The haunted house
for more than two, and just possibly they might even cut out one of
those. The first he had already begun to scribble in the train:
“_I ran down to Rackham Catchings this week-end, Mrs. Hilda
Maple’s charming place in Sussex. It is a fifteenth-century
home, quite unspoiled, a rare thing nowadays. Mrs. Hilda
Maple is, of course, the widow of Mr. William Maple, and she
was famous some years ago in London during her distinguished
husband’s lifetime for her_ salons _to which all the great
lights of the day had the_ entrée....”
and so on. There were about twenty lines of it. If anything happened
he would work in a second paragraph. He hoped, with a doubtful hope,
that something would happen, though it was difficult to see what could
happen with a dull woman like Hilda Maple and a Yankee lord and a war
profiteer (for he had been told who was coming). Still, he hoped—and
his hope was rewarded. A good deal did happen.
Yet another thought was at the back of the noble Professor’s mind as he
travelled. He wanted to make quite sure that there really was nothing
old—at least, nothing older than the eighteenth century—in Rackham
Catchings. He suspected as much, but he wasn’t certain. He liked to
know those things. It gave him a hold over people. One never knew when
it might turn up useful.
Lord Hambourne, like most of the academic tribe, had real knowledge in
one matter outside his own subject. He did understand old wood, from
adzed chamfered beams to Misericordes. As for psychology, he knew by
this time as much about it as any other man, for it was now many years
since that rich cousin of his, then in the Ministry, had terrified
the Turtle Eaters Company into founding the Chair. It was quite a new
subject in those days, the last years of Queen Victoria; but he had
kept pace with it, and braced himself to read the duller and nastier
books of our own time.
I have told how, during the war, he had enjoyed the one brief period
of good pay he had ever known, had ended with a little fortune and had
lost it.
Now the war was over and he was back again at the old grind, and though
an intelligent man, had become so provincial through long residence
at the University as to imagine that no one guessed his little
supplementary journalistic journal as “Behind the Scenes” in Lord
Toronto’s paper _The Howl_.
He was favourably impressed with the motor-car which met him. He was
delighted to see, as Rackham burst upon his gaze, that all the antique
part of the front was quite new, and that the old part was not very
old. He sized it up at once for what it was. But he still had fears
that there might lurk within it some mediæval stuff; for, after all, it
was church loot. He had got that from a brother don whose Churchism was
so high that he had gone deep blue. He even knew that the particular
monks from whom it had been grabbed were _Pre-mon-stra-tentians_—a term
which meant nothing to him, and which he always got wrong when he tried
to spell it.
His hostess greeted him with an enthusiasm to which his poverty was
unaccustomed, and which he rightly put down (for was he not a Professor
of Psychology?) to her slight acquaintance with lords. She had within
five minutes (by way of comparison with Rackham) deftly alluded to his
own ancestral home. It was a subject he detested, because he had not
been able to repair it, and the people who had taken it stoutly refused
to spend a penny on it—let alone badgering him half a dozen times a
year about gutters, pipes and drains. He lost by the ancestral home.
And Lord Hambourne was a man in whose mind subjects connected with the
loss of even small sums of money are very painful. Then he suddenly
thought that since she had looked up the name of his place in some
book, and had shown some faint interest in it, he might use her later
for selling it. He had never been able to find a purchaser yet.
The ancestral home having been put into its corner, Mrs. Maple all
during lunch rubbed Rackham into the mind of her distinguished guest.
And as lie after lie proceeded from her spate of local history and
personal reminiscence, he deftly plucked out the truths like plums and
pigeonholed them in his mind.
Enormous as her information had been, she kept a wad or two back for
those who were to come.
And the Hellups arrived first. They came (“of course,” as Lord
Hambourne would have said in his column), by car, and a very good
car it was; not showy, but exactly suited to its purposes as a car:
elastic, silent and shockless. Hellup was a man who thought comfort
out, and thought it out rightly.
In one detail only had he not realised his thinking out. And that was
through love of his daughter. For Lovey-Lad had come down with them,
with horrid menace in his eye, all the way from London. He had had
to waste his ferocity upon the landscape; but he looked up to any
mischief as he came in bow-legged, growling, formidable, but reduced
to conventions by a nice smack on the nose from his adoring mistress,
just to make him understand that he was among friends. It would never
have done if he had dug his teeth into the well-displayed and most
sufficient flesh-coloured calves of Aunt Hilda. It was the only thing
that might have caused trouble between her father and herself.
Now with the appearance of this father and daughter the air changed,
as it does change when, known only privately to pairs, but subtly
influencing others, affection comes under a roof. It was an affection
real upon the part of that crisp, humorous and successful, contented
trans-Atlantic man, sincerely received by his hostess. In Bo I cannot
tell you how freshly intense was affection, nor in John how profoundly
sincere. Alas! that with four such currents of mutual attraction
crossing in the Hall of Rackham, only Lord Hambourne should have failed
to polarise. But, Professor of Psychology though he was, he tumbled
to nothing. Nor, certainly, did Aunt Hilda tumble to John and Bo. And
as for those two young people, they had an intellectual knowledge of
the charming friendship between their elders, but of real appreciation
thereon nothing whatever. They had something better to think of.
