 THE FANTOM RICKSHAW by Rudyard Kipling May no ill dreams disturb my rest, nor powers of darkness, me molest, evening him. One of the few advantages that India has over England is a great no-ability. After five years' service a man is directly or indirectly acquainted with the two or three hundred civilians in his province, all the messes of ten or twelve regiments and batteries, and some fifteen hundred other people of the non-official caste. In ten years his knowledge should be doubled and at the end of twenty he knows or knows something about every Englishman in the empire and may travel anywhere and everywhere without paying hotel bills. Globetrotters who expect entertainment as a right have, even within my memory, blunted this open-heartedness. But nonetheless today if you belong to the inner circle and are neither a bear nor a black sheep all houses are open to you and our small world is very, very kind and helpful. Rickett of Kamartha stayed with Polder of Kumi on some fifteen years ago. He meant to stay two nights but was knocked down by rheumatic fever and for six weeks disorganized Polder's establishment, stopped Polder's work, and nearly died in Polder's bedroom. Polder behaves as though he had been placed under eternal obligation by Rickett and yearly sends the little Ricketts a box of presents and toys. It is the same everywhere. The men who do not take the trouble to conceal from you their opinion that you are an incompetent ass and the women who blacken your character and misunderstand your wife's amusements will work themselves to the bone in your behalf if you fall sick or into serious trouble. Heatherly the doctor kept, in addition to his regular practice, a hospital on his private account. An arrangement of loose boxes for incurable, his friends called it, but it was really a sort of fitting-up shed for craft that had been damaged by stress of weather. The weather in India is often sultry and since the tale of bricks is always a fixed quantity and the only liberty allowed is permission to work overtime and get no thanks, men occasionally break down and become as mixed as the metaphors in this sentence. Heatherly is the dearest doctor that ever was and his invariable prescription to all his patients is, lie low, go slow, and keep cool. He says that more men are killed by overwork than the importance of this world justifies. He maintains that overwork slew Pansey, who died under his hands about three years ago. He has, of course, the right to speak authoritatively and he laughs at my theory that there was a crack in Pansey's head and a little bit of the dark world came through and pressed him to death. Pansey went off the handle, says Heatherly. After the stimulus of long leave at home, he may or may not have behaved like a blaggard to Mrs. Keith Wessington. My notion is that the work of the Katabundi settlement ran him off his legs and that he took to brooding and making much of an ordinary P&O flirtation. He certainly was engaged to mismanering and she certainly broke off the engagement. Then he took a feverish chill and all that nonsense about ghosts developed. Overwork started his illness, kept it alight, and killed him, poor devil. Write him off to the system. One man to take the work of two and a half men. I do not believe this. I used to sit up with Pansey, sometimes when Heatherly was called out to patients and I happened to be within claim. The man would make me most unhappy by describing in a low, even voice the procession that was always passing at the bottom of his bed. He had a sick man's command of language. When he recovered I suggested that he should write out the whole affair from beginning to end, knowing that Inc. might assist him to ease his mind. When little boys have learned a new bad word they are never happy till they have chalked it up on a door. And this also is literature. He was in a high fever while he was writing and the blood and thunder magazine diction he adopted did not calm him. Two months afterward he was reported fit for duty, but in spite of the fact that he was urgently needed to help an undermanned commission stagger through a deficit, he preferred to die, vowing at the last that he was hag-ridden. I got his manuscript before he died and this is his version of the affair, dated 1855. My doctor tells me that I need rest and change of air. It is not improbable that I shall get both air long. Rest that neither the red-coated messenger nor the midday gun can break, and change of air far beyond that which any homeward-bound steamer can give me. In the meantime I am resolved to stay where I am and in flat defiance of my doctor's orders to take all the world into my confidence. You shall learn for yourselves the precise nature of my malady and shall too judge for yourselves whether any man born of woman on this weary earth was ever so tormented as I. Speaking now as a condemned criminal might speak ere the drop-bolts are drawn, my story, wild and hideously improbable as it may appear, demands at least attention. That it will ever receive credence I utterly disbelieve. Two months ago I should have scouted as mad or drunk the man who had dared to tell me the like. Two months ago I was the happiest man in India. Today from Peshawar to the sea there is no one more wretched. My doctor and I are the only two who know this. His explanation is that my brain, digestion and eyesight are all slightly affected, giving rise to my frequent and persistent delusions. Delusions indeed. I call him a fool, but he attends me still with the same unwearyed smile, the same bland professional manner, the same neatly trimmed red whiskers, till I begin to suspect that I am an ungrateful evil-tempered invalid, but you shall judge for yourselves. Three years ago it was my fortune, my great misfortune, to sail from Graveson to Bombay on return from long leave with one Agnes Keith Wessington, wife of an officer on the Bombay side. It does not in the least concern you to know what manner of woman she was. Be content with the knowledge that ere the voyage had ended both she and I were desperately and unreasoningly in love with one another. Heaven knows that I can make the admission now without one particle of vanity. In matters of this sort there is always one who gives and another who accepts. From the first day of our ill omen detachment I was conscious that Agnes' passion was a stronger, a more dominant, and if I may use the expression, a purer sentiment than mine. Whether she recognized the fact then I do not know. Afterward it was bitterly plain to both of us. I arrived at Bombay in the spring of the year. We went our respective ways to meet no more for the next three or four months. When my leave and her love took us both to Simla, there we spent the season together, and there my fire of straw burned itself out to a pitiful end with the closing year. I attempt no excuse, I make no apology. Mrs. Wessington had given up much for my sake and was prepared to give up all. From my own lips, in August, 1882, she learned that I was sick of her presence, tired of her company, and weary of the sound of her voice. Ninety-nine women out of a hundred would have wearied of me as I wearied of them. Seventy-five of that number would have promptly avenged themselves by active and obtrusive flirtation with other men. Mrs. Wessington was the hundredth. On her neither my openly expressed aversion nor the cutting brutalities with which I garnished our interviews had the least effect. Jack, darling, was her one eternal cuckoo cry. I'm sure it's all a mistake, a hideous mistake, and we'll be good friends again some day. Please forgive me, Jack, dear. I was the offender, and I knew it. That knowledge transformed my pity into passive endurance and eventually into blind hate, the same instinct I suppose which prompts a man to savagely stamp on the spider he has but half killed. And with this hate in my bosom the season of 1882 came to an end. Next year we met again at Sinla, she with her monotonous face and timid attempts at reconciliation and I with loathing of her in every fiber of my frame. Several times I could not avoid meeting her alone and on each occasion her words were identically the same. Still the unreasoning wail that it was all a mistake and still the hope of eventually making friends. I might have seen had I cared to look that hope only was keeping her alive. She grew more wan and thin month by month. You will agree with me at least that such conduct would have driven anyone to despair. It was uncalled for, childish, unwomenly. I maintained that she was much to blame. And again, sometimes in the black fever-stricken night watches I have begun to think that I might have been a little kinder to her. But that really is a delusion I could not have continued pretending to love her when I didn't, could I? It would have been unfair to both of us. Last year we met again on the same terms as before. The same weary appeal and the same curt answers from my lips. At least I would make her see how wholly wrong and hopeless were her attempts at resuming the old relationship. As the season wore on we fell apart. That is to say, she found it difficult to meet me, for I had other and more absorbing interests to attend to. When I think it over quietly in my sick room, the season of 1884 seems a confused nightmare wherein light and shade were fantastically intermingled. My courtship of little kitty mannering, my hopes, doubts and fears are long rides together, my trembling avowal of attachment, her reply, and, now and again, a vision of a white face flitting by in the rickshaw with the black and white liveries I once watched for so earnestly. The wave of Mrs. Wessington's gloved hand, and when she met me alone, which was but seldom, the irksome monotony of her appeal. I loved kitty mannering, honestly, heartily, loved her, and with my love for her grew my hatred of agnes. In August Kitty and I were engaged. The next day I met those accursed magpie hamponies at the back of Jocko, and moved by some passing sentiment of pity, stopped to tell Mrs. Wessington everything. She knew it already. So I hear you're engaged, Jack, dear. Then, without a moment's pause, I'm sure it's all a mistake, a hideous mistake. We shall be as good friends some day, Jack, as we ever were. My answer might have made even a man wince. It cut the dying woman before me like the blow of a whip. Please forgive me, Jack. I didn't mean to make you angry, but it's true, it's true. And Mrs. Wessington broke down completely. I turned away and left her to finish her journey in peace, feeling but only for a moment or two that I had been an unutterably mean hound. I looked back and saw that she had turned her rickshaw with the idea, I suppose, of overtaking me. The scene and its surroundings were photographed on my memory. The rain swept sky. We were at the end of the wet weather. The soddened, dingy pines, the muddy road, and the black powder-riven cliffs formed a gloomy background against which the black and white liveries of the hamponies, the yellow-paneled rickshaw, and Mrs. Wessington's down-bowed golden head stood out clearly. She was holding her handkerchief in her left hand and was leaning back exhausted against the rickshaw cushions. I turned my horse up a bypass near Sanjoli reservoir and literally ran away. Once I fancied, I heard a faint call of, Jack! This may have been my imagination. I never stopped to verify it. Ten minutes later I came across Kitty on horseback and in the delight of a long ride with her forgot all about the interview. A week later Mrs. Wessington died, and the inexpressible burden of her existence was removed from my life. I went plainsward, perfectly happy. Before three months were over I had forgotten all about her, except that at times the discovery of some of her old letters reminded me unpleasantly of our bygone relationship. By January I had disinterred what was left of our correspondence from among my scattered belongings and had burned it. At the beginning of April of this year, 1885, I was at Simla, semi-deserted Simla, once more, and was deep in lovers' talks and walks with Kitty. It was decided that we should be married at the end of June. You will understand, therefore, that loving Kitty as I did I am not saying too much when I pronounce myself to have been, at that time, the happiest man in India. Fourteen delightful days passed almost before I noticed their flight. Then, aroused to the sense of what was proper among mortal circumstance as we were, I pointed out to Kitty that an engagement ring was the outward and visible sign of her dignity as an engaged girl, and that she must forthwith come to Hamilton's to be measured for one. Up to that moment I give you my word we had completely forgotten so trivial a matter. To Hamilton's we accordingly went on the fifteenth of April, 1885. Remember that whatever my doctor may say to the contrary, I was then in perfect health, enjoying a well-balanced mind and an absolute tranquil spirit. Kitty and I entered Hamilton's shop together, and there, regardless of the order of affairs, I measured Kitty for the ring in the presence of the amused assistant. The ring was a sapphire with two diamonds. We then rode out down the slope that leads to the Kombamir Bridge and Paliti's shop, while my waller was cautiously feeling his way over the loose shale, and Kitty was laughing and chattering at my side, while all Simla, that is to say, as much of it as had come from the plains, was grouped round the reading-room and Paliti's veranda. I was aware that someone apparently at a vast distance was calling me by my Christian name. It struck me that I had heard the voice before, but when and where I could not at once determine. In the short space it took to cover the road between the path from Hamilton's shop and the first plank of the