Theo Gift

NUMBER TWO, MELROSE SQUARE

First published anonymously in two weekly parts on December 6 and 13, 1880 in Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round, the story’s­ authorship was revealed in 1889 when it was reprinted in Theo Gift’s volume of weird tales Not for the Night-time. “Theo Gift” was in fact the pseudonym of Dora Havers (1847-1923), who is also remembered for having collaborated with E. Nesbit in writing stories for children. One of the most accomplished and effective tales in this volume, it serves as a warning to be wary of underpriced rental properties, particularly those with sinister servants.

CHAPTER I

I am asked to state as clearly as possible why I gave up the house in Melrose Square, Bloomsbury, as suddenly as I did, and what happened there. The landlord says that I have given it a bad name, and prevented him (owing to certain paragraphs which have lately appeared in one of the daily papers) from letting it to another tenant. That is why I have been called upon to make this statement, and I will do so accordingly as briefly and exactly as possible. If the landlord be further hurt by it, I cannot help it. Had I been allowed I would far rather have avoided ever saying or thinking anything more on the subject. To me it is still an inexpressibly painful one.

I first entered Number Two, Melrose Square, rather late in the afternoon of November 15, 1878; that is, just about a year ago. It was a furnished house taken for me by a friend who was slightly acquainted with the landlord. She had also, on his recommendation, engaged for me a temporary servant, and it was this woman who opened the door for me as I alighted from the cab at it.

She was not a pleasant looking person; and I remember my first impression of the house was that it looked dark and cheerless, and not so inviting by any means as my friend had described it to me. She, however, had seen it on a bright morning in October, when the sun was shining and the leaves were still ruddy on the trees, while I was entering it under the treble disadvantages of twilight, soaking rain, and a sky low and dense, and sooty enough to suggest its being compounded of nothing but exhalations from the river of black mud which lined the streets and made the pavements foul and slippery on every side. No house could look pleasant under such circumstances, and I had not come to London for pleasure, but for hard practical work. I had undertaken the translation of a book which necessitated my constant vicinity to the British Museum for at least six months, and the house in Melrose Square was at once so convenient for the purpose, and so exceedingly—I had almost said ridiculously—low rented that it seemed as though it had been left empty specially for my accommodation. It would have required something more than a little outward dreariness to damp my spirits on my first arrival.

Inside it was rather more cheerful. The entrance hall, it is true, was dark and narrow; but Mrs. Cathers, the servant, had lighted a bright fire in the dining-room, and the tea-things were already set out on the table. I began to think that the woman’s face belied her character, and that I should not have to suffer from want of attention at any rate; altogether I sat down to tea in very good spirits, and afterwards wrote a letter to brother John, with whom I had been staying ever since I let the cottage after our mother’s death. It had been a long visit—not too long for him, I hope; but Mrs. John was fussy in her kindness, would make a visitor of me, and fidget if I shut myself up for an hour with my writing. On the whole I had rather looked forward to being my own mistress again. This evening I did not mean to do anything, however. The journey from the north had been as long and tiring as such journeys always are, and I hardly felt equal to getting out any occupation; while in the room where I was sitting there was certainly nothing to interest me or amuse my thoughts.

It was a medium sized apartment, with a rather dingy red Turkey carpet, furniture in the orthodox brown leather and mahogany, and a wall-paper of dull orange striped with maroon. There were one or two very bad oil-paintings, and an engraving, not at all bad, representing Judas casting down the thirty pieces of silver in the Temple; a bookcase in one corner, but locked and with no key in it; and over the chimney-piece a mirror covered with yellow gauze. I have a particular objection to gilding covered up with yellow gauze anywhere or at any time; but in this case the glass was covered as well—a precaution as senseless as it was hideous; and I made up my mind to remove the eye-sore on the morrow. For that night I was too lazy, and about nine o’clock rang for Mrs. Cathers to bring me my candle that I might go to bed. She went upstairs with me. It was rather a winding staircase, and my bedroom was on the second floor. I had to pass the drawing-room landing, and a window a little way above just where the stairs took a curve. I remember looking through this window and trying to discover what view it had, and being disappointed because the gloomy blackness of the night without only gave me back a vision of myself reflected in the glass with Mrs. Cathers’s decidedly unprepossessing features a little in my rear. For the moment, indeed, I fancied there were two Mrs. Cathers, or rather a second head a little below hers; but of course that was only a flaw in the glass, and I laughed at myself for the momentary idea that this second head had been more like an old man than my middle-aged servant woman. That is all I recollect of the first night; for after unpacking my trunks I made haste to bed, and slept so soundly that it required more than one knock at my door to arouse me in the morning.

