Part 14
It is told by a decayed gentleman at the sign of _The Leather Butler_, which is in Shepherd’s Market, which is in Mayfair, how one night three men behaved in a most peculiar way; and one of them was left for dead.
Towards twelve o’clock on a night in the month of November some years ago, three men were ascending the noble stairway of a mansion in Grosvenor Square. The mansion, although appointed in every detail--to suit, however, a severe taste--had yet a sour and sensitive atmosphere, as of a house long untenanted but by caretakers.
The first of the men, for they ascended in single file, held aloft a kitchen candlestick: whilst his companions made the best progress they could among the deep shadows that the faulty light cast on the oaken stairway. He who went last, the youngest of the three, said gaily:
“Mean old bird, my aunt! Cutting off the electric-light just because she is away.”
“Fur goodness’ sake!” said the other.
The leader, whose face the candle-light revealed as thin almost to asceticism, a face white and tired, finely moulded but soiled in texture by the dissipations of a man of the world, contented himself with a curt request to his young friend not to speak so loud.
It was, however, the gentleman in between the two whom it will advantage the reader to consider. This was an unusually tall and strongly built man. Yet it was not his giant stature, but rather the assurance of his bearing, which was remarkable. His very clothes sat on his huge frame with an air of firmness, of finality, that, as even a glance at his two companions would show, is deprecated by English tailors, whose inflexible formula it is that the elegance of the casual is the only possible elegance for gentlemen of the mode. While his face had that weathered, yet untired and eager, look which is the enviable possession of many Americans, and is commonly considered to denote, for reasons not very clearly defined, the quality known as poise. Not, however, that this untired and eager look is, as some have supposed, the outward sign of a lack of interest in dissipation, but rather of an enthusiastic and naïve curiosity as to the varieties of the same. The gentleman from America looked, in fine, to be a proper man; and one who, in his early thirties, had established a philosophy of which his comfort and his assurance of retaining it were the two poles, his easy perception of humbug the pivot, and his fearlessness the latitude and longitude.
It was on the second landing that the leader, whose name was Quillier, and on whom the dignity of an ancient baronetcy seemed to have an almost intolerably tiring effect, flung open a door. He did not pass into the room, but held the candlestick towards the gentleman from America. And his manner was so impersonal as to be almost rude, which is a fault of breeding when it is bored.
“The terms of the bet,” said Quillier, “are that this candle must suffice you for the night. That is understood?”
“Sure, why not?” smiled the gentleman from America. “It’s a bum bet, and it looks to me like a bum candle. But do I care? No, sir!”
“Further,” continued the impersonal, pleasant voice, “that you are allowed no matches, and therefore cannot relight the candle when it has gone out. That if you can pass the night in that room, Kerr-Anderson and I pay you five hundred pounds. And _vice versa_.”
“That’s all right, Quillier. We’ve got all that.” The gentleman from America took the candle from Quillier’s hand and looked into the room, but with no more than faint interest. In that faulty light little could be seen but the oak panelling, the heavy hangings about the great bed, and a steel engraving of a Meissonier duellist lunging at them from a wall nearby.
“Seldom,” said he, “have I seen a room look less haunted----”
“Ah,” vaguely said Sir Cyril Quillier.
“But,” said the gentleman from America, “since you and Kerr-Anderson insist on presenting me with five hundred pounds for passing the night in it, do I complain? No, sir!”
“Got your revolver?” queried young Kerr-Anderson, a chubby youth whose profession was dining out.
“That is so,” said the gentleman from America.
Quillier said: “Well, Puce; I don’t mind telling you that I had just as soon this silly business was over. I have been betting all my life, but I have always had a preference for those bets which did not turn on a man’s life or death----”
“Say, listen, Quillier, you can’t frighten me with that junk!” snapped Mr. Puce.
“My aunt,” said young Kerr-Anderson, “will be very annoyed if anything happens and she gets to hear of it. She hates a corpse in her house more than anyone I know. You’re sure you are going on with it, Puce?”
