The garden ghost was, to our thinking, neither Tudor nor modern, but that of a sad little eighteenth-century nun. For, passing through many hands, the place had for a time been a convent. A gentle community, turned out by the French Revolution, had been offered a refuge in this far corner of England by the then papist possessor of “The Court.” The place had its previous story of faith and persecution: its parish church, which had long clung to the old dispensation, and its priest martyr still lying in the little churchyard. All this is forgotten now. We knew nothing of it, nor of the nuns; but oddly enough, when we came into the house, one of us said to the other: “I am sure there was a chapel here.”
Well, when the nuns packed up their goods and returned to France, they took away with them too ‹so tradition says› the coffins of some sisters who had been buried in the garden. Surely they had forgotten one! What else could account for the dreadful melancholy which fell upon us at a particular turn of the walk that ran round that sunny, bowery enclosure? There was nothing whatsoever suggestive about the spot. The high, warm wall with the spreading fruit trees rose on one side; an Apple tree and a clump of Hazels held the other—yet so sure as one came to this place the heart was gripped, the spirit seized. We each of us felt it; visitors felt it. That dear, departed cat, Tom, of venerable memory—he was a great ghost-seer—he felt it—nay, he saw it! His tail would bristle, his fur stare, he would stand and then flee as if pursued for his life.
The poor little nun, lying in a foreign land, away from the rest of her sisters, forgotten!—Ghosts have walked for much less. In fact, it is curious to note that the restlessness of most authenticated ghosts seems due to an objection to their place of burial. And on this score—if the anecdote takes me away from gardens, it brings me back to them in the end—I have in my mind another tale. It is a true story, as the children say, connected with a house which we have often visited in Ireland: an old monastery, full of that curious depression in its stateliness which so many confiscated church properties retain. It was haunted in many ways.
Personally, beyond unpleasant sensations in traversing some particular corridor and landing, we never met any ghost in the Abbey. But then we were not placed in the ghost-room.
A STRONG MIND CONVINCED
An old friend of our hostess, an elderly lady, was not so kindly treated. She was a spinster of robust constitution and strong mind; a type of the particular generation which comes between the nervous gentility of the Early Victorian sisterhood and the present day “suffrage” community. No doubt the mistress of the Abbey believed her ghost-proof. But she was mistaken. After the first night in the Lavender Bedroom, the visitor’s appearance at breakfast pointed so conclusively to the fatigue of sleeplessness that, with some misgiving, her friend drew her on one side to question her in private:
“Were you disturbed, Lucy?”
“I was, Mary.” The maiden lady was not a person of many words.
“Did you—did you ... see any thing, Lucy?” exclaimed the hostess. The family had but lately come into possession; and the idea of haunters and haunted annoyed rather than frightened her.