Chapter VIII: Saved! (4)

"'You can, indeed, my lord, relieve me of a great burden,' said the young man, and it was apparent enough that he _did_ acknowledge the validity of Anglican orders. 'Will you kindly take from the shelf that volume of Cicero "De Officiis," he said, pointing to a copy of an Elzevir variorum edition,--not the small duodecimo Elzevir,--'remove the paper you will find there, and burn it in the fire on the hearth.'

"'Certainly I will do as you say, but will you reward me by explaining the reason of your request?'

"'In me,' said the appearance, 'you behold Francis Wilton, priest. I was born in 1657, and, after adventures and an education with which I need not trouble you, found myself here as chaplain to the family of the Lord Birkenhead of the period. It chanced one day that I heard in confession, from the lips of Lady Birkenhead, a tale so strange, moving, and, but for the sacred circumstances of the revelation, so incredible, that my soul had no rest for thinking thereon. At last, neglecting my vow, and fearful that I might become forgetful of any portion of so marvellous a narrative, I took up my pen and committed the confession to the security of manuscript. Litera scripta manet. Scarcely had I finished my unholy task when the sound of a distant horn told me that the hunt (to which pleasure I was passionately given) approached the demesne. I thrust the written confession into that volume of Cicero, hurried to the stable, saddled my horse with my own hands, and rode in the direction whence I heard the music of the hounds. On my way a locked gate barred my progress. I put Rupert at it, he took off badly, fell, and my spirit passed away in the fall. But not to the place of repose did my sinful spirit wing its flight. I found myself here in the library, where, naturally, scarcely any one ever comes except the maids. When I would implore them to destroy the unholy document that binds me to earth, they merely scream; nor have I found any scion of the house, nor any guest, except your lordship, of more intrepid resolution or more charitable mood. And now, I trust, you will release me.'

"I rose (for I had seated myself during his narrative), my heart was stirred with pity; I took down the Cicero, and lit on a sheet of yellow paper covered with faded manuscript, which, of course, I did not read. I turned to the hearth, tossed on the fire the sere old paper, which blazed at once, and then, hearing the words pax vobiscum, I looked round. But I was alone. After a few minutes, devoted to private ejaculations, I returned to the dining-room; and that is all my story. Your maids need no longer dread the ghost of the library. He is released."

"Will any one take any more wine?" asked Lord Birkenhead, in tones of deep emotion. "No? Then suppose we join the ladies."

"Well," said one of the ladies, the Girton girl, when the squire had finished the prelate's narrative, "_I_ don't call that much of a story. What was Lady Birkenhead's confession about? That's what one really wants to know."

"The bishop could not possibly have read the paper," said the Bachelor of Arts, one of the guests; "not as a gentleman, nor a bishop."

"I wish _I_ had had the chance," said the Girton girl.

"Perhaps the confession was in Latin," said the Bachelor of Arts.

The Girton girl disdained to reply to this unworthy sneer.

"I have often observed," she said in a reflective voice, "that the most authentic and best attested bogies don't come to very much. They appear in a desultory manner, without any context, so to speak, and, like other difficulties, require a context to clear up their meaning."

These efforts of the Girton girl to apply the methods of philology to spectres, were received in silence. The women did not understand them, though they had a strong personal opinion about their learned author.

"The only ghost _I_ ever came across, or, rather, came within measurable distance of, never appeared at all so far as one knew."

"Miss Lebas has a story," said the squire, "Won't she tell us her story?"

The ladies murmured, "Do, please."

"It really cannot be called a ghost-story," remarked Miss Lebas, "it was only an uncomfortable kind of coincidence, and I never think of it without a shudder. But I know there is not any reason at all why it should make any of _you_ shudder; so don't be disappointed.

"It was the Long Vacation before last," said the Girton girl, "and I went on a reading-party to Bantry Bay, with Wyndham and Toole of Somerville, and Clare of Lady Margaret's. Leighton coached us."

"Dear me! With all these young men, my dear?" asked the maiden aunt.

"They were all women of my year, except Miss Leighton of Newnham, who was our coach," answered the Girton girl composedly.

"Dear me! I beg your pardon for interrupting you," said the maiden aunt.

"Well, term-time was drawing near, and Bantry Bay was getting pretty cold, when I received an invitation from Lady Garryowen to stay with them at Dundellan on my way south. They were two very dear, old, hospitable Irish ladies, the last of their race, Lady Garryowen and her sister, Miss Patty. They were _so_ hospitable that, though I did not know it, Dundellan was quite full when I reached it, overflowing with young people. The house has nothing very remarkable about it: a grey, plain building, with remains of the chateau about it, and a high park wall. In the garden wall there is a small round tower, just like those in the precinct wall at St. Andrews. The ground floor is not used. On the first floor there is a furnished chamber with a deep round niche, almost a separate room, like that in Queen Mary's apartments in Holy Rood. The first floor has long been fitted up as a bedroom and dressing-room, but it had not been occupied, and a curious old spinning-wheel in the corner (which has nothing to do with my story, if you can call it a story), must have been unused since '98, at least. I reached Dublin late--our train should have arrived at half-past six--it was ten before we toiled into the station. The Dundellan carriage was waiting for me, and, after an hour's drive, I reached the house. The dear old ladies had sat up for me, and I went to bed as soon as possible, in a very comfortable room. I fell asleep at once, and did not waken till broad daylight, between seven and eight, when, as my eyes wandered about, I saw, by the pictures on the wall, and the names on the books beside my bed, that Miss Patty must have given up her own room to me. I was quite sorry and, as I dressed, determined to get her to let me change into any den rather than accept this sacrifice. I went downstairs, and found breakfast ready, but neither Lady Garryowen nor Miss Patty. Looking out of the window into the garden, I heard, for the only time in my life, the wild Irish _keen_ over the dead, and saw the old nurse wailing and wringing her hands and hurrying to the house. As soon as she entered she told me, with a burst of grief, and in language I shall not try to imitate, that Miss Patty was dead.

