OLD SARAH Wall, the key-bearer, who now came ambling up at a very slow pace, holding her hand to her side, and muttering feebly as she moved, was a poor exchange, Olivia thought, for the masculine friend who had ended his kindly services so abruptly. He had not even waited, as he had intimated an intention of doing, to see the luggage safely moved into the house. Mrs. Wall looked very cross and not too clean. Scarcely deigning to glance at the strangers, she muttered, “This way!” and then fell to groaning as she led the way through the farmyard up to the house.
Olivia paused to look despairingly at her scattered trunks, and to give a kindly word of comfort to the unlucky cab driver, who was still occupied in estimating the damage done to his vehicle, and his chances of getting it back to Matherham that night. As she did so she heard a footstep on the hard ground beside her, and found the shamefaced and blushing Mat at her side.
“Ah’ll get t’ luggage in seefe, never fear,” said he, in a voice so gruff with excessive bashfulness that poor Olivia thought him surly, and shrank back with a cold refusal of his services rising to her lips.
Mat thought she identified him with his father and so hastened to offer a neat apology for that gentleman’s conduct.
“Feyther’s a pig,” said he. “Boot he wunna harm ye! an’ Ah’ll do what Ah can to mak’ oop for him being so rough.”
And he shouldered one trunk and caught up another, and strode along towards the house, whistling to himself with the defiant carelessness of one who feels he has done a bold stroke. The lady and her attendant followed, somewhat soothed by this little show of friendliness.
Even in the midst of her feelings of desolation and disappointment, in spite of the keen cold and of the forlorn, blind look which shuttered and shut-up windows, broken chimney pots, and untrimmed ivy gave to the house, Olivia could not look quite without admiration and a youthful sense of delight in the picturesque at the old Hall. The body of the house was a long, plain, two-storeyed building, with a flagged roof and a curious wide, flat portico, supported by two spindleshank wooden windows, beneath which three stone steps, deeply hollowed out and worn by generations of feet, led to the front door. At the west end a gabled wing, flag-roofed like the rest, ran back from the body of the house; and at right angles to this there jutted out westwards a second small wing of the same shape. In these, the oldest portions of the house, traces of former architectural beauties remained in stately Tudor chimneys and two mullioned windows, round which the ivy clustered in huge bushes, long left neglected and untrimmed. At this end of the building a little garden ran underneath the walls, protected from the incursions of intrusive cows by a wall which began towards the back of the house by being very high and ended towards the front by being very low. From the wall to the house the garden had been shut in by palings and a little gate; but these were now much broken and decayed, and afforded small protection to the yews and holly bushes, the little leafless barberry tree and the shabby straggling evergreens, which grew thickly against the weather-stained walls of the old house, choking the broken panes of the lower windows as the ivy did those of the upper ones. It was this western end that was visible from the road, the view of the front being obscured by a long stone-built barn, very old, and erected on foundations older still, about which hung traditions of monkish days.
If she had seen it at any other time, Olivia would have been crazy with delight at the thought of living in such a place; and even now, cheerless as the immediate prospect was, it gave her a gleam of comfort to reflect that, if she did have to pass the night without any bed amongst the rats, the ancestors of those rats had scampered over the place in the time of Queen Elizabeth.
With some difficulty, Mrs. Wall turned the key in the rusty lock and admitted them. It seemed that she had a grievance in the fact that she had not known on what day they were to arrive. As a matter of fact, she was one of those persons who are never prepared for anything, but Olivia had had no means of learning her peculiarities, and so she met the old woman’s complaints in a humble and apologetic spirit which increased Mrs. Wall’s arrogance.
The entrance hall was low-roofed and square; the walls were covered with a cheap and commonplace paper, the wainscoting and the banisters of the broad staircase were of painted wood. This was the portion of the house which had suffered most during its decadence. Olivia, examining everything with an eye keen to discover the good points to be made the most of in her new home, found that where the paint had worn off the staircase and wainscot dark oak was revealed underneath, and she rashly uttered an exclamation of horror at the vandalism of the farm’s late occupants.
“The idea of spoiling beautiful dark oak with this horrid paint! Why, the people who did it ought to be sent to penal servitude!”
Mrs. Wall was scandalized.
