THE PHANTOM COACH: Collected Ghost Stories (58 page)

Such are my books. If, however, I were to show my visitor what I consider my choicest treasures, I should take down volumes which have been given to me by friends, some now far distant, others departed. Here, for instance, is the folio edition of Doré’s
Don Quichotte
, on the fly-leaf of which he signs himself as my ‘
ami affectueux
’; or some of the works of my dear friend of many years, John Addington Symonds, especially
Many Moods
, which he has dedicated to myself. Or I would take down the first volume of
The Ring and the Book
, containing a delightful inscription from the pen of Robert Browning; or the late Lord Lytton’s version of the Odes of Horace, in which is inserted an interesting letter on the method and spirit of his translation, addressed to me at the time of its publication. Next to this stands a presentation copy of Sir Theodore Martin’s translation of the same immortal poems. To most persons these would be more interesting than other and later presentation volumes from various foreign savants—Maspero, Naville, Ebers, Wiedemann, and others.

I am often asked how many books I possess, and I can only reply that I have not the least idea, having lost count of them for many years. Those which are in sight are attired in purple and fine linen, beautiful bindings having once upon a time been one of my hobbies; but behind the beautiful bindings, many of which were executed from my own designs, are other books in modest cloth and paper wrappers; so that the volumes are always two rows, and sometimes even three rows deep. If I had not a tolerably good memory, I should certainly be very much perplexed by this arrangement, the more especially as my only catalogue is in my head.

I fear I am allowing myself to say too much about my books; yet, after all, they represent a large of myself. My life, since I have lived at The Larches, has been one of ever-increasing seclusion, and my books have for many years been my daily companions, teachers, and friends. Merely to lean back in one’s chair now and then—merely to lean back and look at them—is a pleasure, a stimulus, and in some sense a gain. For, as it seems to me, there is a virtue which goes out from even the backs of one’s books; and though to glance along the shelves without taking down a single volume be but a Barmecide feast, yet the tired brain is consciously refreshed by it.

Although the room is essentially a bookroom, there are other things than books to which one can turn for a momentary change of thought. In yonder corner, for instance, stands an easel, the picture upon which is constantly changed. Today, it will be a watercolour sketch by John Lewis; tomorrow, an etching by Albert Dürer or Seymour Haden; the next day, an oil painting by Elihu Vedder, or perhaps an ancient Egyptian funerary papyrus, with curious pen-and-ink vignettes of gods and genii surmounting the closely written columns of hieroglyphic text.

For, you see, I have no wall space in my library upon which to hang pictures; and yet, I am not happy, and my thoughts are not rightly in tune, unless I have a picture or two in sight, somewhere about the room. In the corners, hidden away behind pedestals and curtains, a quick eye may detect stacks of pictures, ready to be brought out and put on the easel when needed. On the pedestals stand plaster casts of busts from antique originals in the Louvre, the Uffizzi Gallery, and the British Museum; and yonder, beside the arched entrance between the ante-room and the library, stands a small white marble torso of a semi-recumbent river god which I picked up years ago from amid the dusty stores of a little curiosity-shop in one of the small by-streets near Soho Square. It is a splendid fragment, so powerfully and learnedly modelled, that no less a critic than the late Charles Blanc once suggested to me that it might be a trial-sketch by a pupil of Michaelangelo, or even by the master himself. Curiously enough, this little masterpiece, which has lost both arms from below the shoulders and both legs from above the knee, was wrecked before its completion; the face, the beard, the hair, and the back being little more than blocked out, whereas, the forepart of the trunk is highly finished. On the opposite side of the archway, in an iron tripod, stands a large terra-cotta amphora found in the cellar of a Roman villa discovered in 1872, close behind the Baths of Caracalla.

As I happened to be spending that winter in Rome, I went, of course, to see the new
scavo
, and there were the big jars standing in the cellar, just as in the lifetime of the ancient owner. I need scarcely say that I bought mine on the spot.

