“Oh,” said my host, “he is the earth-bound spirit of an architect who lived in St Andrews at the time that James the Fifth married Mary of Lorraine in the Cathedral; he says he was present at the ceremony and can describe it all. A gay pageant it was and much revelry.”
“If you can get all this sort of curious information, which I don’t exactly credit, why on earth can’t you find out something practical and useful, for instance, where the secret underground hiding place is, and where all the tons of valuable ornaments, papers, and vestments are concealed?”
“My dear friend,” said Greenbracket solemnly, “these people won’t be pumped; they only tell you what they choose to, or are permitted to reveal.”
“If they really do turn up and talk to you as you say they do, why on earth can’t you get them to talk some useful sense?”
“I really can’t force their confidence,” said Greenbracket, “all they do tell me voluntarily is most interesting and absorbing. This Sir Rodger planned numerous very important structural alterations in the Cathedral and elsewhere.”
“It is all very odd to me,” I said, “one meets people with strange ideas. I met a man years ago at Aberystwith who was a firm believer in the transmigration of souls. He said he quite remembered being a cab horse in Glasgow, and was certain when he left this planet he would become a parrot in Mars.”
“I don’t understand that sort of thing a bit,” said my extraordinary friend, Greenbracket, “but Sir Rodger de Wanklyn has sometimes to visit the Valley of Fire and Frost, where there are mighty furnaces on one side of him and ice and snow on the other and it is very painful.”
“I had that sort of experience the other day,” I remarked, “at a meeting. On one side was a furnace of a fire and on the other a window wide open with a biting frost wind blowing in.”
“Tuts,” said Greenbracket “that’s here; I am talking of the spirit world.”
“Hang! your spirit stuff. Has your butler, Amos Bradleigh, seen any spookey things lately?”