Curious Warnings - The Great Ghost Stories Of M.R. James (47 page)

Dr. Ashton was the holder, among other preferments, of a prebend in the rich collegiate church of Whitminster, one of the foundations which, though not a cathedral, survived Dissolution and Reformation, and retained its constitution and endowments for a hundred years after the time of which I write.

The great church, the residences of the dean and the two prebendaries, the choir and its appurtenances, were all intact and in working order. A dean who flourished soon after 1500 had been a great builder, and had erected a spacious quadrangle of red brick adjoining the church for the residence of the officials.

Some of these persons were no longer required: their offices had dwindled down to mere titles, borne by clergy or lawyers in the town and neighborhood. And so the houses that had been meant to accommodate eight or ten people were now shared among three—the dean and the two prebendaries.

Dr. Ashton’s included what had been the common parlor and the dining-hall of the whole body. It occupied a whole side of the court, and at one end had a private door into the minster. The other end, as we have seen, looked out over the country.

So much for the house. As for the inmates, Dr. Ashton was a wealthy man and childless, and he had adopted, or rather undertaken to bring up, the orphan son of his wife’s sister.

Frank Sydall was the lad’s name: he had been a good many months in the house. Then one day came a letter from an Irish peer, the Earl of Kildonan (who had known Dr. Ashton at college), putting it to the doctor whether he would consider taking into his family the Viscount Saul, the Earl’s heir, and acting in some sort as his tutor.

Lord Kildonan was shortly to take up a post in the Lisbon Embassy, and the boy was unfit to make the voyage. “Not that he is sickly,” the Earl wrote, “though you’ll find him whimsical, or of late I’ve thought him so, and to confirm this, ’twas only today his old nurse came expressly to tell me he was possess’d. But let that pass.

“I’ll warrant you can find a spell to make all straight. Your arm was stout enough in old days, and I give you plenary authority to use it as you see fit. The truth is, he has here no boys of his age or quality to consort with, and is given to moping about in our raths and graveyards; and he brings home
romances that fright my servants out of their wits. So there are you and your lady forewarned.”

It was perhaps with half an eye open to the possibility of an Irish bishopric (at which another sentence in the Earl’s letter seemed to hint) that Dr. Ashton accepted the charge of my Lord Viscount Saul and of the 200 guineas a year that were to come with him.

So he came, one night in September. When he got out of the chaise that brought him, he went first and spoke to the postboy and gave him some money, and patted the neck of his horse.

Whether he made some movement that scared it or not, there was very nearly a nasty accident: for the beast started violently, and the postilion being unready was thrown and lost his fee, as he found afterward, and the chaise lost some paint on the gateposts, and the wheel went over the man’s foot who was taking out the baggage.

When Lord Saul came up the steps into the light of the lamp in the porch to be greeted by Dr. Ashton, he was seen to be a thin youth of, say, sixteen years old, with straight black hair and the pale coloring that is common to such a figure.

He took the accident and commotion calmly enough, and expressed a proper anxiety for the people who had been, or might have been, hurt. His voice was smooth and pleasant, and without any trace, curiously, of an Irish brogue.

Frank Sydall was a younger boy, perhaps of eleven or twelve, but Lord Saul did not for that reject his company. Frank was able to teach him various games he had not known in Ireland, and he was apt at learning them. Apt, too, at his books, though he had had little or no regular teaching at home.

It was not long before he was making a shift to puzzle out the inscriptions on the tombs in the minster, and he would often put a question to the doctor about the old books in the library that required some thought to answer.

It is to be supposed that he made himself very agreeable to the servants, for within ten days of his coming they were almost falling over each other in their efforts to oblige him. At the same time, Mrs. Ashton was rather put to it to find new maidservants; for there were several changes, and some of the families in the town from which she had been accustomed to draw seemed to have no one available. She was forced to go farther afield than was usual.

These generalities I gather from the doctor’s notes in his diary and from letters. They are generalities, and we should like, in view of what has to be told, something sharper and more detailed.