It is such associations as these which are the collector’s greatest pleasures. Each object recalls the place and circumstances of its purchase, brings back incidents of foreign travel, and opens up long vistas of delightful memories. For me, every bit of old pottery on the tops of the bookcases has its history. That Majolica jar painted with the Medici arms, and those Montelupo plates, were bought in Florence; those brass salvers with heads of Doges in repousé work were picked up in a dark old shop on one of the side canals of Venice. The tall jars, yellow, green, white, and brown, with grotesque dragon mouths and twisted handles, are of Gallipoli make, and I got them at a shop in an out-of-the-way court at the top of a blind alley in Stamboul.

I have said that there are reasons why an intending visitor might, perchance, fail to penetrate as far as this den of books and bric-à-brac, and I might allege a considerable number, but they may all be summed up in the one deplorable fact that there are but twenty-four hours to the day, and seven days to the week. Time is precious to me, and leisure is a thing unknown. If, however, the said visitor is of congenial tastes, has gained admittance, and finds me less busy than usual, he will, perhaps, be let into the secret of certain hidden treasures, the existence of which is unsuspected by the casual caller. For dearer to me than all the rest of my curios are my Egyptian antiquities; and of these, strange to say, though none of them are in sight, I have enough to stock a modest little museum. Stowed away in all kinds of nooks and corners, in upstairs cupboards, in boxes, drawers, and cases innumerable, behind books, and invading the sanctity of glass closets and wardrobes, are hundreds, nay, thousands, of those fascinating objects in bronze and glazed ware, in carved wood and ivory, in glass, and pottery, and sculptured stone, which are the delight of archaeologists and collectors. Here, for instance, behind the
Revue Archeologique
packed side by side as closely as figs in a box, are all the gods of Egypt—fantastic little porcelain figures plumed and horned, bird-headed, animal-headed, and the like. Their reign, it is true, may be over in the Valley of the Nile, but in me they still have a fervent adorer. Were I inclined to worship them with due antique ceremonial, there are two libation tables in one of the attics ready to my hand, carved with semblances of sacrificial meats and drinks; or here, in a tin box behind the
Retrospective Review
, are specimens of actual food offerings deposited three thousand years ago in various tombs at Thebes—shrivelled dates, lentils, nuts, and even a slice of bread. Rings, necklaces, bracelets, earrings, amulets, mirrors, and toilet objects, once the delight of dusky beauties long since embalmed and forgotten; funerary statuettes, scarabs, rolls of mummy cloth, and the like are laid by ‘in a sacred gloom’ from which they are rarely, if ever, brought forth into the light of day. And there are stranger things than these—fragments of spiced and bituminised humanity to be shown to visitors who are not nervous, nor given to midnight terrors. Here is a baby’s foot (some mother cried over it once) in the Japanese cabinet in the ante-room. There are three mummied hands behind
Allibone’s Dictionary of English Authors
, in the library. There are two arms with hands complete—the one almost black, the other singularly fair—in a drawer in my dressing-room; and grimmest of all, I have the heads of two ancient Egyptians in a wardrobe in my bedroom, who, perhaps, talk to each other in the watches of the night, when I am sound asleep. As, however, I am not writing a catalogue of my collection, I will only mention that there is a somewhat battered statue of a Prince of Kush standing upright in his packing-case, like a sentry in a sentry-box, in an empty coach-house at the bottom of the garden.

It may, perhaps, be objected to my treatment of this subject that I have described only my ‘home’, and that, being myself, I have not described Miss Edwards. This is a task which I cannot pretend to perform in a manner satisfactory either to myself or the reader. My personal appearance has, however, been so fully depicted in the columns of some hundreds of newspapers, that I have but to draw upon the descriptions given by my brethren of the press, in order to fill what would otherwise be an inevitable gap in the present article. By one, for instance, I am said to have ‘coal-black hair and flashing black eyes’; by another, that same hair is said to be ‘snow-white’; while a third describes it as ‘iron-grey, and rolled back in a large wave’. On one occasion, as I am informed, I had ‘a commanding and Cassandra-like presence’; elsewhere, I was ‘tall, slender, and engaging’; and occasionally I am merely of ‘middle height’ and, alas! ‘somewhat inclined to
embonpoint
.’ As it is obviously so easy to realise what I am like from the foregoing data, I need say no more on the subject.

