V.
I lit a fresh cigar, poured out another glass of wine, and gave myself up to meditation. Those blank spaces completely mystified me. For what other object had this lengthy transcription been made than to record A.’s “last will,” and the causes leading up to and (so far as that was possible) justifying it? Yet, on the other hand, the careful omission of every clue whereby the persons concerned might have been identified seemed to annul and stultify the laborious record of their actions. Or if the composition were a mere fiction, why not have invented names as well as incidents?
But fiction, I was satisfied, it could not be. It was not the fashion to compose such fictions a hundred and fifty or more years ago. And it was not within the scope of such an arid old specimen of the antique clergy as he whose stilted Latin and angular chirography I had just examined to follow such a fashion even had it existed. No, no. Account for it how I might, the things here set down were facts, not fancies.
The will was the only part of the compilation written in English, as though it were especially commended to the knowledge of all men; and it was certainly not the sort of thing a dying man would be apt to compose and have attested purely for his own amusement. Yet, as it stood, it was no more than a lifeless formula. But, indeed, so far as this feature of the narrative was concerned, the subtlest casuistry failed to enlighten me as to what Mr. A.’s proposed revenge had been, and how he expected it to be accomplished. An attempt to make the tourmaline locket serve as a key to the enigma promised well at first, but could not quite be induced to fit the lock after all. Either the problem was too abstruse, or my head was not in the best condition for solving it. The longer I puzzled over it, the more plainly did my inefficiency appear; and at last I came to the very sensible determination to go to bed, and hope for clearer faculties on the morrow.
I had just finished winding up my watch, which marked half-past ten, when there was a violent ring at my door-bell, followed by a rattling appeal to the knocker.
“A telegram!” I exclaimed, falling back in my chair. “The only thing I detest more than a postman. Well, the postman brought an enigma; perhaps the telegram may contain the solution.”
It was not a telegram, but Calbot, to whom I have already made incidental allusion. He opened the library door without knocking, came swiftly in, and walked up to the fire. This abruptness of manner, which was by no means proper to him, added to something very peculiar in his general aspect and expression, gave me quite a start.
He was dressed in light in-door costume, and, in spite of the cold, wore neither top-coat nor gloves. His face had a pallor which would have been extraordinary in anyone, but in a man whose cheek was ordinarily so ruddy and robust as Calbot’s, it was almost ghastly. He said nothing for some moments, but seemed to be struggling with an irrepressible and exaggerated physical tremor, resembling St. Vitus’s dance. I must say that my nerves have never been more severely tried than by this unexpected apparition, in so strange a guise, of a friend whom I had always looked upon as about the most imperturbable and common-sensible one I had. He was a young man, but older than his years, clear-headed, practical, clever, an excellent lawyer, and a fine fellow. Eccentricity of any kind was altogether foreign to his character. Something very unpleasant, I apprehended, must be at the bottom of his present profound and uncontrollable agitation.
Of course I jumped up after the first shock, and shook his hand—which, notwithstanding the cold weather and his own paleness, was dry and hot. I fancied Calbot hardly knew where he was or what he was doing; not that he seemed delirious, but rather overwhelmingly preoccupied about something altogether hateful and ugly.
“What’s the matter, John?” I said, instinctively using a sharp tone, and laying my hand heavily on his shoulder. “Are you ill?” Then a thought struck me, and I added: “Nothing wrong about Miss Burleigh, I hope?”
“Drayton,” said my friend—his utterance was interrupted somewhat by the nervous starts and twitches which still mastered his efforts to control them—“something terrible has happened. I wanted to tell you. I can’t fathom it. Drayton, I’ve seen—— May I take a glass of wine?”
He drank two glasses in quick succession. As he hardly ever touched wine, there was no little significance in the act. The rich old liquor evidently did him good. To tell the truth, I would rather have given him some brandy. He was not in a state to appreciate a fine flavour, and my port was as rare as it was good. However, I was really concerned about him, and would gladly have given the whole decanterful to set him right again.
He would not take a chair, but stood on the rug with his back to the fire. As I sat looking up at his tall figure, I caught the painted eye of my priestly ancestor over his shoulder, and it seemed to me to twinkle with saturnine humour.
“Well, what have you seen, Calbot?”
“Some evil thing has come between Miss Burleigh and me, and has parted us. I have seen it—two or three times. She has felt it. It’s killing her, Drayton. As for me.... You know me pretty well, and you know what my life has been thus far. I’ve not been a good man, of course—quite the contrary; I’ve done any quantity of bad things, but I don’t know that I’ve committed any such hideous sin as ought to bring a punishment like this upon me—not to speak of her! I’m not a parricide, nor an adulterer; I never sold my salvation to the devil—did I, Drayton?”
