“HAVE you a headache, my dear? I am sure you have a headache. You are looking quite ghostly. Poor little thing! you look as if you had not slept all night.”
“Oh, it is nothing,” said Hetty. “I didn’t sleep very well, I got off my sleep somehow.”
“I know; people talk about the sleep of youth, but I can remember many nights, when I was a girl like you, when I never closed my eyes. Take your tea, my dear, and it will refresh you. I suppose as you couldn’t sleep you got to thinking, and cried for your mother like a baby, and to go home.”
“Oh, Miss Hofland!” cried Hetty.
“Yes, I know very well how girls do who have got mothers to cry after. I used to envy them, not having one. Don’t cry now, but take your breakfast and cheer up a little. Have a little of this nice toast. When you cannot have what you want, you should try to get all the good you can out of what you have,” the governess said. This philosophy of her profession was dreary, and not suited to Hetty’s tremulous and unaccustomed ease.
“Didn’t you sleep?” said Rhoda. “Oh, isn’t it awfully quiet in the night when one can’t sleep?” The child, who had thawed very much out of her first gravity, threw her arms round Hetty and kissed her; but while she gave her this embrace asked, with a nervous whisper in her ear, “Did you hear anything?—did you see anything?” with an anxious look.
“I heard the stable clock, and the hours striking from the village,” said Hetty. “Oh! don’t say anything more. It was only that I cou’dn’t sleep.”
Mrs. Mills looked keenly at her from the other side of the table. She seemed to examine the girl’s pale face with questioning eyes. She came in every morning while they were at breakfast, for orders, she said, but there were never any orders to give her. She suggested what there was to be for dinner, if the ladies pleased; and the ladies generally did please, though Miss Hofland, to show her independence, would make an alteration now and then.
“It’s cheerful to hear the clocks when one can’t sleep,” said Mrs. Mills, as if it were possible that she could have heard Rhoda’s question. “And in this quiet place there is nothing else to hear, unless one was to believe the stories of the ghosts about the place, and there’s not much sense in them.”
“I beg you won’t speak of anything of the kind before Miss Rhoda!” cried the governess, sharply. “And you, Hetty, you’re trembling, you silly child!”
“N—no, Miss Hofland,” Hetty said; but her head was racked with pain, and she scarcely knew what she said. Was it a ghost she had seen, a disembodied soul? She had not been so entirely without sleep as she thought, but had dozed and woke again, always in a fever of alarm and misery, recalling to herself the long muffled figure, the slow, soft, noiseless movements, the winding out and in of the flower beds where the yellow and brown heads of the chrysanthemums drooped in the frost. It seemed to stand before her now as Mrs. Mills stood—though very unlike Mrs. Mills—a long thin figure, wrapped from head to foot in some clinging garment.
“If I speak it is in a joke,” said Mrs. Mills; “you don’t think I believe in anything of the sort?”
“I don’t admire that kind of joking,” Miss Hofland said. “Rhoda, come, if you have finished your breakfast it is quite time to begin lessons. I think we are a little late to-day.”
Hetty followed, heavy-eyed and heavy-hearted, her mind oppressed with the secret, which was a burden almost beyond her power of supporting. Should she tell Miss Hofland? she kept asking herself. Should she ask Mrs. Mills? And oh! what was it? it was no thief watching the house, of that Hetty was sure. The fantastic movements of the figure among those flower-beds came up before her eyes a hundred times, and made her almost cry out with terror. She remembered the very poise of the figure, light, with a little swing in the step. Could that be a ghost that moved in such a human way, not gliding, not mystical, as ghosts are described as being? Her head turned round as again and again the moonlight scene rose before her. It seemed impossible to get it out of her eyes. She closed them, to rest her hot strained eyeballs, and lo, there it was before her in those wonderful contrasts of black and white, so clear, so clear! the broad stretch of wistful silvery mist and distance behind, the black solid line of the moving object, the tall flowers drooping their heads, the trees gathering like spectators on every side. The hum of the voices near her was to Hetty’s ears like a monotonous murmur without meaning. When it came to her turn to read or answer a question, she raised a white face without intelligence to the governess. “My dear, you have not been attending,” Miss Hofland cried, astonished; but this by degrees changed into, “My dear, you must be ill. Is your head bad? have you caught cold? What is the matter?” Miss Hofland was very philosophical on her own account, but to the young people under her charge she was kind, and it was understood in her code of laws that a headache was always to be respected, being in some sort a girl’s only refuge in heartache and all other ills.
