The haunted house
He did more. He helped her to buy the Ancestor.
The Maples, as he knew, had ancestors of a sort. They had the
cattle dealer. They had his son, the worthy Georgian squire who had
sat for the county. Indeed, they had a portrait of him in his wig
extraordinarily badly done by an artist of the local town whom the
gentry patronised in those days.
There were even other ancestors at Rackham, as ancestors go—for
ancestors in such houses do not mean _real_ ancestors, but any
collaterals. One was a captain of Nelson’s in his uniform and the
other was a very rich lady whom that captain had had the good fortune
to marry after the wars. There was also a horrible dingy thing which
used to hang in the schoolroom, and which John could vaguely remember
someone having told him as a child was “your great-aunt Jane.”
These had been good enough for Rackham. But they were not good enough
for Rackham Catchings, and Hilda Maple sailed forth in quest of
something more worthy. She set out on the uncharted sea to discover Sir
Harry Murtenshaw, Knight.
She sought him, just in that place where Oxford Street merges into
Holborn, in a shop where she had had the good fortune to find many
things already: a shop belonging to a gentleman of Esthonian
extraction called Curzon; at any rate, this gentleman (who appeared
in person) had the selling of the goods, and, on this occasion, after
so many others sold to Aunt Hilda, of the Ancestor. And a very good
Ancestor he was. Aged in time, though newly cleaned, painted on canvas
which an expert would have ascribed to our own day, but set in the
proper kind of old frame and duly sooted, fumed, and with nothing to
give him away.
He had a square, solid face, not unlike a pig’s, well pleased with
itself, and a square beard to match; and he was dressed in a period
which was either the very last days of Elizabeth or the very first days
of James: a man of about the same age as Shakespeare, but without his
genius. He cost Aunt Hilda surprisingly little, though surprisingly
more than he was worth. Whatever name he may have had in real life
he was now, for _her_, Sir Harry Murtenshaw, and she was always very
careful to explain that he was not a real Maple. Which was indeed the
case.
He was, for _her_, the founder of the family in this sense; that it was
through his daughter, the heiress of Rackham, that the Maples had come
into the property: a touching piece of family history. It had been a
love match; and that was very touching too.
Then, to the unconcealed annoyance of her nephew, she tacked a ghost
on to Sir Harry. At first a vague ghost, it turned more precise
and became a young relative of the knight’s, who had died a romantic
political death.
In a fine innocence upon the date of that eminent Hun, Hilda Maple
accepted the assurance that the portrait was by Holbein, and Sir Harry
Murtenshaw, bluff Englishman that he was, and stout supporter of the
Elizabethan (or Jacobean) settlement, was carried out by two assistants
of Mr. Curzon’s to be packed for delivery to Rackham Catchings. He was
heavy. He was large. He had to go out sideways. He travelled, finally,
upside down: but it in no way affected his imperturbable humour.
John Maple had helped his aunt to choose the picture; had warned
her that Sir Harry was no ancestor of his, whatever he might be of
his aunt’s husband; had received the naturally sharp reply of that
lady to such a comment; and later, when the great founder of the
fortunes of Rackham was unwrapped, had helped to choose the part of
the panelling into which he was to be incongruously forced, frame
and all. He presided over the dining-room, as an ancestor should,
the new dining-room—which was also the old. For though it was the
new dining-room in Corton’s phrase, and in John Maple’s the sham
dining-room, everything had been done to make it the oldest dining-room
in Sussex. When Hilda Maple told her guests that the picture dated with
the room, and that the panelling built around it was its contemporary,
she was not strictly truthful. For whereas the panelling was of early
1918, Sir Harry (as I have established by deep research) was painted by
a starving Frenchman in Soho as long a time back as 1893.
Anyhow, there he beamed over the Refectory table, the antique chairs
and all the caboodle, with virile if somewhat vacuous determination in
his contented eyes. It was men such as he, Aunt Hilda would explain to
her guests, who made us what we are. And God have mercy upon us all!
For we also are liars, my readers, yourselves not excepted.
Pray let my reader remember this also (if I may so burden her memory)
that the Ancestor was but the last of Aunt Hilda’s purchases—and she
had outrun the constable.
The gentleman of Esthonian extraction, Mr. Curzon, had let the
Ancestor go cheap—at thirty-seven times what he paid for him. But
he had sold Aunt Hilda valuable expert advice, panelling and chairs
as well, and tapestries which were not tapestries, and Jacobean
silver of the last few years (with Hall Marks let in) and Elizabethan
four-posters, Victorian on the carpenter’s side, and even bibelots
and fraudelquins; not to speak of fanfreluches and negligeables. And
for a long time past Mr. Curzon, the Esthonian, had not been selling
these to Aunt Hilda for cash, but for sundry promises of cash in time
to come. And these bore interest. For of such is the Kingdom of the
Esthonians—or, at any rate, of the Curzon sort.
* * * * *
I have digressed. I have been misled by the contemplation of Sir Harry
Murtenshaw, Knight (from the brush of Holbein—with a Jacobean ruff and
trunk hose).
