The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Mrs Molesworth Read online

  Some little time passed. In the quiet country place whither, sorely against Seton’s desires, Mrs. Medway had betaken herself for “change,” she heard no mention of Major Graham’s death. One or two friends casually alluded to it in their letters as “very sad,” but that was all. And Anne was glad of it.

  “I must brace myself to hear it spoken of and discussed by the friends who knew him well—who knew how well I knew him”—she reflected. “But I am glad to escape it for a while.”

  It was February already, more than three months since Kenneth Graham had left England, when one morning—among letters forwarded from her London address—came a thin foreign paper one with the traces of travel upon it—of which the superscription made Anne start and then turn pale and cold.

  “I did not think of this,” she said to herself. “He must have left it to be forwarded to me. It is terrible—getting a letter after the hand that wrote it has been long dead and cold.”

  With trembling fingers she opened it.

  “My dear—may I say my dearest Anne,” were the first words that her eyes fell on. Her own filled with tears. Wiping them away before going on to read more, she caught sight of the date. “On board H. M. ’s troopship Ariadne, 27th November.”

  Anne started. Stranger and stranger. Two days later than the reported date of his death—and the writing so strong and clear. No sign of weakness or illness even! She read on with frantic eagerness; it was not a very long letter, but when Anne had read the two or three somewhat hurriedly written pages, her face had changed as if from careworn, pallid middle age, back to fresh, sunny youth. She fell on her knees in fervent, unspoken thanksgiving. She kissed the letter—the dear, beautiful letter, as if it were a living thing!

  “It is too much—too much,” she said. “What have I done to deserve such blessedness?”

  This was what the letter told. The officer whose death had been announced was not “our Major Graham,” not Graham of the 113th at all, but an officer belonging to another regiment who had come on board at Madeira to return to India, believing his health to be quite restored. Kenneth wrote:

  The doctors had in some way mistaken his case, for he broke down again quite suddenly and died two days ago. He was a very good fellow, and we have all been very cut up about it. He took a fancy to me, and I have been up some nights with him, and I am rather done up myself. I write this to post at the Cape, for a fear has struck me that—his initials being so like mine—some report may reach you that it is I, not he. Would you care very much, dear Anne? I dare to think you would—but I cannot in a letter tell you why. I must wait till I see you. I have had a somewhat strange experience, and it is possible, just possible, that I may be able to tell you all about it, vivâ voce, sooner than I had any idea of when I last saw you. In the meantime, goodbye and God bless you, my dear child.

  Then followed a postscript—of some days’ later date, written in great perturbation of spirit at finding that the letter had, by mistake, not been posted at the Cape:

  After all my anxiety that you should see it as soon as or before the newspapers, it is really too bad. I cannot understand how it happened. I suppose it was that I was so busy getting poor Graham’s papers and things together to send on shore, that I overlooked it. It cannot now be posted till we get to Galles.

  That was all. But was it not enough, and more than enough? The next few weeks passed for Anne Medway like a happy dream. She was content now to wait—years even—she had recovered faith in herself, faith in the future.

  The next Indian mail brought her no letter, somewhat to her surprise. She wondered what had made Kenneth allude to his perhaps seeing her again before long—she wondered almost more, what was the “strange experience” to which he referred. Could it have had any connection with her most strange experience that November afternoon? And thus “wondering” she was sitting alone—in her own house again by this time—one evening towards the end of April, when a ring at the bell made her look up from the book she was reading, half dreamily asking herself what visitor could be coming so late. She heard steps and voices—a door shutting—then Ambrose opened that of the drawing-room where she was sitting and came up to her, his wrinkled old face all flushed and beaming. “It was me that frightened you so that day, ma’am,” he began. “It’s right it should be me again. But it’s himself—his very own self this time. You may believe me, indeed.”

  Anne started to her feet. She felt herself growing pale—she trembled so that she could scarcely stand.

  “Where is he?” she said. “You have not put him into the library—anywhere but there?”