I spent the whole of the next day at the Museum, only returning at dusk to a late dinner. It was still raining then, and the house looked as dreary as it had done on the previous evening. It did not face the square itself—which, indeed, hardly deserved the name, being only a narrow oblong enclosure where a score or so of melancholy trees shook down their last yellow leaves on a wilderness of tall grass and rank weeds, and round which all the house seemed to have acquired an air of damp and gloom. It opened into a little narrow street turning out of one end of the square, and cut off by iron posts and chains from being a thoroughfare to anywhere; and on that side it was divided from the next house by an archway leading down a long entry to some mews in the rear. The house on the other side, that looking into the square, was empty. So was the one immediately in front, and the big, gaunt letters, “To Let,” stared me whitely in the face from the dingy window above and below. It was not a cheerful place; but, as my friend wrote me, when I asked her to find me nice apartments near the Museum, a furnished house in a square, and with a servant included, for positively less money than you would pay for three rooms in anything like a decent street, was a thing to be grasped at, not despised; especially as I could be so much more my own mistress than in the latter place, and could ask Tom and Hester up from their barrack quarters to spend Christmas with me. So I tried to shut my eyes to the exterior look of things and went inside. Here there was one improvement at least—the yellow gauze was gone. I had stripped it off the mirror the last thing before leaving the house in the morning, as also from the glass in the drawing-room, which, though the gilding of the frame was decidedly shabby, was to my great amusement as carefully guarded as the other.

I went up to the latter apartment after dinner. Mrs. Cathers had suggested that “Of course I would not do so, as the dinin’-parlour were so much more cosy;” but I did not agree with Mrs. Cathers. That orange paper with its maroon stripes, and the grim old engraving of Judas, with the horrible expression of the traitor and the sinister, leering faces of the high priests and elders, were depressing to my spirits. The very force and realism of the picture made me feel as if the room were one in which it would be possible to plot a crime. Besides, a house in which a drawing-room is unused, except for company, is never a cosy or homelike one to me; and I knew that Hester felt still more strongly on the subject. I was determined that she should find me and my work-basket and books established there as a matter of course when she came.

Neither books nor work were much called into requisition on the present evening, however. There was a pleasant fire burning in the grate, and two candles on the little round table by the sofa, where the last number of the Cornhill, with a new novel, lay awaiting my perusal; but a day’s continuous writing and my dinner combined had made me sleepy; and after reading a few pages and finding that I was getting into a dreamy state, and mixing up the crackling of the fire with the roar of surf on a sunny beach, and my own position on the sofa with that of the Scottish heroine in a fast-flying cutter, I gave it up, blew out the candles, and composed myself for a nap till tea-time.

Do these details appear irrelevant to you? They are not so in reality. I mention them to show you that nothing of what I may afterwards relate can be accounted for (as has been falsely suggested) by my being in an excited, overwrought state, worked up by loneliness or the writing and reading of sensational romances. I was in perfect health. I had lived alone for weeks, and sometimes months, when my dear mother was visiting her married children. I had been simply following my regular profession, which this day lay in the translating a number of dry, scientific rigidly matter-of-fact letters, had walked home, eaten a plain dinner, and read myself comfortably to sleep with one of our healthiest and most-bracing English writer’s descriptions of sea-coast scenery. Bear this in mind as I wish you to do, and then listen to what follows.

I woke from my nap with a start, caused by the falling of a coal into the fender. How long I had slept I could not tell; but I had that instinctive consciousness, which I daresay most people have experienced, that it was a long time, much longer than I had intended; and this opinion was confirmed by the sight of the tea-things standing on the table, where Mrs. Cathers had evidently placed them without rousing me, and also by the fact that when I touched the teapot I found it was almost stone-cold. Vexed with myself I rose quickly to my feet and began putting the fire together; for it had got so low and dead that the room was almost dark. Indeed, I feared at first that there was not sufficient vitality in it to light a candle, and so enable me to see what time it was, and whether it was worth while beginning any occupation; but a few skilful touches with the poker soon dispelled this idea and produced a bright, wavering flame; and I stood up again, meaning to get a spill from the mantel-piece and light it at it. As I did so my glance naturally fell on my own face in the mirror before me, and I said to myself aloud, and smiling as one sometimes will when alone: “Well, Miss Mary Liddell, you have made your head into a furze-bush! It’s a mercy Mrs. John isn’t here to see you, or——” My voice broke off suddenly at that word; for in the act of uttering it, and smiling to myself at my dishevelledness, as I have said, I saw that I was not alone in the room.

Standing at the farther end of it, almost opposite to the grate, and reflected in the mirror by the ruddy light, was a woman: a woman I had never seen before. That she had not been there five minutes back when I awoke I could almost have sworn; for I had looked all round the room; and dim as the light was, I could see well enough that there was no one else in it, and that the door was closed. It was closed now, and how she could have opened and shut it again without my hearing her, unless during the moment that I was poking the fire, I could not imagine. The curious thing was that she did not look at or speak to me even now; but stood perfectly still, her face turned towards the door as if in the attitude of listening, and with all the appearance of a person belonging to the house, seeing that she was not dressed for walking, but in a loose sort of morning gown of white cambric, with deep ruffles down the front and at the wrists, and wore her hair loosely plaited down her back. I noticed this at the first glance as adding to the strangeness of her presence there at all; but in the same moment the fire shot up in a brilliant flame throwing a bright light on her face, and almost nailing me to the ground as my eyes read the expression on it. In all the years I have lived, in all the years I may yet have before me, I never have seen, I trust I never may see, such an expression on any human being’s face again! For it was a young face, that of a girl, almost a child; and would have been pretty but for the awful, corpse-like pallor which overshadowed the brow and cheeks, and the hopeless, unutterable depth of misery and fear, of utter despair, and ghastly, speechless, livid horror, all blended in one single effort, an intensity of listening, which seemed to absorb every nerve and power: listening to something outside the door, something which seemed from her starting eyeballs and the hopeless quiver in her lower jaw to be drawing nearer and nearer; for her slender, feeble body seemed to shrink with each breath, and draw itself farther and farther back, as though from some loathsome, terrible animal which she could see in act to spring, or as though—— It was all visible in the sudden leaping up of that flame. The next moment it died down again, and I turned round sharply!

