'Did wake them, "Grannie," the other night, didn't she, and they seem to have taken an active share in the musical part of the entertainment?'
'There's no talking with such a random boy as you, but there, if you want to know, that's just what they have all come about. They say that when Miss Beauty was going to bed the other night she heard that soft, wailing music, like what we hear here every year just about this time, and she was so sure that there was something really unnatural about it that the Professor has given her leave to sit up with the other guests, and Captain Lowndes, and the rest in the monitors' common room, to see if they can catch the ghost, and for goodness sake don't you say as I told you, but if you knows the ghost tell him not to walk to-night, as the Professor says such nonsense must be stamped out for good. There now!'
Poor old Elizabeth looked as if she had committed a crime, and puffed and blew and pulled at her two little chin tufts (for, alas, she was bearded like the pard) in a way that nearly sent the boys into convulsions at her own tea-table. But they contained themselves (and about three plates full of muffins), and by-and-by departed.
There was a long and earnest conversation in a certain study that night. There was a surplice missing from amongst the properties of the choir, and then the four hundred wended sleepily from chapel to their dormitories.
In half an hour the lights were out in all windows save those of the head-master's house; stillness fell upon Fernhall; a big bright moon came out upon the scene and made those long grass meadows gleam like the silver sea just beyond them; a bat or two whirled about above the master's orchard, and but for them, and the merry party up at the house, Fernhall, once the smuggler's home, now the busy public school, slept to the lullaby of the summer waves.
* * * * * *
Fernhall slept, its busy brain as quiet as if no memories of an evil past hung thickly round that grey old house by the sea. Could it be that such evil deeds were done there in the storied days of old? At least there was some ground for the country folks' legends and superstitions. Not a rood of ground under or around the 'House' was solid; it was all a great warren, only that the tunnelling and burrowing had been done by men and not by conies.
Under the basement of the head-master's house were huge cellars, such cellars as would have appeared a world too wide even for the most bibulous of scholars. A cupboard of very tiny dimensions would have held all the strong liquors which our Head drank in a year. These cellars had two entrances, one from the house, and the other half a mile away, below what was now low-water mark. For year by year the waves encroach upon Fernhall, and in time those old smugglers who made and used these vaults will get their own again. They, no doubt, many of them, have gone to Davy Jones's locker, but their chief sleeps sound on shore, in a stately vault, which blazons his name and his virtues to the world. In his day smuggling was a remunerative and genteel profession, and he and all his race were past masters in the craft. Living far from the great centres of life, upon a bleak and dangerous coast, little notice was taken of the quiet old squire who yearly added acre to acre and whiled away the cheerless days with such innocent pursuits as sea-fishing and yachting.
Fernhall yokels say that the last squire and his wife did not agree. She was not a native of the Fernhall moorland, but a soft south-country thing with a laugh in her eye and bright clothes on her back when she first came amongst them; a parson's daughter, some said, but no one knew and few cared. Very soon she grew, like the rest of the people round her, silent, serious, or sad—a quiet grey shadow, with the laugh and bright clothes stored away perhaps somewhere with her memories of that sunny south. All at once her face was missed from church and market, but no one cared to ask whither she had gone. Someone, with grim Fernhall humour, suggested that the Squire had added to the 'spirits' in his subterranean vaults.
That was all, then, and to-night was the anniversary of her strange disappearance. There are nights when the world is still and you can feel that she is resting. There are other nights when the stillness is as deep, nay, deeper; but it is not the stillness of rest. The silence is throbbing and alive with some sad secret, and the listening earth is straining to catch it. This was such a night. The whitely gleaming grass stretched away until it reached a vague land of moonlit shadows. The waves were almost articulate in their meanings. The leaves of the poplars kept showing their white underside in the moonlight, until the whole trees swung in the night breeze, a grove of sheeted spectres. Anyone watching the scene was at once seized with the idea that something was going to happen, and, like the watchful stars and bending trees, strained every nerve to listen.