THIS IS A QUEER story, the more queer for the interpretation of passions of strong human heat that has been put upon it, and for glimpses of other motives and doings, not, it would seem, human at all.
The whole thing is seen vaguely, brokenly, a snatch here and there; one tells the tale, strangely another exclaims amaze, a third points out a scene, a fourth has a dim memory of a circumstance, a nine-days’ (or less) wonder, an old print helps, the name on a mural tablet in a deserted church pinches the heart with a sense of confirmation, and so you have your story. When all is said it remains a queer tale.
It is seventy years odd ago, so dating back from this present year of 1845 you come to nearly midway in the last century when conditions were vastly different from what they are now.
The scene is in Glasgow, and there are three points from which we start, all leading us to the heart of our tale.
The first is the portrait of a woman that hangs in the parlour of a respectable banker. He believes it to be the likeness of some connexion of his wife’s, dead this many a year, but he does not know much about it. Some while ago it was discovered in a lumberroom, and he keeps it for the pallid beauty of the canvas, which is much faded and rubbed.
Since, as a young man, I first had the privilege of my worthy friend’s acquaintance, I have always felt a strange interest in this picture; and, in that peculiar way that the imagination will seize on trifles, I was always fascinated by the dress of the lady. This is of dark-green very fine silk, an uncommon colour to use in a portrait, and, perhaps, in a lady’s dress. It is very plain, with a little scarf of a striped Roman pattern, and her hair is drawn up over a pillow in the antique mode. Her face is expressionless, yet strange, the upper lip very thin, the lower very full, the light brown eyes set under brows that slant. I cannot tell why this picture was always to me full of such a great attraction, but I used to think of it a vast deal, and often to note, secretly, that never had I chanced to meet in real life, or in any other painting, a lady in a dark-green silk dress.
In the corner of the canvas is a little device, put in a diamond, as a gentlewoman might bear arms, yet with no pretensions to heraldry, just three little birds, the topmost with a flower in its beak.
It was not so long ago that I came upon the second clue that leads into the story, and that was a mural tablet in an old church near the Rutherglen Road, a church that has lately fallen into disrepute or neglect, for it was deserted and impoverished. But I was assured that a generation ago it had been a most famous place of worship, fashionable and well frequented by the better sort.
The mural tablet was to one “Ann Leete,” and there was just the date (seventy-odd years old) given with what seemed a sinister brevity.
And underneath the lettering, lightly cut on the time-stained marble, was the same device as that on the portrait of the lady in the green silk dress.
I was curious enough to make inquiries, but no one seemed to know anything of, or wished to talk about, Ann Leete.
It was all so long ago, I was told, and there was no one now in the parish of the name of Leete.
And all who had been acquainted with the family of Leete seemed to be dead or gone away. The parish register (my curiosity went so far as an inspection of this) yielded me no more information than the mural tablet.
I spoke to my friend the banker, and he said he thought that his wife had had some cousins by the name of Leete, and that there was some tale of a scandal or great misfortune attached to them which was the reason of a sort of ban on their name so that it had never been mentioned.
When I told him I thought the portrait of the lady in the dark-green silk might picture a certain Ann Leete he appeared uneasy and even desirous of having the likeness removed, which roused in me the suspicion that he knew something of the name, and that not pleasant. But it seemed to me indelicate and perhaps useless to question him.
It was a year or so after this incident that my business, which was that of silversmith and jeweller, put into my hands a third clue. One of my apprentices came to me with a rare piece of work which had been left at the shop for repair.
It was a thin medal of the purest gold, on which was set in fresh-water pearls, rubies, and cairngorms the device of the three birds, the plumage being most skilfully wrought in the bright jewels and the flower held by the topmost creature accurately designed in pearls.
It was one of these pearls that was missing, and I had some difficulty in matching its soft lustre.
An elderly lady called for the ornament, the same person who had left it. I saw her myself, and ventured to admire and praise the workmanship of the medal.
“Oh,” she said, “it was worked by a very famous jeweller, my great-uncle, and he has a peculiar regard for it—indeed I believe it has never before been out of his possession, but he was so greatly grieved by the loss of the pearl that he would not rest until I offered to take it to be repaired. He is, you will understand,” she added, with a smile, “a very old man. He must have made that jewellery—why—seventy-odd years ago.”