The woman was gone!

How I felt I cannot tell you. It has taken many words to write all this, but it did not require the space of one minute to see it. It must have taken you many seconds to read, but it did not take a dozen heart-beats to feel it in all its ghastly, inexplicable mystery. I was still breathless with the surprise of seeing her there, there in my room, which only a moment before had been empty save of myself; and she was gone—disappeared! The door had not opened. There was no sound, no cry, not even the lightest footfall. The house seemed wrapped in the most impenetrable silence. Even the noises in the street were hushed; and I was there alone in the firelight with the unlit spill in my hand. I suppose I rang the bell violently; for I remember listening to the sound of it jingling far away in the basement regions, and then ringing again and again, and waiting, with my heart beating like an alarm-clock, and my hands quite cold and damp, for Mrs. Cathers to answer it.

She made her appearance at last. It may not have been as long as it seemed. One does not tell time accurately at such moments; but it was long enough to give me time to recover myself a little, and to feel annoyed with the woman for the marked sullenness and unwillingness in her whole manner as she entered with the conventional query: “Did you ring, ma’am?” She was carrying a large kerosene lamp, and the sudden glare of light, as well as the sound of her voice, surly as it was, restored me further.

“I should think you heard me ring several times,” I answered. “Did you meet anyone on the stairs just now? I have been asleep longer than I intended, and I did not hear the door open; but——”

“Yes, ma’am, you ’ave been asleep,” Mrs. Cathers interrupted me in a tone of greater injury than before. “And if I didn’t answer of your bell the minnit it ringed, it was in cause of my bein’ that tired of waitin’ up I’d dropt into a doze myself a-sittin’ in my cheer. P’r’aps, ma’am, you don’t know as it’s twelve o’clock?”

“Twelve o’clock!” I repeated. Had I really slept as long? “Why did you not wake me when you brought up the tea?” I added, looking at the woman in surprise.

“Why, m’m,” she said peevishly, “I would have done so, in course, if you ’adn’t said at dinner as you were tired; an’ when I come up you were sleepin’ so sound I didn’t like. Dreamin’, I should think you was too, by your ’air,” the woman put in with a sudden furtive glance at me.

I had not been able to catch her eyes once before. She kept them rigidly fixed on the lamp she carried, never even looking about her; and, indeed, there was something now so unpleasant in her glance, that I felt almost unwilling to go on speaking to her. Still, if anyone had got into the house without my knowledge—anyone of feeble mind, or in great terror! Writing this as though I were in the witness-box, I can solemnly aver that so free was my mind from any morbid or romantic fancies that, even then, I could not think of my visitor as having any supernatural element.

“Have you let anyone into the house without my knowing?” I asked, rather sharply. “Or is the hall-door open? If you have been asleep yourself, you might not hear anyone come in at it; but I believe someone did just now—a woman. She was in this room a few minutes ago.”

Mrs. Cathers looked at me again, this time with barely veiled contempt.

“You ’ave been dreamin’, ma’am,” she said coolly. “The ’all door! Why, it ’ave been shut an’ locked ever since dusk, an’ as to me lettin’ anyone in, I’d not think of such a thing. There ain’t no one in this ’ouse but you and me, nor there hasn’t been, man or woman either. Lor, to think what queer dreams some folks ’ave! But I thought as you were give that way, when I ’eard you mumbling to yourself in your sleep.”

I did not believe her, for I knew that I had not been dreaming; and there was something in the woman’s whole manner which made me distrustful of her, and more especially of her almost impertinent determination to force a ready-made solution of my query on me. Why should she be so anxious to persuade me that I had been dreaming, when, as a matter of fact, she could have no idea of my grounds for speaking as I did? On second thoughts, I decided to say no more on the subject at present; but, simply observing that she ought to have woke me sooner, told her to light me up to bed, and make haste to her own. I could not have stayed longer just then in that drawing-room by myself, and I am perfectly willing to own that until I was safely in bed, with my room door locked, I avoided looking about me as carefully as Mrs. Cathers had done. I was honestly frightened and bewildered, and my mind was in a whirl. It was a comfort to me when three, striking from a church-clock hard-by, and followed by the crowing of an over-wakeful cock, showed me that the actual night was past, and gave me confidence enough to let me sleep.

