And indeed we went to work faithfully enough. For my own part, I quickly came to see that I should remain long at Vailes only under false pretences. The papers left by Lord Lucius Senderhill bore no reference to his private life; they were exclusively scientific, or philosophical, or of a sort to interest political historians of the earlier twentieth century; and they were destined for the library of Senderhill’s old college at Cambridge, where they would be available to all properly qualified persons. Lord Melchester’s apprehensiveness was entirely unjustified.
Arthur Holroyd, too, looked like drawing a blank or near-blank. The poem in heroic couplets had never got itself written, and a brief jotting in one of Senderhill’s scientific notebooks simply gave reasons (of which Holroyd approved) for abandoning the project as invalid. I am bound to say that I was amused at the thought of Mrs Gladwish conjuring her decasyllables from the void in vain.
This particular negative result did not quite license my friend to pack up and go. There is a theory, it seems, that the mind or personality may survive for a short time – disintegrating slowly, so that its final dissolution is postponed weeks or months beyond the period of bodily death. For some reason which did not become clear to me, this made desirable an immediate and rapid survey of such of Senderhill’s papers as were devoted to psychic matters. The task was going to take several days. Perhaps I may so far run ahead as to say that here, too, nothing material was to emerge – or nothing beyond those marginally and dubiously significant data with which I understand the annals of psychical research overflow.
It is, in fact, fair to warn the reader that I have reached a point in my narrative at which Lord Lucius Senderhill must a little retreat into its background – although to make way, indeed, for other, and earlier, Senderhills. His sole substantial link with what I have now to reveal is the vision once mysteriously granted to him through his dining-room window.
That vision – or the vicar’s account of it – had increased my own disposition to explore the lake, but Holroyd’s very proper insistence on ‘work’ had the consequence of a couple of days having passed before I was able to do so. On a bright and rather blowy spring morning the scene, naturally enough, held nothing of the haunting quality that moonlight had shed on it. There was now a sparkle over the surface of the water, which was stirred by the breeze to a semblance of tiny breakers feeling their way, not quite noiselessly, through the pebbles which here and there lay in a tumble below the bank. I wondered whether, if one lay flat on the turf and cultivated a Lilliputian eye, one could magnify this into such a sea-storm as Senderhill had glimpsed, and even see as cliffs of foam the willows whitening on the farther shore, and as great inland mountains the beech woods lying beyond.
The path I followed was to some extent overgrown; there was meadow-sweet to trample down, and here and there a trail of bramble trammelled the foot. Yet I saw signs of recent passage, so that I wondered who now came this way, and whether even in the last days of his life Lucius Senderhill had managed to frequent the lakeside. There was a beguiling abundance of water-fowl: coot, mallard, pintail duck – some with their young already in their wake, progressing with the just perceptible jerkiness of small mechanical toys. Ahead of me endlessly distraught lapwings quartered the air, wildly crying.
I saw that the lake, although narrow, was not much less than a mile long, and that the mansion, with its offices, outbuildings, and little boathouse, lay at one end of it. There was no reason why, if the path permitted, I should not make the complete circuit in an hour’s stroll, so I put the unconvincing Gothic front of the house behind me, and set off.
I have sketched the scene, and I have no doubt that my appreciation of it was lively enough. Yet I was not halfway down the lake before I had fallen into an abstraction effectively diverting my attention from my surroundings. At breakfast Holroyd had said something about the Census of Hallucinations, by which I supposed him to mean an ordered and classified record, no doubt compiled by his Society, of just such experiences as Senderhill had recounted to Hartsilver. I wondered just how common such visitations were. I had myself never contrived to do more than (as I think Shakespeare has it) suppose a bush a bear, nor could I recall anyone recounting to me anything more than momentary aberrations of a similar trivial kind. I wondered whether by any chance Senderhill himself had ever been on a sinking ship, or whether perhaps some ancestor of his had been lost at sea. There was scope for enquiry here, I thought, and I resolved to discuss the matter with Holroyd.
