The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

It is strange how the revisiting of places which one has known in youth revives all sorts of memories which one had supposed must have utterly faded from the mind. Such recollections crowded fast in upon me, jostling each other for recognition and welcome, as I came near to the place. The sight of the church recalled a Sunday of disgrace, when I had laughed at some humorous happening during the progress of the prayers: the sight of the coffee-coloured stream recalled memories of trout fishing: and, most of all, the sight of the lodge, built of brown stone, with the high wall enclosing the garden, reawoke the most vivid and precise recollections. My uncle’s butler, of the name of Wedge – how it all came back! – lived there, coming up to the house of a morning, and going back there with his lantern at night, if it was dark and moonless, to sleep; Mrs Wedge, his wife, had the care of the locked gate, and opened it to visiting or outgoing vehicles. She had been rather a formidable figure to a small boy, a dark, truculent woman, with a foot curiously malformed, so twisted that it pointed outwards and at right angles to the other. She scowled at you when you knocked at the door and asked her to open the gate, and came hobbling out with a dreadful rocking movement. It was, in fact, worth the trouble of going round by a path through the plantation in order to avoid an encounter with Mrs Wedge, especially after one occasion, when, not being able to get any response to my knockings, I opened the door of the lodge and found her lying on the floor, flushed and tipsily snoring. . . . Then the last year that I ever came here Mrs Wedge went off to Whitby or Scarborough on a fortnight’s holiday. Wedge had not waited at breakfast that morning, for he was said to have driven the dogcart to take Mrs Wedge to the station at Harrogate, ten miles away. There was something a little odd about this, for I had been early abroad that morning, and thought I had seen the dogcart bowling along the road with Wedge, indeed, driving it, but no wife beside him. How odd, I thought now, that I should recollect that, and even while I wondered that I should have retained so insignificant a memory, the sequel, which made it significant, flashed into my mind, for a few days afterwards Wedge was absent again, having been sent for to go to his wife, who was dying. He came back a widower. A woman from the village was installed as lodge-keeper, a pleasant body, who seemed to enjoy opening the gate to a young gentleman with a fishing-rod. . . . Just at that moment my rummaging among old memories ceased, for here was the agent, warned by the motor-horn, coming out of the brown stone lodge.

There was time before sunset to stroll up to the house and form a general idea of what must be done in the way of decoration and repair, and not till we had got back to the lodge again did the thought of Wedge re-occur to me.

“My uncle’s butler used to live here,” I said. “Is he alive still? Is he here now?”

“Mr Wedge died a fortnight ago,” said the agent. “It was of the suddenest; he was looking forward to your coming and to attending to you, for he remembered you quite well.”

Though I had so vivid a mental picture of Mrs Wedge, I could not recall in the least what Wedge looked like.

“I, too, can remember all about him,” I said. “But I can’t remember him. What was he like?”

Mr Harkness described him to me, of course, as he knew him, an old man of middle height, grey-haired and much wrinkled, with the habit of looking round quickly when he spoke to you; but his description roused no response whatever in my memory. Naturally, the grey hair and the wrinkles, and, for that matter, perhaps the habit of “looking round quickly,” delineated an older man than he was when I knew him, and anyhow, among so much that was vivid in recollection, the appearance of Wedge was to me not even dim, but had no existence at all.