The Book of Dreams and Ghosts - Andrew Lang (best ebook reader ubuntu .TXT) 📗

position of it might excite surprise and cause inquiry.  I bound up my wrist with black ribbon before I went down to breakfast, where the agitation of my mind was too visible not to attract attention.  Sir Tristram made many anxious inquiries as to my health, especially as to my sprained wrist, as he conceived mine to be.  I begged him to drop all questions as to the bandage, even if I continued to adopt it for any length of time.  He kindly promised me not to speak of it any more, and he kept his promise faithfully.  You, my son, came into the world as predicted, and your father died six years after.  I then determined to abandon society and its pleasures and not mingle again with the world, hoping to avoid the dreadful predictions as to my second marriage; but, alas! in the one family with which I held constant and friendly intercourse I met the man, whom I did not regard with perfect indifference.  Though I struggled to conquer by every means the passion, I at length yielded to his solicitations, and in a fatal moment for my own peace I became his wife.  In a few years his conduct fully justified my demand for a separation, and I fondly hoped to escape the fatal prophecy.  Under the delusion that I had passed my forty-seventh birthday, I was prevailed upon to believe in his amendment, and to pardon him.  I have, however, heard from undoubted authority that I am only forty-seven this day, and I know that I am about to die.  I die, however, without the dread of death, fortified as I am by the sacred precepts of Christianity and upheld by its promises.  When I am gone, I wish that you, my children, should unbind this black ribbon and alone behold my wrist before I am consigned to the grave.’

“She then requested to be left that she might lie down and compose herself, and her children quitted the apartment, having desired her attendant to watch her, and if any change came on to summon them to her bedside.  In an hour the bell rang, and they hastened to the call, but all was over.  The two children having ordered every one to retire, knelt down by the side of the bed, when Lady Riverston unbound the black ribbon and found the wrist exactly as Lady Beresford had described it—every nerve withered, every sinew shrunk.

“Her friend, the Archbishop, had had her buried in the Cathedral of St. Patrick, in Dublin, in the Earl of Cork’s tomb, where she now lies.”

* * * * *

The writer now professes his disbelief in any spiritual presence, and explains his theory that Lady Beresford’s anxiety about Lord Tyrone deluded her by a vivid dream, during which she hurt her wrist.

Of all ghost stories the Tyrone, or Beresford Ghost, has most variants.  Following Monsieur Hauréau, in the Journal des Savants, I have tracked the tale, the death compact, and the wound inflicted by the ghost on the hand, or wrist, or brow, of the seer, through Henry More, and Melanchthon, and a mediæval sermon by Eudes de Shirton, to William of Malmesbury, a range of 700 years.  Mrs. Grant of Laggan has a rather recent case, and I have heard of another in the last ten years!  Calmet has a case in 1625, the spectre leaves

The sable score of fingers four

on a board of wood.

Now for a modern instance of a gang of ghosts with a purpose!

When I narrated the story which follows to an eminent moral philosopher, he remarked, at a given point, “Oh, the ghost spoke, did she?” and displayed scepticism.  The evidence, however, left him, as it leaves me, at a standstill, not convinced, but agreeably perplexed.  The ghosts here are truly old-fashioned.

My story is, and must probably remain, entirely devoid of proof, as far as any kind of ghostly influence is concerned.  We find ghosts appearing, and imposing a certain course of action on a living witness, for definite purposes of their own.  The course of action prescribed was undeniably pursued, and apparently the purpose of the ghosts was fulfilled, but what that purpose was their agent declines to state, and conjecture is hopelessly baffled.

The documents in the affair have been published by the Society for Psychical Research (Proceedings, vol. xi., p. 547), and are here used for reference.  But I think the matter will be more intelligible if I narrate it exactly as it came under my own observation.  The names of persons and places are all fictitious, and are the same as those used in the documents published by the S.P.R.

HALF-PAST ONE O’CLOCK

In October, 1893, I was staying at a town which we shall call Rapingham.  One night I and some kinsfolk dined with another old friend of all of us, a Dr. Ferrier.  In the course of dinner he asked à propos de bottes:—

“Have you heard of the ghost in Blake Street?” a sunny, pleasant street of respectable but uninteresting antiquity in Rapingham.

We had none of us heard of the ghost, and begged the doctor to enlighten our ignorance.  His story ran thus—I have it in his own writing as far as its essence goes:—

“The house,” he said, “belongs to my friends, the Applebys, who let it, as they live elsewhere.  A quiet couple took it and lived in it for five years, when the husband died, and the widow went away.  They made no complaint while tenants.  The house stood empty for some time, and all I know personally about the matter is that I, my wife, and the children were in the dining-room one Sunday when we heard unusual noises in the drawing-room overhead.  We went through the rooms but could find no cause or explanation of the disturbance, and thought no more about it.

