GREENFIELD MANOR was a very old house about ten miles out of Oxford. It lay in a secluded spot, but the road to London ran past the high walls of its park. A heavy growth of trees surrounded the house itself, which was in a state of neglect and disrepair.
A gloomy and forbidding place enough. The very atmosphere which invested this mass of decaying stonework seemed to invite ghosts to walk. Its chimneys rocked continually; its windows rattled. When the vane over the decrepit stables swung in the wind of the summer night, it was as if some lost soul was seeking to escape out of Hades.
As a fact, the house was certainly inhabited by a lost soul. Simon Heriot, its master, lay in the belief that he had done his nephew to death by a subtle, mean and cruel device. And no worthier purpose than greed had been in his heart. It had been his life-long passion to hold the fair manor and the broad lands in the west country, which generations of his name had held before him. These, however, had descended to the son of his elder brother. And the knowledge that there was only one life intervening between him and his great ambition, in the end, became too much for him.
The means to do ill deeds oft makes ill deeds done. It was by chance that the design was unfolded to Simon Heriot of swearing away his nephew’s life. But when occasion came to him he did not resist the call. The pent-up forces of his covetous envy rose up and slew him.
If ever a man might be said to have sold himself to the devil, that man was Simon Heriot. He had a cunning and subtle mind; moreover, he was very well acquainted with the world in which he lived. He was clever enough to make the entail of his nephew’s estates the price of his testimony. And, indeed, it was no uncommon thing in that day to reward those who brought and proved charges of high treason with the property of the people they had hounded to the scaffold. The times were very perilous for all men. The life of no man was safe. Black hatred and superstitious fear of the Pope, and his emissaries were rife throughout the land. In such circumstances, it was easy for a cunning and unscrupulous man to remove a rival from his path by some form of legal process. The character of the evidence was seldom tested. It was enough if it served the purpose it had in view. Gervase Heriot was not the first by many who had been done to death under the ready sanctions of the law.
Howbeit, Simon Heriot, with all his knowledge of men and of the world, was without knowledge of the power of God. As soon as the news was brought to him that his nephew was condemned to the block, a singular change came over his life. The success of his design gave him not a crumb of satisfaction; indeed he took a morbid, an overmastering distaste for the society of his fellows. He shut himself up in his gloomy manor house with his old and stupid servants. He shunned the light of day. His one desire was to avert his face from all men and from the sight of Heaven.
A brooding lethargy fixed itself upon his soul. A kind of slow horror stole into his brain. He could not settle his mind to anything. Asleep or awake, he knew no peace. He would have undone his deed could he have found the courage that such an act demanded.
This night was as many others. After a solitary meal in a large, dim, comfortless room, Simon Heriot sat long at the table, staring straight before him at the huge open fireplace, whose emptiness was like a yawning chasm. At his elbow had been set a large flagon of wine, of which he drank continually.
There was not a sound in the old house, save that made by an occasional mouse behind the paneling. The servants had gone to bed; it was near eleven o’clock of a perfectly still and moonless summer’s evening; and Simon Heriot was alone with his thoughts.
Wine, it is true, did a little to soften their sting. But when the hand of God has been laid upon a man, it is not amenable to human resources. Behind that dull lethargy of spirit was a never-ceasing pressure. Strange phantoms had begun to lurk on the edge of the outer darkness, away beyond the flickering half-light of the candles on the table.
At last, in sheer fatigue, the unhappy man began to doze. Worn out in mind and body, he fell presently into a troubled sleep. But his unquietness of spirit would not let him rest. He awoke with a start. There was a sense of a continual presence, unseen but all-pervading, in the room.
He strained his eyes beyond the circle of light made by the candles set on the table at which he sat. But away in the ghostly outer darkness of the large room, he could discern no visible shape. He strove to fix some faint and remote sound that thrilled in his ears. But, after all, it was only the little sound of the summer wind stirring in the trees.
Again the jaded brain tried to pierce together the slender core of will that might disperse these phantoms and perhaps enable it to sleep. But it was not to be. Each night as he sat there, besieged by this horror that had entered his soul, the will grew more inert. There was a faint voice within that had begun to whisper to him that he would never sleep again.
Yes, it was true. He would never sleep again. He was tormented by unseen phantoms. Never again would he know peace in this life and perhaps never in the life to come.
Once again he strained his ears to listen. It was only the little voice of the summer wind in the wide chimney-place. All was silence save for that. Yet there was an abiding sense of an unseen, all-pervading presence in the room. And then, quite suddenly, without warning of any kind, a thing happened that made the very soul of Simon Heriot recoil.
He was sitting at the table, his head resting on his hand. His back was to the wide chimney-place, but as he sat his body was half turned towards it. On his right hand was a long, low casement. It was curtainless, but was covered on the outside by a wooden shutter. On his left hand, at the opposite end of the room, was another casement precisely similar except that it was smaller.