Kombamir Bridge, I had thought over half a dozen people who might have committed such a solicism, and had eventually decided that it must have been singing in my ears. Immediately opposite Paliti's shop my eye was arrested by the sight of four hampanies in Magpie livery pulling a yellow-paneled, cheap, bizarre rickshaw. In a moment my mind flew back to the previous season and Mrs. Wessington with a sense of irritation and disgust. Was it not enough that the woman was dead and done with without her black-and-white servitors reappearing to spoil the day's happiness? Whoever employed them now I thought I would call upon and ask as a personal favor to change her hampany's livery. I would hire the men myself and if necessary buy their coats from off their backs. It is impossible to say here what a flood of undesirable memories their presence evoked. Kitty, I cried, there are poor Mrs. Wessington's hampanies turned up again. I wonder who has them now? Kitty had known Mrs. Wessington slightly last season and had always been interested in the sickly woman. What? Where? she asked. I can't see them anywhere. Even as she spoke her horse swerving from a laden mule through himself directly in front of the advancing rickshaw, I had scarcely time to utter a word of warning when to my unutterable horror, horse, and rider passed through men and carriage as if they had been thin air. What's the matter? cried Kitty. What made you call out so foolishly, Jack? If I am engaged I don't want all creation to know about it. There was lots of space between the mule and the veranda, and if you think I can't ride, there! Whereupon willful Kitty set off her dainty little head in the air at a hand-gallop in the direction of the bandstand, fully expecting as she herself afterward told me that I should follow her. What was the matter? Nothing, indeed. Either that I was mad or drunk or that Simla was haunted with devils. I reigned in my impatient cob and turned round. The rickshaw had turned, too, and now stood immediately facing me near the left railing of the Combermere Bridge. Jack! Jack, darling! There was no mistake about the words this time. They rang through my brain as if they had been shouted in my ear. It's some hideous mistake! I'm sure! Please forgive me, Jack! And let's be friends again. The rickshaw hood had fallen back, and inside, as I hope and pray daily for the death I dread by night, sat Mrs. Keith Wessington, handkerchief in hand, and golden head bowled on her breast. How long I stared motionless I do not know. Finally I was aroused by my stice, taking the waller's bridle and asking whether I was ill. From the horrible to the common places, I took a step. I tumbled off my horse and dashed half-fainting into Pilates for a glass of cherry brandy. There two or three couples were gathered round the coffee-tables discussing the gossip of the day. Their trivialities were more comforting to me just then than the consolations of religion could have been. I plunged into the midst of the conversation at once, chatted, laughed, and gested with a face, when I caught a glimpse of it in the mirror, as white and drawn as that of a corpse. Three or four men noticed my condition, and evidently setting it down to the results of over-many pegs, charitably endeavored to draw me apart from the rest of the loungers. But I refused to be led away. I wanted the company of my kind, as a child rushes into the midst of the dinner-party after a fright in the dark. I must have talked for about ten minutes or so, though it seemed an eternity to me when I heard Kitty's clear voice outside inquiring for me. In another minute she had entered the shop, prepared to roundly up-brave me for failing so singly in my duties. Something in my face stopped her. Why, Jack! she cried. What have you been doing? What has happened? Are you ill? Thus, driven into a direct lie, I said that the sun had been a little too much for me. It was close upon five o'clock of a cloudy April afternoon, and the sun had been hidden all day. I saw my mistake as soon as the words were out of my mouth, attempted to recover it, blundered hopelessly, and followed Kitty in a regal rage out of the doors amid the smiles of my acquaintances. I made some excuse—I have forgotten what—on the score of my feeling faint and cantered away to my hotel, leaving Kitty to finish the ride by herself. In my room I sat down and tried calmly to reason out the matter. Here was I, Theobald Jack Pansay, a well-educated Bengal civilian in the year of Grace 1885, presumably sane, certainly healthy, driven in terror from my sweetheart side by the apparition of a woman who had been dead and buried eight months ago. These were facts that I could not blink. Nothing was further from my thought than any memory of Mrs. Wessington when Kitty and I left Hamilton's shop. Nothing was more utterly commonplace than the stretch of wall opposite Pilates. It was broad daylight, the road was full of people, and yet here look you in defiance of every law of probability in direct outrage of nature's ordinance. There had appeared to me a face from the grave. Kitty's Arab had gone through the rickshaw, so that my first hope that some woman marvelously like Mrs. Wessington had hired the carriage and the coolies with their old livery was lost. Again and again I went round this treadmill of thought, and again and again gave up baffled and in despair. The voice was as inexplicable as the apparition. I had originally some wild notion of confiding it all to Kitty, of begging her to marry me at once and in her arms defying the ghostly occupant of the rickshaw. After all, I argued, the presence of the rickshaw is in itself enough to prove the existence of a spectral illusion. One may see ghosts of men and women, but surely never of coolies and carriages. The whole thing is absurd. Fancy the ghost of a hillman. Next morning I sent a pentant note to Kitty, imploring her to overlook my strange conduct of the previous afternoon. My divinity was still very wrought, and a personal apology was necessary. I explained with a fluency born of night-long pondering over a falsehood that I had been attacked with sudden palpitation of the heart, the result of indigestion. This eminently practical solution had its effect, and Kitty and I wrote out that afternoon with the shadow of my first lie dividing us. Nothing would please her save a canter round Jocko. With my nerves still unstrung from the previous night, I feebly protested against the notion, suggesting Observatory Hill, Chuteau, the Boilagung Road, anything rather than that Jocko round. Kitty was angry and a little hurt, so I yielded from fear of provoking further misunderstanding, and we set out together toward Chota Simla. We walked a greater part of the way, and according to our custom canterd, from a mile or so below the convent to the stretch of level road by the Sanjoli Reservoir. The wretched horses appeared to fly, and my heart beat quicker and quicker as we neared the crest of the ascent. My mind had been full of Mrs. Wessington all the afternoon, and every inch of the Jocko road bore witness to our old-time walks and talks. The boulders were full of it, the pines sang it aloud overhead. The rain-fed torrents giggled and chuckled unseen over the shameful story, and the wind in my ears chanted the iniquity aloud. As a fitting climax in the middle of the level men called the ladies' mile, the horror was awaiting me. No other rickshaw was in sight, only the four black-and-white hampanies, the yellow-paneled carriage, and the golden head of the woman within. All apparently just as I had left them eight months and one fortnight ago. For an instant I fancied that Kitty must see what I saw, we were so marvelously sympathetic in all things. Her next words undeceived me. Not a soul in sight. Come on, Jack, I'll race you to the Reservoir buildings. Her wiry little Arab was off like a bird, my waller following close behind, and in this order we dashed under the cliffs. Half a minute brought us within fifty yards of the rickshaw. I pulled my waller and fell back a little. The rickshaw was directly in the middle of the road, and once more the Arab passed through it, my horse following. Jack! Jack, dear, please forgive me! rang with a wail in my ears, and after an interval. It's a mistake! A hideous mistake! I spurred my horses like a man possessed. When I turned my head at the Reservoir works the black-and-white liveries were still waiting, patiently waiting, under the gray hillside, and the wind brought me a mocking echo of the words I had just heard. Kitty bantered me a good deal on my silence throughout the remainder of the ride. I had been talking up till then wildly and at random. To save my life I could not speak afterward naturally, and from Sanjoli to the church wisely held my tongue. I was to dine with the mannerings that night and had barely time to canter home to dress. On the road to Elysium Hill I overheard two men talking together in the mosque. It's a curious thing, said one. How completely all trace of it disappeared, you know, my wife was insanely fond of the woman. Never could see anything in her myself, and wanted me to pick up her old rickshaw and coulis if they were to be got for love or money. Morbid sort of fancy, I call it, but I've got to do what the mem sahib tells me. Would you believe that the man she hired it from tells me that all four of the men, they were brothers, died of cholera on the way to Hardwar, poor devils, and the rickshaw has been broken up by the man himself. Told me he never used a dead mem sahib's rickshaw. Spoiled his luck. Queer notion, wasn't it? Fancy poor little Mrs. Wessington spoiling any one's luck except her own. I laughed aloud at this point, and my laugh jarred on me as I uttered it. So there were ghosts of rickshaws after all, and ghostly employment in the other world. How much did Mrs. Wessington give her men? What were their hours? Where did they go? And for visible answer to my last question, I saw the infernal thing blocking my path in the twilight. The dead travel fast, and by shortcuts unknown to ordinary coulis. I laughed aloud a second time, and checked my laughter suddenly, for I was afraid I was going mad. Mad to a certain extent I must have been, for I recollect that I reigned in my horse at the head of the rickshaw, and politely wished Mrs. Wessington good evening. Her answer was one I knew only too well. I'd listened to the end, and replied that I heard it all before, but should be delighted if she had anything further to say. Some malignant devil stronger than I must have entered into me that evening, for I have a dim recollection of talking the common places of the day for five minutes to the thing in front of me. Mad is a hatter, poor devil, or drunk. Max, try and get him to come home. Surely that was not Mrs. Wessington's voice. The two men had overheard me speaking to the empty air, and had returned to look after me. They were very kind and considerate, and from their words evidently gathered that I was extremely drunk. I thanked them confusedly and cantered away to my hotel. There changed, and arrived at the manorings ten minutes late. I pleaded the darkness of the night as an excuse, was rebuked by Kitty for my unlover-like tardiness, and sat down. The conversation had already become general, and under cover of it I was addressing some tender small talk to my sweetheart when I was aware that at the further end of the table a short red-whiskered man was describing with much broidery his encounter with a mad unknown that evening. A few sentences convinced me that he was repeating the incident of half an hour ago. In the middle of the story he looked round for applause, as professional storytellers do, caught my eye, and straight away collapsed. There was a moment's awkward silence, and the red-whiskered man muttered something to the effect that he had forgotten the rest, thereby sacrificing a reputation as a good storyteller which he had built up for six seasons past. I blessed him from the bottom of my heart, and went on with my fish. In the fullness of time that dinner came to an end, and with genuine regret I tore myself away from Kitty, as certain as I was of my own existence that it would be waiting for me outside the door. The red-whiskered man who had been introduced to me as Dr. Heatherly of Simla volunteered to bear me company as far as our roads laid together. I accepted his offer with gratitude. My instinct had not deceived me, it lay in readiness in the mall, and in what seemed devilish mockery of our ways with a delighted headlamp. The red-whiskered man went to the point at once in a manner that showed he had been thinking over it all dinner-time. I say, Pansay, what the deuce was the matter with you this evening on the Elysium Road. The suddenness of the question wrenched an answer from me before I was aware. That, said I, pointing to it. That may be either D.T. or Eyes, for ought I know. Now you don't liquor, I saw as much at dinner, so it can't be D.T. There's nothing whatever where you're pointing, though you're sweating and trembling with fright like a scared pony. Therefore I conclude that it's Eyes, and I ought to understand all about them. Come along home with me, I'm on the Blessington Lower Road. To my intense delight the rickshaw instead of waiting for us kept about twenty yards ahead, and this too whether we walked trotted or cantered. In the course of that long night ride I had told my companion almost as much as I have told you here. Well, you've spoiled one of the best tales I've ever laid tongue to, said he, but I'll forgive you for the sake of what you've gone through. Now come home and do what I tell you, and when I've cured you, young man, let this be a lesson to you to steer clear of women and indigestible food till the day of your death. The