I tried to create for myself the experience of suddenly being confronted with a tempest more magical than Prospero’s. What would one chiefly feel? I recalled reading somewhere that supernatural apparitions seldom rouse terror – and sometimes not even surprise, let alone disbelief – at the actual time of their occurrence. But surely Senderhill must have been unnerved – and not least by the unnatural silence in which the fated ship went down? Yet, I remembered, such is supposed to be the general way with hallucinations; they are seldom accompanied by auditory phenomena. What about olfactory sensations? There is something peculiarly primitive about the sense of smell which one might rather expect to be exploited in psychical experience. Through that dining-room window, and in that balmy summer night, had Lucius Senderhill’s nostrils been suddenly assailed by the tang of a salt ocean air?
I had got so far in these mere ruminations when I found myself abruptly at a halt. Something sharp-scented had caught at my breath, and for a second I really believed that it was the odour of the sea.
In fact, it was quite different. I had passed the end of the lake unnoticing; the terrain had in consequence slightly changed; the smell was of wild mint crushed beneath my feet. There is nothing briny about wild mint, and I was amused by the false association my absorption had prompted. Turning round, I had a view up the length of the lake, with the small boathouse just visible in the distance, and behind it one wing of Vailes itself – the greater part of the house being from here invisible behind a clump of trees in the park. I saw that the route by which I might return along the farther bank was a regular bridle-path, which in the other direction wound away through beech woods on a line approximately continuing that of the lake itself. I was now as far afield as I had intended to go, but the continuing path somehow invited further enterprise. So I left the lake behind me, and plunged into the wood.
Wherever the trees thinned a little there was a carpeting of bluebells and pink campion, and at one point the path passed through a hawthorn copse in which the buds were still sealed close amid a foliage of brilliant green. Presently I was aware of a larger clearing, the ruins of a cottage in the middle of it, and a woman riding past it, rather bumpily, on a bicycle. I was a good deal surprised to find that my encounter was with Mrs Uff.
She dismounted as I approached, and I saw that she proposed to speak to me – a civility which I took as a further token of the success with which Holroyd had persuaded her of what he called our consequence. I made a remark about the quality of the day, and Mrs Uff further indicated her respect by precisely concurring in my estimate of it. I then said something about the trouble we must be giving her in view of the fact that she and her daughter were now virtually unsupported at Vailes. She replied to the effect that she relished a little professional labour, since it helped to occupy her mind in this melancholy period after his lordship’s decease. And she volunteered the information that her present expedition had been a marketing one in the interest of that evening’s dinner.
Although a full basket on the handlebars of Mrs Uff’s bicycle substantiated this claim, I found myself oddly persuaded that here was not, at least, the sole explanation of the housekeeper’s presence on the spot at which I had come upon her. Wherever she had been collecting her poultry and fruit, it seemed improbable that so rough a path represented her best return route. Rather more than by this, however, I was struck by a certain constraint in the woman, as if she were uneasy at having been encountered where she had. And there was something yet further. One cannot have worked for long as a solicitor without coming to know when a client or acquaintance is hesitating on the verge of making a confidence or seeking counsel in a difficulty. And some instinct told me in what general direction any problem of Mrs Uff’s was likely to lie.
I remarked that a capable girl like Martha must be a great support to her, and then offered the sage conjecture that the girl was no doubt holding the fort for her at Vailes at that moment.
‘No,’ Mrs Uff said, ‘she’s not at the house.’ And suddenly she added, ‘As a matter of fact, sir, I have an eye open for her now.’
‘Ah, Martha likes rambling? Well, it’s a very pleasant part of the country for that.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Mrs Uff hesitated, as if uncertain whether to construe this casual rejoinder favourably. ‘She goes off, and that’s the fact,’ she said. ‘Sometimes by day, and sometimes in the dark.’
‘And it worries you, I see.’ The word dark had naturally put me in mind of Martha Uff’s recent history: both my suspicions about Lucius Senderhill’s nocturnal occasions with her, and the respectable if eccentric explanation these had proved to carry. I hadn’t the least idea whether Mrs Uff knew that her late employer had cherished the hope that her daughter might possess psychical or preternatural powers. But it was possible that she might be attributing Martha’s unsettled behaviour to Senderhill’s concern with her – and if this were so it seemed to me that she ought to have made clear to her what the nature of that concern had been. So I resolved on a certain measure of frankness. ‘Do you think,’ I asked, ‘that Lord Lucius had anything to do with setting Martha wandering?’