“Boy, if Abraham Lincoln was to come up this moment and tell me Queen Anne was dead I’d be as sure he was speaking the truth as that I’m going to spend this night in this old haunted room of your aunt’s. Yes, sir! And now I’ll give you good-night, boys. Warn your mothers to be ready to give you five hundred pounds to hand on to Howard Cornelius Puce.”
“I like Americans,” said Quillier vaguely. “They are so enthusiastic. Good-night, Puce, and God bless you. I hope you have better luck than the last man who spent a night in that room. He was strangled. Good-night, my friend.”
“Aw, have a heart!” growled Mr. Puce. “You get a guy so low with your talk that I feel I could put on a tall hat and crawl under a snake.”
II
The gentleman from America, alone in the haunted room, lost none of his composure. Indeed, if anything disturbed him at all, it was that, irritated by Quillier’s manner at a dinner-party a few nights before, and knowing Quillier to be a bankrupt wastrel, he had allowed himself to be dared into this silly adventure and had thus deprived himself for one night of the amenities of his suite at Claridge’s Hotel. Five hundred pounds more or less did not matter very much to Mr. Puce: although, to be sure, it was some consolation to know that five hundred pounds more or less must matter quite a deal to _Sir_ Cyril Quillier, for all his swank. Mr. Puce, like a good American, following the gospel according to Mr. Sinclair Lewis, always stressed the titles of any of his acquaintance.
Now, he contented himself with a very cursory examination of the dim, large room: he rapped, in an amateurish way, on the oak panels here and there for any sign of any “secret passage junk,” but succeeded only in soiling his knuckles: and it was only when, fully clothed, he had thrown himself on the great bed that it occurred to him that five hundred pounds sterling was quite a pretty sum to have staked about a damfool haunted room.
The conclusion that naturally leapt to one’s mind, thought Mr. Puce, was that the room must have something the matter with it: else would a hawk like Quillier have bet money on its qualities of terror? Mr. Puce had, indeed, suggested, when first the bet was put forward, that five hundred pounds was perhaps an unnecessary sum to stake on so idiotic a fancy; but Quillier had said in a very tired way that he never bet less than five hundred on anything, but that if Mr. Puce preferred to bet with poppycock and chickenfood, he, Quillier, would be pleased to introduce him to some very jolly children of his acquaintance.
Such thoughts persuaded Mr. Puce to rise and examine more carefully the walls and appointments of the room. But as the furniture was limited to the barest necessities, and as the oak-panelled walls appeared in the faint light to be much the same as any other walls, the gentleman from America swore vaguely and again reclined on the bed. It was a very comfortable bed.
He had made up his mind, however, that he would not sleep. He would watch out, thought Mr. Puce, for any sign of this old ghost, and he would listen with the ears of a coyote, thought Mr. Puce, for any hint of those rapping noises, rude winds, musty odours, clanking of chains and the like, with which, so Mr. Puce had always understood, the family ghosts of Britishers invariably heralded their foul appearance.
Mr. Puce, you can see, did not believe in ghosts. He could not but think, however, that some low trick might be played on him, since on the honour of _Sir_ Cyril Quillier, peer though he was--for Mr. Puce, like a good American, could never get the cold dope on all this fancy title stuff--he had not the smallest reliance. But as to the supernatural, Mr. Puce’s attitude was always a wholesome scepticism--and a rather aggressive scepticism at that, as Quillier had remarked with amusement when he had spoken of the ghost in, as he had put it, the house of Kerr-Anderson’s aunt. Quillier had said:
“There are two sorts of men on whom ghosts have an effect: those who are silly enough to believe in them, and those who are silly enough not to believe in them.”
Mr. Puce had been annoyed at that. He detested clever back-chat. “I’ll tell the world,” Mr. Puce had said, “that a plain American has to go to a drug-store after a conversation with you.”
Mr. Puce, lying on the great bed, whose hangings depressed him, examined his automatic and found it good. He had every intention of standing no nonsense, and an automatic nine-shooter is, as Mr. Puce remembered having read somewhere, an Argument. Indeed, Mr. Puce was full of those dour witticisms about the effect of a “gun” on everyday life which go to make the less pretentious “movies” so entertaining; although, to be sure, he did not know more than a very little about guns. Travellers have remarked, however, that the exciting traditions behind a hundred-per-cent American nationality have given birth in even the most gentle citizens of that great republic to a feeling of familiarity with “guns,” as such homely phrases as “slick with the steel mit,” “doggone son of a gun,” and the like, go to prove.