“T’ fowk ’as lived here last liked t’ place clean,” she said, severely. “It’ll nivver look t’ same again as it did, wi’ a clean white antimacassar stitched on to ivery cheer, an’ wax flowers under glass sheades in a’ t’ parlor windows. An’ t’ parlor a’ways as neat as a new pin, so ye wur afreaid a’most to coom into ’t. Ah, ye meen talk o’ yer gentlefowk, but they’ll nivver mak’ it look t’ same again!”
Olivia had opened the door to the right, and throwing wide the shutters of one of the three large windows, revealed a long, low-ceilinged room, used as the living room by the late farmer’s family, and having at the further end a wide, high, old-fashioned fireplace, the mouldings of which had been carefully covered with whitewash, now smoked-begrimed and worn into dark streaks. The shutters and the wainscoting, which in this room was breast high upon the walls, had been treated in the same way. Olivia uttered a groan, and turned to the door, afraid of uttering more offensive remarks. Then they went upstairs, and opened the doors of a lot of little meanly papered bedrooms which formed the upper storey of this part of the house. Having allowed the new comers to examine these, while she remained sniffing in the passage, Mrs. Wall shuttled hastily back to the staircase.
“Stop!” cried Olivia, as the old woman placed one downtrodden shoe on the second step; “we haven’t seen the other part of the house at all. Where does this lead to?”
And she peered into a crooked passage which led into the first of the two older wings.
Mrs. Wall paused with evident reluctance.
“There’s nowt yonder but t’ worst o’ t’ bedrooms; ye’ve seen t’ best,” she grumbled.
But Olivia was already exploring, followed by Lucy; and the old woman, with much reluctance, brought up the rear. The passage was quite dark, and very cold. The tallow dip which Mrs. Wall carried gave only just enough light to enable the explorers to find the handles of the doors on the left. One of these Olivia opened, not without difficulty; for the floor was strewn with lumber of all sorts, which the last occupier of the farm had not thought worth carrying away. The walls of this room, which was very small, were panelled right up to the low ceiling; and the panelling had been whitewashed. A second chamber in this passage was in a similar condition, except that the panelling had been torn down from two of the four walls, and its place supplied by a layer of plaster. Holding up her skirts very carefully, Olivia stepped across the dusty piles of broken boxes, damaged fireirons, and odds and ends of torn carpet with which the floor of this room also was covered, and looked through the dusty panes of the little window.
“Now you’ve seen a’,” said Mrs. Wall, rather querulously. “An’ t’ lad downstairs ’ll be wanting to know wheer to put t’ things.”
She was retreating with her candle, when Olivia stopped her again.
“No,” she said, eagerly, “we’ve not seen all. There’s a wing of the house we have not been into at all; and I can see through the little window, on this side of it, some curtains and a flower vase with something still in it. It doesn’t look empty and deserted like the rest. I must get in there before I go down.”
But Mrs. Wall’s old face had wrinkled up with superstitious terror, and it was only by force of muscle that the young girl succeeded in cutting off her retreat.
“Na’,” she said, her voice sinking to a croaking whisper. “I canna tak’ ye in theer. An’—an’ t’ doors are locked, ye see,” she added, eagerly, as Olivia, still grasping her conductress’ arm, in vain tried the door at the end of the passage, and one on the left-hand side, at right angles with it.
“Well, but why are they locked?” asked the young girl, impatiently, her rich-toned, youthful voice ringing sonorously through the long-disused passage. “The whole place is ours now, and I have a right to see into every corner of it.”
“Oh, Miss Olivia, perhaps we’d better go back—go downstairs—for to-day,” suggested the little maid Lucy, rather timorously behind her.
Mrs. Wall’s nervous tremors were beginning to infect the poor girl, who was, moreover, very cold, and was longing for some tea. But her young mistress had at least her fair share of an immovable British obstinacy. Finding that both doors were firmly locked and that there was no key to either forthcoming, she flung the whole weight of her massive and muscular young body against the door on the left, until the old wood cracked and the rusty nails rattled in the disused hinges.
“Mercy on us!” exclaimed Sarah Wall, petrified by the audacity of the young amazon. “Shoo ’ll have t’ owd place aboot our ears!”
“Take the candle, Lucy,” said Olivia, imperiously, perceiving that the dip was flaring and wobbling in an ominous manner in the old woman’s trembling fingers.
Lucy obeyed, frightened but curious. Her mistress made two more vigorous onslaughts upon the door; the first produced a great creaking and straining; at the second the door gave way on its upper hinge, so that the girl’s strong hands were able to force the lock with ease. She turned to the guide in some triumph.
