The Fourth Generation

by Walter Besant

Visitors to the house most conveniently approach it from the Metropolitan Extension Line, which goes to Rickmansworth, Amersham, and Verney. Leonard resolved upon going there that very morning. He took a note-book and started, setting down the points on which he wished to inquire.

He arrived at the station a little before noon; a walk of ten minutes brought him to the house. On the terrace at the back the old man, tall, broad-shouldered, erect, walked as usual up and down, with his hard, resolute air. Leonard did not speak to him; he passed into the garden, and looking at his watch walked along the grass-grown walks, and at the end, turning to the right, entered the park.

It was but a small park: there was only one walk in the direction which the two would have followed; this was now, like the garden walks, overgrown with grass. At the end there was a lodge; but it had stood empty for nearly seventy years; the gates were rusting on their hinges, the windows were broken and the tiles had fallen off the roof.

Beyond the park was an open road—the highroad; beyond the road a narrow path led across a broad field into a small wood; on the right hand was a low rising ground. This, then, was the wood where the thing was done; this was the hillside on which the boy was scaring the birds when he saw the two go in and the one come out.

Leonard crossed the field and entered the wood. He looked at his watch again. It had taken him twenty minutes to walk from the house to the road; he made a note of that fact. He walked through the wood; it was a pretty wood, more like a plantation than a wood—a wood with a few large trees, many saplings, two or three trees lying on the ground and waiting to be cut up. The spring foliage was out, dancing in the sunlight; the varying light and shade were pleasing and restful, the air was soft, the birds were singing. A peaceful, lovely place.

This, then, was the spot where Langley Holme was suddenly done to death. By whom?

Now, as Leonard stood looking into the tangled mass of undergrowth, a curious thing happened. It was the same thing which had happened to the housekeeper, and was mentioned in her notes. By some freak of light and shade, there was fashioned in a part of the wood where the shade was darkest the simulacrum or spectre of a man—only the shoulders and upper part of a man, but still a man.

Leonard was no more superstitious than his neighbours; but at this ghostly presentment he was startled, and for a moment his heart beat quickly with that strange kind of terror, unlike any other, which is called supernatural.

There are men who boast that they know it not, and have never felt it. These are men who would take their work into a deserted house, and would carry it on serenely, alone, through the watches of the livelong night. For my own part, I envy them not. Give me the indications of the unseen world; the whisper of the unseen spirit; the cold breath of the unseen guest; even though they are received with terror and superstitious shrinkings.

It was with such terror that Leonard saw this apparition. A moment after and it was gone; then he perceived that it was nothing but the shadows lying among the undergrowth, so that they assumed a solid form. Yet, as to the housekeeper, to whom that same apparition had appeared, it seemed to him the actual phantom of the murdered man.