rickshaw kept steady in front, and my red whiskered friends seemed to drive great pleasure from my account of its exact whereabouts. Eyes, pantsay, all eyes, brain, and stomach, and the greatest of these three is stomach. You too much conceited brain, too little stomach, and thoroughly unhealthy eyes. Get your stomach straight, and the rest follows, and all that's French for a liver pill. I'll take sole medical charge of you from this hour for your too interesting a phenomenon to be passed over. By this time we were deep in the shadow of the Blessington Lower Road, and the rickshaw came to a dead stop under a pine clad overhanging shale cliff. Instinctively I halted, too, giving my reason. Heatherly wrapped out an oath. Now if you think I'm going to spend a cold night on the hillside for the sake of a stomach come brain, come eye-illusion. Lord! Mercy! What's that? There was a muffled report, a blinding smother of dust just in front of us, a crack, the noise of rent-bowls, and about ten yards of the cliffside pines, undergrowth and all, slid down into the road below, completely blocking it up. The uprooted trees swayed and tottered for a moment like drunken giants in the gloom, and then fell prone among their fellows with a thunderous crash. Our two horses stood motionless and sweating with fear. As soon as the rattle of falling earth and stone had subsided, my companion muttered, Man, if we'd gone forward we should have been ten feet deep in our graves by now. There are more things in heaven and earth. Come home, Pansey, and thank God I want a peg badly. We retraced our way over the church ridge, and I arrived at Dr. Heatherly's house just after midnight. His attempts toward my cure commenced almost immediately, and for a week I never left his sight. Many a time in the course of that week did I bless the good fortune which had thrown me in contact with the seamless best and kindest doctor. Day by day my spirits grew lighter and more equitable. Day by day, too, I became more and more inclined to fall in with Heatherly's spectral illusion theory, implicating eyes, brain, and stomach. I wrote to Kitty telling her that a slight sprain caused by a fall from my horse kept me indoors for a few days, and that I should be recovered before she had time to regret my absence. Heatherly's treatment was simple to a degree. It consisted of liver pills, cold-water baths, and strong exercise, taken in the dusk or at early dawn. For as he sagesly observed, a man with a sprained ankle doesn't walk a dozen miles a day, and your young woman might be wondering if she saw you. At the end of the week, after much examination of pupil and pulse and strict injunctions as to diet and pedestrianism, Heatherly dismissed me as briskly as he had taken charge of me. Here is his parting benediction. Man, I can certify to your mental cure, and that's as much as to say I've cured most of your bodily ailments. Now, get your traps out of this as soon as you can and be off to make love to Miss Kitty. I was endeavouring to express my thanks for his kindness. He cut me short. Don't think I did this because I like you. I gather that you've behaved like a blaggard all through. But, all the same, you're a phenomenon and as queer a phenomenon as you are a blaggard. No. Checking me a second time. Not a rupee, please. Go out and see if you can find the eyes, brain and stomach business again. I'll give you a lock for each time you see it. Half an hour later I was in the mannering's drawing-room with Kitty, drunk with the intoxication of present happiness and the foreknowledge that I should never more be troubled with its hideous presence. Strong in the sense of my newfound security I proposed a ride at once, and, by preference, a canter round Jocko. Never had I felt so well, so overladen with vitality and mere animal spirits as I did on the afternoon of the thirtieth of April. Kitty was delighted at the change in my appearance and complimented me on it in her delightfully frank and outspoken manner. We left the mannering's house together, laughing and talking, and cantered along the Chota Simla Road as of old. I was in haste to reach the Sanjoli Reservoir, and there make my assurance doubly sure. The horses did their best, but seemed all too slow to my impatient mind. Kitty was astonished at my boisterousness. Why, Jack, she cried at last, you are behaving like a child! What are you doing? We were just below the convent, and from sheer wantonness I was making my wall or plunge and curvette across the road as I tickled it with the loop of my riding-wip. Doing, I answered, nothing, dear, that's just it. If you'd been doing nothing for a week except lie up, you'd be as riotous as I. Singing and murmuring in your feastful mirth, joying to feel yourself alive. Lord over nature, Lord of the visible earth, Lord of the senses five. My quotation was hardly out of my lips before we had rounded the corner above the convent, and a few yards further on could see across to the Sanjoli. In the center of the level road stood the black-and-white liverys, the yellow-paneled rickshaw, and Mrs. Keith Wessington. I pulled up, looked, rubbed my eyes, and I believe must have said something. The next thing I knew was that I was lying face downward on the road with Kitty kneeling above me in tears. Has it gone, child? I gasped. Kitty only wept more bitterly. Has what gone, Jack, dear? What does it all mean? There must be a mistake somewhere, Jack, a hideous mistake. Her last words brought me to my feet, mad, raving for the time being. Yes, there is a mistake somewhere, I repeated, a hideous mistake. Come and look at it. I have an indistinct idea that I dragged Kitty by the wrist along the road up to where it stood and implored her for Pity's sake to speak to it, to tell it that we were betrothed that neither death nor hell could break the tie between us, and Kitty only knows how much more to the same effect. Now and again I appealed passionately to the terror in the rickshaw to bear witness to all I had said and to release me from a torture that was killing me. As I talked I suppose I must have told Kitty of my old relations with Mrs. Wessington, for I saw her listen intently with white face and blazing eyes. Thank you, Mr. Pansay, she said. That's quite enough. Sisi, go to Laos. The Sisi's impassive, as orientals always are, had come up with the recaptured horses, and as Kitty sprang into her saddle I caught hold of the bridle, and treating her to hear me out and forgive. My answer was the cut of her riding whip across my face from mouth to eye, and a word or two of farewell that even now I cannot write down. So I judged and judged rightly that Kitty knew all, and I staggered back to the side of the rickshaw. My face was cut and bleeding, and the blow of the riding whip had raised a livid blue wheel on it. I had no self-respect. Just then Heather Lee, who must have been following Kitty and me at a distance cantered up. Doctor, I said pointing to my face, here's Mrs. Manoring's signature to my order of dismissal, and I'll thank you for that lock as soon as convenient. Heather Lee's face, even in my abject misery, moved me to laughter. I'll stake my professional reputation, he began. Don't be a fool, I whispered. I've lost my life's happiness, and you'd better take me home. As I spoke the rickshaw was gone. Then I lost all knowledge of what was passing. The crest of jacos seemed to heave and roll like the crest of a cloud and fall in upon me. Seven days later, on the 7th of May, that is to say, I was aware that I was lying in Heather Lee's room as weak as a little child. Heather Lee was watching me intently from behind the papers on his writing table. His first words were not encouraging, but I was too far spent to be much moved by them. Here's Mrs. Kitty has sent back your letters. You corresponded a good deal, you young people. Here's a packet that looks like a ring and a cheerful sort of note from Manoring Papa, which I've taken the liberty of reading and burning. The old gentleman's not pleased with you. And Kitty, I asked Dully. Rather more drawn than her father from what she says. By the same token you must have been letting out any number of queer reminiscences just before I met you. Says that a man who would have behaved to a woman as you did to Mrs. Wessington ought to kill himself out of sheer pity for his kind. She's a hot-headed little varago, your mash. We'll have it, too, that you were suffering from D.T. when that row on the Chaco Road turned up. Says she'll die before she ever speaks to you again. I groaned and turned over to the other side. Now you've got your choice, my friend. This engagement has to be broken off, and the Manorings don't want to be too hard on you. Was it broken through D.T. or epileptic fits? Sorry, but I can't offer you a better exchange unless you'd prefer hereditary insanity. Say the word, and I'll tell them its fits. All seamless knows about that scene on the lady's mile. Come! I'll give you five minutes to think it over. During those five minutes I believe that I explored thoroughly the lowest circles of the Inferno, which it is permitted man to tread on earth. And at the same time I myself was watching myself faltering through the dark labyrinths of doubt, misery, and utter despair. I wondered as Heatherly in his chair might have wondered which dreadful alternative I should adopt. Presently I heard myself answering in a voice that I hardly recognized. There confoundedly particular about morality in these parts. Give them fits, Heatherly, in my love. Now let me sleep a bit longer. Then my two selves joined, and it was only I, half crazed, devil-driven I, that tossed in my bed, tracing step by step the history of the past month. But I am in Simla. I kept repeating to myself. I, Jack Pansay, am in Simla, and there are no ghosts here. It's unreasonable of that woman to pretend there are. Why couldn't Agnes have left me alone? I never did her any harm. It might just as well have been me as Agnes, only I'd never have come back on purpose to kill her. Why can't I be left alone, left alone and happy? It was high noon when I first awoke, and the sun was low in the sky before I slept. Slept as the tortured criminal sleeps on his rack, too worn to feel further pain. Next day I could not leave my bed. Heatherly told me in the morning that he had received an answer from Mr. Manoring, and that thanks to his Heatherly's friendly offices, the story of my affliction had traveled through the length and breadth of Simla, where I was on all sides much pitied. And that's rather more than you deserve, he concluded pleasantly, though the Lord knows you've been going through a pretty severe mill. Never mind. We'll cure you yet, you perverse phenomenon. I declined firmly to be cured. You've been much too good to me already, old man, said I, but I don't think I need trouble you further. In my heart I knew that nothing Heatherly could do would lighten the burden that had been laid upon me. With that knowledge came also a sense of hopelessness, impotent rebellion against the unreasonableness of it all. There were scores of men no better than I whose punishments had at least been reserved for another world, and I felt that it was bitterly, cruelly unfair that I alone should have been singled out for so hideous of fate. This mood would in time give place to another where it seems that the rickshaw and I were the only realities in a world of shadows, that Kitty was a ghost, that Manoring, Heatherlage, and all the other men and women I knew were all ghosts, and the great gray hills themselves, but vain shadows devised to torture me. From mood to mood I tossed backward and forward for seven weary days. My body growing daily stronger and stronger until the bedroom-looking glass told me that I had returned to everyday life and was, as other men, once more. Curiously enough my face showed no signs of the struggle I had gone through. It was pale indeed, but as expressionless and common places ever. I had expected some permanent alteration, visible evidence of the disease that was eating me away. I found nothing. On the fifteenth of May I left Heatherle's house at eleven o'clock in the morning, and the instinct of the bachelor drove me to the club. There I found that every man knew my story as told by Heatherle, and was, in clumsy fashion, abnormally kind and attentive. Nevertheless, I recognized that for the rest of my natural life I should be among but not of my fellows, and I envied very bitterly indeed the laughing coolies on the Mall below. I lunched at the club, and at four o'clock wandered aimlessly down the Mall in the vague hope of meeting Kitty. Close to the bandstand the black and white liveries joined me, and I heard Mrs. Wessington's old appeal at my side. I had been expecting this ever since I came out, and was only surprised at her delay. The phantom rickshaw and I went side by side along the Chota Simla Road in silence. Close to the bazaar, Kitty and a man on horseback overtook and passed us. For any sign she gave I might have been a dog in the road. She did not even pay me the compliment of quickening her pace, though the rainy afternoon had served for an excuse. So Kitty and her companion and I and my ghostly light o' love crept round Jocko in couples. The road was streaming with water, the pines dripped like roofpipes on the rocks below, and the air was full of fine driving rain. Two or three times I found myself saying to myself, almost aloud, I'm Jack Pansay on leave at Simla, at Simla, every day, ordinary Simla. I mustn't forget that. I mustn't forget that. Then I would try to recollect some of the gossip I had heard at the club, the prices of so and so's horses, anything in fact that related to the workday Anglo-Indian world I knew so well. I even repeated the multiplication table rapidly to myself to