“I feel dreadfully stupid,” said Hetty, not knowing how to excuse herself.
“It is your head that is bad. You will be better if you will go and lie down,” said Miss Hofland; but this was a remedy that made Hetty shiver. Lie down with her face towards the window from which she had seen that sight, or, worse still, turning her back to it, so that the figure might be performing any kind of wild gyration behind her! This made the throbbing in her head and the fluttering at her heart worse than ever.
“Oh no!” she cried, “I don’t want to lie down; let me stay here—oh! let me stay with you. It is so much nicer to be with you.”
“Then lie down on the sofa,” said the governess, “and try to go to sleep. Poor little thing! how you are trembling, your nerves are all wrong. That’s what it is to have a nuit blanche when one is young.”
“Did you hear anything, Hetty? did you see anything?” cried little Rhoda in her ear, while Miss Hofland covered her up. Hetty, in the agony of her unwonted secret, did not know how to make any reply. She had never known what it was to have a secret before. To know something which she kept to herself seemed wrong to Hetty. If there ever was any little thing unknown to mamma, such as that project for the private paying of the bills, it was breathed to Janey. Little secrets about Christmas presents and suchlike—secrets so little, so innocent—were always shared with somebody. To have this dark knowledge in her heart, and nobody to tell it to, made Hetty’s heart sick. And Rhoda’s big eyes appealing to her made everything more difficult. She had heard nothing, not a sound, which made what she had seen still more weird and unearthly. And what did the child mean, whispering as if she had a secret too?
Hetty, however, slumbered a little in the warm room, with the protecting sense of society round her, and the hum of the voices in her ears. Nothing could happen there to her that would not be known. If that thing should really appear again, at least Miss Hofland would be there to see it too. This soothed and brought the ease of rest to the feverish brain.
But when night came again, and Hetty had to go to bed by herself in that room, with the window as usual open to the sky, and the formal flower-beds with the chrysanthemums all spread out in the moonlight, and the consciousness that Miss Hofland had turned the key in her door, and shut herself off from all possibility of appeal, Hetty’s sensations of alarm were indescribable. She rushed to the window and drew the curtains close that she might not see out; then, feeling still more intolerable the thought that outside, in the whiteness of the moon, that ghastly thing might be pacing, drew them back again in a panic, and gazed out in a trance of speechless terror. But the white light fell unbroken over the garden, and the long vista of the park opened before her, a wistful vacancy stretching to the sky, without a living thing to disturb the scene. Hetty stood clinging to the curtains, half hidden in their folds, as if she were herself afraid to be seen, for a long time, she did not know how long. But there was no movement or shadow upon the undisturbed stillness, and ghostly, motionless, half-frozen calm without. She stood there till she was chilled to the heart with cold; her fire had gone out; her candles were nearly burnt to the socket, and nature began to assert her rights. The stable clock shrilling all the hours close at hand, and the village clock booming in a minute after like a bass accompaniment, were half consoling, half alarming. Twelve! how long it took to strike! and was not this the hour “when churchyards yawn and graves give up——” Hetty hung upon the curtains, half unconscious, for a minute or two; if she had not grasped them so she would have fallen, and probably fainted. But the support of the heavy, thick folds, which sustained her slight little figure, kept her from that climax. And after a time she crept to bed and slept soundly, and woke wondering at herself; trying to laugh at herself; chiding herself for all this excitement. Her night’s rest had restored her nerves. She appeared at breakfast, if still a little tremulous, yet herself again, and smiled as she met Miss Hofland’s sympathetic inquiries, and Mrs. Mills’ keen look. Why did Mrs. Mills look at her with that gaze of suspicion? and little Rhoda, with her big eyes, seizing the first opportunity to whisper, “Did you hear anything?” The look and the question raised again a little flutter in her spirits, but she felt brave in the strength of her night’s sleep, and of the passage of time, which has always a soothing effect: and began to forget.