"When I arrived the house was so full that there was literally no room for me. But 'Dundellan was never beaten yet,' the old ladies had said. There was still the room in the tower. But this room had such an evil reputation for being 'haunted' that the servants could hardly be got to go near it, at least after dark, and the dear old ladies never dreamed of sending any of their guests to pass a bad night in a place with a bad name. Miss Patty, who had the courage of a Bayard, did not think twice. She went herself to sleep in the haunted tower, and left her room to me. And when the old nurse went to call her in the morning, she could not waken Miss Patty. She was dead. Heart-disease, they called it. Of course," added the Girton girl, "as I said, it was only a coincidence. But the Irish servants could not be persuaded that Miss Patty had not seen whatever the thing was that they believed to be in the garden tower. I don't know what it was. You see the context was dreadfully vague, a mere fragment."

There was a little silence after the Girton girl's story.

"I never heard before in my life," said the maiden aunt, at last, "of any host or hostess who took the haunted room themselves, when the house happened to be full. They always send the stranger within their gates to it, and then pretend to be vastly surprised when he does not have a good night. I had several bad nights myself once. In Ireland too."

"Tell us all about it, Judy," said her brother, the squire.

"No," murmured the maiden aunt. "You would only laugh at me. There was no ghost. I didn't hear anything. I didn't see anything. I didn't even _smell_ anything, as they do in that horrid book, 'The Haunted Hotel.'"

"Then why had you such bad nights?"

"Oh, I _felt_" said the maiden aunt, with a little shudder.

"What did _you feel_, Aunt Judy?"

"I _know_ you will laugh," said the maiden aunt, abruptly entering on her nervous narrative. "I felt all the time _as if somebody was looking through the window_. Now, you know, there _couldn't_ be anybody. It was in an Irish country house where I had just arrived, and my room was on the second floor. The window was old-fashioned and narrow, with a deep recess. As soon as I went to bed, my dears, I _felt_ that some one was looking through the window, and meant to come in. I got up, and bolted the window, though I knew it was impossible for anybody to climb up there, and I drew the curtains, but I could not fall asleep. If ever I began to dose, I would waken with a start, and turn and look in the direction of the window. I did not sleep all night, and next night, though I was dreadfully tired, it was just the same thing. So I had to take my hostess into my confidence, though it was extremely disagreeable, my dears, to seem so foolish. I only told her that I thought the air, or something, must disagree with me, for I could not sleep. Then, as some one was leaving the house that day, she implored me to try another room, where I slept beautifully, and afterwards had a very pleasant visit. But, the day I went away, my hostess asked me if I had been kept awake by anything in particular, for instance, by a feeling that some one was trying to come in at the window. Well, I admitted that I _had_ a nervous feeling of that sort, and she said that she was very sorry, and that every one who lay in the room had exactly the same sensation. She supposed they must all have heard the history of the room, in childhood, and forgotten that they had heard it, and then been consciously reminded of it by reflex action. It seems, my dears, that that is the new scientific way of explaining all these things, presentiments and dreams and wraiths, and all that sort of thing. We have seen them before, and remember them without being aware of it. So I said I'd never heard the history of the room; but she said I _must_ have, and so must all the people who felt as if some one was coming in by the window. And I said that it was rather a curious thing they should _all_ forget they knew it, and _all_ be reminded of it without being aware of it, and that, if she did not mind, I'd like to be reminded of it again. So she said that these objections had all been replied to (just as clergymen always say in sermons), and then she told me the history of the room. It only came to this, that, three generations before, the family butler (whom every one had always thought a most steady, respectable man), dressed himself up like a ghost, or like his notion of a ghost, and got a ladder, and came in by the window to steal the diamonds of the lady of the house, and he frightened her to death, poor woman! That was all. But, ever since, people who sleep in the room don't sleep, so to speak, and keep thinking that some one is coming in by the casement. That's all; and I told you it was not an interesting story, but perhaps you will find more interest in the scientific explanation of all these things."

The story of the maiden aunt, so far as it recounted her own experience, did not contain anything to which the judicial faculties of the mind refused assent. Probably the Bachelor of Arts felt that something a good deal more unusual was wanted, for he instantly started, without being asked, on the following narrative:--

"I also was staying," said the Bachelor of Arts, "at the home of my friends, the aristocracy in Scotland. The name of the house, and the precise rank in the peerage of my illustrious host, it is not necessary for me to give. All, however, who know those more than feudal and baronial halls, are aware that the front of the castle looks forth on a somewhat narrow drive, bordered by black and funereal pines. On the night of my arrival at the castle, although I went late to bed, I did not feel at all sleepy. Something, perhaps, in the mountain air, or in the vicissitudes of baccarat, may have banished slumber. I had been in luck, and a pile of sovereigns and notes lay, in agreeable confusion, on my dressing-table. My feverish blood declined to be tranquillized, and at last I drew up the blind, threw open the latticed window, and looked out on the drive and the pine-wood. The faint and silvery blue of dawn was just wakening in the sky, and a setting moon hung, with a peculiarly ominous and wasted appearance, above the crests of the forest. But conceive my astonishment when I beheld, on the drive, and right under my window, a large and well-appointed hearse, with two white horses, with plumes complete, and attended by mutes, whose black staffs were tipped with silver that glittered pallid in the dawn.

