The property, Miss Carmichael informed me, passed to a distant relative, who, after trying in vain to let it, pulled it down. The ghost, it was rumoured, was that of a very beautiful ancestress of the Dennings, who, after leading a life, evil even for those times, disappeared. What happened to her material body no one ever knew, but her spirit was supposed to haunt the house and grounds in dual form. To the stranger, that is to say, to those outside her own family, she appeared in all the radiant beauty of her earthly body, but to the Dennings she seldom revealed her face. When she did, they beheld something too terrible for the mind to conceive—and live.
“I have heard,” Miss Carmichael added, “that the ghost has been seen quite recently haunting the site once occupied by the house and grounds, and also the borders of the heath.”
And as Miss Carmichael was very emphatic on this last point, I may not unreasonably conclude that the girl of my dreams was the actual ghost of “The Gables.”
CHAPTER X
MY VIEWS ON A FUTURE LIFE FOR THE ANIMAL AND VEGETABLE WORLDS
I mentioned in one of my former works that I believe many of the figures we pass by in the streets are not men and women like ourselves, but phantasms—phantasms of the living, that is to say, spirit projections of people consciously or unconsciously thinking of being where we see them—phantasms of the dead, and impersonating neutrarians.
Mingling with the crowds in the parks and gliding in and out the trees, I have often seen people with the pallor of corpses; I have followed them, and they have unaccountably vanished. I believe Hyde Park, particularly the northern side, to be as full of ghosts as any spot in London, and I have heard many strange tales from the outcasts, the tattered and torn brigade, who have slept all night under its trees and bushes. The police are, I believe, expected to clear the Park before locking-up time, and I’ve no doubt they try to do so, but they cannot possibly look into every nook and cranny in that vast expanse, and there are many in which one could easily hide and defy detection. I have tried the experiment once, and I am not anxious to try it again; there is no place so terribly depressing, so strangely suggestive of suicide, and hauntings by the most grotesque type of neutrarians, as London’s premier park by night.
Some twelve or fifteen years ago, in my nightly rambles there, I noticed that the seat beneath a certain tree, mid-way between the Marble Arch and Lancaster Gate, was rarely occupied, whereas all the other seats in that vicinity were invaded by couples. One evening, the weather being warm and sultry, I went and sat there. I dozed off, and eventually fell into a deep sleep. I dreamed that an old man and a young girl stood under the tree, whispering, and that as I watched them they raised their eyes, and looked in a horribly guilty manner, not at me, but at the space next me, which I perceived, for the first time, was occupied by a tiny child. Moving stealthily forward and holding in their hands an outspread cloth, they crept up behind the child, the cloth descended, and all three vanished. Then something made me gaze up into the branches of the tree, and I saw a large, light, colourless, heavily-lidded eye peering down at me with an expression of the utmost malevolence. It was altogether so baneful, so symbolic of cruelty, malice, and hate that I could only stare back at it in mute astonishment. The whole shape of the tree then seemed to alter, and to become like an enormous dark hand, which, swaying violently to and fro, suddenly dived down and closed over me. I awoke at once, but was so afraid of seeing the eye, that for some minutes I kept my own eyes tightly shut. When I opened them, I saw, bending over me, a very white face, and to my intense relief a voice, unmistakably human, croaked, “No wonder you’re scared, sitting here at this time of night by yourself.”
The speaker was merely one of the many hundreds of tramps for whom the Park was reception and bedroom combined. His hat was little more than a rim, and his trousers cried shame on the ladies I saw every day with their skirts plastered all over with buttons. His cheeks were hollow, his eyes preternaturally bright, and his breath full of hunger. Still, he was alive, and anything alive just then was very welcome.
“I never sleep here,” he said; “none of us do.”