The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Mrs Molesworth Read online

  “I was not in the least frightened. I knew it was a phantom, but I felt paralysed, and as if I myself had somehow got outside of ordinary conditions. And there I sat—staring at Maud, and there she stood, gazing before her with that terrible, unspeakable sadness in her face, which, even though I felt no fear, seemed to freeze me with a kind of unutterable pity.

  “I don’t know how long I had sat thus, or how long I might have continued to sit there, almost as if in a trance, when suddenly I heard the front-door bell ring. It seemed to awaken me. I started up and glanced round, half-expecting that I should find the vision dispelled. But no; she was still there, and I sank back into my seat just as I heard my brother coming quickly upstairs. He came towards the library, and seeing the door wide open walked in, and I, still gazing, saw his figure pass through that of the woman in the doorway as you may walk through a wreath of mist or smoke—only, don’t misunderstand me, the figure of Maud till that moment had had nothing unsubstantial about it. She had looked to me, as she stood there, literally and exactly like a living woman—the shade of her dress, the colour of her hair, the few ornaments she wore, all were as defined and clear as yours, Nina, at the present moment, and remained so, or perhaps became so again as soon as my brother was well within the room.

  “He came forward addressing me by name, but I answered him in a whisper, begging him to be silent and to sit down on the seat opposite me for a moment or two. He did so, though he was taken aback by my strange manner, for I still kept my eyes fixed on the door. I had a queer consciousness that if I looked away it would fade, and I wanted to keep cool and see what would happen. I asked Herbert in a low voice if he saw nothing, but though he mechanically followed the direction of my eyes, he shook his head in bewilderment. And for a moment or two he remained thus.

  “Then I began to notice that the figure was growing less clear, as if it were receding, yet without growing smaller to the sight; it grew fainter and vaguer, the colours grew hazy. I rubbed my eyes once or twice with a half idea that my long watching was making them misty, but it was not so. My eyes were not at fault—slowly but surely Maud Bertram, or her ghost, melted away, till all trace of her had gone. I saw again the familiar pattern of the carpet where she had stood and the objects of the room that had been hidden by her draperies—all again in the most commonplace way, but she was gone, quite gone.

  “Then Herbert, seeing me relax my intense gaze, began to question me. I told him exactly what I have told you. He answered, as every ‘common-sensible’ person of course would, that it was strange, but that such things did happen sometimes and were classed by the wise under the head of ‘optical delusions.’ I was not well, perhaps, he suggested. Been over-working? Had I not better see a doctor? But I shook my head. I was quite well, and I said so. And perhaps he was right, it might be an optical delusion only. I had never had any experience of such things.

  “‘All the same, ’ I said, ‘I shall mark down the date.’

  “Herbert laughed and said that was what people always did in such cases. If he knew where Mrs. —— then was he would write to her, just for the fun of the thing, and ask her to be so good as to look up her diary, if she kept one, and let us know what she had been doing on that particular day—‘the 6th of April, isn’t it?’ he said—when I would have it her wraith had paid me a visit. I let him talk. It seemed to remove the strange painful impression—painful because of that terrible sadness in the sweet face. But we neither of us knew where she was, we scarcely remembered her married name! And so there was nothing to be done—except, what I did at once in spite of Herbert’s rallying, to mark down the day and hour with scrupulous exactness in my diary.

  “Time passed. I had not forgotten my strange experience, but of course the impression of it lessened by degrees till it seemed more like a curious dream than anything more real, when one day I did hear of poor Maud again. ‘Poor’ Maud I cannot help calling her. I heard of her indirectly, and probably, but for the sadness of her story, I should never have heard it at all. It was a friend of her husband’s family who had mentioned the circumstances in the hearing of a friend of mine, and one day something brought round the conversation to old times, and he startled me by suddenly inquiring if I remembered Maud Bertram. I said, of course I did. Did he know anything of her? And then he told me.