make quite sure that I was not taking leave of my senses. It gave me much comfort and must have prevented my hearing, Mrs. Wessington, for a time. Once more I wearily climbed the convent slope and entered the level road. Here Kitty and the man started off at a canter and I was left alone with Mrs. Wessington. Agnes said I, will you put back your hood and tell me what it all means? The hood dropped noiselessly and I was face to face with my dead and buried mistress. She was wearing the dress in which I had last seen her alive, carried the same tiny handkerchief in her right hand and the same card case in her left. A woman eight months dead with a card case. I had to pin myself down to the multiplication table and set both hands on the stone parapet of the road to assure myself that at least this was real. Agnes, I repeated, for pity's sake, tell me what it all means. Mrs. Wessington leaned forward with that odd quick turn of the head I used to know so well and spoke. If my story had not already so madly overleaped the bounds of all human belief I should apologize to you now, as I know that no one, no, not even kitty for whom it is written as some sort of justification of my conduct will believe me. I will go on. Mrs. Wessington spoke and I walked with her from the San Jolie Road to the turning below the Commander-in-Chief's house as I might walk by the side of any living woman's rickshaw deep in conversation. The second and most tormenting of my moods of sickness had suddenly laid hold upon me and like the Prince in Tennyson's poem I seemed to move amid a world of ghosts. There had been a garden party at the Commander-in-Chief's and we too joined the crowd of homeward bound folk. As I saw them then it seemed that they were the shadows, impalpable, fantastic shadows that divided for Mrs. Wessington's rickshaw to pass through. What we said during the course of that weird interview I cannot, indeed, I dare not tell. Heatherly's comment would have been a short laugh and a remark that I had been mashing a brain-eye and stomach chimera. It was a ghastly and yet in some indefinable way a marvelously dear experience. Could it be possible I wondered that I was in this life to woo a second time the woman I had killed by my own neglect and cruelty? I met Kitty on the homeward road, a shadow, among shadows. If I were to describe all the incidents of the next fortnight in their order my story would never come to an end and your patience would be exhausted. Morning after morning and evening after evening the ghostly rickshaw and I used to wander through Seamla together. Wherever I went there the four black and white liveries followed me and bore me company to and from my hotel. At the theatre I found them amid the crowd or yelling hampanies. Outside the club veranda, after a long evening of wist at the birthday ball waiting patiently for my reappearance and in broad daylight when I went calling, save that it cast no shadow the rickshaw was in every respect as real to look upon as one of wood and iron. More than once indeed I have had to check myself from warning some hard-riding friend against cantering over it. More than once I have walked down the mall deep in conversation with Mrs. Wessington to the unspeakable amazement of the passers-by. Before I had been out in about a week I learned that the fit theory had been discarded in favour of insanity. However I made no change in my mode of life. I called, rode, and dined out as freely as ever. I had a passion for the society of my kind which I had never felt before. I hungered to be among the realities of life and at the same time I felt vaguely unhappy when I had been separated too long from my ghostly companion. It would be almost impossible to describe my varying moods from the fifteenth of May up to today. The presence of the rickshaw filled me by turns with horror, blind fear, a dim sort of pleasure and utter despair. I dared not leave Simla and I knew that my stay there was killing me. I knew moreover that it was my destiny to die slowly and a little every day. My only anxiety was to get the penance over as quietly as might be. Alternately I hungered for a sight of Kitty and watched her outrageous flirtations with my successor to speak more accurately my successors with amazed interest. She was as much out of my life as I was out of hers. By day I wandered with Mrs. Wessington almost content. By night I implored Heaven to let me return to the world as I used to know it. Above all these varying moods lay the sensation of dull, numbing wonder that the seen and the unseen should mingle so strangely on this earth to hound one poor soul to its grave. August 27th. Heatherly has been indefatigable in his attendance on me, and only yesterday told me that I ought to send in an application for sick leave. An application to escape the company of a phantom. A request that the government would graciously permit me to get rid of five ghosts and an airy rickshaw by going to England. Heatherly's proposition moved me to almost hysterical laughter. I told him that I should await the end quietly at Simla and I'm sure that the end is not far off. Believe me that I dread its advent more than any word can say and I torture myself nightly with a thousand speculations as to the manner of my death. Shall I die in my bed decently as an English gentleman should die or in one last walk on the Mall will my soul be wrenched from me to take its place forever and ever by the side of that ghastly phantasm? Shall I return to my old lost allegiance in the next world or shall I meet Agnes loathing her and bound to her side through all eternity? Shall we to hover over the scene of our lives till the end of time? As the day of my death draws nearer the intense horror that all living flesh feels towards escaped spirits from beyond the grave grows more and more powerful. It is an awful thing to go down quick among the dead with scarcely one half of your life completed. It is a thousand times more awful to wait as I do in your midst, for I know not what unimaginable terror. Pitting me at least on the score of my delusion, for I know you will never believe what I have written here. Yet as surely as ever a man was done to death by the powers of darkness, I am that man. In justice too pity her, for as surely as ever woman was killed by man I killed Mrs. Wessington, and the last portion of my punishment is ever now upon me. End of The Phantom Rickshaw by Rudyard Kipling The Red Room by H. G. Wells This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Paul Sheiky The Red Room by H. G. Wells I can assure you, said I, that it will take a very tangible ghost to frighten me, and I stood up before the fire with my glass in my hand. It is your own choosing, said the man with the withered arm, and glanced at me a scance. Eight and twenty years, said I, I have lived and never a ghost have I seen as yet. The old woman sat staring hard into the fire, her pale eyes wide open. Ah! she broke in. At eight and twenty years you have lived, and never seen the likes of this house, I reckon. There are many things to see when one's still but eight and twenty. She swayed her head slowly from side to side, and many things to see and sorrow fall. I half suspected the old people were trying to enhance the spiritual terrors of their house by their droning insistence. I put down my empty glass on the table, and looked about the room, and caught a glimpse of myself, abbreviated and broadened to an impossible sturdiness, in a queer old mirror at the end of the room. Well, I said, if I see anything tonight I shall be so much the wiser, for I come to the business with an open mind. It's your own choosing, said the man with the withered arm once more. I heard the sound of a stick and a shambling step on the flags in the passage outside, and the door creaked on its hinges as a second old man entered, more bent, more wrinkled, more aged even than the first. He supported himself by a single crutch. His eyes were covered by a shade, and his lower lip, half averted, hung pale and pink from his decaying yellow teeth. He made straight for an armchair on the opposite side of the table, sat down clumsily, and began to cough. The man with the withered arm gave this newcomer a short glance of positive dislike. The old woman took no notice of his arrival, but remained with her eyes fixed steadily on the fire. I said, it's your own choosing, said the man with the withered arm, when the coughing had ceased for a while. It's my own choosing, I answered. The man with the shade became aware of my presence for the first time, and threw his head back for a moment and sideways to see me. I caught a momentary glimpse of his eyes, small and bright and inflamed. Then he began to cough and splutter again. Why don't you drink? said the man with the withered arm, pushing the beer towards him. The man with the shade poured out a glassful with a shaky arm that splashed half as much again on the deal table. A monstrous shadow of him crouched upon the wall and mocked his action as he poured and drank. I must confess I had scarce expected these grotesque custodians. There is to my mind something inhuman in senility, something crouching and atavistic. The human qualities seem to drop from old people insensibly day by day. The three of them made me feel uncomfortable, with their gaunt silences, their bent carriage, their evident unfriendliness to me and to one another. If, said I, you will show me to this haunted room of yours, I will make myself comfortable there. The old man with the cough jerked his head back so suddenly that it startled me, and shot another glance of his red eyes at me from under the shade. But no one answered me. I waited a minute, glancing from one to the other. If, I said a little louder, if you all show me to this haunted room of yours, I will relieve you from the task of entertaining me. There's a candle on the slab outside the door, said the man with the withered arm, looking at my feet as he addressed me. But if you go to the red room tonight, this night of all nights, said the old woman, you go alone. Very well, I answered, and which way do I go? You go along the passage for a bit, said he, until you come to a door and through that is a spiral staircase, and halfway up that is a landing and another door covered with bays. Go through that and down the long corridor to the end, and the red room is on your left up the steps. Have I got that right? I said, and repeated his directions. He corrected me in one particular. Are you really going? said the man with the shade, looking at me again for the third time, with that queer unnatural tilting of the face. This night of all nights, said the old woman. It is what I came for, I said, and moved towards the door. As I did so, the old man with the shade rose and staggered round the table, so as to be closer to the others and to the fire. At the door I turned and looked at them, and saw they were all close together, dark against the firelight, staring at me over their shoulders, with an intent expression on their ancient faces. Good night, I said, setting the door open. It's your own choosing, said the man with the withered arm. I left the door wide open until the candle was well alight, and then I shut them in and walked down the chilly, echoing passage. I must confess that the oddness of these three old pensioners, in whose charge her ladyship had left the castle, and the deep-toned, old-fashioned furniture of the housekeeper's room in which they foregathered, affected me in spite of my efforts to keep myself at a matter-of-fact phase. They seemed to belong to another age, an older age, an age when things spiritual were different from this of ours, less certain, an age when omens and witches were credible, and ghosts beyond denying. Their very existence was spectral, the cut of their clothing, fashions born in dead brains. The ornaments and conveniences of the room about them were ghostly, the thoughts of vanished men, which still haunted rather than participated in the world of today. But with an effort, I sent such thoughts to the right about. The long, drafty subterranean passage was chilly and dusty, and my candle flared and made the shadows cower and quiver. The echoes rang up and down the spiral staircase, and a shadow came sweeping up after me, and one fled before me into the darkness overhead. I came to the landing and stopped there for a moment, listening to a rustling that I fancied I heard. Then, satisfied of the absolute silence, I pushed open the bay's covered door, and stood in the corridor. The effect was scarcely what I expected, for the moonlight coming in by the great window and the grand staircase picked out everything in vivid black shadow or silvery illumination. Everything was in its place. The house might have been deserted on the yesterday instead of 18 months ago. There were candles in the sockets of the sconces, and whatever dust had gathered on the carpets or upon the polished flooring was distributed so evenly as to be invisible in the moonlight. I was about to advance and stopped abruptly. A bronze group stirred upon the landing, hidden from me by the corner of the wall, but its shadow fell with marvellous distinctness upon the white paneling, and gave me the impression of someone crouching to waylay me. I stood rigid for half a minute, perhaps. Then, with my hand in the pocket that held my revolver, I advanced, only to discover a ganymede and eagle glistening in the moonlight. That incident for a time restored my nerve, and a porcelain china man on a boule table, whose head rocks silently as I passed him, scarcely startled me. The door to the red room and the steps up to it were in a shadowy corner. I moved my candle from side to side, in order to see clearly the nature of the recess in which I stood before opening the door. Here