I exhausted my ingenuity in conjectures as to the presence of this remarkable vehicle with the white horses, so unusual, though, when one thinks of it, so appropriate to the chariot of Death. Could some belated visitor have arrived in a hearse, like the lady in Miss Ferrier's novel? Could one of the domestics have expired, and was it the intention of my host to have the body thus honourably removed without casting a gloom over his guests?

Wild as these hypotheses appeared, I could think of nothing better, and was just about to leave the window, and retire to bed, when the driver of the strange carriage, who had hitherto sat motionless, turned, and looked me full in the face. Never shall I forget the appearance of this man, whose sallow countenance, close-shaven dark chin, and small, black moustache, combined with I know not what of martial in his air, struck into me a certain indefinable alarm. No sooner had he caught my eye, than he gathered up his reins, just raised his whip, and started the mortuary vehicle at a walk down the road. I followed it with my eyes till a bend in the avenue hid it from my sight. So wrapt up was my spirit in the exercise of the single sense of vision that it was not till the hearse became lost to view that I noticed the entire absence of sound which accompanied its departure. Neither had the bridles and trappings of the white horses jingled as the animals shook their heads, nor had the wheels of the hearse crashed upon the gravel of the avenue. I was compelled by all these circumstances to believe that what I had looked upon was not of this world, and, with a beating heart, I sought refuge in sleep.

"Next morning, feeling far from refreshed, I arrived among the latest at a breakfast which was a desultory and movable feast. Almost all the men had gone forth to hill, forest, or river, in pursuit of the furred, finned, or feathered denizens of the wilds--"

"You speak," interrupted the schoolboy, "like a printed book! I like to hear you speak like that. Drive on, old man! Drive on your hearse!"

The Bachelor of Arts "drove on," without noticing this interruption. "I tried to 'lead up' to the hearse," he said, "in conversation with the young ladies of the castle. I endeavoured to assume the languid and preoccupied air of the guest who, in ghost-stories, has had a bad night with the family spectre. I drew the conversation to the topic of apparitions, and even to warnings of death. I knew that every family worthy of the name has its omen: the Oxenhams a white bird, another house a brass band, whose airy music is poured forth by invisible performers, and so on. Of course I expected some one to cry, 'Oh, _we've_ got a hearse with white horses,' for that is the kind of heirloom an ancient house regards with complacent pride. But nobody offered any remarks on the local omen, and even when I drew near the topic of _hearses_, one of the girls, my cousin, merely quoted, 'Speak not like a death's-head, good Doll' (my name is Adolphus), and asked me to play at lawn-tennis.

In the evening, in the smoking-room, it was no better, nobody had ever heard of an omen in this particular castle. Nay, when I told my story, for it came to that at last, they only laughed at me, and said I must have dreamed it. Of course I expected to be wakened in the night by some awful apparition, but nothing disturbed me. I never slept better, and hearses were the last things I thought of during the remainder of my visit. Months passed, and I had almost forgotten the vision, or dream, for I began to feel apprehensive that, after all, it _was_ a dream. So costly and elaborate an apparition as a hearse with white horses and plumes complete, could never have been got up, regardless of expense, for one occasion only, and to frighten one undergraduate, yet it was certain that the hearse was not 'the old family coach.' My entertainers had undeniably never heard of it in their lives before. Even tradition at the castle said nothing of a spectral hearse, though the house was credited with a white lady deprived of her hands, and a luminous boy.

Here the Bachelor of Arts paused, and a shower of chaff began.

"Is that really all?" asked the Girton girl.

"Why, this is the third ghost-story to-night without any ghost in it!"

"I don't remember saying that it _was_ a ghost-story," replied the Bachelor of Arts; "but I thought a little anecdote of a mere 'warning' might not be unwelcome."

"But where does the warning come in?" asked the schoolboy.

"That's just what I was arriving at," replied the narrator, "when I was interrupted with as little ceremony as if I had been Mr. Gladstone in the middle of a most important speech. I was going to say that, in the Easter Vacation after my visit to the castle, I went over to Paris with a friend, a fellow of my college. We drove to the Hotel d'Alsace (I believe there is no hotel of that name; if there is, I beg the spirited proprietor's pardon, and assure him that nothing personal is intended). We marched upstairs with our bags and baggage, and jolly high stairs they were. When we had removed the soil of travel from our persons, my friend called out to me, 'I say, Jones, why shouldn't we go down by the lift.' {256} 'All right,' said I, and my friend walked to the door of the mechanical apparatus, opened it, and got in. I followed him, when the porter whose business it is to 'personally conduct' the inmates of the hotel, entered also, and was closing the door.

"His eyes met mine, and I knew him in a moment. I had seen him once before. His sallow face, black, closely shaven chin, furtive glance, and military bearing, were the face and the glance and bearing of the driver of that awful hearse!