Seventy-odd years ago—that would bring one back to the date on the tablet to Ann Leete, to the period of the portrait.
“I have seen this device before,” I remarked, “on the likeness of a lady and on the mural inscription in memory of a certain Ann Leete.” Again this name appeared to make an unpleasant impression.
My customer took her packet hastily.
“It is associated with something dreadful,” she said quickly. “We do not speak of it—a very old story. I did not know anyone had heard of it——”
“I certainly have not,” I assured her. “I came to Glasgow not so long ago, as apprentice to this business of my uncle’s which now I own.”
“But you have seen a portrait?” she asked.
“Yes, in the house of a friend of mine.”
“This is queer. We did not know that any existed. Yet my great-uncle does speak of one—in a green silk dress.”
“In a green silk dress,” I confirmed.
The lady appeared amazed.
“But it is better to let the matter rest,” she decided. “My relative, you will realize, is very old—nearly, sir, a hundred years old, and his wits wander and he tells queer tales. It was all very strange and horrible, but one cannot tell how much my old uncle dreams.”
“I should not think to disturb him,” I replied.
But my customer hesitated.
“If you know of this portrait—perhaps he should be told; he laments after it so much, and we have always believed it an hallucination——”
She returned the packet containing the medal.
“Perhaps,” she added dubiously, “you are interested enough to take this back to my relative yourself and judge what you shall or shall not tell him?”
I eagerly accepted the offer, and the lady gave me the name and residence of the old man who, although possessed of considerable means, had lived for the past fifty years in the greatest seclusion in that lonely part of the town beyond the Rutherglen Road and near to the Green, the once pretty and fashionable resort for youth and pleasure, but now a deserted and desolate region. Here, on the first opportunity, I took my way, and found myself well out into the country, nearly at the river, before I reached the lonely mansion of Eneas Bretton, as the ancient jeweller was called.
A ferocious dog troubled my entrance in the dark overgrown garden where the black glossy laurels and bays strangled the few flowers, and a grim woman, in an old-fashioned mutch or cap, at length answered my repeated peals at the rusty chain bell.
It was not without considerable trouble that I was admitted into the presence of Mr. Bretton, and only, I think, by the display of the jewel and the refusal to give it into any hands but those of its owner.
The ancient jeweller was seated on a southern terrace that received the faint and fitful rays of the September sun. He was wrapped in shawls that disguised his natural form, and a fur and leather cap was fastened under his chin.
I had the impression that he had been a fine man, of a vigorous and handsome appearance; even now, in the extreme of decay, he showed a certain grandeur of line and carriage, a certain majestic power in his personality. Though extremely feeble, I did not take him to be imbecile nor greatly wanting in his faculties.
He received me courteously, though obviously ill-used to strangers.
I had, he said, a claim on him as a fellow craftsman, and he was good enough to commend the fashion in which I had repaired his medal.
This, as soon as he had unwrapped, he fastened to a fine gold chain he drew from his breast, and slipped inside his heavy clothing.
“A pretty trinket,” I said, “and of an unusual design.”
“I fashioned it myself,” he answered, “over seventy years ago. The year before, sir, she died.”
“Ann Leete?” I ventured.
The ancient man was not in the least surprised at the use of this name.
“It is a long time since I heard those words with any but my inner ear,” he murmured; “to be sure, I grow very old. You’ll not remember Ann Leete?” he added wistfully.
“I take it she died before I was born,” I answered.
He peered at me.
“Ah, yes, you are still a young man, though your hair is grey.”
I noticed now that he wore a small tartan scarf inside his coat and shawl; this fact gave me a peculiar, almost unpleasant shudder.
“I know this about Ann Leete—she had a dark-green silk dress. And a Roman or tartan scarf.”
He touched the wisp of bright-coloured silk across his chest.
“This is it. She had her likeness taken so—but it was lost.”
“It is preserved,” I answered. “And I know where it is. I might, if you desired, bring you to a sight of it.”
He turned his grand old face to me with a civil inclination of his massive head.
“That would be very courteous of you, sir, and a pleasure to me. You must not think,” he added with dignity, “that the lady has forsaken me or that I do not often see her. Indeed, she comes to me more frequently than before. But it would delight me to have the painting of her to console the hours of her absence.”
I reflected what his relative had said about the weakness of his wits, and recalled his great age, which one was apt to forget in face of his composure and reasonableness.