it was, thought I, that my predecessor was found, and the memory of that story gave me a sudden twinge of apprehension. I glanced over my shoulder at the ganymede in the moonlight, and opened the door of the red room rather hastily, with my face half turned to the pallid silence of the landing. I entered, closed the door behind me at once, turned the key I found in the lock within, and stood with a candle held aloft, surveying the scene of my vigil, the great red room of Lorraine Castle, in which the young Duke had died. Or, rather, in which he had begun his dying, for he had opened the door and fallen headlong down the stepside just ascended. That had been the end of his vigil, of his gallant attempt to conquer the ghostly tradition of the place, and never, I thought, had Apoplexy better serve the ends of superstition. And there were other and older stories that clung to the room. Back to the half-credible beginning of it all, the tale of a timid wife and the tragic end that came to her husband's jest of frightening her. And looking around that large somber room, with its shadowy window-bays, its recesses and alcoves, one could well understand the legends that had sprouted in its black corners, its germinating darkness. My candle was a little tong of light in its vastness, that failed to pierce the opposite end of the room, and left an ocean of mystery and suggestion beyond its island of light. I resolved to make a systematic examination of the place at once, and dispel the fanciful suggestions of its obscurity before they obtained a hold upon me. After satisfying myself of the fastening of the door, I began to walk about the room, peering round each article of furniture, tucking up the valances of the bed, and opening its curtains wide. I pulled up the blinds and examined the fastenings of the several windows before closing the shutters, lent forward and looked up the blackness of the wide chimney, and tapped the dark oak panelling for any secret opening. There were two big mirrors in the room, each with a pair of sconces bearing candles, and on the mantel shelf too were more candles in china candlesticks. All these I lit one after the other. The fire was laid, an unexpected consideration from the old housekeeper, and I lit it to keep down any disposition to shiver, and when it was burning well, I stood round with my back to it and regarded the room again. I had pulled up a chintz covered armchair and a table to form a kind of barricade before me, and on this lay my revolver ready to hand. My precise examination had done me good, but I still found the remote darkness of the place and its perfect stillness too stimulating for the imagination. The echoing of the stirrer and crackling of the fire was no sort of comfort to me. The shadow in the alcove at the end in particular had the undefinable quality of a presence, that old suggestion of a lurking living thing that comes so easily in silence and solitude. At last, to reassure myself, I walked with a candle into it and satisfied myself that there was nothing tangible there. I stood that candle upon the floor of the alcove and left it in that position. By this time I was in a state of considerable nervous tension. Although to my reason there was no adequate cause for the condition. My mind however was perfectly clear. I postulated quite unreservedly that nothing supernatural could happen and to pass the time I began to string some rhymes together in Goldsby fashion of the original legend of the place. A few I spoke aloud where the echoes were not pleasant. For the same reason I also abandoned, after a time, a conversation with myself upon the impossibility of ghosts and haunting. My mind reverted to the three old and distorted people downstairs and I tried to keep it upon that topic. The somber reds and blacks of the room troubled me. Even with seven candles the place was merely dim. The one in the alcove flared in a draft and the fire's flickering kept the shadows and pernumbra perpetually shifting and stirring. Casting about for a remedy I recalled the candles I had seen in the passage and, with a slight effort, walked out into the moonlight carrying a candle and leaving the door open and presently returned with as many as ten. These I put in various knickknacks of China with which the room was sparsely adorned, lit and placed where the shadows had lain deepest, some on the floor, some in the window recesses, until at last my seventeen candles were so arranged that not an inch of the room but had the direct light of at least one of them. It occurred to me that when the ghost came I could warn him not to trip over them. The room was now brightly illuminated. There was something very cheery and reassuring in these little streaming flames and snuffing them gave me an occupation and afforded a helpful sense of the passage of time. Even with that, however, the brooding expectation of the vigil weighed heavily upon me. It was after midnight that the candle in the alcove suddenly went out and the black shadow sprung back into its place there. I did not see the candle go out. I simply turned and saw that the darkness was there as one might start and see the unexpected presence of a stranger. By Jove, said I aloud, that drafts a strong one. And taking the matches from the table, I walked across the room in a leisurely manner to relight the corner again. My first match would not strike, and as I succeeded with the second, something seemed to blink on the wall before me. I turned my head involuntarily and saw that the two candles on the little table by the fireplace were extinguished. I rose at once to my feet. Old, I said. Did I do that myself in a flash of absent-mindedness? I walked back, relit one, and as I did so, I saw the candle in the right sconce of one of the mirror's wing can go right out. And almost immediately its companion followed it. There was no mistake about it. The flame vanished as if the wicks had suddenly been nipped between a finger and a thumb, leaving the wick neither glowing nor smoking, but black. While I stood gaping, the candle at the foot of the bed went out, and the shadow seemed to take another step towards me. This won't do, said I. And first one, and then another candle on the mantel shelf followed. What's up? I cried with a queer high note getting into my voice somehow. And that the candle on the wardrobe went out, and the one I had relit in the alcove followed. Steady on, I said. These candles are wanted. Speaking with a half hysterical facetiousness, and scratching away at a match the wire for the mantel candlesticks. My hands trembled so much that twice I missed the rough paper of the matchbox. As the mantel emerged from darkness again, two candles in the remote end of the window were eclipsed. But with the same match I also relit the larger mirror candles, and those on the floor near the doorway, so that for the moment I seemed to gain on the extinctions. But then in a volley there vanished four lights at once in different corners of the room, and I struck another match in quivering haste, and stood hesitating wither to take it. As I stood, undecided, an invisible hand seemed to sweep out the two candles on the table. With a cry of terror I dashed to the alcove, then into the corner, and then to the window, relighting three as two more vanished by the fireplace. Then, perceiving a better way, I dropped the matches on the iron-bound deedbox in the corner, and caught up the bedroom candlestick. With this, I avoided the delay of striking matches. But for all that, the steady process of extinction went on, and the shadows I feared and fought against returned, and crept in upon me, first a step gained on this side of me, and then on that. It was like a ragged storm cloud sweeping out the stars. Now and then, one returned for a minute, and was lost again. I was now asked frantic with the horror of the coming darkness, and my self-possession deserted me. I leaped panting and dishevelled from candle to candle in a vain struggle against that remorseous advance. I bruised myself on the thigh against the table. I sent a chair headlong. I stumbled and fell and whisked the cloth from the table in my fall. My candle rolled away from me, and I snatched another as I rose. Abruptly this was blown out, as I swung it off the table by the wind of my sudden movement, and immediately the two remaining candles followed. But there was light still in the room. A red light that staved off the shadows from me. The fire. Of course, I could still thrust my candle between the bars and relight it. I turned to where the flames were still dancing between the glowing coals, and splashing red reflections upon the furniture. Made two steps towards the grate, and incontinently the flames dwindled and vanished. The glow vanished. The reflections rushed together and vanished. And as I thrust the candle between the bars, darkness closed upon me like the shutting of an eye. Wrapped about me in a stifling embrace, sealed my vision, and crushed the last vestiges of reason from my brain. The candle fell from my hand. I flung out my arms in a vain effort to thrust that ponderous blackness away from me, and, lifting up my voice, screamed with all my might, once, twice, thrice. Then I think I must have staggered to my feet. I know I thought suddenly of the moonlit corridor, and, with my head bowed and my arms over my face, made a run for the door. But I had forgotten the exact position of the door, and struck myself heavily against the corner of the bed. I staggered back, turned, and was either struck or struck myself against some other bulky furniture. I have a vague memory of battering myself thus, to and fro in the darkness, of a cramped struggle, and of my own wild crying as I darted to and fro, of a heavy blow at last upon my forehead, a horrible sensation of falling that lasted an age of my last frantic effort to keep my footing. And then I remember no more. I opened my eyes in daylight. My head was roughly bandaged, and the man with a withered arm was watching my face. I looked about me, trying to remember what had happened, and for a space I could not recollect. I rolled my eyes into the corner, and saw the old woman, no longer abstracted, pouring out some drops of medicine from a little blue file into a glass. Where am I? I asked. I seem to remember you, but yet I cannot remember who you are. They told me then, and I heard of the haunted red room as one who hears a tale. We found you at dawn, said he, and there was blood on your forehead and lips. It was very slowly I recovered my memory of my experience. You believe now, said the old man, that the room is haunted? He spoke no longer as one who greets an intruder, but as one who grieves for a broken friend. Yes, said I, the room is haunted, and you have seen it? And we, who have lived here all our lives, have never set eyes upon it, because we have never dared? Tell us, is it truly the old Earl who— No, said I. It is not. I told you so, said the old lady, with the glass in her hand. It is his poor young countess who was frightened. It is not, I said. There is neither ghost of Earl nor ghost of Countess in that room. There is no ghost there at all, but worse, far worse. Well, they said, the worst of all things that haunt poor mortal men, said I. And that is, in all its nakedness, fear, fear that will not have light nor sound, that will not bear with reason, that deafens and darkens and overwhelms. It followed me through the corridor. It fought against me in the room. I stopped abruptly. There was an interval of silence. My hand went up to my bandages. Then the man with the shade sighed and spoke. That is it, said he. I knew that was it, a power of darkness, to put such a curse upon a woman. It lurks there always. You can feel it even in the daytime, even of a bright summer's day, in the hangings, in the curtains, keeping behind you however you face about. In the dusk it creeps along the corridor and follows you, so they dare not turn. There is fear in that room of hers, black fear, and there will be, so long as this house of sin endures. End of The Red Room by H. G. Wells The Shadow in the Corner by Mary Elizabeth Braddon This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Rosie. The Shadow in the Corner by Mary Elizabeth Braddon Wild Heath Grange stood a little way back from the road, with a barren stretch of heath behind it and a few tall fir trees with straggling wind-tossed heads for its only shelter. It was a lonely house on a lonely road, little better than a lane, leading across a desolate waste of sandy fields to the seashore. And it was a house that bore a bad name among the natives of the village of Holcroft, which was the nearest place where humanity might be found. It was a good old house nevertheless, substantially built in the days when there was no stint of stone and timber, a good old grey stone house with many gables, deep window seats, and a wide staircase, long dark passages, hidden doors and queer corners, closets as large as some modern rooms, and cellars in which a company of soldiers might have lain perdu. This spacious old mansion was given over to rats and mice, loneliness, echoes, and the occupation of three elderly people, Michael Baskham, whose forebears had been landowners of importance in the neighborhood, and his two servants, Daniel Skegg and his wife, who had served the owner of that grim old house ever since he left the university where he had lived 15 years of his life, five as student and ten as professor of natural science. At 3 and 30, Michael Baskham had seemed a middle-aged man. At 56, he looked and moved and spoke like an old man. During that interval of 23 years, he had lived alone in Wild Heath Grange, and the country people told each other that the house had made him what he was. This was a fanciful and superstitious