over did Mr. Stainton think of leaving the house in consequence of that haunting presence which had kept the house tenantless. It would have been worse than useless, he felt. With the ocean stretching between, his spirit would still be in the old mansion at Lambeth—his mental vision would always be watching the child engaged in the weary search to which there seemed no end—that never appeared to produce any result.
At bed and at board he had company, or the expectation of it. No apartment in the building was secure from intrusion. It did not matter where he lay; it did not matter where he ate; between sleeping and waking, between breakfast and dinner, whenever the notion seized it, the child came gliding in, looking, looking, looking, and never finding; not lingering longer than was necessary to be certain the object of its search was absent, but wandering hither and thither, from garret to kitchen, from parlour to bed-chamber, in that quest which still seemed fresh as when first begun.
Mr. Stainton went to his solicitors as the most likely persons from whom to obtain information on the subject, and plunged at once into the matter.
“Who is the child supposed to be, Mr. Timpson?” he asked, making no secret that he had seen it.
“Well, that is really very difficult to say,” answered Mr. Timpson.
“There was