The following day, the 17th of November, was bright and sunny; and I awoke, feeling more cheerful, and able to reason with myself quite calmly as to the last night’s occurrence. Looking back upon it thus, through the medium of sunlight and a refreshing sleep, I could only conclude that, however unlikely and foreign to all my previous experience, I had simply been the victim of some strange optical delusion, though how produced, and whence arising, I could not tell. Against any other idea, that, for instance, which had already presented itself to me, of some mad or imbecile girl being concealed in the house with Mrs. Cathers’s connivance, I guarded by looking into every room and cupboard immediately after breakfast, and, after locking up those which I did not require for present occupation, depositing the keys in my desk.

I spent the greater part of that day like the last at the British Museum, and afterwards called on some old friends in Russell Place, and stayed to dinner with them. I had been half in hopes of carrying off one of the girls to sleep and spend a few days with me, for the strange vividness and reality of the last night’s vision, and the ghastly sense of horror and mystery encompassing it, had left a sufficiently strong impression on me still to make me wishful for some other company than my own. I was not exactly afraid to be alone, but my nerves had received an unpleasant shock, and I wished to assist myself to recover from it. I was disappointed, however, both the daughters being away on a visit in the country; but their father, one of the kindest and most genial men living, insisted on seeing me home at night, and even came in and sat for half an hour or so talking to me, greatly, as I judged from her face, to the discontent of Mrs. Cathers. Indeed, the sourness of her expression, when she saw me return accompanied by a clergy­man, even attracted the old gentleman’s attention, and caused him to observe laughingly to me:

“Why, Mary, my dear, one would think you were a jealous wife, with a husband partial to pretty servant girls, and had chosen the most repellent you could find accordingly. Does your Abigail always present such an unamiable appearance?”

She was to have her amiability further tried. My kind friend, to whom I had half jestingly mentioned the previous night’s fright, insisted on looking over the house with me before he left, so as to “set my mind at rest,” he said; and Mrs. Cathers resented the proceeding so much that she came up to me in the middle of it, and, without taking any notice of Mr. L——’s presence, asked me, in her strongest tone of ill usage, whether I objected to her going to bed: “seeing as how it were past twelve before she got to rest last night, and just on eleven now, and having been hard at work since——”

I told her shortly that she might go to bed as soon as she pleased. When you are used to nice old family servants with gentle, respectful ways, this sort of coarse incivility grates on you, and as I bid my kind old friend good night, a few minutes later, I told him, smiling:

“Well, I think I shall take your advice in one respect before Tom and Hester come, although she is rather a jealous wife. I shall look out for a pleasanter maid.”

I said this, with the hall-door in my hand—he will bear witness now, how cheerfully, and how little the thought that I should never require another maid in that house, or sleep another night there, had occurred to me. Indeed, I can safely say that such an idea had never been further from my mind. I went back to the dining-room quite cheerfully too. Originally, I had intended going to bed very early, and had even, by an impulse which I was ashamed to put into words, re-covered the mirror with its hideous yellow veil; but the evening with my cheery-hearted friends had so restored my natural spirits that I felt divided between laughter and blushes at my own folly in so doing, and finding a little pile of letters and proofs which had come for me by the last post lying on the side-table, I sat down to look over them, and speedily got so absorbed in the task as to forget altogether how time was passing.

I was aroused from it quite suddenly by a feeling which I cannot explain, but yet which was strong enough to make me lift my head with a start, and look sharply around: a feeling that someone was in the same room with me!

CHAPTER II

I said at the end of the first part of this statement that I was aroused from my occupation by the sudden sensation that someone was in the room with me. It was not so in fact. One glance round the formal gas-lit apartment, with its rather skimpy curtains looped flatly against the wall, and its utter absence of anything like dark corners or ghostly recesses, was enough to assure me of my error; but the feeling remained with me all the same, and grew stronger instead of passing away. It almost seemed as though someone were seated at the same table with me, breathing near me, occupying the very next chair; and then gradually there stole over me the same sensation I had had before with regard to this room, as if some crime, some deadly, sickening sin which appalled me even while I was utterly ignorant of its nature, were being plotted and worked out in it—something too hideous to be rendered into words, but to which I, by the very fact of my presence there, was being made a party. It was then, at that moment, that the thought of what I had seen in the mirror last night came into my mind. I was exactly under the drawing-room floor where it had stood—the vision-woman with that awful, unspoken mystery of horror and despair in her livid cheeks and dim, dilated eyes. Was this unknown, unguessed-at wickedness being woven and worked out against her? Was she up there now, waiting?

I had been sitting down, holding my letters in my hand, trying honestly and hard to think of them and nothing else. I could not do so any longer. I stood up abruptly. There was a trembling in my limbs and hands, and my forehead felt cold and moist. All the while I was putting up my papers my eyes would keep wandering by a sort of fascination to the mirror. I could see nothing in it. The gauze prevented me; yet it seemed to me more than once as if the reflection of something—some moving figure, not mine, had passed across it; as if, but for the veil—— I could not bear it, and went out quickly from the room, shutting and locking the door behind me. There was no light in the hall or upon the stairs, except the candle I carried. After putting that ready for me, Mrs. Cathers had turned out the gas. I went upstairs with swift steps; swiftest in passing the drawing-room door.