“About six or seven years ago I let the house to a Mr. Buckley, who is still the tenant.  He was unmarried, and his family consisted of his mother and sisters.  They preceded him to put the place in order, and before his arrival came to me in some irritation complaining that I had let them a haunted house!  They insisted that there were strange noises, as if heavy weights were being dragged about, or heavy footsteps pacing in the rooms and on the stairs.  I said that I knew nothing about the matter.  The stairs are of stone, water is only carried up to the first floor, there is an unused system of hot air pipes. {177a}  Something went wrong with the water-main in the area once, but the noises lasted after it was mended.

“I think Mr. Buckley when he arrived never heard anything unusual.  But one evening as he walked upstairs carrying an ink-bottle, he found his hand full of some liquid.  Thinking that he had spilt the ink, he went to a window where he found his hand full of water, to account for which there was no stain on the ceiling, or anything else that he could discover.  On another occasion one of the young ladies was kneeling by a trunk in an attic, alone, when water was switched over her face, as if from a wet brush. {177b}  There was a small pool of water on the floor, and the wall beyond her was sprinkled.

“Time went on, and the disturbances were very rare: in fact ceased for two years till the present week, when Mrs. Claughton, a widow accompanied by two of her children, came to stay with the Buckleys. {177c}  She had heard of the disturbances and the theory of hauntings—I don’t know if these things interested her or not.

“Early on Monday, 9th October, Mrs. Claughton came to consult me.  Her story was this: About a quarter past one on Sunday night, or Monday morning, she was in bed with one of her children, the other sleeping in the room.  She was awakened by footsteps on the stair, and supposed that a servant was coming to call her to Miss Buckley, who was ill.  The steps stopped at the door, then the noise was repeated.  Mrs. Claughton lit her bedroom candle, opened the door and listened.  There was no one there.  The clock on the landing pointed to twenty minutes past one.  Mrs. Claughton went back to bed, read a book, fell asleep, and woke to find the candle still lit, but low in the socket.  She heard a sigh, and saw a lady, unknown to her, her head swathed in a soft white shawl, her expression gentle and refined, her features much emaciated.

“The Appearance said, ‘Follow me,’ and Mrs. Claughton, taking the bedroom candle, rose and followed out on to the landing, and so into the adjacent drawing-room.  She cannot remember opening the door, which the housemaid had locked outside, and she owns that this passage is dreamlike in her memory.  Seeing that her candle was flickering out, she substituted for it a pink one taken from a chiffonier.  The figure walked nearly to the window, turned three-quarters round, said ‘To-morrow!’ and was no more seen.  Mrs. Claughton went back to her room, where her eldest child asked:—

“‘Who is the lady in white?’

“‘Only me, mother, go to sleep,’ she thinks she answered.  After lying awake for two hours, with gas burning, she fell asleep.  The pink candle from the drawing-room chiffonier was in her candlestick in the morning.

“After hearing the lady’s narrative I told her to try change of air, which she declined as cowardly.  So, as she would stay on at Mr. Buckley’s, I suggested that an electric alarm communicating with Miss Buckley’s room should be rigged up, and this was done.”

Here the doctor paused, and as the events had happened within the week, we felt that we were at last on the track of a recent ghost.

“Next morning, about one, the Buckleys were aroused by a tremendous peal of the alarm; Mrs. Claughton they found in a faint.  Next morning {179} she consulted me as to the whereabouts of a certain place, let me call it ‘Meresby’.  I suggested the use of a postal directory; we found Meresby, a place extremely unknown to fame, in an agricultural district about five hours from London in the opposite direction from Rapingham.  To this place Mrs. Claughton said she must go, in the interest and by the order of certain ghosts, whom she saw on Monday night, and whose injunctions she had taken down in a note-book.  She has left Rapingham for London, and there,” said the doctor, “my story ends for the present.”

We expected it to end for good and all, but in the course of the week came a communication to the doctor in writing from Mrs. Claughton’s governess.  This lady, on Mrs. Claughton’s arrival at her London house (Friday, 13th October), passed a night perturbed by sounds of weeping, “loud moans,” and “a very odd noise overhead, like some electric battery gone wrong,” in fact, much like the “warning” of a jack running down, which Old Jeffrey used to give at the Wesley’s house in Epworth.  There were also heavy footsteps and thuds, as of moving weighty bodies.  So far the governess.

This curious communication I read at Rapingham on Saturday, 14th October, or Sunday, 15th October.  On Monday I went to town.  In the course of the week I received a letter from my kinsman in Rapingham, saying that Mrs. Claughton had written to Dr. Ferrier, telling him that she had gone to Meresby on Saturday; had accomplished the bidding of the ghosts, and had lodged with one Joseph Wright, the parish clerk.  Her duty had been to examine the Meresby parish registers, and to compare certain entries with information given by the ghosts and written by her in her note-book.  If the entries in the parish register tallied with her notes, she was to pass the time between one o’clock and