Mr. Puce placed the sleek little automatic on a small table by the bed, on which stood the candle and, as he realised for the first time, a book. One glance at the paper jacket of the book was enough to convince the gentleman from America that its presence there must be due to one of Quillier’s tired ideas. It showed a woman of striking, if conventional, beauty fighting for her life with a shape which might or might not be the wraith of a bloodhound but was certainly something quite outside a lovely woman’s daily experience. Mr. Puce laughed. The book was called: _Tales of Terror for Tiny Tots_, by _Ivor Pelham Marlay_.
The gentleman from America was a healthy man, and needed his sleep; and it was therefore with relief that he turned to Mr. Marlay’s absurd-looking book as a means of keeping himself awake. The tale at which the book came open was called _The Phantom Foot-steps_; and Mr. Puce prepared himself to be entertained, for he was not of those who read for instruction. He read:
THE PHANTOM FOOT-STEPS
The tale of “The Phantom Foot-steps” is still whispered with awe and loathing among the people of that decayed but genteel district of London known to those who live in it as Belgravia and to others as Pimlico.
Julia and Geraldine Biggot-Baggot were twin sisters who lived with their father, a widower, in a town in Lancashire called Wigan, or it may have been called Bolton. The tale finds Julia and Geraldine in their nineteenth year, and it also finds them in a very bad temper, for they were yearning for a more spacious life than can be found in Wigan, or it might be Bolton. This yearning their neighbours found all the more inexplicable since the parents of the girls were of Lancashire stock, their mother having been a Biggot from Wigan and their father a Baggot from Bolton.
The reader can imagine with what excess of gaiety Julia and Geraldine heard one day from their father that he had inherited a considerable property from a distant relation; and the reader can go on imagining the exaltation of the girls when they heard that the property included a mansion in Belgravia, since that for which they had always yearned most was to enjoy, from a central situation, the glittering life of the metropolis.
Their father preceded them from Wigan, or was it Bolton? He was a man of a tidy disposition, and wished to see that everything in the Belgravia house was ready against his daughters’ arrival. When Julia and Geraldine did arrive, however, they were admitted by a genial old person of repellent aspect and disagreeable odour, who informed them that she was doing a bit of charing about the house but would be gone by the evening. Their father, she added, had gone into the country to engage servants, but would be back the next day; and he had instructed her to tell Julia and Geraldine not to be nervous of sleeping alone in a strange house, that there was nothing to be afraid of, and that he would, anyhow, be with them first thing in the morning.
Now Julia and Geraldine, though twins, were of vastly different temperaments; for whereas Julia was a girl of gay and indomitable spirit who knew not fear, Geraldine suffered from agonies of timidity and knew nothing else. When, for instance, night fell and found them alone in the house, Julia could scarcely contain her delight at the adventure; while it was with difficulty that Geraldine could support the tremors that shook her girlish frame.
Imagine, then, how differently they were affected when, as they lay in bed in their room towards the top of the house, they distinctly heard from far below a noise, as of someone moving. Julia sat up in bed, intent, unafraid, curious. Geraldine swooned.
“It’s only a cat,” Julia whispered. “I’m going down to see.”
“Don’t!” sighed Geraldine. “For pity’s _sake_ don’t leave me, Julia!”
“Oh, don’t be so childish!” snapped Julia. “Whenever there’s the chance of the least bit of fun you get shivers down your spine. But as you are so frightened I will lock the door from the outside and take the key with me, so that no one can get in when I am not looking. Oh, I hope it’s a burglar! I’ll give him the fright of his life, see if I don’t.”
