The haunted house
and I got my health back as I grew up. And you know, I went abroad. So
it became only a memory.”
The old man was restless. And when John began again, “Of course, they
say that the influence of a violent and horrible death....” Lord Mere
de Beaurivage wanted to change the subject.
“Yus, yus, yus!” he said hastily, as John helped him to his feet. They
went back slowly towards the house, Lord Mere already hobbling even
after so short a stroll, and John tenderly supporting him by the arm
and treading most leisurely to ease the old man’s way.
It was after some moments of silence, when they were in the thick
of the rhododendrons on either side, that Lord Mere de Beaurivage
gave a startled twist in the midst of a step, a twist that hurt him
and stopped him as he shot a glance at the thick growth to his left.
He had heard—he thought he had heard—had he heard?—an evil whisper,
sneering little words, not high above the ground, as from the mouth of
something creeping, not human: surely the leaves had never stirred in
that windless afternoon? And the words he had heard, or thought he had
heard, were: “To the house,” or “in the house”—something like that. It
was a sibilant sound. He had heard the word “house” sneered at him....
Surely he had heard it.... It was a sound such as rustling leaves might
have made.... But then no leaf had stirred.
He turned his head towards John. He was still halted, and still
breathing heavily.
“What’s the matter, Lord Mere?” said the young man, with great
sympathy. “I’m afraid I’ve overtired you?” The old fellow shook his
head.
“No, no. It’s me heart, I think,” he said. “I’m orl right. Let’s be
getting along and doing—along and doing. Get among the others, eh? Get
among the others. More cheerful-like.”
They were moving away from the rhododendrons now, and into the open.
So much to the good. And there was the house before them. He thought of
that whispered word “house,” and he shuddered.
Then he shook off the little trouble. It had only been a moment. And
any small beast creeping in the shrubs might have brushed through with
that sibilant sound.
During what remained of their brief companionship as they made back
towards the porch John Maple cheered his guest in every way.
_He_ made no allusion to the Abominable Thing. He even appeared to have
forgotten it.
But Lord Mere de Beaurivage, as he painfully put down his hat and stick
on the oaken chest in the hall, and more painfully crawled out of his
coat with his companion’s aid, had something or other on his mind that
would not away. He turned back suddenly on his way toward the library,
put one arm on John’s shoulder, and looked with a fixed but uncertain
look in his poor old yellow eyes, straight into the frank glance of his
hostess’ nephew.
“Did yer say it ’ad no ’ed?” he whispered thickly.
“Oh, Lord Mere,” answered John, “don’t let’s think of it!” He drew
in his breath. “It was a long time ago, and I tell you, I was only a
child. And—and—I’m sleeping here to-night also,” he added, suddenly.
“So the less I think of it the better.”
Then he watched the broad, squat figure retreating slowly towards
the library door. He saw the painful aged gesture of the gouty hand
upon the knob, the shuffle into the room beyond. He thought he heard
something like a groan, and in his heart he half repented.
But already that which commanded him was upon him: no less than Bo
herself, swinging into the hall out of the drawing-room like a rather
too tall ray of sunshine.
“Dog-Man,” she said, “how’s your end? Have you bitten ’em? Have you
bitten ’em good and hard?”
There was no lack of healthy determination in _this_ conspirator. Women
know their minds. At least, some women do. And especially those of the
kind who make happy marriages. John was learning every hour. But pray
remember that the woman tempted him.
He was a little ashamed, and he did not meet her eye.
“I have suggested things, Bo. I did say a few words. Made an
atmosphere.”
“Was he scared?” persisted his implacable premate.
“I’m afraid he was,” said John.
“What did ye tell him, Jacko?” she asked softly, with such affection
that he was relieved. “Did you make it glare?”
“He couldn’t glare without a head, Bo.”
“No more could he,” answered the young lady thoughtfully. “Not in
nature, that wouldn’t be. But then, _he’s_ not in nature either, Jacko,
is he? Did ye make Blackie Bogey talk?”
“No,” said her lover. Then he corrected himself. “He did say a word in
the rhododendrons.”
“_What?_” answered Bo, delighted. “Oh, that’s good! Push it along.
He’ll babble yet, Jacko. He’ll babble like a brook. He’ll moan and
he’ll groan. He’ll put down old Uncle Hamlet like a one-spot taking a
deuce. You are,” she added, after searching for a compliment at the
back of her mind, “the Bee’s Knees. You are the Cat’s Pyjamas.”
Even as she spoke she was looking through the open drawing-room door
and the tall French windows towards the big lawn in front of Rackham,
and there she saw a sight which made her seize John Maple’s wrist
suddenly and strongly after a fashion more tolerable to-day from her
sex and age than it would have been half a generation ago.
“Look, Dog-Man!” she whispered excitedly, and jutted her chin towards
the sight that had thus fixed her eyes.
“What is it, Bo?” he asked. He saw nothing but his aunt and Lady Mere
de Beaurivage standing on the grass some little way off, and looking up
towards the new-old woodwork of the house. Once more the comprehension
of women came to aid the dullness of men.
“You haven’t gotten it, haven’t you?” she said compassionately.
“John Maple, heir of Rackham, mark the twain. The Baroness is deep in
converse with the Lady of the Manor upon the green sward. Money’s going
to talk.”
John Maple understood.
“You think it’s begun already?” said he.
Isabeau Hellup nodded, with a fixed certitude.
“And my noble father will be the next to suffer,” she added.
“It’s a race, Bo,” said John, “between them and us.”