I have said the staircase took a bend here and crossed a long window, which in daylight lighted it from top to bottom. This window gave on the dead wall of a neighbouring house about eight feet distant. There was no blind to it. As on the first night, it frowned on me in black, unsheltered nakedness when I turned the corner. As on the first night, I saw myself reflected at full length in it, the candle in my hand, the buttons and fringes of my dress, the—— My God! but who, who or what was that behind me, that crouching figure which froze me to the spot, actually paralysed with dread—a dread which was all the more over­mastering because I had heard no faintest rustle or sound to give me warning of it.

Believe me or not; but just below me, creeping slowly with soft, gliding, noiseless steps, was the figure of a man!

At the moment he was not on the same angle of the stairs with me. The banisters separated us, and at first the light only fell on his head: the head of an old man, bald, with tufts of greyish-white hair hanging in coarse, shaggy locks over the large, red, wrinkly ears, and a short, stubbly beard, white too—an old man with stooping shoulders and heavily corrugated brow. The face beneath was inexpressibly evil and repulsive: evil and repulsive in the loose, hanging, sensual lips; evil and repulsive in the cruel, vindictive eyes almost hidden under their overhanging brows; so evil and repulsive in every line and curve of the hoary head and brutal, wolfish jaws, that even if met by daylight in a crowded street one would instinctively have shuddered and shrunk away from contact with him. How much more so now when illumined by an expression of such deadly, sinister determination that the very sight of it seemed to chill one’s heart and limbs, and deprive one even of the power of a cry for help.

In that moment of mortal, agonised terror, longer in seeming than all the years of my past life, I felt as though in the presence of some ferocious animal; some creature without pity, without conscience, without soul, whose very glance must foul and destroy if it once fell on one.

For that was the strangest part of it, adding in one way to the mystery and horror of his presence. This creature, man or devil, never looked at me; seemed, if it were possible to believe such a thing, unconscious even of my presence. Like the vision-woman of last night, its eyes were fixed straight before it. Like the vision-woman of last night, they never blinked or wandered once, but seemed concentrated in one fixed, deadly stare; a stare which had for its object the drawing-room door! Could it be—was it possible, or was this some horrible, fevered dream?—that she was there now, cowering behind that door; a woman, young, almost a child, alone in the night, utterly friendless, utterly helpless, waiting and listening in an anguish of fear beyond words, beyond hope, beyond even prayer, for the approach of this very man who, step by step, was gradually drawing nearer to her—the man whose unseen presence had made the room below horrible with meditated crime, whom I had thought to leave behind me there!

I could see the whole of him now. Inch by inch with a stealthy, crawling movement, as though he were raising himself by the wrinkled, sinewy hand, which grasped the rail of the banisters so close to me that it almost touched my dress, rather than by the use of his feet. He had gained the landing outside the drawing-room door; and I saw that he was clad only in trousers and shirt—the latter open at the throat so as to show the wrinkled, hairy skin; also that he carried in his left hand an ordinary table-knife with a black horn handle, the blade of which, worn to a point like a dagger, had evidently been recently sharpened. I saw, too, for the first time, that he was not alone. Close to his side, and alternately rubbing herself against his legs and the knuckles of his left hand, was a big, yellow, gaunt-bodied cat, with an unusually large head, and one eye bleeding and sore from some recent wound. There was something peculiarly horrible about this cat, horrible even in the almost obtrusive way in which she lavished her caresses on her sinister companion, and then, leaping forward, crouched down at the door, smelling at it and turning her sound eye on her master as if aware of his object and inviting him to hurry with it. Still without a word, and seeming indeed to hold his breath between his clenched teeth, he struck at her with the knife to drive her off; and then, gliding closer to the door, gave one furtive glance around him, and tightening his hold of the weapon, laid his hand upon the lock.

That broke the spell which held me, and had held me till then numb and speechless; and as the handle slowly turned under those cruel, sinewy fingers I shrieked aloud, shrieked again and again, till the whole house rang with my cries of fear and horror; shrieked, and springing wildly forward, saw——nothing! a blank, empty space, where a moment before had been man and animal, and let the candle fall out of my nerveless fingers down between the banister and far below, clattering into the darkness.

What happened next, or how I got there, I shall never know; but it was early dawn when I recovered consciousness, and I was lying face downwards on the floor in my own room. Someone—Mrs. Cathers it was—was trying to lift me up; but at first I did not recognise her, and the touch of a hand only wrung a faint cry from me, and made me go off again into a second fainting-fit. I suppose she must have got some water then and dashed it in my face; for, when I next revived, both it and my hair were dripping with wet, and I opened my eyes and saw her bending over me. But I was still only half-conscious. I did not know where I was or what had happened to me, and my first effort of returning life was to cling to this woman, so repugnant to me usually, and moan out faint contradictory entreaties that she would stay with me, that she would not leave me; and then, at the same time, that she would run to that poor girl and save her. “Oh, do go to her; do, do, or he will kill her. He will have killed her by now.”

