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She was a most excellent and devout woman, and when Emily, who in youthful gaieté de cœur had got a little tired of her, exclaimed at his taste, and asked if she made him read nothing but Pike’s Early Piety, he replied gravely, ‘She showed me where to lay my burthen down,’ and turned to the two last verses of the poem for ‘Good Friday’ in the Christian Year, as well as to the one we had just read on the Holy Communion.

My father’s kindness had seemed to him the pledge of the Heavenly Father’s forgiveness; and he added, perhaps a little childishly, that it had been his impulse to promise never to touch a card again, but that he dreaded the only too familiar reply, ‘What availed his promises?’

‘Do promise, Clarry!’ cried Emily, ‘and then you won’t have to play with that tiresome old Mrs. Sophia.’

‘That would rather deter me,’ said Clarence good-humouredly.

‘A card-playing old age is despicable,’ pronounced Miss Emily, much to our amusement.

After that we got into a bewilderment.  We knew nothing of the future question of temperance versus total abstinence; but after it had been extracted that Miss Newton regarded cards as the devil’s books, the inconsistent little sister changed sides, and declared it narrow and evangelical to renounce what was innocent.  Clarence argued that what might be harmless for others might be dangerous for such as himself, and that his real difficulty in making even a mental vow was that, if broken, there was an additional sin.

‘It is not oneself that one trusts,’ I said.

‘No,’ said Clarence emphatically; ‘and setting up a vow seems as if it might be sticking up the reed of one’s own word, and leaning on that—when it breaks, at least mine does.  If I could always get the grasp of Him that I felt to-day, there would be no more bewildered heart and failing spirit, which are worse than the actual falls they cause.’  And as Emily said she did not understand, he replied in words I wrote down and thought over, ‘What we are is the point, more than even what we do.  We do as we are; and yet we form ourselves by what we do.’

‘And,’ I put in, ‘I know somebody who won a victory last night over himself and his two brothers.  Surely doing that is a sign that he is more than he used to be.’

‘If he were, it would not have been an effort at all,’ said Clarence, but with his rare sweet smile.

Just then Griff called him away, and Emily sat pondering and impressed.  ‘It did seem so odd,’ she said, ‘that Clarry should be so much the best, and yet so much the worst of us.’

I agreed.  His insight into spiritual things, and his enjoyment of them, always humiliated us both, yet he fell so much lower in practice,—‘But then we had not his temptations.’

‘Yes,’ said Emily; ‘but look at Griff!  He goes about like other young men, and keeps all right, and yet he doesn’t care about religious things a bit more than he can help.’

It was quite true.  Religion was life to the one and an insurance to the other, and this had been a mystery to us all our young lives, as far as we had ever reflected on the contrast between the practical failure and success of each.  Our mother, on the other hand, viewed Clarence’s tendencies as part of an unreal, self-deceptive nature, and regretted his intimacy with Miss Newton, who, she said, had fostered ‘that kind of thing’ in his childhood—made him fancy talk, feeling, and preaching were more than truth and honour—and might lead him to run after Irving, Rowland Hill, or Baptist Noel, about whose tenets she was rather confused.  It would be an additional misfortune if he became a fanatical Evangelical light, and he was just the character to be worked upon.

My father held that she might be thankful for any good influence or safe resort for a young man in lodgings in London, and he merely bade Clarence never resort to any variety of dissenting preacher.  We were of the school called—a little later—high and dry, but were strictly orthodox according to our lights, and held it a prime duty to attend our parish church, whatever it might be; nor, indeed, had Clarence swerved from these traditions.

Poor Mrs. Sophia was baulked of the game at whist, which she viewed as a legitimate part of the Christmas pleasures; and after we had eaten our turkey, we found the evening long, except that Martyn escaped to snapdragon with the servants; and, by and by, Chapman, magnificent in patronage, ushered in the church singers into the hall, and clarionet, bassoon, and fiddle astonished our ears.

CHAPTER XIV
THE MULLION CHAMBER

 
‘A lady with a lamp I see,
Pass through the glimmering gloom,
   And flit from room to room.’
 

Longfellow.

