Hence his sprint was terrific—faster, he thinks, than he ever did in the school Close—and he kept praying too all the while.
But the thing gained on him, and he feels certain it would have been all up with him, had not a party of cyclists suddenly appeared on the scene and scared it off. He heard it go back pattering up the coombe, and there was something about those sounds that told him more plainly than words that he had not seen the last of it, and that it would come to him again. When he entered the house he encountered Merryweather and his wife together, and he could not help noticing that they seemed on strangely familiar terms and very upset and startled at seeing him. He spoke to his wife about it afterwards, and though she vehemently denied there was any truth in his suspicions, she could not meet his gaze with her customary frankness. Merryweather was the last person on earth he would have suspected of flirting with anyone, and up to the present time Mrs. Robert Fitzsimmons had always behaved with the utmost propriety and decorum; indeed, everyone regarded her as a model wife and mother, and particular, even to prudishness.
The incident worried Fitzsimmons a great deal, and for nights he lay awake thinking about it.
The governess was the next person to experience the hauntings. Her room was a sort of attic, large and full of quaint angles, and it looked out on to the coombe. Well, one night she had gone to bed rather early, owing to a very bad headache which had been brought on by the behaviour of the children, who had been naughty with a naughtiness that could scarcely have been surpassed in hell, and was partly undressed when her eyes suddenly became centred on the wall-paper, which had a curious dark pattern running through it.
She looked at the pattern, and it suddenly took the form of a tree. Now some people are in the habit of seeing faces where others see nothing. The governess belonged to the latter category. She was absolutely practical and matter-of-fact, a typical Midland farmer’s daughter, and had no imagination whatever. Consequently, when she saw the tree, she at once regarded it in the light of some peculiar phenomenon, and stared at it in open-mouthed astonishment. At first it was simply a tree, a tree with a well-defined trunk and branches. Soon, however, the trunk became a vivid yellow and black, a most unpleasant, virulent yellow, and the branches seemed to move. Much alarmed, she shrank away from it and clutched hold of the bed. She afterwards declared that the tree suddenly became something quite different, something she never dare even think of, and which nothing in God’s world would ever make her mention. She made one supreme effort to reach the bell, just touched it with the tips of her fingers, and then sank on the bed in a dead swoon.
She told her story next morning to Mrs. Fitzsimmons, and although asked on no account to breathe a word of it to the children, she told them too. That night she took her departure, and Mrs. Fitzsimmons refused her a character.
Curious noises were now frequently heard in the house. Door handles turned and footsteps tiptoed cautiously about the hall and passages at about two o’clock in the morning.
Mrs. Fitzsimmons was the next to have a nasty experience. Going to her room one evening, when everyone else was at supper, she saw the bed valance suddenly move. Thinking it was the cat, she bent down, and was about to call “Puss,” when a huge striped thing, shaped, so she thought, something like the trunk of a much gnarled tree, shot out and, rolling swiftly past her, vanished in the wainscoting. She called out, and Fitzsimmons, who came running up, found her leaning against the doorway of their room, laughing hysterically.
Two days later, on his return from another fishing expedition, he found that his wife had gone, leaving a note for him pinned to the dressing-table.