We get it in entries which begin late in the year, and, I think, were posted up all together after the final incident. But they cover so few days in all that there is no need to doubt that the writer could remember the course of things accurately.

On a Friday morning it was that a fox, or perhaps a cat, made away with Mrs. Ashton’s most prized black cockerel, a bird without a single white feather on its body. Her husband had told her often enough that it would make a suitable sacrifice to Æsculapius. That had discomfited her much, and now she would hardly be consoled.

The boys looked everywhere for traces of it. Lord Saul brought in a few feathers, which seemed to have been partially burned on the garden rubbish-heap. It was on the same day that Dr. Ashton, looking out of an upper window, saw the two boys playing in the corner of the garden at a game he did not understand.

Frank was looking earnestly at something in the palm of his hand. Saul stood behind him and seemed to be listening. After some minutes he very gently laid his hand on Frank’s head, and almost instantly thereupon, Frank suddenly dropped whatever it was that he was holding, clapped his hands to his eyes, and sank down on the grass.

Saul, whose face expressed great anger, hastily picked the object up, of which it could only be seen that it was glittering, put it in his pocket, and turned away, leaving Frank huddled up on the grass.

Dr. Ashton rapped on the window to attract their attention, and Saul looked up as if in alarm, and then springing to Frank, pulled him up by the arm and led him away.

When they came in to dinner, Saul explained that they had been acting a part of the tragedy of Radamistus, in which the heroine reads the future fate of her father’s kingdom by means of a glass ball held in her hand, and is overcome by the terrible events she has seen.

During this explanation Frank said nothing, only looked rather bewilderedly at Saul. He must, Mrs. Ashton thought, have contracted a chill from the wet of the grass, for that evening he was certainly feverish and disordered;
and the disorder was of the mind as well as the body, for he seemed to have something he wished to say to Mrs. Ashton, only a press of household affairs prevented her from paying attention to him.

And when she went, according to her habit, to see that the light in the boys’ chamber had been taken away, and to bid them good night, he seemed to be sleeping, though his face was unnaturally flushed, to her thinking. Lord Saul, however, was pale and quiet, and smiling in his slumber.

Next morning it happened that Dr. Ashton was occupied in church and other business, and unable to take the boys’ lessons. He therefore set them tasks to be written and brought to him. Three times, if not oftener, Frank knocked at the study door, and each time the doctor chanced to be engaged with some visitor, and sent the boy off rather roughly, which he later regretted.

Two clergymen were at dinner this day, and both remarked—being fathers of families—that the lad seemed sickening for a fever, in which they were too near the truth, and it had been better if he had been put to bed forthwith—for a couple of hours later in the afternoon he came running into the house, crying out in a way that was really terrifying, and rushing to Mrs. Ashton, clung about her, begging her to protect him, and saying, “Keep them off! Keep them off!” without intermission.

And it was now evident that some sickness had taken strong hold of him.

He was therefore got to bed in another chamber from that in which he commonly lay, and the physician brought to him: who pronounced the disorder to be grave and affecting the lad’s brain, and prognosticated a fatal end to it if strict quiet were not observed, and those sedative remedies used which he should prescribe.

We are now come by another way to the point we had reached before. The minster clock has been stopped from striking, and Lord Saul is on the threshold of the study.

“What account can you give of this poor lad’s state?” was Dr. Ashton’s first question.

“Why, sir, little more than you know already, I fancy. I must blame myself, though, for giving him a fright yesterday when we were acting that silly play you saw. I fear I made him take it more to heart than I meant.”

“How so?”

“Well, by telling him foolish tales I had picked up in Ireland of what we call the second sight.”

“
Second
sight! What kind of sight might that be?”

“Why, you know our ignorant people pretend that some are able to foresee what is to come—sometimes in a glass, or in the air, maybe, and at Kildonan we had an old woman that pretended to such a power.

“And I dare say I colored the matter more highly than I should: but I never dreamed Frank would take it so near as he did.”

“You were wrong, my lord, very wrong, in meddling with such superstitious matters at all, and you should have considered whose house you were in, and how little becoming such actions are to my character and person or to your own.