For want of being able to take exercise, the first part of the night had always been sleepless with me, though my dear mother thought it wrong to recognise the habit or allow me a lamp.  A fire, however, I had, and by its light, on the second night after Christmas, I saw my door noiselessly opened, and Clarence creeping in half-dressed and barefooted.  To my frightened interrogation the answer came, through chattering teeth, ‘It’s I—only I—Ted—no—nothing’s the matter, only I can’t stand it any longer!’

His hands were cold as ice when he grasped mine, as if to get hold of something substantial, and he trembled so as to shake the bed.  ‘That room,’ he faltered.  ‘’Tis not only the moans!  I’ve seen her!’

‘Whom?’

‘I don’t know.  There she stands with her lamp, crying!’  I could scarcely distinguish the words through the clashing of his teeth, and as I threw my arms round him the shudder seemed to pass to me; but I did my best to warm him by drawing the clothes over him, and he began to gather himself together, and speak intelligibly.  There had been sounds the first night as of wailing, but he had been too much preoccupied to attend to them till, soon after one o’clock, they ended in a heavy fall and long shriek, after which all was still.  Christmas night had been undisturbed, but on this the voices had begun again at eleven, and had a strangely human sound; but as it was windy, sleety weather, and he had learnt at sea to disregard noises in the rigging, he drew the sheet over his head and went to sleep.  ‘I was dreaming that I was at sea,’ he said, ‘as I always do on a noisy night, but this was not a dream.  I was wakened by a light in the room, and there stood a woman with a lamp, moaning and sobbing.  My first notion was that one of the maids had come to call me, and I sat up; but I could not speak, and she gave another awful suppressed cry, and moved towards that walled-up door.  Then I saw it was none of the servants, for it was an antique dress like an old picture.  So I knew what it must be, and an unbearable horror came over me, and I rushed into the outer room, where there was a little fire left; but I heard her going on still, and I could endure it no longer.  I knew you would be awake and would bear with me, so I came down to you.’

Then this was what Chapman and the maids had meant.  This was Mrs. Sophia Selby’s vulgar superstition!  I found that Clarence had heard none of the mysterious whispers afloat, and only knew that Griff had deserted the room after his own return to London.  I related what I had learnt from the old lady, and in that midnight hour we agreed that it could be no mere fancy or rumour, but that cruel wrong must have been done in that chamber.  Our feeling was that all ought to be made known, and in that impression we fell asleep, Clarence first.

By and by I found him moving.  He had heard the clock strike four, and thought it wiser to repair to his own quarters, where he believed the disturbance was over.  Lucifer matches as yet were not, but he had always been a noiseless being, with a sailor’s foot, so that, by the help of the moonlight through the hall windows, he regained his room.

And when morning had come, the nocturnal visitation wore such a different aspect to both our minds that we decided to say nothing to our parents, who, said Clarence, would simply disbelieve him; and, indeed, I inclined to suppose it had been an uncommonly vivid dream, produced in that sensitive nature by the uncanny sounds of the wind in the chinks and crannies of the ancient chamber.  Had not Scott’s Demonology and Witchcraft, which we studied hard on that day, proved all such phantoms to be explicable?  The only person we told was Griff, who was amused and incredulous.  He had heard the noises—oh yes! and objected to having his sleep broken by them.  It was too had to expose Clarence to them—poor Bill—on whom they worked such fancies!

He interrogated Chapman, however, but probably in that bantering way which is apt to produce reserve.  Chapman never ‘gave heed to them fictious tales,’ he said; but, when hard pressed, he allowed that he had ‘heerd that a lady do walk o’ winter nights,’ and that was why the garden door of the old rooms was walled up.  Griff asked if this was done for fear she should catch cold, and this somewhat affronted him, so that he averred that he knew nought about it, and gave no thought to such like.

Just then they arrived at the Winslow Arms, and took each a glass of ale, when Griff, partly to tease Chapman, asked the landlady—an old Chantry House servant—whether she had ever met the ghost.  She turned rather pale, which seemed to have impressed him, and demanded if he had seen it.  ‘It always walked at Christmas time—between then and the New Year.’  She had once seen a light in the garden by the ruin in winter-time, and once last spring it came along the passage, but that was just before the old Squire was took for death,—folks said that was always the way before any of the family died—‘if you’ll excuse it, sir.’  Oh no, she thought nothing of such things, but she had heard tell that the noises were such at all times of the year that no one could sleep in the rooms, but the light wasn’t to be seen except at Christmas.