Let me return to the adventures of John, and these shall be brief.
CHAPTER IV
John had started with his little nest egg of £352, but it would not
last for ever. He had had the wisdom to begin earning at once. He first
took chance jobs at writing for next to nothing. Then he helped a
friend to read proofs. Then he catalogued a library (extremely badly),
but at any rate with a good knowledge of French and German—which
was useful—at 30s. a week. Then he put in a short time, through the
kindness of one of his father’s friends, as assistant to the agent of
an estate; but there he was paid no wages, the experience was held to
be a sufficient reward, so that could not last. Then he spent a rather
longer time, under an assumed name, in a curious little venture with a
chance acquaintance of his, a man of the stage who had a tiny capital;
it immediately dissipated in a cabaret show which failed. It was bad,
but it would have failed even sooner had it been better.
At last, having earned in rather less than a year somewhat under two
hundred pounds and having spent at least two hundred and fifty, he put
in three splendid weeks at sea without wages, but lodged and fed and
gaining time to think things over. He had come across the poor owner
of a small, old and ill-found ketch which traded with odd cargoes in
and out of London River, pottering up the creeks of the East Coast, and
sometimes standing across for the Hook or Ostend. John had a way with
him, and persuaded this acquaintance to let him sign on for a round
voyage across the North Sea and home by the East Coast ports, picking
up chance ladings and making what she could for her owner: her Mate and
Captain sharing. He was to grub with those officers in the after-cabin,
under one of those many odd titles whereby they excuse a supernumerary
on board. His presence delighted neither. He found the Old Man surly
and the Mate hostile. Yet he enjoyed himself hugely; and there it
was—of all places in the world!—that he discovered his talent and his
earning power, for we each of us have a talent—a saleable talent, I
mean—and happy is the man who discovers his while he is yet young.
The Mate and he were together in the cabin of that aged ketch during a
long wait outside Harwich for the tide. The Old Man was smoking on deck
watching for the turn. The Mate was more sour than ever that evening,
jealous of such a super-cargo, with his white hands and gentleman’s
accent. Yet it was the Mate who, there and then, brought John his good
fortune, as enemies often do. John Maple was standing by in the dark
corner of the little stuffy place, lit only by a swinging oil lamp,
with no sound but the dull plash of the shallow water outside, and in
his exasperation at something worse than usual which the Mate had just
grumbled at him, he muttered to himself a word not polite, but said
in such a low tone that he hoped it could provoke no quarrel. What it
did provoke in the Mate was an attitude quite unexpected. That worthy
looked up with a sudden startled air, and said in an awed tone, “What
was that? Didn’t you hear summat?” and with that he peered furtively
askance into the darkness.
“What was that?” said John Maple, rather surlily, thinking he had been
challenged.
“I ’eard a voice!” said the Mate in scared religious tones, and John,
looking at him, saw that he had gone quite white.
Those of the Unseen Powers who were looking after John’s affairs shot
into his head the right thing to do, though he hardly knew why it was
the right thing to do. He turned his face round again slowly away from
the Mate, put his hand to his temple, to cover his features, and again
gave that slight muttering; to be correct, it was the word “Swine!”
He heard something like a muffled shriek from the Mate:
“There it goes again! It said ‘Mine,’” moaned the Mate, now glaring
wide-eyed at the darkest corner of the cabin, where the reflector of
the lamp threw a deep shadow behind its smoky light.
“Whose? Eh? ’ose? Am I ’is? What’s ’ee mean?” The Mate may have been
drinking or may have knocked off, which is worse still for the nerves.
But there was no doubt as to his mistaking the direction of the slight
sound which had terrified him.
John Maple had discovered in those five minutes how easy it was—for him
at least, or in the right surroundings—to ventriloquise.
“I dursn’t hear it again,” whispered the Mate.
John Maple could not refuse to oblige, and he obliged for the third
time. The Mate sprang up all tense and said, trembling, that he didn’t
like it.
“What don’t you like?” said John Maple, pleasant and friendly, to show
that the quarrel was forgotten.
“Voices,” said the Mate scratching the little swinging table with his
nails nervously. “Don’t you ’ear nothin’?”
John Maple paused.
“Yes, I think I did,” he said slowly—which was true enough.
It was the First Episode, and a very slight one. It had no immediate
sequel.
On the return voyage (they carried bricks) John Maple was again
successful, not only in the cabin, but once at night on deck, when the
Mate and he had gone forward together; and again, when he had helped to
see whether there was any shifting in the hold (for a cargo of bricks
can work wonders if it shifts), the Mate heard voices. This time the
voices had something to say worth saying. They touched the Mate on
his immortal soul, the immediate perils of life, and advanced a strong
premonition of death. The Mate had fled up and aft, steadied himself
with a glass, and sworn at the end of the ordeal by all the gods below
London Bridge he would not sign on that vessel again.
The Old Man was not superstitious. He had many of the qualities of
wood: not only its toughness, endurance and colour, but also its lack
of sensibility. John wondered whether this new-found talent would work
on the non-superstitious.
Well, it had not that fine “first night” success which the Mate had