“No, no, of course not, my dear Calbot. You have a fever, that’s all. Don’t get excited. Just lie down on the sofa for half an hour, and quiet yourself a little.”
“I see you think I’m out of my head, and no wonder. I behave like a madman. But I’m not mad at all; I wish I could think I were. This shuddering—it won’t last—but I tell you, Drayton, when you see a man of my health and strength stricken this way in two days, you may believe it would have driven many a man to madness, or to suicide——”
“Let me pour it out for you; your hand shakes so. I can give you some splendid French cognac, if you’d prefer it? Well. Hadn’t you better lie down?”
“Come, I can control myself, now—I will!” said Calbot, through his teeth, and putting a strong constraint upon himself. For about a minute he kept silent, the blood gradually coming into his cheeks and the nervous twitchings growing less frequent.
“That’s better,” said I, encouragingly. “You don’t look so much as though you’d seen a ghost, now. How is that Chancery case of yours getting on?”
“A ghost? You speak lightly enough, and I suppose your idea of a ghost is some conventional bogey such as children are scared with. We laugh at such things—heaven knows why! An evil, sin-breathing spirit, coming from hell to take vengeance, for some dead and buried wrong, upon living men and women—what is there laughable in that?”
“Really, Calbot,” I said, with a smile—a rather uneasy smile, be it admitted—“I never laughed at a ghost, for the simple reason that I never saw one to laugh at.”
“You never saw one, and you mean to hint, I suppose, that there are none to see?”
“Well,” returned I, still maintaining a precarious grimace, “I’m not a spiritualist, you know——”
“Nor I,” interrupted Calbot, in a lower and quieter tone than he had yet used. He took a chair, and, sitting down close in front of me, bent forward and whispered in my ear: “But I saw the soul of a dead man yesterday; and this afternoon I saw it again, and chased it from the Burleighs’ house in Mayfair, along the Strand, and through the heart of London, to its grave in St. G——’s churchyard. I copied the inscription on the stone: it is a very old one, as you will see by the date.”
A far bolder man than I have ever claimed to be might have felt his heart stand still at this speech; and its effect on me was greatly heightened by Calbot’s tone and manner, and by the way he fastened his eyes upon me. Nor were the circumstances in other respects reassuring—alone at night, with a man three or four times my physical equal, who was wholly emancipated from rational control. I sat quite still for a few moments—very long moments they seemed to me—staring helplessly at Calbot, who took a small notebook out of his pocket, tore out a leaf with something scrawled on it, and handed it to me. I read it mechanically—“Archibald Armstrong. Died February 6th, 1698.” Meanwhile Calbot helped himself to another glass of wine; but I was too much unnerved to restrain him, and, indeed, too much bewildered.
“Archibald Armstrong,” muttered I, repeating the name aloud; “died February 6th—yes; but it was this present year 1875—not 1698. Why, I went to the auction-sale of his effects this very afternoon!”
“Keep the paper,” said Calbot, not noticing my observation, “it may possibly lead to something. And now I wish you to listen to my statement. I am neither crazy, Drayton, nor intoxicated. But I am not the same man you have known heretofore; my life has been seared—blasted. Perhaps you think my language extravagant; but after what I have experienced there can be no such thing as extravagance for me. It is an awful thing,” he added, with a long involuntary sigh, “to have been face to face with an evil spirit!”
“In Heaven’s name, Calbot,” cried I, starting up from my chair, and trembling all over, I believe, from nervous excitement, “don’t go on talking and looking like that. If you can tell me a straightforward, consistent story, I’ll listen to it; but these hints and interjections of yours will drive me mad!”
“I’m going to tell you, Drayton, though it will be the next worst thing to meeting that——Thing——itself, to tell about it. But the matter is too grim earnest to allow of trifling. You have a great deal of knowledge on queer and out-of-the-way subjects, Drayton, and I thought it not impossible that you might make some suggestions, for there must be some reason for this hideous visitation—some cause for it; and though all is over for me now, there would be a kind of satisfaction in knowing what that reason was. Besides, I must speak to someone, and you are a dear friend, and an old one.”
I was a good deal relieved to hear Calbot speak thus affectionately of our relations with each other; and indeed he appeared no way inclined to violence. Accordingly, having offered him a Cabana (which he refused), I put the box and the decanter back in the cupboard, and locked the door. Then, relighting my own cigar, and putting a lump or two of coal on the fire, I resumed my chair, and bade my friend begin his story.