“Killed her! Why, ma’am, whatever are you talking on? There’s no one in the ’ouse but you an’ me. There ain’t, indeed. On my conscience there ain’t.” This, or something like this, Mrs. Cathers kept repeating; but I hardly heard or understood. The frenzy of terror, only half subdued by exhaustion, was still on me; and when I found she would not move I tried to rise, and failing, burst into a fit of hysterical weeping, which lasted so long that Mrs. Cathers got quite frightened. She ran for some brandy and poured it down my throat, and this partially revived me; but by this time I was as weak as a child, and the woman had to half lift, half drag me on to the bed, and then stoop her head low to hear my whispered request, urged with tremulous eagerness, that even if she were sure that there was no one in the house, she would send at once to the friends I had been with last evening, and beg Mrs. L—— to come to me. To my surprise and sorrow, however, this Mrs. Cathers would not do. She had a hundred reasons to the contrary. There was no one to send, and I was not well enough to be left, and if I liked to write to Mrs. L—— later she would put the note in the pillar; all of which did not satisfy me; for with all my suspicions of the woman revived by her reluctance to carry out such a simple and natural wish, I could not feel sure that any letter I might write would reach its destination. Besides, a better idea had come into my head, and finding her obstinate on that score, I begged her to help me to dress, and call a cab, declaring that I would go to the L——’s myself. That would save all delay, and they would take care of me. I could not and would not sleep another night in that house.

Mrs. Cathers lost patience.

“Tush, ma’am! What’s the matter with the ’ouse?” she said rudely, and pressing me back on the pillows with a hand strong enough to be unpleasantly suggestive in my weakened state. “There’s not a soul stirred in it but yourself after the gentleman went last night, and nothing ain’t happened excep’ that you’ve nearly druv yourself into a fever an’ got a fit of the hystericks with the bad air in that beastly Museum, and writin’ mornin’, noon, an’ evenin’, too, as is enough to drive anyone mad. I expect you was reg’lar wore out, and most like fell asleep aside of your bed a-sayin’ your prayers, and got awful nightmares in consequence, as was only natural. Why, you was cryin’ out and struggling in one still when I came upstairs. And now just you lie down, ma’am, an’ take a sleep to quiet you. Why, bless you! you’ll be all right when you wake, and thankful to me I didn’t let you go rampagin’ about when you wasn’t sensible what you was sayin’ or doin’.”

I looked up in the woman’s face and saw that it was useless to try either argument or command on her; for there was a darkly obstinate expression about her mouth which told me she meant to have her way. Perhaps if I pretended to give in to her, and lay still for a while, I might be able to get up later and leave the house without any further appeal to her. That any such appeal would be futile I felt sure. Indeed, her resoluteness in keeping me in the house and preventing me from speaking to other people, with her peculiarly persistent avoidance of asking me any question, either now or on the previous night, as to what had happened, preferring to put forward a made-up story of her own as though she were going through a programme learnt by rote beforehand, made me certain that she either knew more of the secrets of this gloomy house than anyone suspected, or was in the landlord’s pay to keep them from being brought to the light of day at any cost, even of life or reason, to a tenant. Put before yourself what would be the natural curiosity, wonder, and sympathy of most women of the lower orders on such an occasion, and I think you will come to a similar conclusion.

Acting on this idea I made believe to yield to her way of thinking, and also to her making me a cup of tea, which she declared would do me all the good in the world. In truth I was both thirsty and anxious above all things to regain strength enough to carry out my purpose; and, therefore, when she brought me up a large breakfast-cup full, I raised myself and drank it off greedily, although it struck me in so doing that it was not good tea, and had a strange bitter flavour. The next moment I felt myself sinking heavily back and my eyes closing. I opened them with an effort, and looked at Mrs. Cathers. There was a smile on her face; but it seemed to be getting fainter, as though I saw it through a thickening mist; and when I tried to say, “You have given me a narcotic,” my voice sounded thick, and the words seemed to lose themselves between my teeth. Before they were fairly uttered, sound and sight, too, had faded away, and I was fast asleep.

How long I slept I do not know, but I should judge it was about four hours. Narcotics, especially in strong doses, have rather a curious effect on me. They both operate and lose their power far more rapidly and thoroughly than with most people. It wanted a few minutes to eleven when I awoke, and, with the exception of a slight headache, I felt at once that both my perceptions and my memory were quite clear. My bodily powers, too, had come back in a great degree; for though I felt much weaker than usual I was quite able to rise, and lost no time in dressing myself for walking, and putting up my money and a few valuables in a small hand-bag as softly and swiftly as possible. My intention was to leave the house, if possible without seeing Mrs. Cathers again; and at first I seemed likely to succeed. There was no sign of her on the stairs as I passed that awful window, now blank and bare, and filled with raw, white daylight; or in the drawing-room, the door of which stood wide open; and as I hastened down a shudder ran through my limbs, and a feeling of sickness came over me, when I noticed, what I had not seen before, a large brownish stain, which had been partially obliterated by scraping and washing, on the stencilled wall just outside the room.