  “He would have it so, ma’am. He said he would explain to you. Oh, go to him, ma’am—you’ll see it’ll be all right.”

  Anne made her way to the library. But at the door a strange tremor seized her. She could scarcely control herself to open it. Yes—there again on the hearthrug stood the tall figure she had so often pictured thus to herself. She trembled and all but fell, but his voice—his own hearty, living voice—speaking to her in accents tenderer and deeper than ever heretofore—reassured her, and dispersed at once the fear that had hovered about her.

  “Anne, my dear Anne. It is I myself. Don’t look so frightened;” and in a moment he had led her forward, and stood with his hand on her shoulder, looking with his kind, earnest eyes into hers.

  “Yes,” he said dreamily, “it was just thus. Oh, how often I have thought of this moment! Anne, if I am mistaken forgive my presumption, but I can’t think I am. Anne, my darling, you do love me?”

  There was no need of words. Anne hid her face on his shoulder for one happy moment. Then amidst the tears that would come she told him all—all she had suffered and hoped and feared— her love and her agony of humiliation when she thought it was not returned—her terrible grief when she thought him dead; and yet the consolation of believing herself to have been his last thought in life.

  “So you shall be—my first and my last,” he answered. “My Anne—my very own.”

  And then she told him more of the strange story we know. He listened with intense eagerness, but without testifying much surprise, far less incredulity. “I anticipated something of the kind,” he said, after a moment or two of silence. “It is very strange. Listen, Anne: at the time, the exact time, so far as I can roughly calculate, at which you thought you saw me, I was dreaming of you. It was between four and five o’clock in the afternoon, was it not?”

  Anne bowed her head in assent.

  “That would have made it about six o’clock where we then were,” he went on consideringly. “Yes; it was about seven when I awoke. I had lain down that afternoon with a frightful headache. Poor Graham had died shortly before midnight the night before, and I had not been able to sleep, though I was very tired. I daresay I was not altogether in what the doctors call a normal condition, from the physical fatigue and the effect generally of having watched him die. I was feeling less earthly, if you can understand, than one usually does. It is—to me at least—impossible to watch a deathbed without wondering about it all—about what comes after—intensely. And Graham was so good, so patient and resigned and trustful, though it was awfully hard for him to die. He had every reason to wish to live.

  “Well, Anne, when I fell asleep that afternoon I at once began dreaming about you. I had been thinking about you a great deal, constantly almost, ever since we set sail. For, just before starting, I had got a hint that this appointment—I have not told you about it yet, but that will keep; I have accepted it, as you see by my being here—I got a hint that it would probably be offered me, and that if I didn’t mind paying my passage back almost as soon as I got out, I had better make up my mind to accept it. I felt that it hung upon you, and yet I did not see how to find out what you would say without—without risking what I had—your sisterly friendship. It came into my head just as I was falling asleep that I would write to you from the Cape, and tell you of Graham’s death to avoid any mistaken report, and that I might in my letter someh
ow feel my way a little. This was all in my mind, and as I fell asleep it got confused so that I did not know afterwards clearly where to separate it from my dream.”

  “And what was the dream?” asked Anne breathlessly. “Almost precisely what you saw,” he replied. “I fancied myself here—rushing upstairs to the library in my haste to see you— to tell you I was not dead, and to ask you if you would have cared much had it been so. I saw all the scene—the hall, the staircase already lighted. This room—and you coming in at the door with a half-frightened, half-eager look in your face. Then it grew confused. I next remember standing here beside you on the hearthrug with my hand on your shoulder—thus, Anne— and gazing into your eyes, and struggling, struggling to ask you what I wanted so terribly to know. But the words would not come, and the agony seemed to awake me. Yet with the awaking came the answer. Something had answered me; I said to myself, ‘Yes, Anne does love me.’”

  And Anne remembered the strange feeling of joy which had come to her even in the first bitterness of her grief. She turned to the hand that still lay on her shoulder and kissed it. “Oh, Kenneth,” she said, “how thankful we should be! But how strange, to think that we owe all to a dream! Was it a dream, Kenneth?”