And the indomitable girl went, feeling her way to the door in darkness, for to have switched on the light would have been to warn the intruder, if there was one, that the house was inhabited: whereas it was the plucky girl’s conceit to turn the tables on the burglar, if there was one, by suddenly appearing to him as an avenging phantom: for having done not a little district-visiting in Wigan or, possibly, Bolton, no one knew better than Julia of the depths of base superstition among the vulgar.
A little calmed by her sister’s nonchalance, Geraldine lay still as a mouse in the darkness, with her pretty head beneath the bedclothes. From without came not a sound, and the very stillness of the house had impelled Geraldine to a new access of terror had she not concentrated on the works of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, which tell of the grit of the English people.
Then, as though to test the grit of the English people in the most abominable way, came a dull noise from below. Geraldine restrained a scream, lay breathless in the darkness. The dull noise, however, was not repeated, and presently Geraldine grew a little calmer, thinking that maybe her sister had dropped a slipper or something of the sort. But the reader can imagine into what terror the poor girl had been plunged had she been a student of the detective novels of the day, for then she must instantly have recognised the dull noise as a dull thud, and can a dull thud mean but one thing?
It was as she was praying a prayer to Our Lady that her ears grew aware of footsteps ascending the stairs. Her first feeling was one of infinite relief. Of course Julia had been right, and there had been nothing downstairs but a cat or, perhaps, a dog. And now Julia was returning, and in a second they would have a good laugh together. Indeed, it was all Geraldine could do to restrain herself from jumping out of bed to meet her sister, when she was assailed by a terrible doubt; and on the instant her mind grew so charged with fear that she could no longer hold back her sobs. Suppose it was not Julia ascending! Suppose----“Oh, God!” sobbed Geraldine.
Transfixed with terror, yet hopeful of the best, the poor girl could not even command herself to reinsert her head beneath the sheets. And always the ascending steps came nearer. As they approached the door, she thought she would die of uncertainty. But as the key was fitted into the lock she drew a deep breath of relief--to be at once shaken by the most acute agony of doubt, so that she had given anything in the world to be back again in Wigan or, even better, Bolton.
“Julia!” she sobbed. “Julia!”
For the door had opened, the footsteps were in the room, and Geraldine thought she recognised her sister’s maidenly tread. But why did Julia not speak, why this intolerable silence? Geraldine, peer as hard as she might, could make out nothing in the darkness. The footsteps seemed to fumble in their direction, but came always nearer to the bed, in which poor Geraldine lay more dead than alive. Oh, why did Julia not speak, just to reassure her?
“Julia!” sobbed Geraldine. “Julia!”
The footsteps seemed to fumble about the floor with an indecision maddening to Geraldine’s distraught nerves. But at last they came beside the bed--and there they stood! In the awful silence Geraldine could hear her heart beating like a hammer on a bell.
“Oh!” the poor girl screamed. “What is it, Julia? Why don’t you speak?”
But never a sound nor a word gave back the livid silence, never a sigh nor a breath, though Julia must be standing within a yard of the bed.
“Oh, she is only trying to frighten me, the beast!” poor Geraldine thought; and, unable for another second to bear the cruel silence, she timidly stretched out a hand to touch her sister--when, to her infinite relief, her fingers touched the white rabbit fur with which Julia’s dressing-gown was delicately trimmed.
“You beast, Julia!” she sobbed and laughed. Never a word, however, came from the still shape. Geraldine, impatient of the continuation of a joke which seemed to her in the worst of taste, raised her hand from the fur, that she might touch her sister’s face; but her fingers had risen no further than Julia’s throat when they touched something wet and warm, and with a scream of indescribable terror Geraldine fainted away.
When Mr. Biggot-Baggot admitted himself into the house early the next morning, his eyes were assailed by a dreadful sight. At the foot of the stairs was a pool of blood, from which, in a loathsome trail, drops of blood wound up the stairway.
Mr. Biggot-Baggot, fearful lest something out-of-the-way had happened to his beloved daughters, rushed frantically up the stairs. The trail of blood led to his daughters’ room; and there, in the doorway, the poor gentleman stood appalled, so foul was the sight that met his eyes. His beloved Geraldine lay on the bed, her hair snow-white, her lips raving with the shrill fancies of a maniac. While on the floor beside the bed lay stretched, in a pool of blood, his beloved Julia, her head half-severed from her trunk.
