The one comic element connected with the bodiless visitant was introduced, oddly enough, by our sanctimonious clerical uncle-in-law, who now and then paid us visits of varying lengths. As he came unannounced, it was not invariably convenient to receive him. On one occasion his appearance caused dismay akin to consternation. We were expecting a houseful of younger friends within two days, and needed the guest-room he must occupy. He was good for a week at the shortest.
True to the Arab-like traditions of hospitality that pervaded all ranks of Old Dominion society, we suffered nothing of this to appear in our behavior. Nor could he have heard the anguished discussion of ways and means that went on between Mea and myself late that night. It was, therefore, a delightful surprise when he announced, next morning, his intention of going out to Olney that day, and to remain there for—perhaps a week. He “had let too long a time elapse since he had paid the good people there a visit. He didn’t want them to think he had forgotten them.”
One of the “good people,” the wife of my mother’s brother, drove into town to spend the day with us, a week after the close of his stay at Olney. “Aunt Sue” was a prime favorite with us all, and she was in fine feather to-day, full of fun and anecdote. She interrupted a spicy bit of family news to say, by-and-by:
“Did any of you ever suspect that your house is haunted?”
“How ridiculous!” laughed my mother. “Why do you ask?”
The narrator laughed yet more merrily.
“The funniest thing you ever heard! The old gentleman had an awful scare the last night he was here. I asked him what he had eaten—and drunk—for supper that evening. But he stuck to it that he was standing at his window, looking out into the moonlight in the garden, when somebody came up behind him, and took him by the elbows and turned him clear around! He felt the two hands that grabbed hold of him so plainly that he made sure Horace had hidden under the bed and jumped out to scare him. So he looked under the bed and in the wardrobe and the closet, and, for all I know, in the bureau drawers and under the washstand, for the boy. There was nobody in the room but himself, and the door was locked. He says he wouldn’t sleep in that room another night for a thousand dollars.”
“Nobody is likely to offer it!” retorted Mea, dryly. “I have slept there nearly a thousand nights, and nothing ever caught hold of me.”
Passing over what might or might not have been a link in the true, weird history of our bodiless tenant, I leap a chasm of a dozen years to wind up the tale of the “little gray lady,” so far as it bears directly upon our family. After the death of her husband and the marriages of sons and daughters left my mother alone in the old colonial homestead, she decided to sell it and to live with my youngest sister.
The property was bought as a “Church Home”—a sort of orphanage, conducted under the patronage of a prominent Episcopal parish renowned for good works. In altering the premises to adapt buildings to their new uses, the workmen came upon the skeleton of a small woman about four feet below the surface of the front yard. She lay less than six feet away from the wall of the house, and directly under the drawing-room window. There was no sign of coffin or coffin-plate. Under her head was a high, richly carved tortoise-shell comb, mute evidence that she had not been buried in cap and shroud, as was the custom a hundred years agone. The oldest inhabitant of a city that is tenacious of domestic legends, had never heard of an interment in that quarter of a residential and aristocratic district. The street, named for the eminent lawyer, must have been laid out since the house was built, and may have been cut right through grounds, then far more spacious than when we bought the place. Even so, the grave was dug in the front garden, and so close to the house as to render untenable the theory that the plot was ever part of a family burying-ground.