However, as I have said, affection mellowed things, and the air was
kindly when in half an hour after the Hellups an enormous machine,
the size of a cottage, driven by a gentleman whose uniform vaguely
recalled the General Officers of Central American States, and having
by his side yet another uniformed gentleman of a more moderate type,
purred, roared, halted and panted grandly before the door.
Therein, through large spaces of glass could be seen a huge bunch of
hot-house flowers, set in a silver sconce. It faced in its gay opulence
the owner of the splendid conveyance, Lord Mere de Beaurivage himself.
His considerable though not elongated form was protected from the
inclemencies of the weather by a fur coat and, as to his legs at least,
by the mounted skin of a very fine African lion, the head of which
drooped, fierce, towards his feet, while the hinder quarters performed
the same office of comfort for his wife, who sat upon his left.
And what a wife!
Her dress, though the afternoon was yet young, seemed compounded of a
material wherein there entered no small proportion of gold. The hair
upon her head, cut very short (and upon her ample neck even shaved) was
more than sufficient in its amount, and excellently blended, crowning
a large, determined face, in fine contrast with the somewhat more
exhausted but equally expansive visage of her lord.
As she thus swept up, throned, the stern look of mastery which befits
the mistress of such great possessions still dignified her glance, yet
it dissolved into delighted smiles and half-closed elongated eyes of
joy as she caught sight of dear Hilda unconventionally rushing out to
meet her upon the very threshold.
John Maple (and his aunt was grateful to him) helped her down from the
car.
“Darling Hilda!”
“Oh! Darling Amathea!”
The two women were clasped in each other’s arms.
Lord Mere de Beaurivage alighted with more circumspection, considerably
aided by the second of his two dependants, the one in the lesser
uniform, and set foot upon the sacred soil of England with a grunt,
followed by a heavy breathing. For the exertion of such a man in
leaving a vehicle is even more trying to him than his exertion in
mounting one. The lion skin lay deserted upon the floor of the car. The
lion’s master followed his wife hobbling into Rackham Catchings.
Aunt Hilda gave them time to recover from the enormous fatigues of the
journey, solacing them with tea, impressing them with the dignified
figure of Corton. Then only, when she had gathered them together
(making at the same time certain signs to John with uplifted eyebrows
and sharp glances), did she take them round in a herd, to put a climax
to their rivalry for the house by filling it with history.
She was a determined woman. The thing had to be done some time, and
the sooner the better, as a foundation for all that had to be wound
up by way of business in a brief week-end. The Esthonian in his
character of Mr. Rupert de Vere of Jermyn Street was upon her: he would
not wait.
And John followed the flock, looking up with sagacious vacuity at
picture and carving and beam as each was mentioned, and down, as each
was mentioned, at table and at chair and at _bric_ and at _brac_: and
feeling as he had felt on but one other occasion of his life, when Bo
had insisted on his joining a horrible clot of tourists who were doing
the Tower. It was a delightful thought that this trial would not last
so long; for after all Rackham, though more beloved, was not as large
as the Tower. He was glad of that.
He got what amusement he could out of information startlingly new to
him. He learned more than he thought could be known about Rackham—let
alone the Catchings. He learned that the Hall (where he so vividly
remembered the rabbit hutches, the plaster and the bicycle) dated in
part from the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, but with later additions
under James I. He learned that the great beam running across it from
the staircase to the fire-place had upon it the date 1487, and was
probably the oldest dated object in the house. He learned that a little
chair which his father had bought for him when a tiny child because he
had fallen in love with it himself during a visit to London had been
a chair belonging to Queen Anne’s nursery, and given to one of his
forbears by Sarah Duchess of Marlborough. He learned that the damned
panelling was made from one of the ships of the Spanish Armada. These
things he learned, and many more.
The Fury of Destruction rose in his heart and was struggling with the
Comic Spirit, when, towards the close of the lecture, as they were
waddling back to the drawing-room again, through the dining-room, and
had just heard startling things about the oak table and Ben Jonson—as
Lord Mere de Bruvvish was giving signs of distress—it was a good long
walk for him—as Darling Amathea’s admiring exclamations were growing
a trifle conventional, and as even Lord Hellup’s thirst for facts,
dates and measurements was getting satiated, there came something he
might have expected, for he had heard it before: but now, since that
suggestion Bo had made in London, it struck with unexpected force. That
something was the Ghost.
It was as they were passing the Ancestor. The regular phrases had
come out, how he was Sir Harry Murtenshaw, how he was by Holbein; how
he combined all the qualities of the great Elizabethans, sea-faring,