Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
No; I do not wish to listen to any more. Make no difficulties, I beg.
You have your orders—go. Will you follow me, sir?”
They went to the study. The packet which young Mr Crome had brought—he
was then just become a Fellow of Clare Hall in Cambridge, I may say,
and subsequently brought out a respectable edition of
Polyaenus—contained among other things the notes which the old Vicar
had made upon the occasion of Sir Matthew Fell’s death. And for the
first time Sir Richard was confronted with the enigmatical _Sortes
Biblicæ_ which you have heard. They amused him a good deal.
“Well,” he said, “my grandfather’s Bible gave one prudent piece of
advice—_Cut it down_. If that stands for the ash-tree, he may rest
assured I shall not neglect it. Such a nest of catarrhs and agues was
never seen.”
The parlour contained the family books, which, pending the arrival of a
collection which Sir Richard had made in Italy, and the building of a
proper room to receive them, were not many in number.
Sir Richard looked up from the paper to the bookcase.
“I wonder,” says he, “whether the old prophet is there yet? I fancy I
see him.”
Crossing the room, he took out a dumpy Bible, which, sure enough, bore
on the flyleaf the inscription: “To Matthew Fell, from his Loving
Godmother, Anne Aldous, 2 September, 1659.”
“It would be no bad plan to test him again, Mr Crome. I will wager we
get a couple of names in the Chronicles. H’m! what have we here? ‘Thou
shalt seek me in the morning, and I shall not be.’ Well, well! Your
grandfather would have made a fine omen of that, hey? No more prophets
for me! They are all in a tale. And now, Mr Crome, I am infinitely
obliged to you for your packet. You will, I fear, be impatient to get
on. Pray allow me—another glass.”
So with offers of hospitality, which were genuinely meant (for Sir
Richard thought well of the young man’s address and manner), they
parted.
In the afternoon came the guests—the Bishop of Kilmore, Lady Mary
Hervey, Sir William Kentfield, etc. Dinner at five, wine, cards,
supper, and dispersal to bed.
Next morning Sir Richard is disinclined to take his gun with the rest.
He talks with the Bishop of Kilmore. This prelate, unlike a good many
of the Irish Bishops of his day, had visited his see, and, indeed,
resided there, for some considerable time. This morning, as the two
were walking along the terrace and talking over the alterations and
improvements in the house, the Bishop said, pointing to the window of
the West Room:
“You could never get one of my Irish flock to occupy that room, Sir
Richard.”
“Why is that, my lord? It is, in fact, my own.”
“Well, our Irish peasantry will always have it that it brings the worst
of luck to sleep near an ash-tree, and you have a fine growth of ash
not two yards from your chamber window. Perhaps,” the Bishop went on,
with a smile, “it has given you a touch of its quality already, for you
do not seem, if I may say it, so much the fresher for your night’s rest
as your friends would like to see you.”
“That, or something else, it is true, cost me my sleep from twelve to
four, my lord. But the tree is to come down tomorrow, so I shall not
hear much more from it.”
“I applaud your determination. It can hardly be wholesome to have the
air you breathe strained, as it were, through all that leafage.”
“Your lordship is right there, I think. But I had not my window open
last night. It was rather the noise that went on—no doubt from the
twigs sweeping the glass—that kept me open-eyed.”
“I think that can hardly be, Sir Richard. Here—you see it from this
point. None of these nearest branches even can touch your casement
unless there were a gale, and there was none of that last night. They
miss the panes by a foot.”
“No, sir, true. What, then, will it be, I wonder, that scratched and
rustled so—ay, and covered the dust on my sill with lines and marks?”
At last they agreed that the rats must have come up through the ivy.
That was the Bishop’s idea, and Sir Richard jumped at it.
So the day passed quietly, and night came, and the party dispersed to
their rooms, and wished Sir Richard a better night.
And now we are in his bedroom, with the light out and the Squire in
bed. The room is over the kitchen, and the night outside still and
warm, so the window stands open.
There is very little light about the bedstead, but there is a strange
movement there; it seems as if Sir Richard were moving his head rapidly
to and fro with only the slightest possible sound. And now you would
guess, so deceptive is the half-darkness, that he had several heads,
round and brownish, which move back and forward, even as low as his
chest. It is a horrible illusion. Is it nothing more? There! something
drops off the bed with a soft plump, like a kitten, and is out of the
window in a flash; another—four—and after that there is quiet again.
_“Thou shalt seek me in the morning, and I shall not be.”_
As with Sir Matthew, so with Sir Richard—dead and black in his bed!
A pale and silent party of guests and servants gathered under the
window when the news was known. Italian poisoners, Popish emissaries,
infected air—all these and more guesses were hazarded, and the Bishop
of Kilmore looked at the tree, in the fork of whose lower boughs a
white tom-cat was crouching, looking down the hollow which years had
gnawed in the trunk. It was watching something inside the tree with
great interest.
Suddenly it got up and craned over the hole. Then a bit of the edge on
which it stood gave way, and it went slithering in. Everyone looked up
at the noise of the fall.
