The haunted house
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THE HAUNTED HOUSE
CHESTER-BELLOCS
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The Green Overcoat
Mr. Petre
The Emerald
The Haunted House
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THE
HAUNTED HOUSE
BY
HILAIRE BELLOC
_With Illustrations by
G. K. CHESTERTON_
NEW YORK · _Harper & Brothers_ · LONDON
1928
THE HAUNTED HOUSE
COPYRIGHT, 1928, BY HILAIRE BELLOC
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES
FIRST EDITION
M-B
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
An early portrait of Lord de Beaurivage (then Mr. George
Huggins) as an open-air merchant of vegetables and orchard
produce in 1883 _Frontispiece_
_Facing page_
The brothers at Rackham 20
Aunt Hilda settling everything 38
Neighbour Hellup and Neighbour Jake 56
“Our younger hostesses” 60
The Ancestor 68
Progress of Sir Harry Murtenshaw, Knight, to his ancestral home 70
John Maple as Lieutenant Allegri 78
The atheist Gaul 122
“Twenty thousand pounds? You haven’t got twenty thousand pence!”
said Aunt Hilda 130
Fond embrace of Hilda, relict of the late William Maple,
Esquire, of Rackham Catchings in the County of Sussex, and
Amathea, wife of George, First Baron de Beaurivage (pronounced
Bruvvish) 146
Lord Hambourne is astonished at the modern habits of the
fifteenth century 156
Mr. Corton reads _The Spectator_ 188
John Maple explains his plan 194
Growing nervousness of Lord de Beaurivage 226
Lord Hellup accepting from Lord Hambourne the interesting
scientific discovery that motor-cars are less susceptible to
psychic influence than horses 236
Partial, but representative deputation of the domestic staff of
Rackham Catchings protesting against the Headless Thing 238
Unaffected emotion of George, First Baron de Beaurivage on the
appearance of an historic figure 242
Distraction of Lord Hambourne on being offered the usual terms 248
Effect of the other world on Miss Broom, housemaid 250
Solid satisfaction of Mr. Pretherton at the pressed pace of
Columbus 256
Genuine pleasure of Columbus on observing the haste of Mr.
Pretherton 258
Wifely protest of Amathea, Lady de Beaurivage, at the unworthy
treatment of her lord 268
Hilda Maple admits that she is a sinful woman 270
“Hannibal!... I mean, Hamilcar!” 272
THE
HAUNTED HOUSE
CHAPTER I
In the English County of Sussex, upon the clay thereof, and upon a
slight eminence of that clay, stood and stands a squire’s house called
Rackham.
Rackham is a common enough name in that part of the world, attached to
perhaps half a dozen widely-different places and things; downs, woods,
fields. But no one had ever bothered to call Rackham anything extra to
make it a special Rackham. Rackham it had been and remained during its
three hundred years as a cell of Lewes Priory and its four hundred of
various lay owners.
Its master at the end of the nineteenth century was a certain Mr. Henry
Maple, of a good ordinary position, born to no great fortune, but a
sufficient master of his countryside.
By birth he was what one might expect, a great-grandson. A Maple who
had begun as a smith and cattle dealer and had gone on as a general
broker, sometimes advancing cash to his fellows and sometimes making a
lucky purchase and sale in stock, had bought out the former immemorial
squires of Rackham when George III. was king. Those whom he had bought
out were an impoverished line, whose founder (a Lewes tallow chandler)
had got it, rather more than a century before, after the Civil Wars,
from a ruined cavalier family, which, in its turn, had been started by
a scullion in Thomas Cromwell’s kitchen, who, yet a century earlier,
had nobbled this parcel of his master’s loot during the great break-up.
So you see that Rackham was just like scores and hundreds of its kind
up and down England, and possessed, after the fashion of any one of the
others, by a very amiable man, a gentleman (which is saying a great
deal), a man formed by Public School and University, and having behind
him two generations of Public School and University, and three of
sufficient wealth.
Rackham was a rather absurd looking house, but dignified. Half of it
was the original Elizabethan living house, with a few stones left of
the earlier monastic building and great oak beams for its framework,
but transmogrified by eighteenth-century additions and internal
changes. From the lawn in front you saw at one end two low stories of
wood and plaster, a tiled roof above that; at the other a brick wall
pierced at regular intervals by a particularly ugly set of windows. At
the back, looking north, was a dreary stucco addition of kitchens and
offices, greenish with damp weather. The later half of the house, all
brick, had been added, as had certain changes in the older part, before
1790, by the fortunate smith and cattle dealer. The stucco offices to
the north had been built by his son during the high corn prices of the
Napoleonic wars.