notion on their parts, doubtless, yet it would not have been difficult to have traced a certain affinity between the dull grey building and the man who lived in it. Both seemed alike, remote from the common cares and interests of humanity. Both had an air of settled melancholy engendered by perpetual solitude. Both had the same faded complexion, the same look of slow decay. Yet, lonely as Michael Baskham's life was at Wild Heath Grange, he would not on any account have altered its tenor. He had been glad to exchange the comparative seclusion of college rooms for the unbroken solitude of Wild Heath. He was a fanatic in his love of scientific research, and his quiet days were filled to the brim with labours that seldom failed to interest and satisfy him. There were periods of depression, occasional moments of doubt, when the gold towards which he strove seemed unattainable, and his spirit fainted within him. Happily such times were rare with him. He had a dogged power of continuity which ought to have carried him to the highest pinnacle of achievement, and which perhaps might ultimately have won for him a grand name and worldwide renown, but for a catastrophe which burdened the declining years of his harmless life with an unconquerable remorse. One autumn morning, when he had lived just three and twenty years at Wild Heath, and had only lately begun to perceive that his faithful butler and body-servant, who was middle-aged when he first employed him, was actually getting old, Mr. Baskham's breakfast meditations over the latest treatise on the atomic theory were interrupted by an abrupt demand from that very Daniel's gag. The man was accustomed to wait upon his master in the most absolute silence, and his sudden breaking out into speech was almost as startling as if the bust of Socrates above the bookcase had burst into human language. It's no use, said Daniel. My Mrs. must have a girl. A what? demanded Mr. Baskham, without taking his eyes from the line he had been reading. A girl. A girl to trot about and wash up and help the old lady. She's getting weak on her legs, poor soul. We've none of us grown younger in the last twenty years. Twenty years, echoed Michael Baskham scornfully. What is twenty years in the formation of Estrada? What even in the growth of an oak, the cooling of a volcano? Not much, perhaps, but it's apt to tell upon the bones of a human being. The manganese staining to be seen upon some skulls would certainly indicate, began the scientists dreamily, I wish my bones were only as free from rheumatics as they were twenty years ago, pursued Daniel Testilly, and then perhaps I should make light of twenty years. Howsoever, the long and short of it is, my Mrs. must have a girl. She can't go on trotting up and down these everlasting passages and standing in that stone scullery year after year just as if she was a young woman. She must have a girl to help. Let her have twenty girls, said Mr. Baskham, going back to his book. What's the use of talking like that, sir? Twenty girls indeed. We should have rare work to get one. Because the neighborhood is sparsely populated, interrogated Mr. Baskham, still reading? No, sir, because this house is known to be haunted. Michael Baskham laid down his book and turned a look of grave reproach upon his servant. Skeg, he said, in a severe voice. I thought you had lived long enough with me to be superior to any folly of that kind. I don't say that I believe in ghosts, answered Daniel, with a semi-apologetic air, but the country people do. There's not a mortal among them that will venture across our threshold after nightfall. Merely because Anthony Baskham, who led a wild life in London and lost his money in land, came home here brokenhearted and is supposed to have destroyed himself in this house, the only remnant of property that was left him out of a fine estate. Supposed to have destroyed himself, cried Skeg, why the fact is as well known as the death of Queen Elizabeth or the great fire of London, why, wasn't he buried at the crossroads between here and Hallcroft? An idle tradition for which he could produce no substantial proof, retorted Mr. Baskham. I don't know about proof, but the country people believe it as firmly as they believe their gospel. If their faith in the gospel was a little stronger, they need not trouble themselves about Anthony Baskham. Well, grumbled Daniel as he began to clear the table, a girl of some kind we must get, but she'll have to be a foreigner or a girl that's hard driven for a place. When Daniel Skeg said a foreigner, he did not mean the native of some distant climb, but a girl who had not been born and bred at Hallcroft. Daniel had been raised and reared in that insignificant hamlet, and, small and dull as it was, he considered the world beyond it only margin. Michael Baskham was too deep in the atomic theory to give a second thought to the necessities of an old servant. Mrs. Skeg was an individual with whom he rarely came in contact. She lived, for the most part, in a gloomy region at the north end of the house, where she ruled over the solitude of a kitchen that looked like a cathedral, and numerous offices of the sculler, larder, and pantry class, where she carried on a perpetual warfare with spiders and beetles, and wore her old life out in the labor of sweeping and scrubbing. She was a woman of severe aspect, dogmatic piety, and a bitter tongue. She was a good, plain cook, and ministered diligently to her master's wants. He was not an epicure, but liked his life to be smooth and easy, and the equilibrium of his mental power would have been disturbed by a bad dinner. He heard no more about the proposed addition to his household for a space of ten days, when Daniel Skeg again startled him amidst his studious repose by the abrupt announcement, I've got a girl. Oh, said Michael Baskham, have you? And he went on with his book. This time he was reading an essay on phosphorus and its functions in relation to the human brain. Yes, pursued Daniel in his usual grumbling tone, she was a wave and a stray, or I shouldn't have got her, if she'd been a native she'd never have come to us. I hope she's respectable, said Michael. Respectable. That's the only fault she has, poor thing. She's too good for the place. She's never been in service before, but she says she's willing to work, and I dare say my old woman will be able to break her in. Her father was a small tradesman at Yarmouth. He died a month ago and left this poor thing homeless. Mrs. Midge at Holcroft is her aunt, and she said to the girl, come and stay with me till you get a place, and the girl has been staying with Mrs. Midge for the last three weeks, trying to hear of a place. When Mrs. Midge heard that my Mrs. wanted a girl to help, she thought it would be the very thing for her niece Maria. Luckily Maria had heard nothing about this house, so the poor innocent dropped me a curtsy and said she'd be thankful to come, and would do her best to learn her duty. She'd had an easy time of it with her father, who had educated her above her station, like a fool as he was, growled Daniel. By your own account I'm afraid you've made a bad bargain, said Michael. You don't want a young lady to clean kettles and pans. If she was a young duchess my old woman would make her work, retorted Skag decisively. And pray, where are you going to put this girl, asked her Mr. Baskham, rather irritably, I can't have a strange young woman tramping up and down the passages outside my room. You know what a wretched sleeper I am, Skag, a mouse behind the wane scot is enough to wake me. I've thought of that, answered the butler, with his look of ineffable wisdom. I'm not going to put her on your floor, she's to sleep in the attics. Which room? The big one at the north end of the house, that's the only ceiling that doesn't let water. She might as well sleep in a shower bath, as in any of the other attics. The room at the north end, repeated Mr. Baskham thoughtfully, isn't that? Of course it is, Snapskag, but she doesn't know anything about it. Mr. Baskham went back to his books and forgot all about the orphan from Yarmouth until one morning on entering his study he was startled by the appearance of a strange girl, in a neat black and white cotton gown busy dusting the volumes which were stacked and blocks upon his spacious writing table, and doing it with such deft and careful hands that he had no inclination to be angry at this unwanted liberty. Old Mrs. Skag had religiously refrained from all such dusting on the plea that she did not wish to interfere with the master's ways. One of the master's ways, therefore, had been to inhale a good deal of dust in the course of his studies. The girl was a slim little thing, with a pale and somewhat old-fashioned face, flaxen hair braided under a neat muslin cap, a very fair complexion, and light blue eyes. They were the lightest blue eyes Michael Baskham had ever seen, but there was a sweetness and gentleness in their expression which atoned for their insipid color. I hope you do not object to my dusting your books, sir, she said, dropping the curtsy. She spoke with a quaint precision which struck Michael Baskham as a pretty thing in its way. No, I don't object to cleanliness so long as my books and papers are not disturbed. If you take a volume off my desk, replace it on the spot you took it from. That's all I ask. I will be very careful, sir. When did you come here? Only this morning, sir. The student seated himself at his desk, and the girl withdrew, drifting out of the room as noiselessly as a flower blown across the threshold. Michael Baskham looked after her curiously. He had seen very little of youthful womanhood in his dry-as-dust career, and he wondered at this girl as a creature of a species hitherto unknown to him. How fairly and delicately she was fashioned. What a translucent skin, what soft and pleasing accents issued from those rose-tinted lips. A pretty thing, assuredly, this kitchen wench. A pit that in all this busy world there could be no better work found for her than the scouring of pots and pans. Absorbed in considerations about dry bones, Mr. Baskham thought no more of the pale-faced handmaiden. He saw her no more about his rooms. Whatever work she did there was done early in the morning before the scholar's breakfast. She had been a week in the house when he met her one day in the hall. He was struck by the change in her appearance. The girlish lips had lost their rosebud hue, the pale blue eyes had a frightened look, and there were dark rings around them, as in one whose nights had been sleepless or troubled by evil dreams. Michael Baskham was so startled by an undefinable look in the girl's face, reserved as he was by habit and nature, he expanded so far as to ask her what ailed her. There is something amiss, I am sure, he said. What is it? Nothing, sir, she faltered, looking still more scared at his question. Indeed, it is nothing, or nothing worth troubling you about. Nonsense. Do you suppose because I live among books I have no sympathy with my fellow creatures? Tell me what is wrong with you, child. You have been grieving about the father you have lately lost, I suppose. No, sir, it is not that. I shall never leave off being sorry for that. It is a grief which will last me all my life. What? There's something else, then, asked Michael impatiently. I see. You are not happy here. Hard work does not suit you. I thought as much. Oh, sir, please don't think that, cried the girl, very earnestly. Indeed, I am glad to work, glad to be in service. It is only she faltered and broke down, the tears rolling slowly from her sorrowful eyes, despite her effort to keep them back. Only what, cried Michael, growing angry, the girl is full of secrets and mysteries. What do you mean, Wench? I—I know it is very foolish, sir, but I am afraid of the room where I sleep. Afraid? Why? Shall I tell you the truth, sir? Will you promise not to be angry? I will not be angry if you will only speak plainly, but you provoke me by these hesitations and suppressions. And please, sir, do not tell Mrs. Skegg that I have told you. She would scold me, or perhaps even send me away. Mrs. Skegg shall not scold you. Go on, child. You may not know the room where I sleep, sir. It is a large room at one end of the house, looking towards the sea. I can see the dark line of water from the window, and I wonder sometimes to think that it is the same ocean I used to see when I was a child at Yarmouth. It is very lonely, sir, at the top of the house. Mr. and Mrs. Skegg sleep in a little room near the kitchen, you know, sir, and I am quite alone on the top floor. Skegg told me you had been educated in advance of your position in life, Maria. I should have thought the first effect of a good education would have been to make you superior to any foolish fancies about empty rooms. Oh, praise, sir, do not think it is any fault in my education. Father took such pains with me. He spared no expense in giving me as good an education as a tradesman's daughter need wish for. And he was a religious man, sir. He did not believe—here she paused with a suppressed shudder, in the spirits of the dead appearing to the living since the days of miracles when the ghost of Samuel appeared to Saul. He never put any foolish ideas into my head, sir. I hadn't a thought of fear when I first laid down to rest in the big, lonely room upstairs. Well, what then? But on the very first night the girl went on breathlessly. I felt weighed down in my sleep as if there were some heavy burden laid upon my chest. It was not a bad dream, but it was a sense of trouble that followed me all through my sleep. And just a daybreak, it begins to be light a little after six, I woke suddenly, with the cold perspiration pouring down my face, and knew that there was something dreadful in