  He shook his head.

  “You must ask that of wiser people than I,” he said. “I suppose it was.”

  “But how could it have been a dream?” said Anne again. “You forget, Kenneth—Ambrose saw you too.”

  “Though I did not see him, nor even think of him. Yes, that makes it even more incomprehensible. It must have been the old fellow’s devotion to you, Anne, that made him sympathise with you, somehow.”

  “I am glad he saw you,” said Anne. “I should prefer to think it more than a dream. And there is always more evidence in favour of any story of the kind if it has been witnessed by two. But there is one other thing I want to ask you. It has struck me since that you answered me rather abstractedly that last evening when I spoke about your address, and asked if there was any other of the name in your regiment. Once or twice I have drawn a faint ray of hope from remembering your not very decided answer.” “Yes, it was stupid of me; I half remembered it afterwards. I should have explained it, but it scarcely seemed worthwhile. I did know another Major Graham might be joining us at Funchal, for that very day I had been entrusted with letters for him. But I was abstracted that evening, Anne. I was trying to persuade myself I didn’t care for what I now know I care for more than for life itself—your love—Anne.”

  Unexplained

  (A story from Four Ghost Stories).

  PART 1

  For facts are stubborn things.—SMOLLETT.

  “Silberbach! What in the name of everything that is eccentric should you go there for? The most uninteresting, out-of-the-way, altogether unattractive little hole in all Germany? What can have put Silberbach in your head?”

  “I really don’t know,” I answered, rather tired, to tell the truth, of the discussion. “There doesn’t seem any particular reason why anybody ever should go to Silberbach, except that Goethe and the Duke of Weimar are supposed to have gone there to dance with the peasant maidens. I certainly don’t see that that is any reason why I should go there. Still, on the other hand, I don’t see that it is any reason why I should not? I only want to find some thoroughly country place where the children and I can do as we like for a fortnight or so. It is really too hot to stay in a town, even a little town like this.”

  “Yes, that is true,” said my friend. “It is a pity you took up your quarters in the town. You might have taken a little villa outside, and then you would not have needed to go away at all.”

  “I wanted a rest from housekeeping, and our queer old inn is very comfortable,” I said. “Besides, being here, would it not be a pity to go away without seeing anything of the far-famed Thuringian Forest?”

  “Yes, certainly it would. I quite agree with you about everything except about Silberbach. That is what I cannot get over. You have not enough self-assertion, my dear. I am certain Silberbach is some freak of Herr von Walden’s—most unpractical man. Why, I really am not at all sure that you will get anything to eat there.”

  “I am not afraid of that part of it,” I replied philosophically. “With plenty of milk, fresh eggs, and bread and butter, we can always get on. And those I suppose we are sure to find.”

  “Milk and eggs—yes, I suppose so. Butter is doubtful once you leave the tourist track, and the bread will be the sour bread of the country.”

  “I don’t mind that—nor do the children. But if the worst comes to the worst we need not stay at Silberbach—we can always get away.”

  “That is certainly true; if one can get there, one can, I suppose, always get away,” answered Fräulein Ottilia with a smile, “though I confess it is a curious inducement to name for going to a place—that one can get away from it! However, we need not say any more about it. I see your heart is set on Silberbach, and I am quite sure I shall have the satisfaction of hearing you own I was right in trying to dissuade you from it, when you come back again,” she added, rather maliciously.

  “Perhaps so. But it is not only Silberbach we are going to. We shall see lots of other places. Herr von Walden has planned it all. The first three days we shall travel mostly on foot. I think it will be great fun. Nora and Reggie are enchanted. Of course I would not travel on foot alone with them; it would hardly be safe, I suppose?”

  “Safe? oh yes, safe enough. The peasants are very quiet, civil people—honest and kindly, though generally desperately poor! But you would be safe enough anywhere in Thuringia. It is not like Alsace, where now and then one does meet with rather queer customers in the forests. So goodbye, then, my dear, for the next two or three weeks—and may you enjoy yourself.”

