Three Ghost Stories
animal’s paint—especially when I brought it out, by making him warm—I am
ready to swear to. I followed the ghost, afterwards, in a hackney coach;
an institution with the peculiar smell of which, the present generation
is unacquainted, but to which I am again ready to swear as a combination
of stable, dog with the mange, and very old bellows. (In this, I appeal
to previous generations to confirm or refute me.) I pursued the phantom,
on a headless donkey: at least, upon a donkey who was so interested in
the state of his stomach that his head was always down there,
investigating it; on ponies, expressly born to kick up behind; on
roundabouts and swings, from fairs; in the first cab—another forgotten
institution where the fare regularly got into bed, and was tucked up with
the driver.
Not to trouble you with a detailed account of all my travels in pursuit
of the ghost of Master B., which were longer and more wonderful than
those of Sinbad the Sailor, I will confine myself to one experience from
which you may judge of many.
I was marvellously changed. I was myself, yet not myself. I was
conscious of something within me, which has been the same all through my
life, and which I have always recognised under all its phases and
varieties as never altering, and yet I was not the I who had gone to bed
in Master B.’s room. I had the smoothest of faces and the shortest of
legs, and I had taken another creature like myself, also with the
smoothest of faces and the shortest of legs, behind a door, and was
confiding to him a proposition of the most astounding nature.
This proposition was, that we should have a Seraglio.
The other creature assented warmly. He had no notion of respectability,
neither had I. It was the custom of the East, it was the way of the good
Caliph Haroun Alraschid (let me have the corrupted name again for once,
it is so scented with sweet memories!), the usage was highly laudable,
and most worthy of imitation. “O, yes! Let us,” said the other creature
with a jump, “have a Seraglio.”
It was not because we entertained the faintest doubts of the meritorious
character of the Oriental establishment we proposed to import, that we
perceived it must be kept a secret from Miss Griffin. It was because we
knew Miss Griffin to be bereft of human sympathies, and incapable of
appreciating the greatness of the great Haroun. Mystery impenetrably
shrouded from Miss Griffin then, let us entrust it to Miss Bule.
We were ten in Miss Griffin’s establishment by Hampstead Ponds; eight
ladies and two gentlemen. Miss Bule, whom I judge to have attained the
ripe age of eight or nine, took the lead in society. I opened the
subject to her in the course of the day, and proposed that she should
become the Favourite.
Miss Bule, after struggling with the diffidence so natural to, and
charming in, her adorable sex, expressed herself as flattered by the
idea, but wished to know how it was proposed to provide for Miss Pipson?
Miss Bule—who was understood to have vowed towards that young lady, a
friendship, halves, and no secrets, until death, on the Church Service
and Lessons complete in two volumes with case and lock—Miss Bule said she
could not, as the friend of Pipson, disguise from herself, or me, that
Pipson was not one of the common.
Now, Miss Pipson, having curly hair and blue eyes (which was my idea of
anything mortal and feminine that was called Fair), I promptly replied
that I regarded Miss Pipson in the light of a Fair Circassian.
“And what then?” Miss Bule pensively asked.
I replied that she must be inveigled by a Merchant, brought to me veiled,
and purchased as a slave.
[The other creature had already fallen into the second male place in the
State, and was set apart for Grand Vizier. He afterwards resisted this
disposal of events, but had his hair pulled until he yielded.]
“Shall I not be jealous?” Miss Bule inquired, casting down her eyes.
“Zobeide, no,” I replied; “you will ever be the favourite Sultana; the
first place in my heart, and on my throne, will be ever yours.”
Miss Bule, upon that assurance, consented to propound the idea to her
seven beautiful companions. It occurring to me, in the course of the
same day, that we knew we could trust a grinning and good-natured soul
called Tabby, who was the serving drudge of the house, and had no more
figure than one of the beds, and upon whose face there was always more or
less black-lead, I slipped into Miss Bule’s hand after supper, a little
note to that effect; dwelling on the black-lead as being in a manner
deposited by the finger of Providence, pointing Tabby out for Mesrour,
the celebrated chief of the Blacks of the Hareem.
There were difficulties in the formation of the desired institution, as
there are in all combinations. The other creature showed himself of a
low character, and, when defeated in aspiring to the throne, pretended to
have conscientious scruples about prostrating himself before the Caliph;
wouldn’t call him Commander of the Faithful; spoke of him slightingly and
inconsistently as a mere “chap;” said he, the other creature, “wouldn’t
play”—Play!—and was otherwise coarse and offensive. This meanness of
disposition was, however, put down by the general indignation of an
united Seraglio, and I became blessed in the smiles of eight of the
fairest of the daughters of men.
The smiles could only be bestowed when Miss Griffin was looking another
way, and only then in a very wary manner, for there was a legend among
the followers of the Prophet that she saw with a little round ornament in
the middle of the pattern on the back of her shawl. But every day after
dinner, for an hour, we were all together, and then the Favourite and the
rest of the Royal Hareem competed who should most beguile the leisure of
the Serene Haroun reposing from the cares of State—which were generally,
as in most affairs of State, of an arithmetical character, the Commander
of the Faithful being a fearful boggler at a sum.
