But I am a right ghost for all that. Time and space possess no significance for me, and hundreds of people have mistaken me for luminous paint after dark. Against these advantages, however, must be set the unhappy conditions of smallness and stoutness; for as in life I was of diminutive and plump habit, so do I now remain. I am, in fact, a short, fat ghost—a combination of qualities that promised from the first to be fatal to any spectral procedure on a high plane.
Thus, though I have haunted in all the best middle-class families, and once or twice taken a locum tenens among county people; though I have foretold deaths, indicated buried treasure, pointed out secret staircases, corpses and so forth; though I have gone through the regular mill, my spirit has yet failed of acquiring even a reasonable reputation among men.
For the past fifty years I have dwelt in Herefordshire with some pleasant, self-made folks who suit me very well. Capon Hall is a very roomy mansion, possessing architectural advantages from my point of view, and situated in a somewhat densely-haunted district. The original owners got themselves destroyed in the time of Charles I., and the property, after many fluctuations of fortune, was ultimately purchased by Mr. John Smithson, a Manchester man. Here he resided, developed into a good old Squire of the right sort, and grew popular. He was a widower, and had two children, Ethel, a girl of eighteen, who lived with him, and William, a son of two or three and twenty, who entered the army and went to India. This youth married, became the father of a daughter, and sent the infant home to Capon Hall. Now, love may often appear where there is no respect, and when an element of real human affection entered into my ghostly life, I found it a comfortable and pleasing thing.
This baby Smithson loved me, and her regard was returned. Our attachment must be allowed platonic to a degree perhaps never before imagined, for Winifred has just attained to the age of three years, while I am above three hundred. She is a golden-haired, sunny little soul, making all the music and laughter of her home. I am an old, grey ghost, to whom the western wing of Capon Hall has for fifty years been consecrated.
With an accident to the Squire’s daughter, Miss Ethel Smithson, upon some occasion of fox-hunting, this narrative properly begins. She suffered an awkward tumble, and the young man who came to her aid had the good fortune to please the girl immensely. Squire Smithson, upon the narration of Mr. Talbot Warren’s bravery, could not for the life of him see anything to make a fuss about. “If a woman falls into a ditch, is it asking much of the man nearest at the time to pull her out?” he inquired. But Miss Ethel explained that the circumstances were of a very terrific nature, and how her hero, not content with seeing that she was safe and sound, had foregone all further sport, sacrificed his day’s pleasure, and insisted on riding with her to the nearest farmhouse.
She met Mr. Warren again soon afterwards, and continued to find peculiar pleasure in his society; while, finally, through mutual friends, the young man secured an invitation to Capon Hall for a week’s hunting.
He and his horse arrived. He proved uninteresting, and a sportsman of mean capabilities; but Ethel Smithson, blind to the youth’s colourless and negative nature, fell violently in love with him. Being, moreover, a wilful little soul, who did pretty much what she liked with a most indulgent parent, matters went nearly all her own way from the first.
But the Squire and Mr. Warren had nothing in common, and at times their manifold differences of opinion might have produced serious results save for the younger man’s caution. Talbot’s physical nerve was weak, he wanted pluck—a lack that Mr. Smithson quickly discovered, and made the boy’s life a burden to him.
Ethel always supported the weaker side in the many arguments arising from this question of bravery; and, on one occasion, after the Squire had made some allusions more pointed than polite to his guest’s rapidly acquired knowledge of gaps, gates and like aids to the judicious Nimrod, Miss Smithson thought proper to drag me into the conversation.
“How can the wild, reckless courage you admire, papa, compare with the cool mental nerve which may be shown to some purpose in the useful affairs of life? How many of the men who jump over hedges and ditches, and risk their stupid necks before the gaze of farm yokels, would sleep night after night in a haunted room, for instance, as Mr. Warren does here?”