"No, not exactly that—nothing so awful; but all sorts of strange noises; I can't describe them. I say—what kind of a house is this? I have always believed the stories of haunted houses were bally nonsense; but in heaven's name what does all this mean?"
I was unable to enlighten him:—and although I called my wife from her room and described to him our morning's experience with the voices, I thought it best to keep the feature of the apparition a secret. In fact, he never did learn of it, or of many other things that did not come directly to his personal apprehension. What he did see and hear, in the months that followed, was bad enough, God knows!—and I am convinced that one of the reasons (and that not the least considerable) which prevented him from leaving us on any one of a dozen different occasions, and ourselves from abandoning the house outright, was the consideration (on his part) that it would be unseemly for one of his nation to confess himself inferior in pluck to an American, and (on ours) that we should be untrue to all our country's traditions if we permitted a Britisher to see us in retreat.
This reason may seem extreme, and even fantastical; but it has its weight in explaining why—at the outset, at least—we held our ground. In the long discussion which followed, that night, it was evident that each party was urgent that the other should suggest abandonment of the premises. Neither, however, would broach the subject, and we separated for bed at last with the implied understanding that we were to remain.
CHAPTER VII
A GHOSTLY CO-TENANCY
Such was the first manifestation of a Possession which held the house for more than nine months. That we endured it is to me now sufficient cause for wonder, and the reasons why we did so (reasons which presented themselves by degrees) may require some explanation. It must be said that with the exception of a few visitations which I shall duly describe, there were no occasions so terrifying as those which happened on the day of the storm. Moreover, as my wife and I had made acquaintance in former years with many inexplicable things and had never seen any serious results come from them, our attitude toward these new phenomena was one compact more of curiosity than anything else. The experience could hardly be called agreeable, but it was strange and unusual, and we wanted to find out what it all meant. We never did find out, by the way, but the anticipation (which was constant) that we should, kept us interested.
The amiable reader may be disposed to credit us with unusual courage, but we never looked at the matter in that light. Besides the influence of national pride which I have mentioned as supporting both our friend and ourselves, there was also the consideration that we had covenanted for the house for a year, and had paid the first six-months' rent in advance—and Yankee and Scottish thrift alike moved us to desire our money's worth; and although we might hope to annul our bargain if we could plead that the dwelling was infested with rats, we had doubts as to our standing in court in case we should set up a defense that it was overrun with ghosts. Moreover, we liked our quarters so well that we could not make up our minds to leave them merely because an unseen co-tenantry insisted on sharing them with us; therefore we remained, and in time even managed to extract some entertainment from the quips and cranks that were more or less constantly going on.
A saving feature of the situation was the fact that the manifestations were not continuous, and rarely occurred—until near the end of our term—at night. This, I think, must be set down as an unusual circumstance, but it was one that brought us considerable relief. It need not be pointed out, for example, how much less terrifying it is to hear muffled footsteps and the rustle of women's garments up and down the hall by daylight than in darkness, and to see, under the same conditions, chairs and light tables shifted about in apparent accordance with some invisible person's notion of their proper arrangement. It is somewhat disquieting, to be sure, when walking through the hall, to hear the bell above one's head break out in rattling clangor, and, looking through the wide-open front door, to perceive that no visible visitor was at the other end of the wire:—and in spite of many former experiences, we could not restrain ourselves from jumping in our seats when, at dinner, all the doors in the house would slam in rapid succession with a violence that set the dishes dancing on the board. And the singular thing about this performance was that although the sound was unmistakably that of banging doors, the doors themselves seemed to have no part in it. More than once we arranged them in anticipation of this manifestation, leaving some closed, some wide open, and some ajar at various angles which we carefully noted. Presently would come the expected thunderous reverberations—and running from the dining-room we would find every door precisely as we had left it.