He appeared now to doze and to take no further notice of my presence, so I left him.
He had a strange look of lifelessness as he slumbered there in the faintest rays of the cloudy autumn sun.
I reflected how lightly the spirit must dwell in this ancient frame, how easily it must take flight into the past, how soon into eternity.
It did not cost me much persuasion to induce my friend, the banker, to lend me the portrait of Ann Leete, particularly as the canvas had been again sent up to the attics.
“Do you know the story?” I asked him.
He replied that he had heard something; that the case had made a great stir at the time; that it was all very confused and amazing, and that he did not desire to discuss the matter.
I hired a carriage and took the canvas to the house of Eneas Bretton.
He was again on the terrace, enjoying with a sort of calm eagerness the last warmth of the failing sun.
His two servants brought in the picture and placed it on a chair at his side.
He gazed at the painted face with the greatest serenity.
“That is she,” he said, “but I am glad to think that she looks happier now, sir. She still wears that dark-green silk. I never see her in any other garment.”
“A beautiful woman,” I remarked quietly, not wishing to agitate or disturb his reflections, which were clearly detached from any considerations of time and space.
“I have always thought so,” he answered gently, “but I, sir, have peculiar faculties. I saw her, and see her still as a spirit. I loved her as a spirit. Yet our bodily union was necessary for our complete happiness. And in that my darling and I were balked.”
“By death?” I suggested, for I knew that the word had no terrors for him.
“By death,” he agreed, “who will soon be forced to unite us again.”
“But not in the body,” I said.
“How, sir, do you know that?” he smiled. “We have but finite minds. I think we have but little conception of the marvellous future.”
“Tell me,” I urged, “how you lost Ann Leete.”
His dim, heavy-lidded, many-wrinkled eyes flickered a glance over me.
“She was murdered,” he said.
I could not forbear a shudder.
“That fragile girl!” I exclaimed. My blood had always run cool and thin, and I detested deeds of violence; my even mind could not grasp the idea of the murder of women save as a monstrous enormity.
I looked at the portrait, and it seemed to me that I had always known that it was the likeness of a creature doomed.
“Seventy years ago and more,” continued Eneas Bretton, “since when she has wandered lonely betwixt time and eternity, waiting for me. But very soon I shall join her, and then, sir, we shall go where there is no recollection of the evil things of this earth.”
By degrees he told me the story, not in any clear sequence, nor at any one time, nor without intervals of sleep and pauses of dreaming, nor without assistance from his servants and his great-niece and her husband, who were his frequent visitors.
Yet it was from his own lips and when we were alone together that I learned all that was really vital in the tale.
He required very frequent attendance; although all human passion was at the utmost ebb with him, he had, he said, a kind of regard for me in that I had brought him his lady’s portrait, and he told me things of which he had never spoken to any human being before. I say human on purpose because of his intense belief that he was, and always had been, in communication with powers not of this earth.
In these words I put together his tale.
As a young man, said Eneas Bretton, I was healthy, prosperous, and happy.
My family had been goldsmiths as long as there was any record of their existence, and I was an enthusiast in this craft, grave, withal, and studious, over-fond of books and meditation. I do not know how or when I first met Ann Leete.
To me she was always there like the sun; I think I have known her all my life, but perhaps my memory fails.
Her father was a lawyer and she an only child, and though her social station was considered superior to mine, I had far more in the way of worldly goods, so there was no earthly obstacle to our union.
The powers of evil, however, fought against us; I had feared this from the first, as our happiness was the complete circle ever hateful to fiends and devils who try to break the mystic symbol.
The mistress of my soul attracted the lustful attention of a young doctor, Rob Patterson, who had a certain false charm of person, not real comeliness, but a trick of colour, of carriage, and a fine taste in clothes.
His admiration was whetted by her coldness and his intense dislike of me.
We came to scenes in which he derided me as no gentleman, but a beggarly tradesman, and I scorned him as an idle voluptuary designing a woman’s ruin for the crude pleasure of the gratification of fleeting passions.
For the fellow made not even any pretence of being able to support a wife, and was of that rake-helly temperament that made an open mock of matrimony.
Although he was but a medical student, he was of what they call noble birth, and his family, though decayed, possessed considerable social power, so that his bold pursuit of Ann Leete and his insolent flaunting of me had some licence, the more so that he did not lack tact and address in his manner and conduct.
