"I have somewhere read that very few persons in this world have been unfortunate enough to have seen those things that are invisible to others."
"By Jove! Do you mean a—ghost?"
"Not exactly the vulgar ghost of the nursery," said he, his pale face colouring slightly.
"But we have all met with those who knew some one else who had seen something weird, unearthly, unexplainable."
"Precisely; but I shall speak from personal experience—so now for a little narrative of my own."
We had dined that evening at the club, where D—— of the Greys had given a few fellows a dinner, in honour of being gazetted to his troop, and to "wet" the new commission; and though it seemed to me that, like the rest of us, Jack Arkley had done justice to all the good things set before him, from the soup to the coffee and curaçao, he had been, during dinner, remarkably triste or abstracted, and took but little interest in the subjects discussed by the guests, who were mostly all upon short leave from Aldershot, and, the Spring drills being over, were thankful to exchange the white dust of the Long Valley, for the Row or Regent Street.
We were alone now, and lingering over some iced brandy-pawnee (as we called it in India) in the cool bay-window of his room in Piccadilly, where it overlooked the pleasant Green Park and where the clock of Westminster was shining above the trees, like a red harvest moon. So I prepared to listen to him with more curiosity than belief, while he related the following singular story, which he would never have ventured to relate to the circle of heedless fellows whom we had just left.
"My parents died when I was little more than an infant, leaving me to the care of two uncles, a maternal one, named Beverley, a man of considerable wealth, who in consequence of a quarrel with my father, whose marriage with his sister he resented, totally ignored my existence, and was ever a kind of myth to me; the other a paternal one, a bachelor curate in North Wales, poor old Morgan Apreece Arkley, than whom there was no better or more kind-hearted man in all the principality.
"His means were most limited; but to share the little he possessed he made me freely and tenderly welcome, all the more so that to two appeals he had made to the generosity of my Uncle Beverley, no response was ever returned—a cutting coldness and rudeness, bitterly resented by my hot-tempered but warm-hearted old Welsh kinsman.
"A career was necessarily chosen for me.