It is known to most of us that a cat can cry; but few of us have heard,
I hope, such a yell as came out of the trunk of the great ash. Two or
three screams there were—the witnesses are not sure which—and then a
slight and muffled noise of some commotion or struggling was all that
came. But Lady Mary Hervey fainted outright, and the housekeeper
stopped her ears and fled till she fell on the terrace.
The Bishop of Kilmore and Sir William Kentfield stayed. Yet even they
were daunted, though it was only at the cry of a cat; and Sir William
swallowed once or twice before he could say:
“There is something more than we know of in that tree, my lord. I am
for an instant search.”
And this was agreed upon. A ladder was brought, and one of the
gardeners went up, and, looking down the hollow, could detect nothing
but a few dim indications of something moving. They got a lantern, and
let it down by a rope.
“We must get at the bottom of this. My life upon it, my lord, but the
secret of these terrible deaths is there.”
Up went the gardener again with the lantern, and let it down the hole
cautiously. They saw the yellow light upon his face as he bent over,
and saw his face struck with an incredulous terror and loathing before
he cried out in a dreadful voice and fell back from the ladder—where,
happily, he was caught by two of the men—letting the lantern fall
inside the tree.
He was in a dead faint, and it was some time before any word could be
got from him.
By then they had something else to look at. The lantern must have
broken at the bottom, and the light in it caught upon dry leaves and
rubbish that lay there, for in a few minutes a dense smoke began to
come up, and then flame; and, to be short, the tree was in a blaze.
The bystanders made a ring at some yards’ distance, and Sir William and
the Bishop sent men to get what weapons and tools they could; for,
clearly, whatever might be using the tree as its lair would be forced
out by the fire.
So it was. First, at the fork, they saw a round body covered with
fire—the size of a man’s head—appear very suddenly, then seem to
collapse and fall back. This, five or six times; then a similar ball
leapt into the air and fell on the grass, where after a moment it lay
still. The Bishop went as near as he dared to it, and saw—what but the
remains of an enormous spider, veinous and seared! And, as the fire
burned lower down, more terrible bodies like this began to break out
from the trunk, and it was seen that these were covered with greyish
hair.
All that day the ash burned, and until it fell to pieces the men stood
about it, and from time to time killed the brutes as they darted out.
At last there was a long interval when none appeared, and they
cautiously closed in and examined the roots of the tree.
“They found,” says the Bishop of Kilmore, “below it a rounded hollow
place in the earth, wherein were two or three bodies of these creatures
that had plainly been smothered by the smoke; and, what is to me more
curious, at the side of this den, against the wall, was crouching the
anatomy or skeleton of a human being, with the skin dried upon the
bones, having some remains of black hair, which was pronounced by those
that examined it to be undoubtedly the body of a woman, and clearly
dead for a period of fifty years.”
NUMBER 13
Among the towns of Jutland, Viborg justly holds a high place. It is the
seat of a bishopric; it has a handsome but almost entirely new
cathedral, a charming garden, a lake of great beauty, and many storks.
Near it is Hald, accounted one of the prettiest things in Denmark; and
hard by is Finderup, where Marsk Stig murdered King Erik Glipping on St
Cecilia’s Day, in the year 1286. Fifty-six blows of square-headed iron
maces were traced on Erik’s skull when his tomb was opened in the
seventeenth century. But I am not writing a guide-book.
There are good hotels in Viborg—Preisler’s and the Phœnix are all that
can be desired. But my cousin, whose experiences I have to tell you
now, went to the Golden Lion the first time that he visited Viborg. He
has not been there since, and the following pages will, perhaps,
explain the reason of his abstention.
The Golden Lion is one of the very few houses in the town that were not
destroyed in the great fire of 1726, which practically demolished the
cathedral, the Sognekirke, the Raadhuus, and so much else that was old
and interesting. It is a great red-brick house—that is, the front is of
brick, with corbie steps on the gables and a text over the door; but
the courtyard into which the omnibus drives is of black and white wood
and plaster.
The sun was declining in the heavens when my cousin walked up to the
door, and the light smote full upon the imposing façade of the house.
He was delighted with the old-fashioned aspect of the place, and
promised himself a thoroughly satisfactory and amusing stay in an inn
so typical of old Jutland.
It was not business in the ordinary sense of the word that had brought
Mr Anderson to Viborg. He was engaged upon some researches into the
Church history of Denmark, and it had come to his knowledge that in the
Rigsarkiv of Viborg there were papers, saved from the fire, relating to
the last days of Roman Catholicism in the country. He proposed,
therefore, to spend a considerable time—perhaps as much as a fortnight
or three weeks—in examining and copying these, and he hoped that the
Golden Lion would be able to give him a room of sufficient size to
serve alike as a bedroom and a study. His wishes were explained to the
landlord, and, after a certain amount of thought, the latter suggested
that perhaps it might be the best way for the gentleman to look at one
or two of the larger rooms and pick one for himself. It seemed a good
idea.
The top floor was soon rejected as entailing too much getting upstairs
after the day’s work; the second floor contained no room of exactly the
dimensions required; but on the first floor there was a choice of two
or three rooms which would, so far as size went, suit admirably.
The landlord was strongly in favour of Number 17, but Mr Anderson