On these occasions, the devoted Mesrour, chief of the Blacks of the
Hareem, was always in attendance (Miss Griffin usually ringing for that
officer, at the same time, with great vehemence), but never acquitted
himself in a manner worthy of his historical reputation. In the first
place, his bringing a broom into the Divan of the Caliph, even when
Haroun wore on his shoulders the red robe of anger (Miss Pipson’s
pelisse), though it might be got over for the moment, was never to be
quite satisfactorily accounted for. In the second place, his breaking
out into grinning exclamations of “Lork you pretties!” was neither
Eastern nor respectful. In the third place, when specially instructed to
say “Bismillah!” he always said “Hallelujah!” This officer, unlike his
class, was too good-humoured altogether, kept his mouth open far too
wide, expressed approbation to an incongruous extent, and even once—it
was on the occasion of the purchase of the Fair Circassian for five
hundred thousand purses of gold, and cheap, too—embraced the Slave, the
Favourite, and the Caliph, all round. (Parenthetically let me say God
bless Mesrour, and may there have been sons and daughters on that tender
bosom, softening many a hard day since!)
Miss Griffin was a model of propriety, and I am at a loss to imagine what
the feelings of the virtuous woman would have been, if she had known,
when she paraded us down the Hampstead Road two and two, that she was
walking with a stately step at the head of Polygamy and Mahomedanism. I
believe that a mysterious and terrible joy with which the contemplation
of Miss Griffin, in this unconscious state, inspired us, and a grim sense
prevalent among us that there was a dreadful power in our knowledge of
what Miss Griffin (who knew all things that could be learnt out of book)
didn’t know, were the main-spring of the preservation of our secret. It
was wonderfully kept, but was once upon the verge of self-betrayal. The
danger and escape occurred upon a Sunday. We were all ten ranged in a
conspicuous part of the gallery at church, with Miss Griffin at our
head—as we were every Sunday—advertising the establishment in an
unsecular sort of way—when the description of Solomon in his domestic
glory happened to be read. The moment that monarch was thus referred to,
conscience whispered me, “Thou, too, Haroun!” The officiating minister
had a cast in his eye, and it assisted conscience by giving him the
appearance of reading personally at me. A crimson blush, attended by a
fearful perspiration, suffused my features. The Grand Vizier became more
dead than alive, and the whole Seraglio reddened as if the sunset of
Bagdad shone direct upon their lovely faces. At this portentous time the
awful Griffin rose, and balefully surveyed the children of Islam. My own
impression was, that Church and State had entered into a conspiracy with
Miss Griffin to expose us, and that we should all be put into white
sheets, and exhibited in the centre aisle. But, so Westerly—if I may be
allowed the expression as opposite to Eastern associations—was Miss
Griffin’s sense of rectitude, that she merely suspected Apples, and we
were saved.
I have called the Seraglio, united. Upon the question, solely, whether
the Commander of the Faithful durst exercise a right of kissing in that
sanctuary of the palace, were its peerless inmates divided. Zobeide
asserted a counter-right in the Favourite to scratch, and the fair
Circassian put her face, for refuge, into a green baize bag, originally
designed for books. On the other hand, a young antelope of transcendent
beauty from the fruitful plains of Camden Town (whence she had been
brought, by traders, in the half-yearly caravan that crossed the
intermediate desert after the holidays), held more liberal opinions, but
stipulated for limiting the benefit of them to that dog, and son of a
dog, the Grand Vizier—who had no rights, and was not in question. At
length, the difficulty was compromised by the installation of a very
youthful slave as Deputy. She, raised upon a stool, officially received
upon her cheeks the salutes intended by the gracious Haroun for other
Sultanas, and was privately rewarded from the coffers of the Ladies of
the Hareem.
And now it was, at the full height of enjoyment of my bliss, that I
became heavily troubled. I began to think of my mother, and what she
would say to my taking home at Midsummer eight of the most beautiful of
the daughters of men, but all unexpected. I thought of the number of
beds we made up at our house, of my father’s income, and of the baker,
and my despondency redoubled. The Seraglio and malicious Vizier,
divining the cause of their Lord’s unhappiness, did their utmost to
augment it. They professed unbounded fidelity, and declared that they
would live and die with him. Reduced to the utmost wretchedness by these
protestations of attachment, I lay awake, for hours at a time, ruminating
on my frightful lot. In my despair, I think I might have taken an early
opportunity of falling on my knees before Miss Griffin, avowing my
resemblance to Solomon, and praying to be dealt with according to the
outraged laws of my country, if an unthought-of means of escape had not
opened before me.
One day, we were out walking, two and two—on which occasion the Vizier
had his usual instructions to take note of the boy at the turnpike, and
if he profanely gazed (which he always did) at the beauties of the
Hareem, to have him bowstrung in the course of the night—and it happened
that our hearts were veiled in gloom. An unaccountable action on the
part of the antelope had plunged the State into disgrace. That charmer,
on the representation that the previous day was her birthday, and that
vast treasures had been sent in a hamper for its celebration (both