“The details had hardly had time to shape themselves within my brain, when the light died out. I heard—or fancied I heard—a short, sharp gasp, an inarticulate cry for mercy, and the carriage drew up before the gate of Broadwater.”
That night after dinner we were subjected to a close cross-examination by our uncle.
“The boys have told me your surprising story, Mr. Roberts. May I ask how it is I never heard it from you before?”
“Why, to tell you the truth, Mr. Heyward, you wouldn’t have heard it now if my little friend Ronald hadn’t rushed me into telling it by his burst of eagerness. You might have said I’d been dining too well—as indeed I had—and that isn’t exactly the thing to recommend a family lawyer. So you’ve got my reputation at your mercy, young gentlemen. For, of course, it was the dinner—a nightmare of some kind, no doubt. Though I’m bound to say I never had a nightmare, either before or afterwards, that was half so vivid and real. It was quite the worst quarter of an hour I ever passed in my life.”
“Perhaps not so much of a nightmare as you suppose,” rejoined the uncle, and then proceeded to narrate his own experiences. I remember thinking how much better Frampton told the story than he did, in spite of his rather unorthodox language.
“Phew! that alters the whole question. Corroborative evidence with a vengeance—evidence that one might almost take into court. For even if you had been dining not wisely, your sister hadn’t, I know. Anyhow, we three staid gentlefolk could create a pretty sensation with our three independent testimonies. To think that a belief in ghosts should be forced upon me at my age! Why I shall be dragged next into believing the village legend.”
“What is it? I never even heard of it.”
“That Ronald’s old carriage is somehow mixed up with the quarrel between Thorpe and Broadwater—that it stands in the way of their family union. So you see, young gentlemen, where you’ve got to look for a wife as soon as the carriage is gone. But it doesn’t look like it yet. Old Thorpe’s dead, and the house shut up, and the only survivor of the family is on the point, they tell me, of marrying her cousin. Above all, you guard the old carriage, Heyward, as if it were a priceless heirloom. But perhaps you are right; it isn’t your business to get rid of it.”
III
So the old carriage mouldered on in the coach-house, and its net-work of cobwebs grew grimier each day.