the room. What do you mean by something dreadful? Did you see anything? Not much, sir, but it froze the blood in my veins, and I knew it was this that had been following me and weighing upon me all through my sleep. In the corner, between the fireplace and the wardrobe, I saw a shadow, a dim, shapeless shadow, produced by an angle of the wardrobe, I dare say. No, sir, I could see the shadow of the wardrobe, distinct and sharp, as if it had been painted on the wall. This shadow was in the corner, a strange, shapeless mass, or if it had any shape at all, it seemed— What! asked Michael eagerly. The shape of a dead body hanging against the wall. Michael Baskham grew strangely pale, yet he affected utter incredulity. Poor child, he said kindly. You have been fretting about your father until your nerves are in a weak state, and you are full of fancies. A shadow in the corner indeed. Why, at daybreak, every corner is full of shadows. My old coat flung upon a chair will make you as good a ghost as you need care to see. Oh, sir, I have tried to think it is my fancy, but I have had the same burden weighing me down every night. I have seen the same shadow every morning. But when broad daylight comes, can you not see what stuff your shadow is made of? No, sir, the shadow goes before it is broad daylight. Of course, just like other shadows. Come, come, get these silly notions out of your head, or you will never do for the work-a-day world. I could easily speak to Mrs. Skegg and make her give you another room if I wanted to encourage you in your folly. But that would be about the worst thing I could do for you. Besides, she tells me that all the other rooms on that floor are damp, and, no doubt, if she shifted you into one of them you would discover another shadow in another corner and get rheumatism into the bargain. No, my good girl, you must try to prove yourself the better for a superior education. I will do my best, sir, Maria answered meakly, dropping a curtsy. Maria went back to the kitchen, sorely depressed. It was a dreary life she led at Wild Heath Grange, dreary by day, awful by night, for the vague burden and the shapeless shadow which seemed so slight a matter to the elderly scholar were unspeakably terrible to her. Nobody had told her that the house was haunted, yet she walked about those echoing passages wrapped round with a cloud of fear. She had no pity from Daniel Skegg and his wife, those two pious souls had made up their minds that the character of the house should be upheld so far as Maria went. To her, as a foreigner, the Grange should be maintained to be an immaculate dwelling, tainted by no sulfurous blast from the underworld. A willing, biddable girl had become a necessary element in the existence of Mrs. Skegg. That girl had been found, and that girl must be kept. Any fancies of a supernatural character must be put down with a high hand. Ghosts, indeed, cried the amiable Skegg, read your Bible, Maria, and don't talk no more about ghosts. There are ghosts in the Bible, said Maria, with a shiver at the recollection of certain awful passages in the scripture she knew so well. Ah, they was in their right place, or they wouldn't have been there, retorted Mrs. Skegg. You ain't a go into pick holes in your Bible, I hope, Maria, at your time of life. Maria sat down quietly in her corner by the kitchen fire and turned over the leaves of her dead father's Bible till she came to the chapters they too had loved best and oftenest read together. He had been a simple-minded, straightforward man, the Yarmouth Cabinet Maker, a man full of aspirations after good, innately refined, instinctively religious. He and his motherless girl had spent their lives alone together in the neat little home which Maria had so soon learnt to cherish and beautify, and they had loved each other with an almost romantic love. They had had the same tastes, the same ideas, very little had suffice to make them happy, but inexorable death parted father and daughter in one of those sharp, sudden partings which are like the shock of an earthquake, instantaneous ruin, desolation, and despair. Maria's fragile form had bent before the tempest, she had lived through a trouble that might have crushed a stronger nature. Her deep religious convictions and her belief that this cruel parting would not be forever had sustained her. She faced life and its cares and duties with a gentle patience which was the noblest form of courage. Michael Baskham told himself that the servant girl's foolish fancy about the room that had been given her was not a matter of serious consideration. Yet the idea dwelt in his mind unpleasantly and disturbed him at his labours. The exact sciences required the complete power of a man's brain, his utmost attention, and on this particular evening Michael found that he was only giving his work a part of his attention. The girl's pale face, the girl's tremulous tones, thrust themselves into the foreground of his thoughts. He closed his book with a fretful sigh, wheeled his large armchair round to the fire and gave himself up to contemplation. To attempt study was so disturbed a mind was useless. It was a dull gray evening early in November. The student's reading lamp was lighted, but the shutters were not yet shut, nor the curtains drawn. He could see the leaden sky outside his windows, the fir tree tops tossing in the angry wind. He could hear the wintry blast whistling amidst the gables before it rushed off seaward with a savage howl that sounded like a war-woop. Michael Baskham shivered and drew nearer the fire. It's childish, foolish nonsense he said to himself, yet it's strange she should have that fancy about the shadow, for they say Anthony Baskham destroyed himself in that room. I remember hearing it when I was a boy from an old servant whose mother was housekeeper at the Great House in Anthony's time. I never heard how he died, poor fellow, whether he poisoned himself or shot himself or cut his throat, but I've been told that was the room. Old Skag has heard it too. I could see that by his manner when he told me the girl was to sleep there. He sat for a long time till the gray of evening outside his study windows changed to the black of night and the war-woop of the wind died away to a low, complaining murmur. He sat looking into the fire and letting his thoughts wander back to the past and traditions he had heard in his boyhood. That was a sad, foolish story of his great-uncle, Anthony Baskham, the pitiful story of a wasted fortune and a wasted life, a riotous collegiate career at Cambridge, a racing stable at Newmarket, an imprudent marriage, a dissipated life in London, a runaway wife, an estate forfeited to Jew money lenders, and then the fatal end. Michael had often heard that dismal story, how, when Anthony Baskham's fair, false wife had left him, when his credit was exhausted and his friends had grown tired of him, and all was gone except Wildheath Grange. Anthony, the broken-down man of fashion, had come to that lonely house unexpectedly one night and had ordered his bed to be got ready for him in the room where he used to sleep when he came to the place for the wild duck shooting in his boyhood. His old blunderbuss was still hanging over the mantelpiece, where he had left it when he came into the property and could afford to buy the newest thing in fouling pieces. He had not been to Wildheath for fifteen years. Nay, for a good many of those years, he had almost forgotten that the drear old house belonged to him. The woman who had been housekeeper at Baskham Park, till house and lance had passed into the hands of the Jews, was at this time the sole occupant of Wildheath. She cooked some supper for her master, and made him as comfortable as she could in the long, untenanted dining room, but she was distressed to find when she cleared the table after he had gone upstairs to bed that he had eaten hardly anything. Next morning she got his breakfast ready in the same room, which she managed to make brighter and cheerier than it had looked overnight. Rooms, dusting brushes, and a good fire did much to improve the aspect of things. But the morning wore on to noon, and the old housekeeper listened in vain for her master's footfall on the stairs. Noon waned till late afternoon. She had made no attempt to disturb him, thinking that he had worn himself out by a tedious journey on horseback, and that he was sleeping the sleep of exhaustion. But when the brief November day clouded with the first shadows of twilight, the old woman grew seriously alarmed, and went upstairs to her master's door, where she waited in vain for any reply to her repeated calls and knockings. The door was locked on the inside, and the housekeeper was not strong enough to break it open. She rushed downstairs again full of fear, and ran bare-headed out into the lonely road. There was no habitation nearer than the turnpike on the old coach road, from which this side road branched off to the sea. There was scanty hope of a chance pass her by. The old woman ran along the road, hardly knowing whether she was going, or what she was going to do, but with a vague idea that she must get somebody to help her. Chance favoured her. A cart, laden with seaweed, came lumbering slowly along from the level line of sand beyond her where the land melted into water. A heavy lumbering farm labourer walked beside the cart. For God's sake, come in and burst open my master's door, she entreated, seizing the man by the arm. He's lying dead or in a fit, and I can't get to help him. All right, Mrs. answered the man, as if such an invitation were a matter of daily occurrence. Whoa, Dobbin, stawn still horse, and bedong to thee. Dobbin was glad enough to be brought to anchor on the patch of waste grass in front of the Grange Garden. His master followed the housekeeper upstairs and shattered the old-fashioned box lock with one blow of his ponderous fist. The old woman's worst fear was realised. Anthony Baskham was dead. But the mode and manner of his death Michael had never been able to learn. The housekeeper's daughter, who told him the story, was an old woman when he was a boy. She had only shaken her head and looked unutterable things when he questioned her too closely. She had never even admitted that the old squire had committed suicide. Yet the tradition of his self-destruction was rooted in the minds of the natives of Holcroft, and there was a settled belief that his ghost, at certain times and seasons, haunted Wild Heath Grange. Now Michael Baskham was a stern materialist. For him the universe with all its inhabitants was a great machine governed by inexorable laws. To such a man the idea of a ghost was simply absurd, as absurd is the assertion that two and two make five, or that a circle can be formed of a straight line. Yet he had a kind of dilettante interest in the idea of a mind which could believe in ghosts. The subject offered an amusing psychological study. This poor little pale girl now had evidently got some supernatural terror into her head, which could only be conquered by rational treatment. I know what I ought to do, Michael Baskham said to himself suddenly. I'll occupy that room myself tonight and demonstrate to this foolish girl that her notion about the shadow is nothing more than a silly fancy, bread of timidity and low spirits. An ounce of proof is better than a pound of argument. If I can prove to her that I have spent a night in the room and seen no such shadow, she will understand what an idle thing superstition is. Daniel came in presently to shut the shutters. Tell your wife to make up my bed in the room where Maria has been sleeping and to put her into one of the rooms on the first floor for tonight's gag, said Mr. Baskham. Sir? Mr. Baskham repeated his order. That silly wench has been complaining to you about her room's gag exclaimed indignantly. She doesn't deserve to be well fed and cared for in a comfortable home. She ought to go to the workhouse. Don't be angry with the poor girl's gag. She has taken a foolish fancy into her head, and I want to show her how silly she is, said Mr. Baskham. And you want to sleep in his in that room yourself, said the butler? Precisely. Well, muse Skagg, if he does walk, which I don't believe, he was your own flesh and blood, and I don't suppose he'll do you any hurt. When Daniel Skagg went back to the kitchen, he railed mercilessly at poor Maria, who sat pale and silent in her corner by the hearth, darning old Mr. Skagg's gray worsted stockings, which were the roughest and harshest armor that ever human foot clothed itself with all. Was there ever such a whimsical fine ladylike mist, demanded Daniel, to come into a gentleman's house and drive him out of his own bedroom to sleep in an attic with her nonsense and vagaries? If this was the result of being educated above one station, Daniel declared that he was thankful he had never got so far in his schooling as to read words of two syllables without spelling. Education might be hanged for him if this was all it led to. I am very sorry, faulted Maria, weeping silently over her work. Indeed, Mr. Skagg, I made no complaint. My master questioned me, and I told him the truth. That was all. All, exclaimed Mr. Skagg, irately. All, indeed, I should think it was enough. Poor Maria held her peace. Her mind, fluttered by Daniel's unkindness, had wandered away from that bleak big kitchen to the lost home of the past. The snug little parlor where she and her father had sat beside the cozy hearth on such a night as this. She, with her smart workbox and her plain sewing, he with the newspaper he loved to read, the petted cat purring on the rug, the kettle singing on the bright brass trivet, the tea tray pleasantly suggestive of the most comfortable meal in the day. All those happy nights that dear companionship, were they really