All at once, without warning and without any apparent cause, the shutters of the right-hand casement were flung to the ground. Simon Heriot turned his head with a startled cry. His wild eyes stared out into the night. At first, he could see nothing but the cavernous darkness. Yet as he was still gazing, a light was flashed suddenly across the window, and then he saw that a white, ghostly face was pressed against the pane and was looking into the room.
The apparition was so real, so vivid, that Simon Heriot rose half swooning with terror and walked across to the window.
“Who are you?” he gasped.
He had no need to ask. It was the face of the young man, his nephew, whom, as he believed, he had done to death.
“Who are you?” shrieked the wretched man.
He stumbled forward to the window. But when he came there all was dark again. The light was gone, and the face of his nephew had vanished.
Like a lost soul, trembling upon the verge of unreason, he stood at the window gazing far out into the void. But there was only the darkness of the night and the little voice of the summer wind. Yet if he was not in a dream, or if he was not yet bereft of his wits, the shutters were indubitably prone on the ground.
After a moment, the unhappy man turned away from the window, unable longer to endure that cavern of darkness which confronted him. Yet, hardly had he done so, when the shutters which covered the window at the other end of the long room were flung to the ground with a violent crash.
Simon Heriot screamed with terror. There again was the flash of the light. There again was the face of his nephew pressed against the window. Like one possessed, the unhappy man stumbled across the room to this other window. But by the time he had reached it, the light and the face were gone.
There was nothing but the night. All was silence. And there was nought to be seen out in the darkness. He uttered another wild scream of terror.
Shuddering in every vein, he withdrew his eyes from the window. As he sought the table for support, he almost fell. And then as he reached it, his heart seemed to stop beating. For a voice deep and terrible filled the room, echoing and re-echoing in it, making its spacious gloom resound.
“Simon Heriot!”
He heard his name.
“Simon Heriot!”
The voice of the unseen re-echoed high in the wide chimney-place. The heart of the unhappy wretch was already dead within him.
“Simon Heriot has murdered sleep!”
In a frenzy that seemed to tear his soul in pieces, he pressed his hands to his ears that they might be closed against the sound. But it was in vain. No human agency had the power to shut out those terrible words, or the awful voice that gave them utterance.
“Simon Heriot, if ever you would sleep again, attend that which is said to you.”
With the shred of will that remained to him, the guilty man strung all his faculties in order to heed the words that were spoken.
“Do you attend, Simon Heriot.” The voice was low, deep and terrible. “Do you take a candle and sit at yonder table, upon which materials for writing are set, and do you write as you are now directed.”
It was true that quill, inkhorn and foolscap were laid out on a small table at the other end of the room. At the beck of that which he was powerless to disobey, the unhappy man tottered very slowly towards the table. After a moment of indecision, he sat down and took up the quill. He was as one in a dream, except that his head seemed to be bursting.
“Simon Heriot, write as you are directed.”
The terrible voice had now grown so loud and so compelling, that it seemed to tear his brain asunder. When he took up the pen, his trembling fingers could hardly hold it.
Very slowly and very clearly, the voice then uttered the following:
“I, Simon Heriot, in the presence of Almighty God and with the shadow of death upon me, hereby solemnly declare, that I have caused to be borne to our Sovereign Lady the Queen, false testimony in the matter of my nephew, Gervase Heriot. I further declare that I suborned three men, Robert Grisewood, John Nixon and Gregory Bannister by name, to bear false testimony touching the complicity of the said Gervase Heriot in the Round House Plot, by reason of which alleged complicity the said Gervase Heriot has been condemned to death. In the presence of Almighty God, and as I shortly hope for eternal rest, I do hereby most solemnly avow what I have written to be the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Given under my hand this second day of July, 1599—Simon Heriot.”
Under the goad of terror, the guilty man gathered every fragment of his crumbling will in order that he might set pen to paper. No less slowly than the grim voice pronounced the words, Simon Heriot wrote them down with a kind of automatic precision. It was as if his highly wrought state had become susceptible to a process of hypnotism.
When at last the task was finished and he had signed the document which made full confession of his crime, he was commanded to open a window and to fling out the paper into the night.
He would have had neither the strength nor the courage to do this of his own volition. But the dread voice compelled him. He rose from the writing-table, but now such was his condition that he could hardly stand. A palsy was on his limbs; he was as one who has lost all control of his mind.
“Take heed, Simon Heriot.”
He knew not whence the voice came, yet a power beyond himself compelled implicit obedience. Scarcely able to walk, he tottered toward the casement at the other end of the wide room.
He was destined never to reach it. With a dismal cry, he stopped midway. The paper fluttered out of his hand. Suddenly, he fell face down on the stone floor, a slight foam on his lips.