"In a moment--more swiftly than I can tell you--I pushed past the man, threw open the door, and just managed, by a violent effort, to drag my friend on to the landing. Then the lift rose with a sudden impulse, fell again, and rushed, with frightful velocity, to the basement of the hotel, whence we heard an appalling crash, followed by groans. We rushed downstairs, and the horrible spectacle of destruction that met our eyes I shall never forget. The unhappy porter was expiring in agony; but the warning had saved my life and my friend's."

"_I was that friend_," said I--the collector of these anecdotes; "and so far I can testify to the truth of Jones's story."

At this moment, however, the gong for dressing sounded, and we went to our several apartments, after this emotional specimen of "Evenings at Home."

IN CASTLE PERILOUS.

"What we suffer from most," said the spectre, when I had partly recovered from my fright, "is a kind of aphasia."

The spectre was sitting on the armchair beside my bed in the haunted room of Castle Perilous.

"I don't know," said I, as distinctly as the chattering of my teeth would permit, "that I quite follow you. Would you mind--excuse me--handing me that flask which lies on the table near you. . . . Thanks."

The spectre, without stirring, so arranged the a priori sensuous schemata of time and space {261} that the silver flask, which had been well out of my reach, was in my hand. I poured half the contents into a cup and offered it to him.

"No spirits," he said curtly.

I swallowed eagerly the heady liquor, and felt a little more like myself.

"You were complaining," I remarked, "of something like aphasia?"

"I was," he replied. "You know what aphasia is in the human subject? A paralysis of certain nervous centres, which prevents the patient, though perfectly sane, from getting at the words which he intends to use, and forces others upon him. He may wish to observe that it is a fine morning, and may discover that his idea has taken the form of an observation about the Roman Calendar under the Emperor Justinian. That is aphasia, and we suffer from what, I presume, is a spiritual modification of that disorder."

"Yet to-night," I responded, "you are speaking like a printed book."

"To-night," said the spectre, acknowledging the compliment with a bow, "the conditions are peculiarly favourable."

"Not to _me_," I thought, with a sigh.

"And I am able to manifest myself with unusual clearness."

"Then you are not always in such form as I am privileged to find you in?" I inquired.

"By no means," replied the spectre. "Sometimes I cannot appear worth a cent. Often I am invisible to the naked eye, and even quite indiscernible by any of the senses. Sometimes I can only rap on the table, or send a cold wind over a visitor's face, or at most pull off his bedclothes (like the spirit which appeared to Caligula, and is mentioned by Suetonius) and utter hollow groans."

"That's exactly what you _did_," I said, "when you wakened me. I thought I should have died."

"I can't say how distressed I am," answered the spectre. "It is just an instance of what I was trying to explain. We don't know how we are going to manifest ourselves."

"Don't apologize," I replied, "for a constitutional peculiarity. To what do you attribute your success to night?"

"Partly to your extremely receptive condition, partly to the whisky you took in the smoking-room, but chiefly to the magnetic environment."

"Then you do not suffer at all from aphasia just now?"

"Not a touch of it at this moment, thank you; but, as a rule, we all _do_ suffer horribly. This accounts for everything that you embodied spirits find remarkable and enigmatic in our conduct. We _mean_ something, straight enough; but our failure is in expression. Just think how often you go wrong yourselves, though _your_ spirits have a brain to play on, like the musician with a piano. Now _we_ have to do as well as we can without any such mechanical advantage as a brain of cellular tissue"--here he suddenly took the form of a white lady with a black sack over her head, and disappeared in the wainscot.

"Excuse me," he said a moment afterwards, quite in his ordinary voice, "I had a touch of it, I fancy. I lost the thread of my argument, and am dimly conscious of having expressed myself in some unusual and more or less incoherent fashion. I hope it was nothing at all vulgar or distressing?"

"Nothing out of the way in haunted houses, I assure you," I replied, "merely a white lady with a black sack over her head."

"Oh, _that_ was it," he answered with a sigh; "I often am afflicted in that way. Don't mind me if I turn into a luminous boy, or a very old man in chains, or a lady in a green gown and high-heeled shoes, or a headless horseman, or a Mauth hound, or anything of that sort. They are all quite imperfect expressions of our nature,--symptoms, in short, of the malady I mentioned."

"Then the appalling manifestations to which you allude are not the apparitions of the essential ghost? It is not in those forms that he appears among his friends?"

"Certainly not," said the spectre; "and it would be very promotive of good feeling between men and disembodied spirits if this were more generally known. I myself--"

Here he was interrupted by an attack of spirit rappings. A brisk series of sharp faint taps, of a kind I never heard before, resounded from all the furniture of the room. {265} While the disturbance continued, the spectre drummed nervously with his fingers on his knee. The sounds ended as suddenly as they had begun, and he expressed his regrets. "It is a thing I am subject to," he remarked; "nervous, I believe, but, to persons unaccustomed to it, alarming."

"It _is_ rather alarming," I admitted.