Inside, the house was what you would expect from such a history.
Nothing whatever told you, even in its oldest part, that there was work
many hundred years old, save the few stones of the monastic building
at the base of a wall, certain beams still exposed in the servants’
quarters, a box room, and one of the smaller bedrooms. The other beams
had been covered long ago with plaster ceilings. Some of them had
been cut clean away to raise the height of the living-rooms after the
later fashion. There was a bathroom with hot and cold water, which
was thought a fine new thing in the middle of the nineteenth century,
when it had been fitted up. There was a small, rather dingy hall; a
passage running from this to the various living-rooms; one simple
staircase for the family, with rather nicely carved oaken banisters,
and a very much worn and very ugly carpet. There were plenty of books
and plenty of pictures—pictures of all sorts and kinds; many a bad
watercolour by ladies of the place, living and dead; a few portraits
in the drawing-room, one of which, almost black, was reputed to be a
Gainsborough. The house was comfortable, it was homely, and it exactly
suited its master, who was, in the first years of the twentieth
century, a man of about forty, very much liked in the neighbourhood,
and with something of a reputation for scholarship; a widower with one
young child—a boy called John.
Thus lived Henry Maple, on what he felt, as all such men feel, to be
ancestral land descended to him from beyond all human record; and in
sober truth possessed by his own blood for a good deal more than a
hundred years; which is quite a long succession for such English land.
He was part of it: of the outlook from that slight eminence towards the
Downs ten miles off along the southern sky; of the rather dishevelled
little park (if you liked to call it that) with its ill-kept gravel
way and its little lodge at the gates; of half a dozen farms which had
provided an income sufficient for his father and grandfather before
him, and the rents of which heavily reduced during the depression of
the 80’s had since remained unchanged; sleeping, like most things in
that good world. Part of him also were the two or three horses in
his stables, the two or three vehicles, and particularly the little
brougham in which he drove to the domestic country station three miles
off, where the very asphalt and palings seemed to talk with the Sussex
burr and to think of London, forty miles away, as a place utterly
remote.
London was not properly part of Henry Maple’s life. He had his club, of
course, for which his father had put him down when he was born, just as
he had put him down for his Public School and for his College. He used
it perhaps twenty times in a year.
The staff of Rackham was consonant with all the rest. A butler of much
the same age as his master, and of twenty years’ standing, knowing the
names of wines, but far more familiar with beer. A lad who cleaned
boots, ran messages, and took the blame for mishaps; a few maids; a
fixed, elderly cook called Mrs. Marwell, and a kitchenmaid; and she
that had been the child’s nurse, and still was after a fashion (even
after he had begun to go to a Preparatory School). She was kept on, and
would be kept on till she died.
There was Rackham; and (one would have said) the benediction of God
upon it. I knew it well enough.
The first thing that began to threaten such unchangeable things with
change was an unaccountable creeping oddity in the relation of income
to expenditure. Henry Maple, in the intervals of his reading and his
quiet entertainment, heard of it vaguely as “these times.” It might
also be called certain new habits of a changing age; rather more
travel, a few more visitors, farmers coming shame-facedly and very
privately to ask for some small reduction in rent, or rather heavy
piece of repair, which was granted as a matter of course; coming again
a year or two later to ask for another, which was also granted as a
matter of course, but at last with a little misgiving.
The century was thus nine years old, and his lonely, affectionate
little son, of whom his father made a close companion, was nine years
old also, when Henry Maple realised that there were a good many things
he ought to have done to the house and did not from lack of funds—wear
and tear come so gradually. He was used to the fences beginning to look
tumbled down, and to a good deal of grass on the few paths; for the
gardener was getting old, and not over lively.
Henry Maple had grown used also to an overdraft at his bank; though he
was rather disturbed when, a few years earlier, the manager had told
him in a pleasant conversation that it would be well to fix a limit—and
did so. But he got used to that too.
He very reluctantly and in rather haphazard, expensive fashion
mortgaged two of the outlying farms; then a third. There came a moment