‘Yes and no.’ Mrs Uff, although startled by my question, rose to it with what I could see was relief – the relief of having taken a plunge. ‘It may be he ended by putting things in her head, sir. But she was a strange girl before that. And it was her being strange that made him interested like.’
‘I see.’ I noted, as rather touching, that the idiom of the folk was likely to return to the superior Mrs Uff under stress of strong feeling. ‘But just how was Martha strange in the first place?’
‘She wasn’t right at school, sir, for a start. They said that if she was to learn her reading and ciphering, it would have to be at some special place. His lordship acted very generously, as soon as he learnt about that – and it was before he took his queer kind of special interest in her. He offered to send Martha to a boarding school that wouldn’t be any kind of national school at all. A school where the gentry send their children of Martha’s sort. He said more could be done for her in such a place, where there would be plenty of teachers and equipment and money. And it would be all at his lordship’s charge.’
‘But you didn’t agree, Mrs Uff?’
‘It would still have been a place for defectives. There would have been talk.’ Mrs Uff was silent for a moment, while I registered in myself a certain respect for her thus taking a stand firmly with her own order. ‘And I thought perhaps I could take her through a bit more than her A.B.C. myself.’
‘I quite understand your feeling, Mrs Uff. Is Martha an excitable girl?’
‘She didn’t used to be. But when her womanhood began to come to her, then she did start having her hysterical times.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. But it’s something that is likely to pass away later.’ I am no Arthur Holroyd, but I did now recognise in Martha Uff a psychological type which turns up often enough in the field in which his interest lies. ‘Would you say that Martha . . . ‘I broke off, conscious that Mrs Uff’s attention had momentarily strayed from me. And it had strayed to the small and unimposing ruin close to where we stood. ‘Is this,’ I emended, ‘one of the places Martha wanders off to?’
‘Yes, sir – here and round the lake. It was her liking the lake that first struck his lordship, you see. But it was mostly here she used to come. She’d bring her work to near this ruined cottage, and sit with it all day long. And so she will still. It’s one of the things I dread about probably having to leave Vailes, sir – that it will upset Martha so. She can do very fair plain sewing, Martha can; and it’s here she does it. Mr Hartsilver – who dined at the house last night – encourages her at that. He says her work is just right for some of them in Africa.’
‘I’m sure it is.’ My own gaze in turn had now strayed to the ruin. The stone walls of the cottage nowhere rose more than a couple of feet above the foundations, and for the most part hemlock and nettle and thistle obscured what remained. There was nothing romantic about it. And such feeling as it might evoke – the pathos inherent in any memorial of humble life long passed away – seemed of a kind to be experienced in maturity rather than by a child. Had it been the mouldering mass of a mediaeval castle that confronted us, I could better have understood Martha Uff’s haunting the place. ‘Do you know anything about this ruin?’ I asked.
‘No, sir. But it looks to have been like that for a very long time.’
‘I agree – perhaps for a hundred years or more. It must be on the Vailes estate?’
‘Indeed, it must be. It’s still Senderhill land here, these many miles around. A keeper’s cottage, this might have been. Or it might be a water-bailiff’s.’ The altitude of Mrs Uff’s domestic service seemed to come through in her familiarity with a term like this. ‘But I never heard tell any stories about it.’
‘Mrs Uff, would you call your daughter a secretive child?’
‘As the grave.’
‘I think there are things she is afraid to tell.’ I had been startled by the sudden vehemence of Mrs Uff’s speech, and my professional instinct to speak in a measured way was aroused. ‘All in good time, it might be desirable to win her confidence, and hear about them. Do you think Lord Lucius first became greatly interested in her because of something she told him?’
‘No, sir, I don’t. It was just her loving to walk round the lake, and gaze at it.’
‘And to come and sit in this clearing, beside this ruin?’
‘Not that, sir. I don’t think his lordship got to know about that. You see, it was the lake that he had what you might call a thing about. Or so I thought.’
