“Evidently. About 1300, I should say.”
“Oh, let us explore the rest,” she cried; “it is really a comfort not to have a guide, but only a person like you who just guesses comfortably at dates. I should hate to be told exactly when this hall was built.”
We explored ball-room and picture gallery, white parlour and library. Most of the rooms were furnished—all heavily, some magnificently—but everything was dusty and faded.
It was in the white parlour, a spacious panelled room on the first floor, that she told me the ghost story, substantially the same as my porter’s tale, only in one respect different.
“And so, just as she was leaving this very room—yes, I’m sure it’s this room, because the woman at the inn pointed out this double window and told me so—just as the poor lovers were creeping out of the door, the cruel father came quickly out of some dark place and killed them both. So now they haunt it.”
“It is a terrible thought,” said I gravely. “How would you like to live in a haunted house?”
“I couldn’t,” she said quickly.
“Nor I; it would be too——” my speech would have ended flippantly, but for the grave set of her features.
“I wonder who will live here?” she said. “The owner is just dead. They say it is an awful house, full of ghosts. Of course one is not afraid now”—the sunlight lay golden and soft on the dusty parquet of the floor—“but at night, when the wind wails, and the doors creak, and the things rustle, oh, it must be awful!”
“I hear the house has been left to two people, or rather one is to have the house, and the other a sum of money,” said I. “It’s a beautiful house, full of beautiful things, but I should think at least one of the heirs would rather have the money.”