With regard to ‘my manners and customs’ and the course of my daily life, there is little or nothing to tell. I am essentially a worker, and a hard worker, and this I have been since my early girlhood. When I am asked what are my working hours, I reply: ‘All the time when I am not either sitting at meals, taking exercise, or sleeping’; and this is literally true. I live with the pen in my hand, not only from morning till night, but sometimes from night till morning. I have, in fact, been a night bird ever since I came out of the schoolroom, when I habitually sat up reading till long past midnight. Later on, when I adopted literature as a profession, I still found that ‘To steal a few hours from the night’ was to ensure the quietest time, and the pleasantest, for pen and brain work; and, for at least the last twenty-five years, I have rarely put out my lamp before two or three in the morning. Occasionally, when work presses and a manuscript has to be despatched by the earliest morning mail, I remain at my desk the whole night through; and I can with certainty say that the last chapter of every book I have ever written has been finished at early morning. In summertime, it is certainly delightful to draw up the blinds and complete in sunlight a task begun when the lamps were lighted in the evening.

And this reminds me of a little incident—too trivial, perhaps, to be worth recording—which befell me so long ago as 1873. I had visited the Dolomites during the previous summer, not returning to England till close upon Christmastime, and I had been occupied during the greater part of the spring in preparing that account of the journey entitled
Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys
. Time ran somewhat short towards the last, as my publishers were anxious to produce the volume early in June; and when it came to the point of finishing it off, I sat up all through one beautiful night in May, till the farewell words were written. At the very moment when, with a sigh of satisfaction, I laid down my pen, a wandering nightingale on the pear-tree outside my library window, burst into such a flood of song as I have never heard before or since. The pear-tree was in full blossom; the sky behind it was blue and cloudless; and as I listened to the unwonted music, I could not help thinking that, had I been a pious scribe of the Middle Ages who had just finished a laboriously written life of some departed saint, I should inevitably have believed that the bird was a ghostly messenger sent by the good saint himself to congratulate me upon the completion of my task.

Sources

The Stories in this volume were originally published as follows:

‘My Brother’s Ghost Story’:
All the Year Round
, Christmas 1860

‘The Eleventh of March’:
A Welcome
, Christmas 1863

‘Number Three’ (aka ‘How the Third Floor Knew the Potteries’):
All the Year Round
, Christmas 1863

‘The Phantom Coach’ (aka ‘The North Mail’; originally ‘Another Past Lodger Relates His Own Ghost Story’):
All the Year Round
, Christmas 1864

‘The Discovery of the Treasure Isles’: Routledge’s
Every Boys Magazine
, serialised in four parts in March, May, June, and July 1864; the complete 1864 year was bound together at Christmas that year as
Routledge’s Every Boy’s Annual
(post-dated ‘1865’)

The five stories above, together with ‘The Recollections of Professor Henneberg’ (previous publication untraced, appeared (with others) in
Miss Carew
(Hurst & Blackett, 1865; 3 vols.)

‘The Engineer’ (aka ‘An Engineer’s Story’; originally No. 5 Branch Line: The Engineer):
All the Year Round
, Christmas 1866

‘The Four-fifteen Express’:
Routledge’s Christmas Annual 1867
[i.e. 1866]

‘The Story of Salome’:
Tinsley’s Magazine: ‘Storm-Bound’
, Christmas 1867

‘A Service of Danger:
Routledge’s Christmas Annual
[1869]

‘The New Pass’:
Routledge’s Christmas Annual
[1870]

‘A Night on the Borders of the Black Forest’:
Routledge’s Christmas Annual
[1871]

‘In the Confessional’:
All the Year Round
, Christmas 1871

‘Sister Johanna’s Story’:
All the Year Round
, Christmas 1872

The eight stories above, together with ‘Monsieur Maurice’, appeared in
Monsieur Maurice
(Hurst & Blackett, 1873; 3 vols.)

‘Was It an Illusion?:
Arrowsmith’s Magazine: ‘Thirteen to Dinner’
, Christmas 1881

‘Four Stories’:
All the Year Round
, 14 September 1861

‘A Legend of Boisguilbert’:
Ballads
, Tinsley, 1865

‘My Home Life’:
The Arena
, Boston, 1891