“A night or two afterward, being again awakened by the step, my mother asked Creswell, ‘Who slept in the room above us?’ ‘No one, my lady,’ she replied—‘it is a large, empty garret.’
“About a week or ten days after this, Creswell came to my mother, one morning, and told her that all the French servants talked of going away, because there was a revenant in the house; adding that there seemed to be a strange story attached to the place, which was said, together with some other property, to have belonged to a young man, whose guardian, who was also his uncle, had treated him cruelly and confined him in an iron cage; and as he had subsequently disappeared, it was conjectured he had been murdered. This uncle, after inheriting the property, had suddenly quitted the house and sold it to the father of the man of whom we had hired it. Since that period, though it had been several times let, nobody had ever stayed in it above a week or two, and for a considerable time past it had had no tenant at all.
“ ‘And do you really believe all this nonsense, Creswell?’ said my mother.
“ ‘Well, I don’t know, my lady,’ answered she; ‘but there’s the iron cage in the garret over your bed-room, where you may see it, if you please.’
“Of course we rose to go; and as just at that moment an old officer, with his Croix de St. Louis, called on us, we invited him to accompany us and we ascended together. We found, as Creswell had said, a large empty garret with bare brick walls; and in the further corner of it stood an iron cage, such as wild beasts are kept in, only higher; it was about four feet square, and eight in height, and there was an iron ring in the wall at the back, to which was attached an old rusty chain with a collar fixed to the end of it. I confess it made my blood creep when I thought of the possibility of any human being having inhabited it! And our old friend expressed as much horror as ourselves, assuring us that it must certainly have been constructed for some such dreadful purpose. As, however, we were no believers in ghosts, we all agreed that the noises must proceed from somebody who had an interest in keeping the house empty; and since it was very disagreeable to imagine that there were secret means of entering it at night, we resolved, as soon as possible, to look out for another residence, and in the meantime to say nothing about the matter to anybody. About ten days after this determination, my mother, observing one morning that Creswell, when she came to dress her, looked exceedingly pale and ill, inquired if anything was the matter with her. ‘Indeed, my lady,’ she answered, ‘we have been frightened to death, and neither I nor Mrs. Marsh can sleep again in the room we are now in.’
“ ‘Well,’ returned my mother, ‘you shall both come and sleep in the little spare room next us; but what has alarmed you?’
“ ‘Some one, my lady, went through our room in the night; we both saw the figure, but we covered our heads with the bed-clothes, and lay in a dreadful fright till morning.’
“On hearing this, I could not help laughing, upon which Creswell burst into tears; and seeing how nervous she was, we comforted her by saying we had heard of a good house, and that we should very soon abandon our present habitation.
“A few nights afterward, my mother requested me and Charles to go to her bed-room and fetch her frame, that she might prepare her work for the next day. It was after supper, and we were ascending the stairs by the light of a lamp which was always kept burning, when we saw going up before us a tall, thin figure, with hair flowing down his back, and wearing a loose powdering gown. We both at once concluded it was my sister Hannah, and called out: ‘It won’t do, Hannah—you can not frighten us!’ Upon which the figure turned into a recess in the wall; but, as there was nobody there when we passed, we concluded that Hannah had contrived, somehow or other, to slip away and make her escape by the back stairs. On telling this to my mother, she said: ‘It is very odd, for Hannah went to bed with a headache before you came in from your walk;’ and sure enough, on going to her room, there we found her fast asleep; and Alice, who was at work there, assured us that she had been so for more than an hour. On mentioning this circumstance to Creswell, she turned quite pale and exclaimed that that was precisely the figure she and Marsh had seen in their bed-room.
“About this time, my brother Harry came to spend a few days with us, and we gave him a room up another pair of stairs, at the opposite end of the house. A morning or two after his arrival, when he came down to breakfast, he asked my mother angrily whether she thought he went to bed drunk and could not put out his own candle, that she sent those French rascals to watch him. My mother assured him that she never thought of doing such a thing; but he persisted in the accusation, adding: ‘Last night I jumped up and opened the door, and, by the light of the moon through the skylight, I saw the fellow in his loose gown at the bottom of the stairs. If I had not been in my shirt, I would have gone after him and made him remember coming to watch me.’