  “She was dead—she had died some months ago after a long and trying illness, the result of a terrible accident. She had caught fire one evening when dressed for some grand entertainment or other, and though her injuries did not seem likely to be fatal at the time, she had never recovered the shock.

  “‘She was so pretty,’ my friend said, ‘and one of the saddest parts of it was that I hear she was terrifically disfigured, and she took this most sadly to heart. The right side of her face was utterly ruined, and the sight of the right eye lost, though, strange to say, the left side entirely escaped, and seeing her in profile one would have had no notion of what had happened. Was it not sad? She was such a sweet, bright creature. ’

  “I did not tell him my story, for I did not want it chattered about, but a strange sort of shiver ran through me at his words. It was the left side of her face only that the wraith of my poor friend had allowed me to see.”

  “Oh, Uncle Paul!” exclaimed Nina.

  “And—as to the dates?” inquired Mr. Snowdon.

  “I never knew the exact date of the accident,” said Mr. Marischal, “but that of her death was fully six months after I had seen her. And in my own mind, I have never made any doubt that it was at or about, probably a short time after, the accident, that she came to me. It seemed a kind of appeal for sympathy— and—a farewell also, poor child.”

  They all sat silent for some little time, and then Mr. Marischal got up and went off to his own quarters, saying something vaguely about seeing if his letters had gone.

  “What a touching story!” said Gladys Lloyd. “I am afraid, after all, it has been more painful than he realised for Mr. Marischal to tell it. Did you know anything of Maud’s husband, dear Lady Denholme? Was he kind to her? Was she happy?”

  “We never heard much about her married life,” her hostess replied. “But I have no reason to think she was unhappy. Her husband married again two or three years after her death, but that says nothing.”

  “N—no,” said Nina. “All the same, mamma, I am sure she really did love Uncle Paul very much,—much more than he had any idea of. Poor Maud!”

  “And he has never married,” added Gladys.

  “No,” said Lady Denholme, “but there have been many practical difficulties in the way of his doing so. He has had a most absorbingly busy life, and now that he is more at leisure he feels himself too old to form new ties.”

  “But,” persisted Nina, “if he had had any idea at the time that Maud cared for him so?”

  “Ah well,” Lady Denholme allowed, “in that case, in spite of the practical difficulties, things would probably have been different.”

  And again Nina repeated softly, “Poor Maud!”

  Old Gervais

  A CURIOUS EXPERIENCE

  Penforres Hall, Carmichael, N. B. ,

  Jan. 17th, 188—.

  . . . And now, as to your questions about that long-ago story. What put it into your head, I wonder? You have been talking “ghosts” like everybody else nowadays, no doubt, and you want to have something to tell that you had at “first hand.” Ah well, I will try to recall my small experience of the kind as accurately as my old brain is capable of doing at so long a distance. Though, after all, that is scarcely a correct way of putting it. For, like all elderly people, I find it true, strikingly true, that the longer ago the better, as far as memory is concerned. I can recollect events, places—nay, words and looks and tones, material impressions of the most trivial, such as scents and tastes, of forty or fifty years ago, far more vividly, more minutely, than things of a year or even a month past. It is strange, but I like it. There is something consolatory and suggestive about it. It seems to show
that we are still all there, or all here, rather; that there is a something—an innermost “I”—which goes on, faithful and permanent, however rusty and dull the machinery may grow with the wear and tear of time and age.

  But you won’t thank me for reflections of this kind. You want my little personal experience of the “more things,” and you shall have it.

  You know, of course, that by birth—by descent, that is to say—I am a little, a quarter or half a quarter, French, And by affection I have always felt myself much more than that. It is often so; there is a sort of loyalty in us to the weaker side of things. Just because there is really so much less French than English in me, because I have spent nearly all my threescore and —! years in Great Britain, I feel bound to stand up for the Gallic part of me, and to feel quite huffed and offended if France or “Frenchness” is decried. It is silly, I dare say; but somehow I cannot help it. We don’t know, we can’t say in what proportions our ancestors are developed in us. It is possible that I am really, paradoxical as it may sound, more French than English, after all.