  “Especially at Silberbach?”

  “Even at Silberbach—that is to say, even if I have to own you were right and I wrong. Yes, my dear, I am unselfish enough to hope you will return having found Silberbach an earthly paradise.”

  And waving her hand in adieu, kind Fräulein Ottilia stood at her garden-gate watching me make my way down the dusty road.

  “She is a little prejudiced, I daresay,” I thought to myself. “Prejudiced against Herr von Walden’s choice, for I notice everyone here has their pet places and their special aversions. I daresay we shall like Silberbach, and if not, we need not stay there after the Waldens leave us. Anyway, I shall be thankful to get out of this heat into the real country.”

  I was spending the summer in a part of Germany hitherto new ground to me. We had—the “we” meaning myself and my two younger children, Nora of twelve and Reggie of nine— settled down for the greater part of the time in a small town on the borders of the Thuringian Forest. Small, but not in its own estimation unimportant, for it was a “Residenz,” with a fortress of sufficiently ancient date to be well worth visiting, even had the view from its ramparts been far less beautiful than it was. And had the little town possessed no attractions of its own, natural or artificial, the extreme cordiality and kindness of its most hospitable inhabitants would have left the pleasantest impression on my mind. I was sorry to leave my friends even for two or three weeks, but it was too hot! Nora was pale and Reggie’s noble appetite gave signs of flagging. Besides—as I had said to Ottilia—it would be too absurd to have come so far and not see the lions of the neighbourhood.

  So we were to start the next morning for an excursion in the so-called “Forest,” in the company of Herr von Walden, his wife and son, and two young men, friends of the latter. We were to travel by rail over the first part of the ground, uninteresting enough, till we reached a point where we could make our way on foot through the woods for a considerable distance. Then, after spending the night in a village whose beautiful situation had tempted some enterprising speculator to build a good hotel, we proposed the next day to plunge still deeper into the real recesses of the forest, walking and driving by turns, in accordance with our inclination and the resources of the country i
n respect of Einspänners—the light carriage with the horse invariably yoked at one side of the pole instead of between shafts, in which one gets about more speedily and safely than might be imagined.

  And at the end of three or four days of this, weather permitting, agreeably nomad life, our friends the Waldens, obliged to return to their home in the town from which we started, were to leave my children and me for a fortnight’s country air in this same village of Silberbach which Ottilia so vehemently objected to. I did not then, I do not now, know—and I am pretty sure he himself could not say—why our guide, Herr von Walden, had chosen Silberbach from among the dozens of other villages which could quite as well—as events proved, indeed, infinitely better—have served our very simple purpose. It was a chance, as such things often are, but a chance which, as you will see, left its mark in a manner which can never be altogether effaced from my memory.

  The programme was successfully carried out. The weather was magnificent. Nobody fell ill or footsore, or turned out unexpectedly bad-tempered. And it was hot enough, even in the forest shades, which we kept to as much as possible, to have excused some amount of irritability. But we were all sound and strong, and had entered into a tacit compact of making the best of things and enjoying ourselves as much as we could. Nora and Reggie perhaps, by the end of the second day, began to have doubts as to the delights of indefinitely continued walking excursions; and though they would not have owned to it, they were not, I think, sorry to hear that the greater part of the fourth day’s travels was to be on wheels.

  But they were very well off. Lutz von Walden and his two friends—a young baron, rather the typical “German student” in appearance, though in reality as hearty and unsentimental as any John Bull of his age and rank—and George Norman, an English boy of seventeen or eighteen, “getting up” German for an army examination—were all three only too ready to carry my little boy on their backs on any sign of over-fatigue. And, indeed, more than one hint reached me that they would willingly have done the same by Nora, had the dignity of her twelve years allowed of such a thing. She scarcely looked her age at that time, but she was very conscious of having entered “on her teens,” and the struggle between this new importance and her hitherto almost boyish tastes was amusing to watch.