Griff with the philosophy of a university man, was certain that all was explained by Clarence having imbibed the impression of the place being haunted; and going to sleep nervous at the noises, his brain had shaped a phantom in accordance.  Let Clarence declare as he might that the legends were new to him, Griff only smiled to think how easily people forgot, and he talked earnestly about catching ideas without conscious information.

However, he volunteered to sit up that night to ascertain the exact causes of the strange noises and convince Clarence that they were nothing but the effects of draughts.  The fire in his gunroom was surreptitiously kept up to serve for the vigil, which I ardently desired to share.  It was an enterprise; it would gratify my curiosity; and besides, though Griffith was good-natured and forbearing in a general way towards Clarence, I detected a spirit of mockery about him which might break out unpleasantly when poor Clarry was convicted of one of his unreasonable panics.

Both brothers were willing to gratify me, the only difficulty being that the tap of my crutches would warn the entire household of the expedition.  However, they had—all unknown to my mother—several times carried me about queen’s cushion fashion, as, being always much of a size, they could do most handily; and as both were now fine, strong, well-made youths of twenty and nineteen, they had no doubt of easily and silently conveying me up the shallow-stepped staircase when all was quiet for the night.

Emily, with her sharp ears, guessed that something was in hand, but we promised her that she should know all in time.  I believe Griff, being a little afraid of her quickness, led her to suppose he was going to hold what he called a symposium in his rooms, and to think it a mystery of college life not intended for young ladies.

He really had prepared a sort of supper for us when, after my father’s resounding turn of the key of the drawing-room door, my brothers, in their stocking soles, bore me upstairs, the fun of the achievement for the moment overpowering all sense of eeriness.  Griff said he could not receive me in his apartment without doing honour to the occasion, and that Dutch courage was requisite for us both; but I suspect it was more in accordance with Oxford habits that he had provided a bottle of sherry and another of ale, some brandy cherries, bread, cheese, and biscuits, by what means I do not know, for my mother always locked up the wine.  He was disappointed that Clarence would touch nothing, and declared that inanition was the preparation for ghost-seeing or imagining.  I drank his health in a glass of sherry as I looked round at the curious old room, with its panelled roof, the heraldic devices and badges of the Power family, and the trophy of swords, dirks, daggers, and pistols, chiefly relics of our naval grandfather, but reinforced by the sword, helmet, and spurs of the county Yeomanry which Griff had joined.

Griff proposed cards to drive away fancies, especially as the sounds were beginning; but though we generally yielded to him we could not give our attention to anything but these.  There was first a low moan.  ‘No great harm in that,’ said Griff; ‘it comes through that crack in the wainscot where there is a sham window.  Some putty will put a stop to that.’

Then came a more decided wail and sob much nearer to us.  Griff hastily swallowed the ale in his tumbler, and, striking a theatrical attitude, exclaimed, ‘Angels and ministers of grace defend us!’

Clarence held up his hand in deprecation.  The door into his bedroom was open, and Griff, taking up one of the flat candlesticks, pursued his researches, holding the flame to all chinks or cracks in the wainscotting to detect draughts which might cause the dreary sounds, which were much more like suppressed weeping than any senseless gust of wind.  Of draughts there were many, and he tried holding his hand against each crevice to endeavour to silence the wails; but these became more human and more distressful.  Presently Clarence exclaimed, ‘There!’ and on his face there was a whiteness and an expression which always recurs to me on reading those words of Eliphaz the Temanite, ‘Then a spirit passed before my face, and the hair of my flesh stood up.’  Even Griff was awestruck as we cried, ‘Where? what?’

‘Don’t you see her?  There!  By the press—look!’

‘I see a patch of moonlight on the wall,’ said Griff.

‘Moonlight—her lamp.  Edward, don’t you see her?’

I could see nothing but a spot of light on the wall.  Griff (plainly putting a force on himself) came back and gave him a good-natured shake.  ‘Dreaming again, old Bill.  Wake up and come to your senses.’

‘I am as much in my senses as you are,’ said Clarence.  ‘I see her as plainly as I see you.’

Nor could any one doubt either the reality of the awe in his voice and countenance, nor of the light—a kind of hazy ball—nor of the choking sobs.

