| ... “Now, O reader! mark, And if my tale thou slowly shalt receive, Thy doubt will cause in me no great surprise, For I, who saw it, scarcely can believe.”[12] |
“But, Uncle Richard,” was now the cry, “you said you had once seen an apparition, or something like one; please tell us all about it.”
“I certainly saw something strange,” said he, “on more than one occasion, which has never yet been accounted for; and I suppose it is now too late to expect it. 189 If it was really a matter of concert and collusion, the motive for it has never been discovered. You remember the open space in town, in front of the Reverend Mr. ——’s meeting-house. Your house, as you know, Jemmie,” addressing me, “looks directly up the street towards this square, and to the somewhat old-fashioned mansion opposite the meeting-house. On one side of the square was a small dwelling, occupied by several distant relatives of ours; Aunt Midkiff (Metcalf), Aunt Foggison (Ferguson, so called), and her sister, Miss Samples (Mrs. Semple), with the daughter of our Aunt Foggison, Mrs. Lane, and her only child. You remember, sister,” addressing my mother, “that you have told me, that one night, after you had gone to bed, your lamented husband stood at the window looking up the street towards the old house above, of which he had a complete view. Upon your asking what detained him, he called you up, and it was 190 evident to you both that one chamber of the house was in a light blaze. Persons appeared to be moving rapidly around it, and, as it were, pulling down the curtains of the bed, which looked as if on fire. After a little time the appearance gradually ceased, and your husband remarking that he would inquire in the morning of his neighbor, a highly respectable lawyer, who occupied the house, what was the cause of the extraordinary spectacle of the night before, he also retired. But upon putting the question to his acquaintance on the following morning, he seemed astonished, and utterly denied that anything unusual had taken place in the chamber, which was the one occupied by himself and his wife, or that they had been at all disturbed during the night.
“Now all this,” continued my uncle, “is quite consistent with the supposition, that this gentleman may have had some secret motive for concealing the fact of a threatened 191 conflagration, pretty sure, if known, to become the town talk and perhaps to expose him to inconvenient inquiries; and though a strictly moral and religious man, he may have thought that the circumstances warranted a direct denial of the matter, seeing it was, as it turned out, an affair of purely domestic concern.”
My mother, I thought, looked at my uncle a little anxiously, and seemed about to make a movement for our departure; but we urged him to tell us to what strange thing he had referred, and why he had so particularly described the situation and characteristics of this square, as if there were something more in relation to it which it might interest us to know; for you may be sure our mother had never mentioned to us children anything likely to alarm us.
“I am afraid,” said he, at last “that something, which really did happen in front of the house I have spoken of, will startle you young folks, and perhaps it is foolish 192 to relate it, as you seem already quite excited enough; but I will premise by saying, that I will only tell you what I saw myself, or heard from those upon whose word I could implicitly rely; and, moreover, that I do not believe in ghosts, however singular the facts in question may appear. Of course, you know, sister,” addressing my mother, “my calls at your house were sometimes in the evening, after attending the market or to other business during the day. It was during one of your husband’s absences at sea, that we were sitting around the fire of a wintry night, when a lively neighbor, a lady who took much interest in whatever was going on, came in evidently in a state of agitation, and taking her seat, with very brief greeting, broke out with the exclamation, ‘There he is again!’ I did not understand what this meant, but it was soon explained to us that, for a week or ten days past, some person, or figure, or whatever it might be, had been 193 observed walking fore and aft, in front of the house opposite the meeting-house, at a certain hour of the evening, and though many had passed, no one had recognized him, nor did he take any notice whatever of any one whom he met. He was said to wear a pea-jacket buttoned to the chin, and a glazed hat, as if prepared for any kind of weather; or, as the gossips afterwards said, indicating the fact that he was the forerunner of the loss of not a few masters of vessels residing in the neighborhood, who perished at sea during the storms of that season. I took my hat and went out to see if I could discover anything uncommon. It was a moonlight night, with a light fall of snow upon the ground. As I passed up the short street to the square, Aunt Foggison’s chamber window was thrown open, and her daughter’s voice was plainly heard berating the supposed spectral night-walker. ‘What are you doing there, you good-for-nothing scamp, you?’ cried she, in 194 a voice that must have reached any mortal ears; ‘why don’t you go home to your family, if you’ve got any family, or wherever else you belong, instead of stalking up and down here, frightening honest folks out of their senses?’ Overcome perhaps by the vigor of her expostulation, the window was shut down with a slam. As I advanced, though I certainly had a full view of a human-looking figure upon its round and at no great distance either, and my senses had been confirmed by the objurgations addressed to it by our worthy relative, when I actually reached the ground of his perambulations, prepared to seize a single man by the collar and learn what he was about, it is certain that he was no longer visible. I returned to the house and made report of my unsuccessful doings, and unhitched my horse and drove home. I learned, a few days afterwards, that the figure regularly appeared, giving one sign of vitality by a regular tramp—tramp—tramp—upon the 195 frozen ground, so far as any one was disposed to listen, and spreading consternation throughout the vicinity. The affair at length became unendurable. Women were afraid to go into the street, and, for that, a good many men too, and it was really so serious, that, as I learned, it was resolved to form what is called, I believe, a cordon, and gradually approaching the place simultaneously from every avenue, so to inclose him that escape would be impossible. Being much acquainted with the people of that part of the town, I was invited to join the company, and accordingly drove in seasonably for the purpose. Certainly, most sober people believed the whole was but some trick, which it only needed reasonable pains to discover and defeat. The mysterious figure, it seemed, continued to walk, ignorant of or indifferent to our devices.
“There were three main avenues, by streets, to the premises, together with a narrow passage way leading from one of the 196 streets to another. At the appointed hour we duly assembled on our several stations. Our director was ‘a rude and boisterous captain of the sea’”—(for Uncle Richard could sometimes be poetical, at least in the way of quoting Shakespeare). “It had been arranged by him that, being on our posts, at a fixed moment, we should move rapidly up the several avenues and so join forces as to form a circle inclosing the open space, and gradually contracting our company, if the rogue was then within our compass we should have him sure. The arrangement had been made in profound secrecy, and if any there were traitors, I was not aware of it. Sure enough there was our guest on his usual stroll. As our circle speedily drew in, and just as hands were stretched out to seize him—presto, as the jugglers say—he was gone!”
“By the jumping gingerbread!” exclaimed Thurlow, our uncle’s hired man, springing from his chair by the wall, outside 197 of our family party,—seeing this was Christmas night.
“Oh dear sus!” cried Sally Bannocks, our own particular help of many years, from the like position.
“Our detective band,” resumed my uncle, “looked at one another in amazement, and after some hard swearing from a few of the roughest, and the exchange of a hasty ‘good-night,’ dispersed, as far as convenient in companies of two or three, and departed, a good deal disconcerted, to their several places of abode. The same experiment was tried on two or three other occasions, as I was informed by friends, with no better success. Spectre or not, he always found means to elude them; and there were always those who, having no other means of accounting for his evasion, insisted upon it that he must have had confederates among those who sought to arrest him.”