There was no sign of Mrs. Cathers in the hall either, and the whole house was as still and silent as if she too had dosed herself off to sleep. It was, therefore, an unpleasant shock to me when I lifted the latch of the front door, expecting next moment to be in the street, to find that it was locked and the key gone. The dining-room too was in darkness, the shutters being still up and barred; and a feeling of nervous dread prevented me from giving more than a hasty glance into it. I preferred to boldly invade the kitchen regions, and, if I saw Mrs. Cathers, desire her to let me out by the area door. She could hardly refuse; and if she did, there were enough passers-by at this time for me to easily attract someone’s attention. I went downstairs accordingly. They were narrow stairs, and, though clean enough at present, had evidently not been kept so by previous tenants, for they were stained with blackish spots and patches nearly all the way to the bottom, as though something had been spilt down them, and soaking into the wood remained there. I noticed too that the wall on one side had been whitewashed for about three feet up at a much later period than the rest.

To my surprise Mrs. Cathers was not in the kitchen below; nor in her own room, which adjoined it, and the door of which standing open showed me that her bonnet and shawl were gone from the peg where, on my previous visits to the basement, I had always seen them hanging. It flashed upon me then that she had gone out on some errand of her own, trusting to my being sound asleep, and probably meaning to return before the influence of the narcotic had worn off; and when, to my intense relief and thankfulness, I discovered that she had omitted or forgotten to fasten the area door behind her, I felt as though a heavy weight had been rolled off my heart, and a sudden resolution came to me to profit by her absence by endeavouring to discover some clue, if any existed, to those horrors nightly enacted upstairs. It did not seem likely that I should; but at least I had courage to try.

The kitchen and lower offices generally I had examined before, and found them all alike, dreary in the dreariness of dark November days, rather bare and very clean. Mrs. Cathers’s room remained; but that came under the same category. There was not even anything lying about in it. She kept all her possessions in a small trunk, which was locked. There was no looking-glass in the room; and the key was inside the door. Did she fasten herself in at night, and remain so, unmoved by any shrieks or cries for help from upstairs? There was nothing to be learnt here.

I had only one more place to visit, a small yard at the back of the house. Originally, perhaps, it had been a garden; for there were a couple of lilac-bushes and a holly at one end of it; but these had evidently not borne a leaf for years, and being coated with a thick garment of soot stood up against the dank, mildewed walls like black spectres. They were high walls, so high that even if there had been any sun it could hardly have forced an entrance; and the ground beneath was black, too, and sodden with moisture. At one side there was a huge tub for rain-water, and a pile of old bottles; at the bottom a worm-eaten, tumbling-to-pieces summerhouse. That was all. I do not know what took my steps to the last-named place. Standing there under the low leaden sky, and half hidden by the spectral lilac-bushes, it presented an appearance even more gloomy, sinister, and desolate than the rest; yet something within me, something which I could not resist, seemed to force me to the door and compel me to look inside. There was nothing to be seen there at first—nothing, at least, but a pile of wood heaped up on one side, and a rusty old chopper lying across some of the billets with which Mrs. Cathers had evidently been chopping them up for her fire; but as I stood gazing, something living seemed to move at one end of the wood-stack; and to my unutterable horror—a horror which must have been felt to be understood—there came out a large yellow cat, very gaunt and rough-skinned, with an unusually big head and only one eye.

For the moment I thought I should have fainted again. This animal, hideous in itself, and the very facsimile of that whose horrible gambols I had witnessed the previous night, seemed like a part of that ghastly scene risen up again in proof of its reality; and for a minute or so the walls of the building seemed to swim round with me, and I was forced to lean on the wood-stack to save myself from falling. Then I saw that the ground where the animal had been crouching was hollowed into a hole, partly by her own claws, partly, perhaps, by chopping billets on it; and at the present moment she had returned there, and was licking and growling over a bone, which, from its whiteness and the earth on one end of it, appeared to have been disinterred in the process. It was a very small bone, not bigger than that in a rabbit’s fore-leg or a human finger; and close by I saw a gleam of something else, also white, showing through the loosened mould. Conquering my repugnance I stooped down, and with a shrinking beyond all words, and which gives me a sick feeling now to think of it, drew out this white thing, discovering it to be a second bone resembling the first. A few blackish fibres like threads were hanging from it, and to it a fragment of stuff—muslin, apparently—was adhering.

The cat lay still, watching me all the while with her one vicious eye, and growling furtively. With an involuntary gesture of disgust I dropped the bone almost as soon as I had touched it, but the bit of muslin had got caught on my finger, and obliged me to look at it more closely. It was a scrap of cambric about nine inches long and two broad, hemmed at one side and gathered at the other, like a frill or ruffle; but it had evidently been torn roughly from the article of dress to which it belonged, and one end was stained with some dark brown liquid, which had dried and caked it into a hard, crumpled mass.