“And you’ve got to win by four little plaits of the mane on the steed’s
neck—or the whole neck, if you like. But you’ve got to win, damn you,
Jacko!—you’ve got to win. Now see here. Have you gotten that spell with
Corton yet?”
“No,” said John. “I can’t do everything at once.”
“Well,” answered Bo, looking at the impossible watch on her wrist,
“step on the gas and shoot. There’s no time to lose.”
He agreed.
“I’m going to fix the coat and the ruff. And I’m going to sew through
the slit in it that dandy little sword which I got from the shield
stack on the stairs; six in a star. There’s only five now. But I put
them straight. No one’ll notice. You run off to Corton.” She paused
and added, “And I’ll add a word to Lord Mere. Just a word. Just a
follow-up, Jacko. ’Nuff said.”
CHAPTER X
Amathea, First Baroness de Beaurivage, stood in ecstacy upon the lawn,
holding darling Hilda’s arm solidly in the crook of hers—two solid
arms well interlocked. In spite of the thickness and the shortness of
her neck, she carried her head a little upon one side, partly from the
intensity of her emotions, more through her conviction that such an
attitude befitted the occasion.
“Oh, Ilda!” she said, “darling Ilda, wot a gem! What a reel Jule!” Then
she sighed. “I wish the Prime Minister could see it, that I do,” she
continued. “Yer can’t think ’ow ’ot ’e is on old English ’ouses. Why,
I tell you strite, Ilda, show that man an old English ’ouse, and he
just fair goes off the deep end—as the saying is. He said to me once,
he did, ‘Amathea,’ he says—’e calls me Amathea, ’cos Uggins don’t like
him to call me Mattie—yet we’re pals, ye’ know——” and here she nudged
her hostess strongly in the rib with a powerful elbow, and that lady,
having before her one approach to fifty thousand pounds, stalwartly
bore the blow.
“There’ll never be another like ’im, Ilda,” went on the Baroness
sentimentally, and in a rather lower tone. “Never no more! There’ll
be another in ’is place, no doubt—one passeth and another cometh—as
the good book says. It’s the rule of them great Parliament men, they
pass away like the flowers o’ the field. Yus, and it’s the rule of the
’ole world too.” She shook her head. “Mebbe they’ll get some ’ighbrow
in his room: but we’ll never see the likes of ’im again—not in that
plice. ’Owever, he’s there now, and long may he stick. A treasure,
Ilda.” (Then she was off on the house again.) “To see all that quiet,
and them old trees, and all so peaceful like, and timber on the front
and all—oh, it fair sets me envious. Aren’t you ’appy, Ilda, aren’t you
’appy in a plice like this?”
Aunt Hilda sighed in her turn, profoundly.
“Dearest Amathea,” she said, with a Christian squeezing of the arm that
had so lately dealt her such a cruel blow (you are too young, reader,
to know what it will feel like to get a bang in the ribs from the elbow
of a peeress and sister-friend in your fiftieth year), “I shall hate to
leave it.”
“Oo talks of yer leavin’ it? Why, you’re the queen o’ the place,”
answered the noblewoman, not without guile, but in her business-like
heart she was murmuring, “Artful, artful! That artful!”
“Sometimes,” said Hilda Maple, disengaging her arm for one moment in
the desire to breathe, and under the excuse of smoothing her kilt,
“sometimes I think that I can’t bear to leave it, and that some day I
might hope.... Then, you know, there comes back to me all that I owe
to the family and the name, and how Rackham ought always to be in Maple
hands.... And then I remember how the poor boy ...” she shrugged her
shoulders, “well, Mattie, you know what _he_ is.”
“I’m shore he’s an ’andsome, well-set-up young feller,” said Mattie.
“Yes, yes,” sighed Hilda again. “He’s all that. But you know what he
is. He could never keep the place up. He will never really _earn_.
His poor father was just like him.... That’s why I sometimes think
... well, that I ought to realise and leave the poor lad, when I am
gone ...” (she sighed again, as though she were on the brink of the
grave) “with a solid lump of money behind him anyhow.” She glanced at
her companion. “But well tied up, Mattie—you understand me. Well tied
up. I wouldn’t trust him to keep a penny of it, any more than his poor
dear father.” And Mattie nodded confidence. “Sometimes I think it’s
my duty,” Hilda Maple went on, “to sell.... And then sometimes I feel
torn and distracted....” She clasped her hands, and cast upwards a gaze
which took in the gables of Rackham and the lower part of the sky. “But
to think of Rackham no longer in Maple hands!” The distinguished figure
of Sir Harry Murtenshaw rose before her eyes, the romantic marriage—but
no ghost. She had already forgotten about _Him_.
Mattie hadn’t.
“Ow! It’s all so romantic! An’ the gowst an’ all!” resumed that lady,
capturing her hostess’ arm once again and leading her towards the door
of the hall. “I wish we ud ad a gowst at home when I was young, that I
do,” and she shook her head. “But there, you can’t have everything!”
There was a pause upon the gravel, and the two ladies made their
majestic progress towards the entry of those ancient walls. The one was
ardently longing for an advance—I do not mean a prepayment (for the
moment), but a suggestion of purchase. The other was considering the
best form in which that suggestion might be made. Hilda Maple, having,
if that were possible, the higher breeding, had the more rapid process
of brain; and the initiative came from her.
“You know, Amathea,” she said gently, reverting to more formality,
“that Lord ... that your husband has spoken of buying the place?” Her
tone was thoughtful, gentle, and a little pensive too.
“Why, Hilda Maple,” answered the peeress, standing back as though in