“But pray how came it that you, acting, as you say, a play, should fall upon any thing that could so alarm Frank?”

“That is what I can hardly tell, sir. He passed all in a moment from rant about battles and lovers and Cleodora and Antigenes to something I could not follow at all, and then dropped down as you saw.”

“Yes. Was that at the moment when you laid your hand on the top of his head?”

Lord Saul gave a quick look at his questioner—quick and spiteful—and for the first time seemed unready with an answer. “About that time it may have been,” he said. “I have tried to recollect myself, but I am not sure. There was, at any rate, no significance in what I did then.”

“Ah!” said Dr. Ashton, “well, my lord, I should do wrong were I not to tell you that this fright of my poor nephew may have very ill consequences to him. The doctor speaks very despondingly of his state.”

Lord Saul pressed his hands together and looked earnestly upon Dr. Ashton.

“I am willing to believe you had no bad intention, as assuredly you could have no reason to bear the poor boy malice. But I cannot wholly free you from blame in the affair.”

As he spoke, the hurrying steps were heard again, and Mrs. Ashton came quickly into the room, carrying a candle, for the evening had by this time closed in.

She was greatly agitated. “O come!” she cried, “come directly. I’m sure he is going.”

“Going? Frank? Is it possible? Already?” With some such incoherent words the doctor caught up a book of prayers from the table and ran out after his wife.

Lord Saul stopped for a moment where he was. Molly, the maid, saw him bend over and put both hands to his face. If it were the last words she had to speak, she said afterward, he was striving to keep back a fit of laughing. Then he went out softly, following the others.

Mrs. Ashton was sadly right in her forecast. I have no inclination to imagine the last scene in detail. What Dr. Ashton records is, or may be taken to be, important to the story.

They asked Frank if he would like to see his companion, Lord Saul, once again. The boy was quite collected, it appears, in these moments.

“No,” he said, “I do not want to see him. But you should tell him I am afraid he will be very cold.”

“What do you mean, my dear?” said Mrs. Ashton.

“Only that,” said Frank. “But say to him besides that I am free of them now, but he should take care. And I am sorry about your black cockerel, Aunt Ashton. But he said we must use it so, if we were to see all that could be seen.”

Not many minutes after, he was gone.

Both the Ashtons were grieved, she naturally most. But the doctor, though not an emotional man, felt the pathos of the early death. And, besides, there was the growing suspicion that all had not been told him by Saul, and that there was something here which was out of his beaten track.

When he left the chamber of death, it was to walk across the quadrangle of the residence to the sexton’s house. A passing bell, the greatest of the minster bells, must be rung, a grave must be dug in the minster yard, and there was now no need to silence the chiming of the minster clock.

As he came slowly back in the dark, he thought he must see Lord Saul again. That matter of the black cockerel—trifling as it might seem—would have to be cleared up. It might be merely a fancy of the sick boy, but if not, was there not a witch-trial he had read, in which some grim little rite of sacrifice had played a part? Yes, he must see Saul.

I rather guess these thoughts of his than find written authority for them. That there was another interview is certain; certain also that Saul would (or, as he said, could) throw no light on Frank’s words: though the message, or some part of it, appeared to affect him horribly. But there is no record of the talk in detail.

It is only said that Saul sat all that evening in the study, and when he bid good night, which he did most reluctantly, asked for the doctor’s prayers.

The month of January was near its end when Lord Kildonan, in the Embassy at Lisbon, received a letter that for once gravely disturbed that vain man and neglectful father.

Saul was dead.

The scene at Frank’s burial had been very distressing. The day was awful in blackness and wind: the bearers, staggering blindly along under the flapping black pall, found it a hard job, when they emerged from the porch of the minster, to make their way to the grave.

Mrs. Ashton was in her room—women did not then go to their kinsfolk’s funerals—but Saul was there, draped in the mourning cloak of the time, and his face was white and fixed as that of one dead, except when, as was noticed three or four times, he suddenly turned his head to the left and looked over his shoulder. It was then alive with a terrible expression of listening fear.