  You know all about me, but if you want to tell my bit of a ghost-story to others, you will understand that I am not actuated by egotism in explaining things. It was through my being a little French that I came to pay long visits to old friends of my mother’s in Normandy. They were not relations, but connections by marriage, and bound by the closest ties of association and long affection to our cousins. And the wife of the head of the family, dear Madame de Viremont, was my own godmother. She had visited us in England and Scotland—she loved both, and she was cosmopolitan enough to think it only natural that even as a young girl I should be allowed to cross the channel to stay with her for weeks, nay, months at a time, in her old château of Viremont-les-bocages.

  Not that I travelled over there alone—ah no, indeed! Girls, even of the unmistakably upper classes, do travel alone now, I am assured, still I can’t say that it has ever come within my own knowledge that a young lady should journey by herself to Normandy, though I believe such things are done. But it was very different in my young days. My father himself took me to Paris—I am speaking just now of the first time I went, with which indeed only, I am at present concerned—and after a few days of sightseeing there, Madame de Viremont’s own maid came to escort me to my destination—the château.

  We travelled by diligence, of course—the journey that five or six hours would now see accomplished took us the best part of two days. At Caen, my godmother met us, and I spent a night in her “hotel” there—the town residence of the family—dear old house that it was! Many a happy day have I spent there since. And then, at Caen, I was introduced for the first time to my godmother’s granddaughters, her son’s children, Albertine and Virginie. Albertine was older than I, Virginie two years younger. We were dreadfully shy of each other, though Albertine was too well bred to show it, and talked formalities in a way that I am sure made her grandmother smile. Virginie, dear soul, did not speak at all, which you must remember is not bad manners in a French girl before she is out, and I, as far as I recollect, spoke nonsense in very bad French, and blushed at the thought of it afterwards. It was stupid of me, for I really could speak the language very decently.

  But that all came right. I think we took to each other in spite of our shyness and awkwardness, at once. It must have been so, for we have remained friends ever since, staunch friends, though Albertine’s life has been spent among the great ones of the earth (she is a great-grandmother now) and I only see my Virginie once a year, or once in two or three years, for a few hours, at the convent of which she has long, long been the head; and I am an old-fashioned, narrow-minded perhaps, Scotch maiden lady of a very certain age, who finds it not always easy to manage the journey to France even to see her dear old friends.

  How delightful, how unspeakably exciting and interesting and fascinating that first real glimpse into the home life of another nation was! The queernesses, the extraordinary differences, the indescribable mingling of primitiveness with ultra refinement, of stateliness and dignity of bearing and customs with odd unsophisticatedness such as I had imagined mediaeval at least—all added to the charm.

  How well I remember my first morning’s waking in my bedroom at the château! There was no carpet on the floor; no looking-glass, except a very black and unflattering one which might have belonged to Noah’s wife, over the chimney-piece; no attempt at a dressing-table; a ewer and basin in the tiny cabinet-de-toilette which would have delighted my little sister for her dolls. Yet the cup in which old Désirée brought me my morning chocolate was of almost priceless china, and the chocolate itself such as I do not think I ever have tasted elsewhere, so rich and fragrant and steaming hot—the roll which accompanied it, though sour, lying on a little fringed doyley marked with the Viremont crest in embroidery which must have cost somebody’s eyes something.

  It seemed to me like awaking in a fairytale in a white cat’s château. And the charm lasted till I had come to feel so entirely at home with my dear, courteous, kindly hosts, that I forgot to ask myself if I were enjoying myself or no. Nay, longer than till then, did it last—indeed, I have never lost the feeling of it—at any moment I can hear the tapping of my godmother’s stoutly shod feet as she trotted about early in the morning, superintending her men and maidens, and giving orders for the day; I can scent the perfume of Monsieur’s pet roses; I can hear the sudden wind, for we were not far from the sea, howling and crying through the trees as I lay in my alcove bed at night.