‘What is she like?’ I asked, holding his hand, for, though infected by his dread, my fears were chiefly for the effect on him; but he was much calmer and less horror-struck than on the previous night, though still he shuddered as he answered in a low voice, as if loth to describe a lady in her presence, ‘A dark cloak with the hood fallen back, a kind of lace headdress loosely fastened, brown hair, thin white face, eyes—oh, poor thing!—staring with fright, dark—oh, how swollen the lids! all red below with crying—black dress with white about it—a widow kind of look—a glove on the arm with the lamp.  Is she beckoning—looking at us?  Oh, you poor thing, if I could tell what you mean!’

I felt the motion of his muscles in act to rise, and grasped him.  Griff held him with a strong hand, hoarsely crying, ‘Don’t!—don’t—don’t follow the thing, whatever you do!’

Clarence hid his face.  It was very awful and strange.  Once the thought of conjuring her to speak by the Holy Name crossed me, but then I saw no figure; and with incredulous Griffith standing by, it would have been like playing, nor perhaps could I have spoken.  How long this lasted there is no knowing; but presently the light moved towards the walled-up door and seemed to pass into it.  Clarence raised his head and said she was gone.  We breathed freely.

‘The farce is over,’ said Griff.  ‘Mr. Edward Winslow’s carriage stops the way!’

I was hoisted up, candle in hand, between the two, and had nearly reached the stairs when there came up on the garden side a sound as of tipsy revellers in the garden.  ‘The scoundrels! how can they have got in?’ cried Griff, looking towards the window; but all the windows on that side had peculiarly heavy shutters and bars, with only a tiny heart-shaped aperture very high up, so they somewhat hurried their steps downstairs, intending to rush out on the intruders from the back door.  But suddenly, in the middle of the staircase, we heard a terrible heartrending woman’s shriek, making us all start and have a general fall.  My brothers managed to seat me safely on a step without much damage to themselves, but the candle fell and was extinguished, and we made too heavy a weight to fall without real noise enough to bring the household together before we could pick ourselves up in the dark.

We heard doors opening and hurried calls, and something about pistols, impelling Griff to call out, ‘It’s nothing, papa; but there are some drunken rascals in the garden.’

A light had come by this time, and we were detected.  There was a general sally upon the enemy in the garden before any one thought of me, except a ‘You here!’ when they nearly fell over me.  And there I was left sitting on the stair, helpless without my crutches, till in a few minutes all returned declaring there was nothing—no signs of anything; and then as Clarence ran up to me with my crutches my father demanded the meaning of my being there at that time of night.

‘Well, sir,’ said Griff, ‘it is only that we have been sitting up to investigate the ghost.’

‘Ghost!  Arrant stuff and nonsense!  What induced you to be dragging Edward about in this dangerous way?’

‘I wished it,’ said I.

‘You are all mad together, I think.  I won’t have the house disturbed for this ridiculous folly.  I shall look into it to-morrow!’

CHAPTER XV
RATIONAL THEORIES

 
‘These are the reasons, they are natural.’
 

Julius Cæsar.

If anything could have made our adventure more unpleasant to Mr. and Mrs. Winslow, it would have been the presence of guests.  However, inquiry was suppressed at breakfast, in deference to the signs my mother made to enjoin silence before the children, all unaware that Emily was nearly frantic with suppressed curiosity, and Martyn knew more about the popular version of the legend than any of us.

Clarence looked wan and heavy-eyed.  His head was aching from a bump against the edge of a step, and his cold was much worse; no wonder, said my mother; but she was always softened by any ailment, and feared that the phantoms were the effect of coming illness.  I have always thought that if Clarence could have come home from his court-martial with a brain fever he would have earned immediate forgiveness; but unluckily for him, he was a very healthy person.

All three of us were summoned to the tribunal in the study, where my father and my mother sat in judgment on what they termed ‘this preposterous business.’  In our morning senses our impressions were much more vague than at midnight, and we betrayed some confusion; but Griff and I had a strong instinct of sheltering Clarence, and we stoutly declared the noises to be beyond the capacities of wind, rats, or cats; that the light was visible and inexplicable; and that though we had seen nothing else, we could not doubt that Clarence did.

‘Thought he did,’ corrected my father.