“Now, Mrs. Wall, we’ll unearth your ghost, if there is one. At any rate, we’ll get to the bottom of your mystery in five minutes.”
But she did not. Pressing on to the end of a very narrow, unlighted passage in which she now found herself, Olivia came to a second door; this opened easily and admitted her into a large chamber, the aspect of which, dimly seen by the fading light which came through a small square window on her left, filled her brave young spirit with a sudden sense of dreariness and desolation.
For it was not empty and lumber-strewn, like the rest of the rooms she had entered. The dark forms of cumbrous, old-fashioned furniture were discernible in the dusk; the heavy hangings of a huge four-post mahogany bedstead shook, as a rat, disturbed by the unwonted intrusion, slid down the curtain and scurried across the floor. As she stepped slowly forward on the carpet, which was damp to the tread, and peered to the right and left in the gloom, Olivia could see strange relics of the room’s last occupant; the withered remains of what had been a bunch of flowers on a table in front of the little window; an assortment of Christmas cards and valentines, all of design now out of date, and all thickly covered with brown dust, fastened with pins on to the wall on each side of the high mantle-piece; even a book, a railway novel, with its yellow boards gnawed by the rats, which she picked up rather timorously from the floor, where, by this time, it seemed to have acquired a consecrated right to lie.
Still advancing very slowly, Olivia reached the opposite side of the room, where her quick eyes had perceived the barred shutters of a second and much larger window. With some difficulty she removed the bar, which had grown stiff and rusty, and, drawing back the heavy shutters, revealed the long, stone-mullioned window, with diamond panes, which had been such a picturesque feature of the house from the outside. The thick, untrained ivy obscured one end of it, but enough light glimmered through the dirt-encrusted panes for Olivia to be now quite sure of two things of which she felt nearly sure before—namely, that this was the best bedroom in the house, and that, for some mysterious reason, this chamber, instead of being dismantled like the rest, had been allowed to remain for a period of years almost as its last occupant had left it. Almost, but not quite; for the bedding had been removed, the covers to the dressing-table and the gigantic chest of drawers, and the white curtains which had once hung before the shuttered window.
On the other hand, a host of knicknacks remained to testify to the sex, the approximate age, and the measure of refinement of the late owner. More railway novels, all well-worn; flower vases of an inexpensive kind; two hand mirrors, one broken; a dream book; a bow of bright ribbon; a handsome cut-glass scent bottle; these things, among others, were as suggestive as a photograph; while the fact that this room alone had been studiously left in its original state, and even furnished in accordance with it, threw a new and more favorable light on the taste of that mysteriously interesting somebody whose individuality made itself felt across a lapse of years to the wondering new comer.
Olivia Denison was not by any means a fanciful girl. She had been brought up by a step-mother—a mode of education little likely to produce an unwholesome forcing of the sentimental tendencies. She was besides too athletic and vigorously healthy to be prone to superstitious or morbid imaginings. But as she stood straining her eyes in the fading daylight to take in every detail of the mysterious room, the panelling, which in this apartment alone was left its own dark color, seemed to take strange moving patterns as she looked; the musty, close air seemed to choke her; and faint creakings and moanings, either in the ancient woodwork or the loose-hanging ivy outside, grew in her listening ears to a murmur as of a voice trying to speak, and miserably failing to make itself understood. She was roused by a shrill cry, and found Lucy, whose fear for her mistress had overcome her fear of this desolate room, shaking her by the arm and pulling her towards the door.
“Oh, Miss Olivia, do come out—do come out! You’re going to faint; I’m sure you are. It’s all this horrid room—this horrid house. Oh, do come and write, and tell master it’s not a fit place for Christians to come to, and he’d never prosper if he was to come here, and nor wouldn’t none of us, I’m positive. Do come, Miss Olivia, there’s a dear. It’s fit to choke one in here, what with the rats and the damp, that it is. And if we was to stay here long enough we’d see ghosts, I know.”
Olivia laughed. No phantom had terrors for her, however strong an impression half-guessed realities might make upon her youthful imagination.
“Don’t be afraid, Lucy,” she said, encouragingly. “We’ll soon frighten the ghosts away by letting a little fresh air into these musty rooms. Here, help me.”