Our marriage could have stopped this persecution, or given the right to publicly resent it, but my darling would not leave her father, who was of a melancholy and querulous disposition.
It was shortly before her twenty-first birthday, for which I had made her the jewel I now wear (the device being the crest of her mother’s family and one for which she had a great affection), that her father died suddenly. His last thoughts were of her, for he had this very picture painted for her birthday gift. Finding herself thus unprotected and her affairs in some confusion, she declared her intention of retiring to some distant relative in the Highlands until decorum permitted of our marriage.
And upon my opposing myself to this scheme of separation and delay she was pleased to fall out with me, declaring that I was as importunate as Dr. Patterson, and that I, as well as he, should be kept in ignorance of her retreat.
I had, however, great hopes of inducing her to change this resolution, and, it being then fair spring weather, engaged her to walk with me on the Green, beyond the city, to discuss our future.
I was an orphan like herself, and we had now no common meeting-place suitable to her reputation and my respect.
By reason of a pressure of work, to which by temperament and training I was ever attentive, I was a few moments late at the tryst on the Green, which I found, as usual, empty; but it was a lovely afternoon of May, very still and serene, like the smile of satisfied love.
I paced about, looking for my darling.
Although she was in mourning, she had promised me to wear the dark-green silk I so admired under her black cloak, and I looked for this colour among the brighter greens of the trees and bushes.
She did not appear, and my heart was chilled with the fear that she was offended with me and therefore would not come, and an even deeper dread that she might, in vexation, have fled to her unknown retreat.
This thought was sending me hot-foot to seek her at her house, when I saw Rob Patterson coming across the close-shaven grass of the Green.
I remembered that the cheerful sun seemed to me to be at this moment darkened, not by any natural clouds or mists, but as it is during an eclipse, and that the fresh trees and innocent flowers took on a ghastly and withered look.
It may appear a trivial detail, but I recall so clearly—his habit, which was of a luxury beyond his means, fine grey broadcloth with a deep edging of embroidery in gold thread, little suited to his profession.
As he saw me he cocked his hat over his eyes, but took no notice of my appearance, and I turned away, not being wishful of any encounter with this gentleman while my spirit was in a tumult.
I went at once to my darling’s house, and learnt from her maid that she had left home two hours previously.
I do not wish to dwell on this part of my tale—indeed, I could not, it becomes very confused to me.
The salient facts are these—that no one saw Ann Leete in bodily form again.
And no one could account for her disappearance; yet no great comment was aroused by this, because there was no one to take much interest in her, and it was commonly believed that she had disappeared from the importunity of her lovers, the more so as Rob Patterson swore that the day of her disappearance he had had an interview with her in which she had avowed her intention of going where no one could discover her. This, in a fashion, was confirmed by what she had told me, and I was the more inclined to believe it, as my inner senses told me that she was not dead.
Six months of bitter search, of sad uneasiness, that remain in my memory blurred to one pain, and then, one autumn evening, as I came home late and dispirited, I saw her before me in the gloaming, tripping up the street, wearing her dark-green silk dress and tartan or Roman scarf.
I did not see her face as she disappeared before I could gain on her, but she held to her side one hand, and between the long fingers I saw the haft of a surgeon’s knife.
I knew then that she was dead.
And I knew that Rob Patterson had killed her.
Although it was well known that my family were all ghost-seers, to speak in this case was to be laughed at and reprimanded.
I had no single shred of evidence against Dr. Patterson.
But I resolved that I would use what powers I possessed to make him disclose his crime.
And this is how it befell.
In those days, in Glasgow, it was compulsory to attend some place of worship on the Sabbath, the observation of the holy day being enforced with peculiar strictness, and none being allowed to show themselves in any public place during the hours of the church services, and to this end inspectors and overseers were employed to patrol the streets on a Sabbath and take down the names of those who might be found loitering there.
But few were the defaulters, Glasgow on a Sunday being as bare as the Arabian desert.
Rob Patterson and I both attended the church in Rutherglen Road, towards the Green and the river.
And the Sunday after I had seen the phantom of Ann Leete, I changed my usual place and seated myself behind this young man.
My intention was to so work on his spirit as to cause him to make public confession of his crime. And I crouched there behind him with a concentration of hate and fury, forcing my will on his during the whole of the long service.