"A mere fit of sneezing," he went on; "but you are now able to judge, from the events of to-night, how extremely hard it is for us, with the best intentions, to communicate coherently with the embodied world. Why, there is the Puddifant ghost--in Lord Puddifant's family, you know: _he_ has been trying for generations to inform his descendants that the drainage of the castle is execrable. Yet he can never come nearer what he means than taking the form of a shadowy hearse-and-four, and driving round and round Castle Puddifant at midnight. And old Lady Wadham's ghost, what a sufferer that woman is! She merely desires to remark that the family diamonds, lost many years ago, were never really taken abroad by the valet and sold. He only had time to conceal them in a secret drawer behind the dining-room chimney-piece. Now she can get no nearer expressing herself than producing a spirited imitation of the music of the bagpipes, which wails up and down the house, and frightens the present Sir Robert Wadham and his people nearly out of their wits. And that's the way with almost all of us: there is literally no connection (as a rule) between our expressions and the things we intend to express. You know how the Psychical Society make quite a study of rappings, and try to interpret them by the alphabet? Well, these, as I told you, are merely a nervous symptom; annoying, no doubt, but not dangerous. The only spectres, almost, that manage to hint what they really mean are Banshees."

"_They_ intend to herald an approaching death?" I asked.

"They do, and abominably bad taste I call it, unless a man has neglected to insure his life, and _then_ I doubt if a person of honour could make use of information from--from that quarter. Banshees are chiefly the spectres of attached and anxious old family nurses, women of the lower orders, and completely destitute of tact. I call a Banshee rather a curse than a boon and a blessing to men. Like most old family servants, they are apt to be presuming."

It occurred to me that the complacent spectre himself was not an unmixed delight to the inhabitants of Castle Perilous, or at least to their guests, for they never lay in the Green Chamber themselves.

"Can nothing be done," I asked sympathetically, "to alleviate the disorders which you say are so common and distressing?"

"The old system of spiritual physic," replied the spectre, "is obsolete, and the holy-water cure, in particular, has almost ceased to number any advocates, except the Rev. Dr F. G. Lee, whose books," said this candid apparition, "appear to me to indicate superstitious credulity. No, I don't know that any new discoveries have been made in this branch of therapeutics. In the last generation they tried to bolt me with a bishop: like putting a ferret into a rabbit-warren, you know. Nothing came of _that_, and lately the Psychical Society attempted to ascertain my weight by an ingenious mechanism. But they prescribed nothing, and made me feel so nervous that I was rapping at large, and knocking furniture about for months. The fact is that nobody understands the complaint, nor can detect the cause that makes the ghost of a man who was perfectly rational in life behave like an uneducated buffoon afterwards. The real reason, as I have tried to explain to you, is a solution of continuity between subjective thought and will on the side of the spectre, and objective expression of them--confound it--"

Here he vanished, and the sound of heavy feet was heard promenading the room, and balls of incandescent light floated about irresolutely, accompanied by the appearance of a bearded man in armour. The door (which I had locked and bolted before going to bed) kept opening and shutting rapidly, so as to cause a draught, and my dog fled under the bed with a long low howl.

"I do hope," remarked the spectre, presently reappearing, "that these interruptions (only fresh illustrations of our malady) have not frightened your dog into a fit. I have known very valuable and attached dogs expire of mere unreasoning terror on similar unfortunate occasions."

"I'm sure I don't wonder at it," I replied; "but I believe Bingo is still alive; in fact, I hear him scratching himself."

"Would you like to examine him?" asked the spectre.

"Oh, thanks, I am sure he is all right," I answered (for nothing in the world would have induced me to get out of bed while he was in the room). "Do you object to a cigarette?"

"Not at all, not at all; but Lady Perilous, I assure you, is a very old fashioned chatelaine. However, if _you_ choose to risk it--"

I found my cigarette-case in my hand, opened it, and selected one of its contents, which I placed between my lips. As I was looking round for a match-box, the spectre courteously put his forefinger to the end of the cigarette, which lighted at once.

"Perhaps you wonder," he remarked, "why I remain at Castle Perilous, the very one of all my places which I never could bear while I was alive--as you call it?"

"I had a delicacy about asking," I answered.

"Well," he continued, "I am the family genius."

"I might have guessed _that_," I said.

He bowed and went on. "It is hereditary in our house, and I hold the position of genius till I am relieved. For example, when the family want to dig up the buried treasure under the old bridge, I thunder and lighten and cause such a storm that they desist."

"Why on earth do you do _that_?" I asked. "It seems hardly worth while to have a genius at all."

"In the interests of the family morality. The money would soon go on the turf, and on dice, drink, etc., if they excavated it; and then I work the curse, and bring off the prophecies, and so forth."

"What prophecies?"

"Oh, the rigmarole the old family seer came out with before they burned him for an unpalatable prediction at the time of the '15. He was very much vexed about it, of course, and he just prophesied any nonsense of a disagreeable nature that came into his head. You know what these crofter fellows are--ungrateful, vindictive rascals. He had been in receipt of outdoor relief for years. Well, he prophesied stuff like this: 'When the owl and the eagle meet on the same blasted rowan tree, then a lassie in a white hood from the east shall make the burn of Cross-cleugh run full red,' and drivel of that insane kind. Well, you can't think what trouble that particular prophecy gave me. It had to be fulfilled, of course, for the family credit, and I brought it off as near as, I flatter myself, it could be done."

"Lady Perilous was telling me about it last night," I said, with a shudder. "It was a horrible affair,"

"Yes, no doubt, no doubt; a cruel business! But how I am to manage some of them I'm sure _I_ don't know. There's one of them in rhyme. Let me see, how does it go?

"'When Mackenzie lies in the perilous ha',
The wild Red Cock on the roof shall craw,
And the lady shall flee ere the day shall daw,
And the land shall girn in the deed man's thraw.'

