It was shortly after sun-rise that Mr. Gamble, awaking from a sound sleep, beheld a deep stain on the ceiling of his chamber; and, with eyes rivetted upon it, he lay reflecting what it could possibly be. The old man was half childish; and the strangest conjectures passed through his mind. At length he grew frightened: an unknown terror stole gradually upon him—and he rang his bell violently. In a few minutes the two female domestics entered the room, having hastily huddled on some clothing; and they found their master gazing intently up at the ceiling, with a wild vacancy in the eyes. Their own looks instantly took the same direction; and one of them suddenly exclaimed, with shuddering horror, “It is blood!” They then hurried up-stairs; and a frightful spectacle met their view. Their mistress lay upon the floor, with her throat cut from ear to ear; and the carpet was completely saturated with her blood. Screams and shrieks burst from the lips of the horror-stricken women; and rushing down stairs, they rashly communicated to Mr. Gamble, without any previous warning or preparation, the dreadful tragedy which had been enacted. The flickering, decaying lamp of the old man’s intellect suddenly burnt up vividly for a few moments: the full powers of reason returned;—he comprehended the appalling news which were thus unguardedly made known to him; and with a horrible lamentation he sprang from his bed. With incredible speed did he ascend to his wife’s chamber; and when the awful spectacle met his eyes, he threw up his arms in despair, gave vent to a piteous cry, and sank down on the blood-stained corpse. Meantime one of the servants had hastened next door to alarm Mr. Pomfret; and when that gentleman, accompanied by two or three of his own domestics, appeared on the scene of murder, assistance was immediately offered to Mr. Gamble. But all endeavours to recover him were ineffectual: the shock he had received was a death-blow—and life was extinct!
A few questions hastily put to the old man’s servants elicited many facts dreadful for Mr. Pomfret to hear. He now learnt enough to convince him that his daughter had long maintained an illicit connexion with a handsome young dragoon—that her lover had been admitted the night before the one of the murder into the house—and that he must have been the author of the dreadful deed. Farther investigation corroborated this belief: the uniform was found, and a suit of Mr. Gamble’s apparel had disappeared;—the plate, jewels, and money were likewise gone. The distracted father, having heard a long time previously that Leonard Mitchell had enlisted in a dragoon regiment, immediately suspected that he must be the criminal; and this idea was confirmed by the discovery of some letters in Ellen’s desk. Information of the murder and robbery was accordingly given to the proper authorities; and Mr. Pomfret, crushed to the very dust by the weight of misfortune, crept back to his own cheerless dwelling—there to meditate upon the closing scene of the tragedy in which his own conduct had originally made his poor daughter the heroine. Bitterness was in the wretched man’s soul—horror in his eyes—spasmodic shuddering in all his limbs; and, when he contemplated his child’s horrible end and his own ruined fortunes, he felt indeed that he had nothing left worth living for. The cup of his adversity was not, however, quite full yet: but in a few hours it was overflowing—for his head clerk arrived in a cab, and, rushing into the parlour without ceremony, announced to him that the officers of justice were in search of him, a true bill of indictment having been found against him for certain frauds in his commercial transactions. “Thank you—thank you, for coming to give me this timely warning,” said Mr. Pomfret, pressing his clerk’s hand with painful violence: “I will depart immediately;”—and he staggered from the room. The clerk waited five minutes, and began to grow impatient: ten minutes elapsed and still his master did not reappear. The man rose and rang the bell furiously to summon one of the domestics; but at the same instant the constables entered the house. These officials, having learnt from the servant who admitted them, that Mr. Pomfret was at home, proceeded to search the dwelling; and the clerk, now entertaining the worst fears, accompanied them to the ruined merchant’s bed-chamber. There these fears met with immediate confirmation: Mr. Pomfret had put a period to his existence—he had hanged himself to a strong nail in his sleeping apartment! The body was instantly cut down, and medical assistance promptly obtained: but the wretched suicide was no more.