Half reassured by her resonant voice, the maid accompanied her to the larger window, still clinging to her arm, but more for companionship than with the idea of affording support to her mistress, who had recovered her self-command. Together they succeeded in throwing open both windows to their full extent, not, however, accomplishing this without a shriek from Lucy as a great bird flew out of the hanging ivy and almost flapped against their faces in his confusion at this unusual disturbance. They both felt a sense of relief as the keen but fresh outside air blew into the long-closed room, dispersing the mouldy, musty smell of damp hangings and decaying wood. Even the old woman, who had stood all this time in the doorway, apparently engaged in muttering incantations over her tallow dip, but really transfixed by this audacity of young blood, drew a long breath as the rush of fresh air reached her, and gathered courage to ask “what they were after doin’ now?”
“Were ‘after’ ransacking every corner of this old ghost run, turning it upside down and inside out, and chasing away the last shadow of a bogey,” answered Olivia, cheerily. “Here’s another room to look into.”
Crossing the room with a light step, she opened the door of the second of the closed-up apartments. This chamber also had escaped the dismantling of the rest of the house, but it contained very little that would have been worth taking away. It was lighted by three small windows, all much broken, and all hung with limp rags which had once been muslin curtains, gaily tied up with blue ribbons, which were now almost colorless with dust and damp. The floor was covered with matting, which smelt like damp straw, and had evidently afforded many a meal to the rats now scurrying behind the woodwork, which in this room was much decayed and in far from good repair. A plain deal table, from which the cover had been removed; two limp wicker chairs with ragged cushions; an empty birdcage; a fanciful wicker kennel for a lapdog; these were nearly all that were left of the furniture. Olivia inspected everything with eager but silent interest, and then turned suddenly to Sarah Wall, who had again followed them as far as the door, preferring even the eerie passage of the bedroom to solitude outside.
“Who lived in these rooms last?” she asked.
But the candle nearly fell from Mrs. Wall’s hand as, for all answer, she withdrew into the desolation of the deserted bedroom rather than face the eager questioner again.
Olivia was not to be put off so easily. She followed precipitately, and, changing the form of her attack, said—
“How long is it since these rooms were shut up, Mrs. Wall?”
The guide’s eyes shifted about, refusing to meet those of the young girl.
“Twea year’; same as rest o’ t’ house,” she answered, in a grumbling tone.
“Only two years! It wasn’t shut up long before the family went away, then?” said Olivia, incredulously.
“Not as Ah knaws on,” answered Sarah Wall.
Miss Denison hated an untruth with the impetuous loathing of an honest nature. She would have liked to shake this wretched old woman, who would not be candid on a subject which could not be of the slightest importance to her. Perhaps her companion got an inkling of this inclination, for she turned and beat a hasty retreat along the narrow passage which led from the bedroom to the body of the house. Olivia did not at once follow her. With a curious reluctance, whether reverence for a dead past whose relics she was disturbing, or fear of some shock which its revelations might bring her, she scarcely knew, the girl picked up one of the dust-begrimed novels, and looked at the title page. But there was nothing written on it. She opened three or four more of the novels with the same result. By this time it was growing so dark that she had to hasten her movements for fear that when at last a clue was found she might be unable to distinguish the letters. Having in vain examined every book upon the table, she continued to explore until she found, on a small hanging bookshelf in an obscure corner of the room, a little pile of devotional works—Bible, hymn book, Bogatsky’s “Golden Treasury,” a tiny “Daily Portion,” and a prayer book. This last was on the top of all. As Olivia opened it, there fell to the floor tiny dried scraps of flowers and fern. Turning to the flyleaf, and carrying the book in haste to the window, she found these words, written in a round, school-boy hand—
“Ellen Mitchell, from her affectionate brother Ned.” And a date of eighteen years back.
Olivia replaced the prayer book on the shelf, and left the old room without further delay, followed by Lucy, who had remained close at hand, but discreetly silent, during these investigations.
When they reached the outer end of the passage, Olivia glanced with some curiosity at the old door she had so roughly broken down, and as she did so, some letters written in pencil high on the upper panel caught her eye. With difficulty she made out a date in July ten years before.
“I wonder,” she thought, “whether that is the date on which the rooms were locked up. If so, it was eight years before the last people left the house, I know. And their name was Mitchell. Who can I ask to tell me the story?”
And, having forgotten cold, fatigue, and hunger in the interest of her discoveries, Olivia Denison made her way slowly down to the ground floor again, where she caught Mrs. Wall in the act of slipping out of the front door.