‘Without discussing the word,’ said Griff, ‘I mean that the effect on his senses was the same as the actual sight.  You could not look at him without being certain.’

‘Exactly so,’ returned my mother.  ‘I wish Dr. Fellowes were near.’

Indeed nothing saved Clarence from being consigned to medical treatment but the distance from Bath or Bristol, and the contradictory advice that had been received from our county neighbours as to our family doctor.  However, she formed her theory that his nervous imaginings—whether involuntary or acted, she hoped the former, and wished she could be sure—had infected us; and, as she was really uneasy about him, she would not let him sleep in the mullion room, but having nowhere else to bestow him, she turned out the man-servant and put him into the little room beyond mine, and she also forbade any mention of the subject to him that day.

This was a sore prohibition to Emily, who had been discussing it with the other ladies, and was in a mingled state of elation at the romance, and terror at the supernatural, which found vent in excited giggle, and moved Griff to cram her with raw-head and bloody-bone horrors, conventional enough to be suspicious, and send her to me tearfully to entreat to know the truth.  If by day she exulted in a haunted chamber, in the evening she paid for it by terrors at walking about the house alone, and, when sent on an errand by my mother, looked piteous enough to be laughed at or scolded on all sides.

The gentlemen had more serious colloquies, and the upshot was a determination to sit up together and discover the origin of the annoyance.  Mr. Stafford’s antiquarian researches had made him familiar with such mysteries, and enough of them had been explained by natural causes to convince him that there was a key to all the rest.  Owls, coiners, and smugglers had all been convicted of simulating ghosts.  In one venerable mansion, behind the wainscot, there had been discovered nine skeletons of cats in different stages of decay, having trapped themselves at various intervals of time, and during the gradual extinction of their eighty-one lives having emitted cries enough to establish the ghastly reputation of the place.  Perhaps Mr. Henderson was inclined to believe there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in even an antiquary’s philosophy.  He owned himself perplexed, but reserved his opinion.

At breakfast Clarence was quite well, except for the remains of his sore throat, and the two seniors were gruff and brief as to their watch.  They had heard odd noises, and should discover the cause; the carpenter had already been sent for, and they had seen a light which was certainly due to reflection or refraction.  Mr. Henderson committed himself to nothing but that ‘it was very extraordinary;’ and there was a wicked look of diversion on Griff’s face, and an exchange of glances.  Afterwards, in our own domain, we extracted a good deal more from them.

Griff told us how the two elders started on politics, and denounced Brougham and O’Connell loud enough to terrify any save the most undaunted ghost, till Henderson said ‘Hush!’ and they paused at the moan with which the performance always commenced, making Mr. Stafford turn, as Griff said, ‘white in the gills,’ though he talked of the wind on the stillest of frosty nights.  Then came the sobbing and wailing, which certainly overawed them all; Henderson called them ‘agonising,’ but Griff was in a manner inured to this, and felt as if master of the ceremonies.  Let them say what they would by daylight about owls, cats, and rats, they owned the human element then, and were far from comfortable, though they would not compromise their good sense by owning what both their younger companions had perceived—their feeling of some undefinable presence.  Vain attempts had been made to account for the light or get rid of it by changing the position of candles or bright objects in the outer room; and Henderson had shut himself into the bedroom with it; but there he still only saw the hazy light—though all was otherwise pitch dark, except the keyhole and the small gray patch of sky at the top of the window-shutters.  ‘You saw nothing else?’ said Griff.  ‘I thought I heard you break out as Clarence did, just before my father opened the door.’

‘Perhaps I did so.  I had the sense strongly on me of some being in grievous distress very near me.’

‘And you should have power over it,’ suggested Emily.

‘I am afraid,’ he said, ‘that more thorough conviction and comprehension are needed before I could address the thing with authority.  I should like to have stayed longer and heard the conclusion.’

For Mr. Stafford had grown impatient and weary, and my father having satisfied himself that there was something to be detected, would not remain to the end, and not only carried his companions off, but locked the doors, perhaps expecting to imprison some agent in a trick, and find him in the morning.

Indeed Clarence had a dim remembrance of having been half wakened by some one looking in on him in the night, when he was sleeping heavily after his cold and the previous night’s disturbance, and we suspected, though we would not say, that our father might have wished to ascertain that he had no share in producing these appearances.  He was, however, fully acquitted of all wilful deception in the case, and he was not surprised, though he was disappointed, that his vision of the lady was supposed to be the consequence of excited imagination.