In the evening of that same day a man was arrested under suspicious circumstances at Dover. The news of the awful occurrences in Stamford Street had not reached that town at the time—for there was neither railway nor electric telegraph between London and the Kentish coast in those days: but the individual alluded to, had presented a quantity of plate at a pawnbroker’s shop, and, not being able to give a satisfactory account of how it came into his possession, was detained until a constable arrived to take him into custody. On the ensuing morning the tidings of the murder in London reached Dover; and the particulars given by the newspapers of the preceding evening were ample enough to identify the person under arrest with the Leonard Mitchell who was accused of desertion, murder, and robbery. He was accordingly sent under a strong escort to the metropolis, where, on his arrival, he was immediately lodged in Newgate. In due course his trial came on: he was found guilty upon evidence the most conclusive:—and, upon being called upon to allege anything wherefore sentence of death should not be passed, he addressed the Judge in the following manner:—“I acknowledge, my lord, that I am guilty of the dreadful crime imputed to me; and although it be too late—far too late to express contrition now, I nevertheless declare that I am deeply, deeply penitent. My lord, lost—degraded—criminal—and condemned, as I stand here in your presence, I was once as sincerely attached to virtue as any man or woman who now hears me. Even when adversity entered the paternal dwelling, ravaging it with the desolating fury of an army, I yielded to no evil temptation: neither did my confidence in the justice, the goodness, and the wisdom of heaven abate. I enlisted, my lord, in order to obtain an honest livelihood, and to stifle in the bustle of a new state of existence the painful reminiscences of blighted hopes and crushed affections. The officers who have appeared before your lordship this day, have all admitted, in reply to the question I put to them, that up to the time when I was sentenced to three hundred lashes, I had never even received a reprimand nor had been once reported for the slightest irregularity. But from the moment that the first blow of the torturing and degrading weapon fell upon my back, my existence assumed a new phase—my soul underwent a sudden and immediate change. With each drop of blood that oozed from my lacerated back, ebbed away some sentiment of rectitude—some principle of virtue. My lord, it was the lash that drove me to drinking—that made me reckless of all consequences—that made me a liar and a voluptuary, a mean fellow and a paltry rascal—and that hardened my heart so as to render it inaccessible to every feeling of honour, mercy, or remorse. It was the lash, then, that has made me a murderer; and I might almost claim to be pitied, rather than to be looked upon with loathing. A cruel law taught me to be cruel: a merciless and barbarian punishment prepared me to become a ruthless and ferocious assassin. And now, my lord, I am about to reveal a fact which has long ago been suspected, and which, situated as I unhappily am, need not exist in doubt or uncertainty any more. My life must be forfeited for the crime which has been proved against me this day; and it will unburthen my soul of a heavy secret to confess another crime, which I perpetrated upwards of a year ago. Your lordship doubtless remembers that a young nobleman—an officer in the regiment to which I belonged—was shot at a review in Hyde Park. My lord, I was the assassin: the man accused me wrongfully—persecuted me unrelentingly—and lied most foully against me,—and I was avenged.”
As Leonard uttered these last words in a firm tone and with marked emphasis, a thrill of horror passed through the crowded court; and the dead silence which had been observed while he was speaking, was succeeded by a subdued murmuring as of many voices commenting on what he had said. Erect, and with an evident determination to meet his doom courageously, the unhappy young man stood in the dock—his eye quailing not, his limbs trembling not; and, heinous as his offences were, he was not altogether without commiseration on the part of many present. The judge put on the black cap; and the sentence of death—that barbarian sentence—was pronounced in due form, the culprit receiving an intimation that he need entertain no hope of mercy. The hint was unnecessary: he had made up his mind to suffer;—and as firmly as he walked out of the dock back into the prison, so resolutely did he step from that same prison ten days afterwards on to the scaffold erected at the debtors’ door. A tremendous crowd was assembled to witness the execution; and the unhappy criminal maintained his courage to the last.
From that time have the three houses in Stamford Street been shut up: from that period have they been suffered to fall into decay. In the first, old Mr. Mitchell expired suddenly: in the second, Mr. Pomfret hung himself;—and in the third, Ellen was brutally murdered. The hand of Fate had marked those three tenements to be the scenes of horror and of crime: and a superstitious feeling on the part of certain credulous and weak-minded neighbours soon engendered the report that they were haunted. It was said that the ghost of the young lady had been seen walking in her shroud, in the yard behind the house where she was murdered; and rumour added that on the anniversary night of the dread crime which had hurried her to a premature grave, she was wont to wander about the premises, uttering hollow and sepulchral moans. Such reports as those lose nothing by repetition during the lapse of years, especially while the buildings which were the scenes of the crimes engendering the superstition, continue to exist; and therefore is it that even at the present day the evil reputation of the HAUNTED HOUSES remains unimpaired in Stamford Street and its neighbourhood.
CHAPTER CLXXIX.
THE GHOST.—AGNES AND MRS. MORTIMER.
The preceding episode has run to a considerable length; but we hope and believe that our readers will experience no difficulty in resuming the thread of the general narrative.
It must be remembered that the leading incidents of the story just placed on record were related to Mrs. Mortimer by Jack Rily, by way of passing the few hours during which they had agreed to remain with Vitriol Bob, who, bound hand and foot, was seated helplessly in a chair.
“Yes,” observed Jack Rily, when he had brought his history to a conclusion, “they do say that the young woman walks at times——”