The tragic story unfolded only when the police arrived. It then became clear that Julia, her head half-severed from her body, and therefore a corpse, had yet, with indomitable purpose, come upstairs to warn her timid sister against the homicidal lunatic who, just escaped from an Asylum nearby, had penetrated into the house. However, the police consoled the distracted father not a little by pointing out that the escape of the homicidal lunatic from the Asylum had done some good, insomuch as there would now be room in an Asylum near her home for Geraldine.
III
When the gentleman from America had read the last line of _The Phantom Foot-steps_ he closed the book with a slam and, in his bitter impatience with the impossible work, was making to hurl it across the room when, unfortunately, his circling arm overturned the candle. The candle, of course, went out.
“Aw, hell!” said Mr. Puce bitterly, and he thought: “Another good mark to _Sir_ Cyril Quillier! Won’t I Sir him one some day! For only a lousy guy with a face like a drummer’s overdraft would have bought a damfool book like that.”
The tale of _The Phantom Foot-steps_ had annoyed him very much; but what annoyed him even more was the candle’s extinction, for the gentleman from America knew himself too well to bet a nickel on his chances of remaining awake in a dark room.
He did, however, manage to keep awake for some time merely by concentrating on wicked words: on Quillier’s face, and how its tired, mocking expression would change for the better were his, Puce’s, foot to be firmly pressed down on its surface: and on Julia and Geraldine. For the luckless twins, by the almost criminal idiocy with which they were presented, kept walking about Mr. Puce’s mind; and as he began to nod to the demands of a healthy and tired body he could not resist wondering if their home town had been Wigan or Bolton and if Julia’s head had been severed from ear to ear or only half-way....
When he awoke, it was the stillness of the room that impressed his sharply awakened senses. The room was very still.
“Who’s there!” snapped Mr. Puce. Then, really awake, laughed at himself. “Say, what would plucky little Julia have done?” he thought, chuckling. “Why, got up and looked!”
But the gentleman from America discovered in himself a reluctance to move from the bed. He was very comfortable on the bed. Besides, he had no light and could see nothing if he did move. Besides, he had heard nothing at all, not the faintest noise. He had merely awoken rather more sharply than usual....
Suddenly, he sat up on the bed, his back against the oak head. Something had moved in the room. He was certain something had moved. Somewhere by the foot of the bed.
“Aw, drop that!” laughed Mr. Puce.
His eyes peering into the darkness, Mr. Puce stretched his right hand to the table on which stood the automatic. The gesture reminded him of Geraldine’s when she had touched the white rabbit fur--Aw, Geraldine nothing! Those idiotic twins kept chasing about a man’s mind. The gentleman from America grasped the automatic firmly in his hand. His hand felt as though it had been born grasping an automatic.
“I want to tell you,” said Mr. Puce into the darkness, “that someone is now going to have something coming to him, her or it.”
It was quite delicious, the feeling that he was not frightened. He had always known he was a helluva fellow. But he had never been quite certain. Now he was certain. He was regular.
But, if anything had moved, it moved no more. Maybe, though, nothing had moved at all, ever. Maybe it was only his half-awakened senses that had played him a trick. He was rather sorry, if that was so. He was just beginning to enjoy the evening.
The room was very still. The gentleman from America could only hear himself breathing.
Something moved again, distinctly.
“What the hell!” snapped Mr. Puce.
He levelled the automatic towards the foot of the bed.
“I will now,” said Mr. Puce grimly, “shoot.”
The room was very still. The gentleman from America wished, forcibly, that he had a light. It was no good leaving the bed without a light. He’d only fall over the infernal thing, whatever it was. What would plucky little Julia have done? Aw, Julia nothing! He strained his ears to catch another movement, but he could only hear himself breathing--in short, sharp gasps! The gentleman from America pulled himself together.
“Say, listen!” he snapped into the darkness. “I am going to count ten. I am then going to shoot. In the meanwhile you can make up your mind whether or not you are going to stay right here to watch the explosion. One. Two. Three. Four....”