gone forever, leaving nothing behind them but unkindness and servitude? Michael Bascombe retired later than usual that night. He was in the habit of sitting at his books long after every other lamp at his own had been extinguished. The Skaggs had subsided into silence and darkness in their dreary ground floor bed chamber. Tonight his studies were of a peculiarly interesting kind, and belonged to the order of recreative reading rather than of hard work. He was deep in the history of that mysterious people who had their dwelling place in the Swiss lakes, and was much exercised by certain speculations and theories about them. The old eight-day clock on the stairs was striking, too, as Michael slowly ascended, candle in hand, to the hitherto unknown region of the attics. At the top of the staircase he found himself facing a dark narrow passage which led northwards, a passage that was in itself sufficient to strike terror to a superstitious mind so black and uncanny did it look. Poor child mused Mr. Baskham thinking of Maria. The satic floor is rather dreary, and for a young mind prone to fancies. He had opened the door of the North Room by this time and stood looking about him. It was a large room with a ceiling that sloped on one side but was fairly lofty upon the other, an old-fashioned room full of old-fashioned furniture, big ponderous clumsy, associated with the day that was gone and people that were dead. A walnut wood wardrobe stared him in the face, a wardrobe with brass handles which gleamed out of the darkness like diabolical eyes. There was a tall four-post bedstead which had been cut down on one side to accommodate the slope of the ceiling and which had a misshapen and deformed aspect and consequence. There was an old mahogany bureau that smelt of secrets. There were some heavy old chairs with rush bottoms, moldy with age, and much worn. There was a corner wash stand with a big basin and a small jug, the odds and ends of past years. Carpet there was none save a narrow strip beside the bed. It is a dismal room, used Michael, with the same touch of pity from Maria's weakness which he had felt on the landing just now. To him it mattered nothing where he slept, but having let himself down to a lower level by his interest in the Swiss Lake people, he was in a manner humanized by the lightness of his evening's reading and was even inclined to compassionate the weaknesses of a foolish girl. He went to bed, determined to sleep his soundest. The bed was comfortable, well supplied with blankets, rather luxurious than otherwise, and the scholar had that agreeable sense of fatigue which promised his profound and restful slumber. He dropped off to sleep quickly, but woke with a start ten minutes afterwards. What was this consciousness of a burden of care that had awakened him, the sense of all-pervading trouble that weighed upon his spirits and oppressed his heart, this icy horror of some terrible crisis in life through which he must inevitably pass? To him these feelings were as novel as they were painful. His life had flowed on with smooth and sluggish tide, unbroken by so much as a ripple of sorrow. Yet tonight he felt all the pangs of unavailing remorse, the agonizing memory of a life wasted, the stings of humiliation and disgrace, shame, ruin, a hideous death which he had doomed himself to die by his own hand. These were the horrors that pressed him round and weighed him down as he lay in Anthony Baskham's room. Yes, even he, the man who could recognize nothing in nature or in nature's God, better or higher than an irresponsible and invariable machine governed by mechanical laws, was fain to admit that here he found himself face to face with a psychological mystery. This trouble which came between him and sleep was the trouble that had pursued Anthony Baskham on the last night of his life. So had the suicide felt as he lay in that lonely room, perhaps striving to rest his wearied brain with one last earthly sleep before he passed to the unknown intermediate land where all his darkness and slumber. And that troubled mind had haunted the room ever since. It was not the ghost of the man's body that returned to the spot where he had suffered and perished, but the ghost of his mind, his very self, no meaningless simulacrum of the clothes he wore and the figure that filled them. Michael Baskham was not the man to abandon his high ground of skeptical philosophy without a struggle. He tried his hardest to conquer the suppression that weighed upon mind and sense. Again and again he succeeded in composing himself to sleep, but only to wake again and again to the same torturing thoughts, the same remorse, the same despair. So the night passed an unutterable weariness, for though he told himself that the trouble was not his trouble, that there was no reality in the burden, no reason for the remorse, these vivid fancies were as painful as realities and took as strong a hold upon him. The first streak of light crept in at the window, dim and cold and gray. Then came twilight and he looked at the corner between the wardrobe and the door. Yes, there was the shadow, not the shadow of the wardrobe only, that was clear enough, but a vague and shapeless something which darkened the dull brown wall, so faint, so shadow, that he could form no conjecture as to his nature or the thing it represented. He determined to watch the shadow till raw daylight, but the weariness of the night had exhausted him, and before the first dimness of dawn had passed away he had fallen fast asleep and was tasting the blessed balm of undisturbed slumber. When he woke the winter sun was shining in at the lattice and the room had lost its gloomy aspect. It looked old-fashioned and gray and brown and shabby, but the depth of its gloom had fled with the shadows and the darkness of night. Mr. Baskham rose refreshed by a sound sleep which had lasted nearly three hours. He remembered the wretched feelings which had gone before that renovating slumber, but he recalled his strange sensations only to despise them, and he despised himself for having attached any importance to them. Indigestion, very likely, he told himself, or perhaps mere fancy and gendered of that foolish girl's story, the wisest of us is more under the dominion of imagination than he would care to confess. Well, Maria shall not sleep in this room any more. There is no particular reason why she should, and she shall not be made unhappy to please old Skag and his wife. When he addressed himself in his usual leisurely way, Mr. Baskham walked up to the corner where he had seen or imagined the shadow and examined the spot carefully. At first sight he could discover nothing of a mysterious character. There was no door in the papered wall, no trace of a door that had been there in the past. There was no trapped door in the worm-eaten boards. There was no dark, ineradicable stain to hint at murder. There was not the faintest suggestion of a secret or a mystery. He looked up at the ceiling. That was sound enough, save for a dirty patch here and there where the rain had blistered it. Yes, there was something, an insignificant thing, yet with a suggestion of grimness which startled him. About a foot below the ceiling he saw a large iron hook projecting from the wall, just above the spot where he had seen the shadow of a vaguely defined form. He mounted on a chair the better to examine this hook and to understand, if he could, the purpose for which it had been put there. It was old and rusty. It must have been there for many years. Who could have placed it there and why? It was not the kind of hook upon which one would hang a picture or one's garments. It was placed in an obscure corner. Had Anthony Baskham put it there on the night he died, or did he find it there ready for a fatal use? If I were a superstitious man, thought Michael, I should be inclined to believe that Anthony Baskham hung himself from that rusty old hook. Sleep well, sir, asked Daniel as he waited upon his master at breakfast. Admirably, answered Michael, determined not to gratify the man's curiosity. He had always resented the idea that wildheath grange was haunted. Oh, indeed, sir, you were so late that I fancied. Late, yes, I slept so well that I overshot my usual hour for waking, but, by the way, Skag, as that poor girl objects to the room, let her sleep somewhere else. It can't make any difference to us, and it may make some differences to her. Humpf, muttered Daniel in his grumpy way. You didn't see anything queer up there, did you? See anything, of course not. Well, then, why should she see things? It's all her silly fiddle-faddle. Never mind, let her sleep in another room. There ain't another room on the top floor that's dry. Then let her sleep on the floor below. She creeped about quietly enough, poor little timid thing. She won't disturb me. Daniel grunted, and his master understood the grunt to mean obedient ascent. But here Mr. Baskham was unhappily mistaken. The proverbial obstinacy of the pink family is as nothing compared with the obstinacy of a cross-grained old man whose narrow mind has never been illuminated by education. Daniel was beginning to feel jealous of his master's compassionate interest in the orphan girl. She was a sort of gentle clinging thing that might creep into an elderly bachelor's heart unawares and make herself a comfortable nest there. We shall have fine carings on, and me and my old woman will be nowhere if I don't put down my heel pretty strong upon this nonsense, Daniel muttered to himself as he carried the breakfast tray to the pantry. Maria met him in the passage. Well, Mr. Skagg, what did my master say? She asked breathlessly. Did he see anything strange in the room? No, girl. What did he see? He said you were a fool. Nothing disturbed him, and he slept there peacefully, faltered Maria. Never slept better in his life. Now don't you begin to feel ashamed of yourself? Yes, she answered meekly. I am ashamed of being so full of fancies. I will go back to my room tonight, Mr. Skagg, if you like, and I will never complain of it again. I hope you won't, Snapskagg. You've given us trouble enough already. Maria sighed and went about her work in saddest silence. The day wore slowly on, like all other days in that lifeless old house. The scholar sat in his study. Maria moved softly from room to room, sweeping and dusting in the cheerless solitude. The midday sun faded into the gray of afternoon, and evening came down like a blight upon the dull old house. Throughout that day Maria and her master never met. Anyone who had been so far interested in the girl as to observe her appearance would have seen that she was unusually pale, and that her eyes had a resolute look, as of one who was resolved to face a painful ordeal. She ate hardly anything all day. She was curiously silent. Skagg and his wife put down both these symptoms to temper. She won't eat and she won't talk, said Daniel, to the partner of his joys. That means sulkingness, and I never allowed sulkingness to master me when I was a young man, and you tried it on as a young woman, and I'm not going to be conquered by sulkingness in my old age. Bedtime came, and Maria bathed the Skaggs a civil good night, and went up to her lonely garret without a murmur. The next morning came, and Mrs. Skagg looked in vain for her patient handmaiden when she wanted Maria's services in preparing the breakfast. The wench sleep sound enough this morning, said the old woman. Go and call her, Daniel. My poor legs can't stand them stares. Your poor legs are getting uncommon useless, muttered Daniel testily, as he went to do his wife's behest. He knocked at the door and called Maria, once, twice, thrice, many times, but there was no reply. He tried the door and found it locked. He shook the door violently, cold with fear. Then he told himself that the girl had played him a trick. She had stolen away before daybreak and left the door locked to frighten him. But no, this could not be, for he could see the key in the lock when he knelt down and put his eye to the keyhole. The key prevented his seeing into the room. She's in there, laughing in her sleeve at me, he told himself, but I'll soon be even with her. There was a heavy bar on the staircase, which was intended to secure the shutters of the window that lighted the stairs. It was a detached bar and had always stood in a corner near the window, which it was but rarely employed to fasten. Daniel ran down to the landing and seized upon this massive iron bar and then ran back to the garret door. One blow from the heavy bar shattered the old lock, which was the same lock the Carter had broken with his strong fist seventy years before. The door flew open and Daniel went into the attic which he had chosen for the stranger's bed chamber. Maria was hanging from the hook in the wall. She had contrived to cover her face decently with her handkerchief. She had hanged herself deliberately about an hour before Daniel found her in the early gray of morning. The doctor, who was summoned from Holcroft, was able to declare the time at which she had slain herself, but there was no one who could say what sudden access of terror had impelled her to the desperate act or under what slow torture of nervous apprehension in her mind had given way. The coroner's jury returned the customary merciful verdict of temporary insanity. The girl's melancholy fate darkened the rest of Michael Baskham's life. He fled from Wild Heath Grange as from an accursed spot and from the skags as from the murderers of a harmless innocent girl. He ended his days at Oxford where he found the society of congenial minds and the books he loved. But the memory of Maria's sad face and sadder death was his abiding sorrow. Out of that deep shadow his soul was never lifted. End of The Shadow in the Corner, Reading by Rosie