‘I happen to know that you are quite right, Mrs Uff. Lord Lucius hoped your daughter might see something on the lake that—well, that not many people would see.’
To my considerable surprise, Mrs Uff crossed herself. And she must have noticed my remarking the fact, since she offered an explanation at once.
‘Yes, sir – I was brought up in the old faith, and I remained with it when married. But in my way of service, if you can’t be with the Catholic gentry, it’s convenient not to mind taking up with the local thing.’ Mrs Uff paused, but not through any consciousness of having smartly characterised the Anglican communion. ‘We knew, of course, all of us at Vailes, that his lordship had his interest in matters that, like enough, are not meant for man to know. But quite harmless, it seemed to be. Nothing to do with witches or black magic or the like – which is what some in rural parts get mixed up with. It went into books for the learned, did the manner of enquiring into such things that his lordship had. Or so Mr Hartsilver has told me. That would be right, sir?’
‘Oh, most decidedly. But tell me, Mrs Uff.’ I had resolved to put one question boldly. ‘Is it your belief that Martha has indeed—well, seen things?’
‘Now, sir, that’s not easy to answer.’ Mrs Uff had given me a wary look. ‘But I’m sure she hasn’t seen what his lordship wanted her to see.’
Since it would have been awkward to trot beside Mrs Uff on her bicycle, and not too easy to sustain a conversation had we proceeded together on foot, I returned to Vailes on the side of the lake by which I had come. Like Mrs Uff, I kept an eye open for the errant Martha, but to no effect. I went over in my mind my very brief conversation with the child on the afternoon of my arrival, and endeavoured to compare it with what her mother had told me. The implication of Mrs Uff’s final speech had been that Martha, although she had proved unavailing for Senderhill’s purpose, was to be suspected of having had some positive uncanny experience of her own – which, however, being secret ‘as the grave’, she had determinedly kept to herself. What I myself had received from Martha had borne the appearance of a comprehensive denial of having ‘seen’ anything at all – as also, indeed, of having ‘done’ anything. But she might have been telling the truth about herself vis-a-vis Senderhill while being less than candid about some other matter. She had been alarmed, and had talked about the police. There had also been about her – I now recalled – an indefinable air of guarding or protecting I didn’t at all know what.
But what might a country girl ‘see’ that would make her apprehensive of the local constable? A crime or deed of violence was one answer; had Martha been the witness to such a thing and failed to speak up about it, she might soon come to feel that her silence constituted implication. Or might the unlawfulness consist not in the thing seen but in the seeing? There came into my head as I asked myself this the memory that a rural community is insatiably inquisitive. Glancing through windows, peering over hedges, lurking to look or listen: the rustic world described by Thomas Hardy, for example, is prolific in such behaviour, which is regarded as common form. In a village school one learns that certain enterprises of this sort are rude, and that the village policeman may have something to say to children who thus peep at unsuitable activities. Could something in this general area be operative in Martha Uff’s mind?
Perhaps I should add that I didn’t carry my speculation far. For one thing, it somehow failed to answer to my sense of this particular girl. Mentally Martha was on the half-witted side; and she was lumpish and sullen and awkward and slatternly. But lurking in her I had felt the potentiality for some sort of response to experience that would not be despicable. There had been a quality in her voice, I remembered, distinguishable beneath her uncouth accent, that had said something of the sort to me. I couldn’t see her as engaged, at least, in the baser sort of peeping.
Outside the house, I encountered Holroyd. He had the appearance of having been minded to come and look for me – and also of severity, as if he judged that I had been neglecting my duties. He had himself, I knew, been up in what was called the muniment room – where I had specifically obtained permission to make what researches I pleased, but which I should have thought to be a little outside my friend’s concern. This last was a persuasion in which I was to prove strikingly mistaken.
‘I’ve had a very enjoyable walk,’ I said blandly. ‘I wish I’d been able to persuade you to accompany me.’
‘You’ll stop wishing anything of the kind, when you hear what I have been doing. Ho-ho, ho-ho!’
‘Well?’ I demanded – for I realised that it was a triumphant man who stood before me.
‘That shipwreck, my dear fellow. I’ve found it. It was in 1832. The barque Gloriana out of Plymouth. Lost with all hands.’