  It was not a great house, though called a château. It was one of the still numerous moderate-sized old country houses which escaped the destruction of that terrible time now nearly a century past. The De Viremonts were of excellent descent, but they had never been extremely wealthy, nor very prominent. They were pious, home-loving, cultivated folk—better read than most of their class in the provinces, partly perhaps thanks to their English connections which had widened their ideas, partly because they came of a scholarly and thoughtful race. The house was little changed from what it must have been for a century or more.

  The grounds, so Madame de Viremont told me, were less well tended than in her husband’s childhood, for it was increasingly difficult to get good gardeners, and she herself had no special gift in that line, such as her mother-in-law had been famed for. And though Monsieur loved his roses, his interest in horticulture began and ended with them. I don’t think he minded how untidy and wilderness-like the grounds were, provided the little bit near the house was pretty decent. For there, round the “lawn” which he and Madame fondly imagined was worthy of the name, bloomed his beloved flowers.

  If it had been my own home, the wildness of the unkempt grounds would have worried me sadly. I have always been old-maidish about neatness and tidiness, I think. But as it was not my home, and I therefore felt no uncomfortable responsibility, I think I rather liked it. It was wonderfully picturesque—here and there almost mysterious. One terrace I know, up and down which Virginie and I were specially fond of pacing, always reminded me of the garden in George Sand’s Château de Pictordu, if only there had been a broken statute at one end!

  The time passed quickly, even during the first two or three weeks, when my only companions were “Marraine,” as Madame made me call her, and her husband. I was not at all dull or bored, though my kind friends would scarcely believe it, and constantly tried to cheer my supposed loneliness by telling me how pleasant it would be when les petites—Albertine and Virginie—joined us, as they were to do before long. I didn’t feel very eager about their coming. I could not forget my shyness; though, of course, I did not like to say so. I only repeated to my godmother that I could not feel dull when she and Monsieur de Viremont were doing so much to amuse me.

  And for another reason I was glad to be alone with my old friends at first. I was very anxious to improve my French, and I worked hard at it under Monsieur’s directions. He used to read aloud to us in the evenings; he read splendidly, and besides the exercises and dictations he ga
ve me, he used to make me read aloud too. I hated it at first, but gradually I improved very much, and then I liked it.

  So passed three or four weeks; then at last one morning came a letter announcing the grand-daughters’ arrival on the following day. I could not but try to be pleased, for it was pretty to see how delighted everyone at the château was, to hear the news.

  “They must be nice girls,” I thought, “otherwise all the servants and people about would not like them so much,” and I made myself take an interest in going round with my godmother superintending the little preparations she was making for the girls.

  They were to have separate rooms. Albertine’s was beside mine, Virginie’s on the floor above. There was a good deal of excitement about Virginie’s room, for a special reason. Her grandmother was arranging a surprise for her, in the shape of a little oratory. It was a tiny closet—a dark closet it had been, used originally for hanging up dresses, in one corner of her room, and here on her last visit, the girl had placed her prie-Dieu, and hung up her crucifix. Madame de Viremont had noticed this, and just lately she had had the door taken away, and the little recess freshly painted, and a small window knocked out, and all made as pretty as possible for the sacred purpose.

  I felt quite interested in it. It was a queer little recess—almost like a turret—and Madame showed me that it ran up the whole height of the house from the cellars where it began, as an out-jut, with an arched window to give light to one end of the large “cave” at that side, which would otherwise have been quite dark.

  “The great cellar used to be a perfect rat-warren,” she told me, “till light and air were thus thrown into it. What that odd out-jut was originally, no one knows. There goes a story that a secret winding-staircase, very, very narrow, of course, once ran up it to the roof. There were some doubts, I know, as to the solidity of the masonry—it has sunk a little at one side, you can see it in the cellar. But I expect it has all ‘settled,’ as they call it, long ago. Old Gervais, whom we employed to knock out the new window in Virginie’s little oratory, had no doubt about it, and he is a clever mason.”