"The 'crowing of the wild Red Cock' means that the castle shall be burned down, of course (I'm beginning to know his style by this time), and the lady is to elope, and the laird--that's Lord Perilous--is to expire in the 'deed man's thraw': that is the name the old people give the Secret Room. And all this is to happen when a Mackenzie, a member of a clan with which we are at feud, sleeps in the Haunted Chamber--where we are just now. By the way, what is _your_ name?"

I don't know what made me reply, "Allan Mackenzie." It was true, but it was not politic.

"By Jove!" said the spectre, eagerly. "Here's a chance! I don't suppose a Mackenzie has slept here for those hundred years. And now, how is it to be done? Setting fire to the castle is simple"--here I remembered how he had lighted my cigarette--"but who on earth is to elope with Lady Perilous? She's fifty if she's a day, and evangelical a tout casser! Oh no; the thing is out of the question. It really must be put off for another generation or two. There is no hurry."

I felt a good deal relieved. He was clearly a being of extraordinary powers, and might, for anything I knew, have made _me_ run away with Lady Perilous. And then, when the pangs of remorse began to tell on her ladyship, never a very lively woman at the best of times--However, the spectre seemed to have thought better of it.

"Don't you think it is rather hard on a family," I asked, "to have a family genius, and prophecies, and a curse, and--"

"And everything handsome about them," he interrupted me by exclaiming; "and you call yourself a Mackenzie of Megasky! What has become of family pride? Why, you yourselves have Gruagach of the Red Hand in the hall, and he, I can tell you, is a very different sort of spectre from _me_. Pre-Christian, you know--one of the oldest ghosts in Ross-shire. But as to 'hard on a family,' why, noblesse oblige."

"Considering that you are the family genius, you don't seem to have brought them much luck," I put in, for the house of Perilous is neither rich in gold nor very distinguished in history.

"Yes, but just think what they would have been without a family genius, if they are what they are with one! Besides, the prophecies are really responsible," he added, with the air of one who says, "I have a partner--Mr. Jorkins."

"Do you mind telling me one thing?" I asked eagerly. "What is the mystery of the Secret Chamber--I mean the room whither the heir is taken when he comes of age, and he never smiles again, nor touches a card except at baccarat?"

"Never smiles _again_!" said the spectre. "Doesn't he? Are you quite certain that he ever smiled _before_?"

This was a new way of looking at the question, and rather disconcerted me.

"I did not know the Master of Perilous before he came of age," said I; "but I have been here for a week, and watched him and Lord Perilous, and I never observed a smile wander over their lips. And yet little Tompkins" (he was the chief social buffoon of the hour) "has been in great force, and I may say that I myself have occasionally provoked a grin from the good-natured."

"That's just it," said the spectre. "The Perilouses have no sense of humour--never had. I am entirely destitute of it myself. Even in Scotland, even _here_, this family failing has been remarked--been the subject, I may say, of unfavourable comment. The Perilous of the period lost his head because he did not see the point of a conundrum of Macbeth's. We felt, some time in the fifteenth century, that this peculiarity needed to be honourably accounted for, and the family developed that story of the Secret Chamber, and the Horror in the house. There is nothing in the chamber whatever,--neither a family idiot aged three hundred years, nor a skeleton, nor the devil, nor a wizard, nor missing title-deeds. The affair is a mere formality to account creditably for the fact that we never see anything to laugh at--never see the joke. Some people can't see ghosts, you know" (lucky people! thought I), "and some can't see jokes."

"This is very disappointing," I said.

"I can't help it," said the spectre; "the truth often is. Did you ever hear the explanation of the haunted house in Berkeley Square?"

"Yes," said I. "The bell was heard to ring thrice with terrific vehemence, and on rushing to the fatal scene they found him beautiful in death."

"Fudge!" replied the spectre. "The lease and furniture were left to an old lady, who was not to underlet the house nor sell the things. She had a house of her own in Albemarle Street which she preferred, and so the house in Berkeley Square was never let till the lease expired. That's the whole affair. The house was empty, and political economists could conceive no reason for the waste of rent except that it was haunted. The rest was all Miss Broughton's imagination, in 'Tales for Christmas Eve.'"

He had evidently got on his hobby, and was beginning to be rather tedious. The contempt which a genuine old family ghost has for mere parvenus and impostors is not to be expressed in mere words apparently, for Mauth-hounds of prodigious size and blackness, with white birds, and other disastrous omens, now began to display themselves profusely in the Haunted Chamber. Accustomed as I had become to regard all these appearances as mere automatic symptoms, I confess that I heard with pleasure the crow of a distant cock.

"You have enabled me to pass a most instructive evening, most agreeable, too, I am sure," I remarked to the spectre, "but you will pardon me for observing that the first cock has gone. Don't let me make you too late for any appointment you may have about this time--anywhere."

"Oh, you still believe in that old superstition about cock-crow, do you?" he sneered. "'I thought you had been too well educated. 'It faded on the crowing of the cock,' did it, indeed, and that in Denmark too,--almost within the Arctic Circle! Why, in those high latitudes, and in summer, a ghost would not have an hour to himself on these principles. Don't you remember the cock Lord Dufferin took North with him, which crowed at sunrise, and ended by crowing without intermission and going mad, when the sun did not set at all? You must observe that any rule of that sort about cock-crow would lead to shocking irregularities, and to an early- closing movement for spectres in summer, which would be ruinous to business--simply ruinous--and, in these days of competition, intolerable."