Like a frill or ruffle! Like—like—good God! was it only a fancy?—the ruffles at her wrist; and stained with——

How I left that horrible house I hardly know; but five minutes later I was outside it in the open street, and I have never entered it again. For several weeks I lay very ill in Russell Place; so ill that Hester was sent for from Aldershot to help the L——’s in nursing me; and as soon as I was well enough to be moved she took me back there with her, and afterwards returned with me to the North, where I have remained quietly almost ever since. On the second day of my illness Mrs. L—— and my brother-in-law went to the house in Melrose Square. Mrs. Cathers was there, and opened the door to them, professing great alarm at my absence and entire innocence as to the possibility of anything in the house being the occasion of it; but when she found that one of their first objects was to summarily send her about her business her manner altered, and she sturdily refused to go, declaring that she had been put into the house by the other lady and the landlord, and that no one had any right to send her off at a moment’s warning because a poor, weak-minded lady had got a fever. She had done all she could for her, and tried to keep her quietly in bed; though as to drugging her that was all an invention, and she would swear she had not. Let them take her to a magistrate and try; and if the poor, silly woman would get up and go out what could be expected but she would get worse? Why, she had seen at the very beginning what a nervous, hysterical state she was in; and had told the landlord she did not much like being alone with such a person; and the least she expected was a month’s board and wages in compensation. Tom had written to the landlord already, and an angry interview and correspondence ensued; the latter gentleman persisting in treating all suspicion of there being anything wrong in the house as equally childish and insulting, had the ground of the summer-house dug up, and triumphantly pointed out that there was nothing buried there (this was a week after my visit to the spot, and who could tell what had been done in the interim?) and spoke of me uniformly as a poor, nervous bibliomaniac, worked up into a brain-fever by a disordered digestion and an overwrought brain. Indeed, he even threatened to claim a quarter’s rent, declaring that the house had been taken for six months; but my brother-in-law fought this valiantly, and he had to be content with the month’s rent he had received in advance.

As to Mrs. Cathers, she disappeared during the quarrel between her superiors, and was heard of no more. My firm belief is, and always will be, that she was aware of the evil character of the house, and was heavily paid by the landlord to act as servant to his tenants in it, and cast a slur on anything they might declare they had seen there. He, of course, spoke of her as a person of the highest character, and pointed to the fact that none of my property had been disturbed in my absence as proof thereof.

But what was the explanation of the mystery? What was the dark secret of this house, so strangely shadowed forth to me, a plain matter-of-fact woman of the nineteenth century? After minute enquiries among the neighbours and shopkeepers in the vicinity, I can only say I do not know! The mystery is still unexplained: the secret still hidden in those dreary walls, never probably to be unveiled on earth.

All that the lawyer and Mrs. L——, acting for me, could find out in their research was this: The house had been untenanted for a year and a half before I took it; the last people who lived there being a blind old lady with her husband and two servants. The aged couple used to go to bed very early, and the servants slept downstairs, and never spoke of having heard or seen anything out of the common; but one night the husband, having to come downstairs for his wife’s medicine, must have missed his footing, for he was heard falling to the bottom, and was picked up speechless and dying. The blind widow went away after that, and the household broke up.

Who had the house before them? Oh, a young couple; but they only stayed a week or so, and left suddenly. Reported in the neighbourhood that the landlord turned them out; said they were not respectable people.

And before that? Before that it had been empty a good while, ever since the old gentleman lived there who owned it and was uncle to the present landlord. Married? No; nor likely to have been; a very ill-favoured old gent, and not pleasant in his manners either. Had a ward living with him, however—a young lady; but she was said to be a sad invalid, never went out, and no one ever saw her, except now and then at an upper window. They went away all in a hurry to France—indeed, no one knew till they were gone; for they were not sociable people, only kept one servant, latterly a charwoman who did not sleep in the house, and had no acquaintances in the neighbourhood. Folks said the young lady died abroad, and perhaps her guardian found the house lonesome without her; for though he came back after a time he did not stay. Anyhow, he was dead, too, now; for that was how the house came to the present owner, who had never lived there himself, but let it just as it stood, furnished.

Dead! And there was an end of the clue, if any had existed. It could be traced no farther. Probably it never will be now, since, as I have said, the man and his ward are both dead; though how she died, or where, no one will ever know save God, who looks down on every ghastly secret of this earth and suffers them to lie hidden in His hand until the Day of Judgment. Anyhow, the house is there now, empty. You may pass it any day and read the big “To Let” in sprawling letters on a card in the dining-room window. No one has ever opened the shutters in that dreary room. A rumour has got about that Number Two is haunted, and that evil sights are seen there; and the landlord cannot let it in consequence. That is why he is now threatening me with an action for libel; and if he chooses he may, of course, carry it out. In my defence I can only make a plain statement, the same that I have written here. Let anyone else make what further examination he pleases, and draw his own conclusions.