Another night passed, and she saw nothing, and then another day. The girl felt more safe; life began to wear its usual aspect. It might be one of the servants after all; some one, perhaps, who did not venture to go into the garden during the day, and who had heard of the chrysanthemums; or it might be the gardener, stealing out to cover some of his more delicate plants. None of those common-sense explanations had occurred to Hetty at first. They came upon her now in a crowd. Of course she said to herself, How foolish not to have thought of it before! The frosts were beginning to be harder every night; what more natural than that the gardener should take every precaution against the severe weather? In the reaction from her panic, Hetty became more cheerful, more gay than ever. If suddenly her vision came before her eyes and chilled her, she flung it away, saying to herself: how silly! Why was it that she had not seen how easily the thing was to be accounted for before?
This continued for some time. She was not so courageous when she went into her room at night. There she invariably passed half an hour or so enveloped in the curtains, gazing out; but with less and less alarm, sometimes even with a little bravado, opening her window, giving herself the keen and thrilling sensations of the wintry night. And a long time passed before she had any occasion for a renewal of her alarm. It was close upon Christmas when the second incident occurred. Suddenly, in the grey of a rainy night, as she took her accustomed stand, something seemed to move outside, and brought her heart with a leap into her throat. Something moved; that was all. She could distinguish nothing; the grey of the night, the soft haze of the falling rain, filled up the landscape. The opening of the park was but a pale blotch upon the surrounding darkness. After the first moment of pain, Hetty chid herself again. Yes, she said to herself, something moved. Of that there was no doubt; the rain falling down straight through the windless air moved, of course, keeping a sensation of flow and action in the immovable atmosphere. But this did not still the beating of her heart. She pressed close to the window, holding it with her hand, peering out into the grey. To see anything was impossible through the veil of that falling rain. It went on, not violently—softly, a gentle cold stream of imperceptible drops, soaking everything, obliterating sound and sight. Who could see, had they the sharpest eyes in the world, through that mist of continuous dropping? who could hear anything, had they ears as keen as those of a savage? And yet Hetty, with her heart beating so loud that it filled all the world with commotion, both heard and saw and knew that something—she could not tell what—something living, that had a will and action of its own, was somewhere near her outside, disguised and enveloped in the soft pouring of the rain. She said to herself, the gardener, one of the servants, as she had done before; but her heart was sick with terror. She could not satisfy herself with that argument; half the night through she watched; and yet she could not say that she had seen anything. No, nothing at all, nothing at all! but she felt in every fibre, in every nerve, that someone had been there.
This time she resolved on telling Miss Hofland. It was impossible to live under the spell of this terror. She must, at least—she must—have somebody to share it; and insensibly she began to hope that perhaps Miss Hofland, being older, and having seen so much in her life, might be able to suggest some explanation, and clear the mystery up. Hetty slept little that night. Her resolution gave her a little steadiness, but it did not restore her calm; and in the dawn of the winter morning she was up before any one, unable to rest. When there was something like daylight in the grey skies, a ghost of morning just making the garden and its formal flower-beds visible, she stole again to her window; and finally, encouraged by the hour, and the consciousness that, though there was still so little light, it was day and not night that was approaching, opened it softly and stole out. The rain had ceased, but everything was sodden and wet, her foot sinking into the spongy grass, which came close up to the window ledge. There was nothing there that could conceal any lurking figure. If there had been anything, any clandestine visitor, whoever it was must have crouched by the wall, close, close to where she stood within. Hetty thought she saw some of the moss upon the wall scraped away as by some one rubbing against it; and her heart sprang up once more with the flutter of terror to think of this possibility. Only the wall between her—so young, so frightened, and helpless—and that presence, whether spirit or man, whatever it was. It was all she could do to stand upon her trembling limbs and keep upright, though it was now morning and no longer dark. And when suddenly something appeared round the corner of
“I FEAR I HAVE DISTURBED YOU” (p. 243).
the house, a dark figure making its way towards her, she could not restrain a scream as she flew back to the shelter of her window. Quick as her movements were, she was not quick enough, however, to elude this presence; and Hetty’s fear gave place to a stupefied astonishment when she recognised the doctor, Mr. Darrell, who touched her shoulder, and called her by her name.
“Let me speak to you a moment,” he said, breathlessly. “I fear I have disturbed you—perhaps more than once.”
“You!” was all that Hetty could say, panting with fright, relief, and profound surprise above all. He was in his usual dress, looking somehow as if he had not taken it off all night, and looked harassed and pale.
“Yes,” he said. “I was afraid you had seen me, and might be frightened. I have a patient with whom I have to be at all hours, both night and day; who is not quite sane but quite harmless. Forgive me; and might I ask you not to speak of it to frighten the house?”