This was awful, for I could see no way of getting rid of him. He might stay to breakfast, or anything.

"By the way," he asked, "who does the Cock at the Lyceum just now? It is a small but very exacting part--'Act I. scene I. Cock crows.'"

"I believe Mr. Irving has engaged a real fowl, to crow at the right moment behind the scenes," I said. "He is always very particular about these details. Quite right too. 'The Cock, by kind permission of the Aylesbury Dairy Company,' is on the bills. They have no Cock at the Francais; Mounet Sully would not hear of it."

I knew nothing about it, but if this detestable spectre was going to launch out concerning art and the drama there would be no sleep for me.

"Then the glow-worm," he said--"have they a real glow-worm for the Ghost's 'business' (Act I. scene 5) when he says?--

"'Fare thee well at once,
The glow-worm shows the matin to be near,
And 'gins to pale his ineffectual fire.'

Did it ever strike you how inconsistent that is? Clearly the ghost appeared in winter; don't you remember how they keep complaining of the weather?

"'For this relief much thanks; 'tis bitter cold,'

and

"'The air bites shrewdly: it is very cold.'"

"Horatio blows on his hands to warm them, at the Francais," I interrupted.

"Quite right; good business," said he; "and yet they go on about the glow- worms in the neighbourhood! Most incongruous. How does Furnivall take it? An interpolation by Middleton?"

I don't like to be rude, but I admit that I hate being bothered about Shakespeare, and I yawned.

"Good night," he said snappishly, and was gone.

Presently I heard him again, just as I was dropping into a doze.

"You won't think, in the morning, that this was all a dream, will you? Can I do anything to impress it on your memory? Suppose I shrivel your left wrist with a touch of my hand? Or shall I leave 'a sable score of fingers four' burned on the table? Something of that sort is usually done."

"Oh, _pray_ don't take the trouble," I said. "I'm sure Lady Perilous would not like to have the table injured, and she might not altogether believe my explanation. As for myself, I'll be content with your word for it that you were really here. Can I bury your bones for you, or anything? Very well, as you _must_ be off, good night!"

"No, thanks," he replied. "By the way, I've had an idea about my apparitions in disguise. Perhaps it is my 'Unconscious Self' that does them. You have read about the 'Unconscious Self' in the Spectator?"

Then he really went.

A nun in grey, who moaned and wrung her hands, remained in the room for a short time, but was obviously quite automatic.

I slept till the hot water was brought in the morning.

THE GREAT GLADSTONE MYTH. {283}

In the post-Christian myths of the Teutonic race settled in England, no figure appears more frequently and more mysteriously than that of Gladstone or Mista Gladstone. To unravel the true germinal conception of Gladstone, and to assign to all the later accretions of myth their provenance and epoch, are the problems attempted in this chapter. It is almost needless (when we consider the perversity of men and the lasting nature of prejudice) to remark that some still see in Gladstone a shadowy historical figure. Just as our glorious mythical Bismarck has been falsely interpreted as the shadowy traditional Arminius (the Arminius of Tacitus, not of Leo Adolescens), projected on the mists of the Brocken, so Gladstone has been recognized as a human hero of the Fourth Dynasty. In this capacity he has been identified with Gordon (probably the north wind), with Spurgeon, {284} whom I have elsewhere shown to be a river god, and with Livingstone. In the last case the identity of the suffix "stone," and the resemblance of the ideas of "joy" and of "vitality," lend some air of speciousness to a fundamental error. Livingstone is ohne zweifel, a mythical form of the midnight sun, now fabled to wander in the "Dark Continent," as Bishop of Natal, the land of the sun's birthplace, now alluded to as lost in the cloud-land of comparative mythology. Of all these cobwebs spun by the spiders of sciolism, the Euhemeristic or Spencerian view--that Gladstone is an historical personage--has attracted most attention. Unluckily for its advocates, the whole contemporary documents of the Victorian Dynasty have perished. When an over-educated and over-rated populace, headed by two mythical figures, Wat Tyler and one Jo, {285a} rose in fury against the School Boards and the Department, they left nothing but tattered fragments of the literature of the time. Consequently we are forced to reconstruct the Gladstonian myth by the comparative method--that is, by comparing the relics of old Ritual treatises, hymns, imprecations, and similar religious texts, with works of art, altars, and statues, and with popular traditions and folklore. The results, again, are examined in the light of the Vedas, the Egyptian monuments, and generally of everything that, to the unscientific eye, seems most turbidly obscure in itself, and most hopelessly remote from the subject in hand. The aid of Philology will not be rejected because Longus, or Longinus, has {285b} meanly argued that her services must be accepted with cautious diffidence. On the contrary, Philology is the only real key to the labyrinths of post-Christian myth.

