SOME GARDEN GHOSTS
There is no ghost in the garden of the Villino. Neither the meek spirit of Susan nor Tom’s saturnine spectre haunts the peaceful glade where they lie. ‹Juvenal has planted a “Tree of Heaven” at the head of his ever-mourned darling and covered the grave with Forget-me-nots!›
My youth ‹these reminiscences are contributed by Loki’s grandmother› was spent in a large country place in Ireland, and to us children—we were six then—certain walks, certain dells in the woods, were assuredly haunted.
The property had long ago belonged to one Lady Tidd, who so adored it that she had herself buried on a hill overlooking it, her coffin upright in its tall square tomb. It was Lady Tidd who was popularly supposed to haunt the fair wooded lands that had come to us. This Dysart Hill, on the top of which the ruined chapel and the deserted graveyard lay, was a favourite walk of our childish days. When our short legs had mastered the difficulties of the slope—and a very stony slope it was, covered towards the summit with a fine mountain grass, than which no footing is more slippery—we never failed to wander round to that singular monument, through the massive granite door of which she who stood in the upright coffin was supposed to be gazing down upon the distant prospect of our own home. It was never without an awful sense of horror and mystery that I pictured those dead eyes, endowed with miraculous vision, piercing through wood and stone to stare out upon what she still loved. Some apprehension of the horror and tragedy of bodily death and of the dread power of the spirit seized hold of my small soul as I contemplated that grave of human folly and of poor human aspiration. There it was, perhaps, that an overpowering dislike of graveyards began in me.
Lady Tidd was seen by a gardener of ours, between two Yew trees, in a dark corner outside the garden wall.
“She riz up out of the ground at me,” he told my mother. And he added, as a convincing detail, that his hat stood up on his equally rising hair. “Sure, wasn’t me hat lifted an inch off me head, ma’m?”
My mother, strong-souled creature as she was, laughed with a fine scepticism. Another kind of spirit had done the mischief, she declared. But we who heard could not so easily dismiss the agonizingly fascinating tale. We knew that spot outside the garden wall, in the shadow of the black Yew trees; and the fear and the darkness that always fell upon us when we passed it.