I noticed he was pale, and that he glanced several times behind him, but he did not change his place or open his lips; but presently his head fell forward on his arms as if he was praying, and I took him to be in a kind of swoon brought on by the resistance of his spirit against mine.
I did not for this cease to pursue him. I was, indeed, as if in an exaltation, and I thought my soul had his soul by the throat, somewhere above our heads, and was shouting out: “Confess! Confess!”
One o’clock struck and he rose with the rest of the congregation, but in a dazed kind of fashion. It was almost side by side that we issued from the church door.
As the stream of people came into the street they were stopped by a little procession that came down the road.
All immediately recognized two of the inspectors employed to search the Sunday streets for defaulters from church attendance, followed by several citizens who appeared to have left their homes in haste and confusion.
These people carried between them a rude bundle which some compassionate hand had covered with a white linen cloth. Below this fell a swathe of dark-green silk and the end of a Roman scarf.
I stepped up to the rough bier.
“You have found Ann Leete,” I said.
“It is a dead woman,” one answered me. “We know not her name.”
I did not need to raise the cloth. The congregation was gathering round us, and amongst them was Rob Patterson.
“Tell me, who was her promised husband, how you found her,” I said.
And one of the inspectors answered:
“Near here, on the Green, where the wall bounds the grass, we saw, just now, the young surgeon, Rob Patterson, lying on the sward, and put his name in our books, besides approaching him to inquire the reason of his absence from church. But he, without excuse for his offence, rose from the ground, exclaiming: ‘I am a miserable man! Look in the water!’
“With that he crossed a stile that leads to the river and disappeared, and we, going down to the water, found the dead woman, deep tangled between the willows and the weeds——”
“And,” added the other inspector gravely, “tangled in her clothes is a surgeon’s knife.”
“Which,” said the former speaker, “perhaps Dr. Patterson can explain, since I perceive he is among this congregation—he must have found some quick way round to have got here before us.”
Upon this all eyes turned on the surgeon, but more with amaze than reproach.
And he, with a confident air, said:
“It is known to all these good people that I have been in the church the whole of the morning, especially to Eneas Bretton, who sat behind me, and, I dare swear, never took his eyes from me during the whole of the service.”
“Ay, your body was there,” I said.
With that he laughed angrily, and mingling with the crowd passed on his way.
You may believe there was a great stir; the theory put abroad was that Ann Leete had been kept a prisoner in a solitary, ruined hut there was by the river, and then, in fury or fear, slain by her jailer and cast into the river.
To me all this is black. I only know that she was murdered by Rob Patterson.
He was arrested and tried on the circuit.
He there proved, beyond all cavil, that he had been in the church from the beginning of the service to the end of it; his alibi was perfect. But the two inspectors never wavered in their tale of seeing him on the Green, of his self-accusation in his exclamation; he was very well known to them; and they showed his name written in their books.
He was acquitted by the tribunal of man, but a higher power condemned him.
Shortly after he died by his own hand, which God armed and turned against him.
This mystery, as it was called, was never solved to the public satisfaction, but I know that I sent Rob Patterson’s soul out of his body to betray his guilt, and to procure my darling Christian burial.
This was the tale Eneas Bretton, that ancient man, told me, on the old terrace, as he sat opposite the picture of Ann Leete.
“You must think what you will,” he concluded. “They will tell you that the shock unsettled my wits, or even that I was always crazed. As they would tell you that I dream when I say that I see Ann Leete now, and babble when I talk of my happiness with her for fifty years.”
He smiled faintly; a deeper glory than that of the autumn sunshine seemed to rest on him.
“Explain it yourself, sir. What was it those inspectors saw on the Green?”
He slightly raised himself in his chair and peered over my shoulder.
“And what is this,” he asked triumphantly, in the voice of a young man, “coming towards us now?”
I rose; I looked over my shoulder.
Through the gloom I saw a dark-green silk gown, a woman’s form, a pale hand beckoning.
My impulse was to fly from the spot, but a happy sigh from my companion reproved my cowardice. I looked at the ancient man whose whole figure appeared lapped in warm light, and as the apparition of the woman moved into this glow, which seemed too glorious for the fading sunshine, I heard his last breath flow from his body with a glad cry. I had not answered his questions; I never can.