The philological analysis of the name of Gladstone is attempted, with very various results, by Roth, Kuhn, Schwartz, and other contemporary descendants of the old scholars. Roth finds in "Glad" the Scotch word "gled," a hawk or falcon. He then adduces the examples of the Hawk-Indra, from the Rig Veda, and of the Hawk-headed Osiris, both of them indubitably personifications of the sun. On the other hand, Kuhn, with Schwartz, fixes his attention on the suffix "stone," and quotes, from a fragment attributed to Shakespeare, "the all-dreaded thunder-stone." Schwartz and Kuhn conclude, in harmony with their general system, that Gladstone is really and primarily the thunderbolt, and secondarily the spirit of the tempest. They quote an isolated line from an early lay about the "Pilot who weathered the storm," which they apply to Gladstone in his human or political aspect, when the storm-spirit had been anthropomorphised, and was regarded as an ancestral politician. But such scanty folklore as we possess assures us that the storm, on the other hand, weathered Gladstone; and that the poem quoted refers to quite another person, also named William, and probably identical with William Tell--that is, with the sun, which of course brings us back to Roth's view of the hawk, or solar Gladstone, though this argument in his own favour has been neglected by the learned mythologist. He might also, if he cared, adduce the solar stone of Delphi, fabled to have been swallowed by Cronus. Kuhn, indeed, lends an involuntary assent to this conclusion (Ueber Entwick. der Myth.) when he asserts that the stone swallowed by Cronus was the setting sun. Thus we have only to combine our information to see how correct is the view of Roth, and how much to be preferred to that of Schwartz and Kuhn. Gladstone, philologically considered, is the "hawkstone," combining with the attributes of the Hawk-Indra and Hawk-Osiris those of the Delphian sun-stone, which we also find in the Egyptian Ritual for the Dead. {287} The ludicrous theory that Gladstone is a territorial surname, derived from some place ("Gledstane" Falkenstein), can only be broached by men ignorant of even the grammar of science; dabblers who mark with a pencil the pages of travellers and missionaries. We conclude, then, that Gladstone is, primarily, the hawk-sun, or sun-hawk.

From philology we turn to the examination of literary fragments, which will necessarily establish our already secured position (that Gladstone is the sun), or so much the worse for the fragments. These have reached us in the shape of burned and torn scraps of paper, covered with printed texts, which resolve themselves into hymns, and imprecations or curses. It appears to have been the custom of the worshippers of Gladstone to salute his rising, at each dawn, with printed outcries of adoration and delight, resembling in character the Osirian hymns. These are sometimes couched in rhythmical language, as when we read--

"[Gla] dstone, the pillar of the People's hopes,"--

to be compared with a very old text, referring obscurely to "the People's William," and "a popular Bill," doubtless one and the same thing, as has often been remarked. Among the epithets of Gladstone which occur in the hymns, we find "versatile," "accomplished," "philanthropic," "patriotic," "statesmanlike," "subtle," "eloquent," "illustrious," "persuasive," "brilliant," "clear," "unambiguous," "resolute." All of those are obviously intelligible only when applied to the sun. At the same time we note a fragmentary curse of the greatest importance, in which Gladstone is declared to be the beloved object of "the Divine Figure from the North," or "the Great White Czar." This puzzled the learned, till a fragment of a mythological disquisition was recently unearthed. In this text it was stated, on the authority of Brinton, that "the Great White Hare" worshipped by the Red Indians was really, when correctly understood, the Dawn. It is needless to observe (when one is addressing students) that "Great White Hare" (in Algonkin, Manibozho) becomes Great White Czar in Victorian English. Thus the Divine Figure from the North, or White Czar, with whom Gladstone is mythically associated, turns out to be the Great White Hare, or Dawn Hero, of the Algonkins. The sun (Gladstone) may naturally and reasonably be spoken of in mythical language as the "Friend of the Dawn." This proverbial expression came to be misunderstood, and we hear of a Liberal statesman, Gladstone, and of his affection for a Russian despot. The case is analogous to Apollo's fabled love for Daphne = Dahana, the Dawn. While fragments of laudatory hymns are common enough, it must not be forgotten that dirges or curses (Dirae) are also discovered in the excavations. These Dirae were put forth both morning and evening, and it is interesting to note that the imprecations vented at sunset ("evening papers," in the old mythical language) are even more severe and unsparing than those uttered ("morning papers") at dawn.

How are the imprecations to be explained? The explanation is not difficult, nothing _is_ difficult--to a comparative mythologist. Gladstone is the sun, the enemy of Darkness. But Darkness has her worshippers as well as Light. Set, no less than Osiris, was adored in the hymns of Egypt, perhaps by kings of an invading Semitic tribe. Now there can be no doubt that the enemies of Gladstone, the Rishis, or hymn- writers who execrated him, were regarded by his worshippers as a darkened class, foes of enlightenment. They are spoken of as "the stupid party," as "obscurantist," and so forth, with the usual amenity of theological controversy. It would be painful, and is unnecessary, to quote from the curses, whether matins or vespers, of the children of night. Their language is terribly severe, and, doubtless, was regarded as blasphemy by the sun-worshippers. Gladstone is said to have "no conscience," "no sense of honour," to be so fugitive and evasive in character, that one might almost think the moon, rather than the sun, was the topic under discussion. But, as Roth points out, this is easily explained when we remember the vicissitudes of English weather, and the infrequent appearances of the sun in that climate. By the curses, uttered as they were in the morning, when night has yielded to the star of day, and at evening, when day is, in turn, vanquished by night, our theory of the sun Gladstone is confirmed beyond reach of cavil; indeed, the solar theory is no longer a theory, but a generally recognized fact.

Evidence, which is bound to be confirmatory, reaches us from an altar and from works of art. The one altar of Gladstone is by some explained as the pedestal of his statue, while the anthropological sciolists regard it simply as a milestone! In speaking to archaeologists it is hardly necessary even to touch on this preposterous fallacy, sufficiently confuted by the monument itself.