‘I can’t help it,’ he said to me in private.  ‘I have always seen or felt, or whatever you may call it, things that others do not.  Don’t you remember how nobody would believe that I saw Lucy Brooke?’

‘That was in the beginning of the measles.’

‘I know; and I will tell you something curious.  When I was at Gibraltar I met Mrs. Emmott—’

‘Mary Brooke?’

‘Yes; I spent a very happy Sunday with her.  We talked over old times, and she told me that Lucy had all through her illness been very uneasy about having promised to bring me a macaw’s feather the next time we played in the Square gardens.  It could not be sent to me for fear of carrying the infection, but the dear girl was too light-headed to understand, and kept on fretting and wandering about breaking her word.  I have no doubt the wish carried her spirit to me the moment it was free,’ he added, with tears springing to his eyes.  He also said that before the court-martial he had, night after night, dreams of sinking and drowning in huge waves, and his friend Coles struggling to come to his aid, but being forcibly withheld; and he had since learnt that Coles had actually endeavoured to come from Plymouth to bear testimony to his previous character, but had been refused leave, and told that he could do no good.

There had been other instances of perception of a presence and of a prescient foreboding.  ‘It is like a sixth sense,’ he said, ‘and a very uncomfortable one.  I would give much to be rid of it, for it is connected with all that is worst in my life.  I had it before Navarino, when no one expected an engagement.  It made me believe I should be killed, and drove me to what was much worse—or at least I used to think so.’

‘Don’t you now?’ I asked.

‘No,’ said Clarence.  ‘It was a great mercy that I did not die then.  There’s something to conquer first.  But you’ll never speak of this, Ted.  I have left off telling of such things—it only gives another reason for disbelieving me.’

However, this time his veracity was not called in question,—but he was supposed to be under a hallucination, the creation of the noises acting on his imagination and memory of the persecuted widow, which must have been somewhere dormant in his mind, though he averred that he had never heard of it.  It had now, however, made a strong impression on him; he was convinced that some crime or injustice had been perpetrated, and thought it ought to be investigated; but Griffith made us laugh at his championship of this shadow of a shade, and even wrote some mock heroic verses about it,—nor would it have been easy to stir my father to seek for the motives of an apparition which no one in the family save Clarence professed to have seen.

The noises were indisputable, but my mother began to suspect a cause for them.  To oblige a former cook we had brought down with us as stable-boy her son, George Sims, an imp accustomed to be the pet and jester of a mews.  Martyn was only too fond of his company, and he made no secret of his contempt for the insufferable dulness of the country, enlivening it by various acts of monkey-mischief, in some of which Martyn had been implicated.  That very afternoon, as Mrs. Sophia Selby was walking home in the twilight from Chapman’s lodge, in company with Mr. Henderson, an eldritch yell proceeding from the vaults beneath the mullion chambers nearly frightened her into fits.  Henderson darted in and captured the two boys in the fact.  Martyn’s asseveration that he had taken the pair for Griff and Emily would have pacified the good-natured clergyman, but Mrs. Sophia was too much agitated, or too spiteful, as we declared, not to make a scene.

Martyn spent the evening alone and in disgrace, and only his unimpeachable character for truth caused the acceptance of his affirmation that the yell was an impromptu fraternal compliment, and that he had nothing to do with the noises in the mullion chamber.  He had been supposed to be perfectly unconscious of anything of the kind, and to have never so much as heard of a phantom, so my mother was taken somewhat aback when, in reply to her demand whether he had ever been so naughty as to assist George in making a noise in Clarence’s room, he said, ‘Why, that’s the ghost of the lady that was murdered atop of the steps, and always walks every Christmas!’

‘Who told you such ridiculous nonsense?’

The answer ‘George’ was deemed conclusive that all had been got up by that youth; and there was considerable evidence of his talent for ventriloquism and taste for practical jokes.  My mother was certain that, having heard of the popular superstition, he had acted ghost.  She appealed to Woodstock to prove the practicability of such feats; and her absolute conviction persuaded the maids (who had given warning en masse) that the enemy was exorcised when George Sims had been sent off on the Royal Mail under Clarence’s guardianship.