The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

She was a fat woman in an apricot-coloured gown, with a heavily powdered face, against which her black long-lashed eyes showed like currants in dough. I was introduced to many fine ladies and gentlemen of those parts. Magnificently appointed landaus and covered motors swept in and out of the drive, and the air was gay with the merry outcries of the tennis players.

As twilight drew on they all went away, and I was left alone with Mr and Mrs M’Leod, while tall men-servants and maid-servants took away the tennis and tea things. Miss M’Leod had walked a little down the drive with a light-haired young man, who apparently knew everything about every South American railway stock. He had told me at tea that these were the days of financial specialisation.

“I think it went off beautifully, my dear,” said Mr M’Leod to his wife; and to me: “You feel all right now, ain’t it? Of course you do.”

Mrs M’Leod surged across the gravel. Her husband skipped nimbly before her into the south verandah, turned a switch, and all Holmescroft was flooded with light.

“You can do that from your room also,” he said as they went in. “There is something in money, ain’t it?”

Miss M’Leod came up behind me in the dusk. “We have not yet been introduced,” she said, “but I suppose you are staying the night?”

“Your father was kind enough to ask me,” I replied.

She nodded. “Yes, I know; and you know too, don’t you? I saw your face when you came to shake hands with mamma. You felt the depression very soon. It is simply frightful in that bedroom sometimes. What do you think it is – bewitchment? In Greece, where I was a little girl, it might have been; but not in England, do you think? Or do you?”

“I don’t know what to think,” I replied. “I never felt anything like it. Does it happen often?”

“Yes, sometimes. It comes and goes.”

“Pleasant!” I said, as we walked up and down the gravel at the lawn edge. “What has been your experience of it?”

“That is difficult to say, but – sometimes that – that depression is like as it were” – she gesticulated in most un-English fashion – “a light. Yes, like a light turned into a room – only a light of blackness, do you understand? – into a happy room. For sometimes we are so happy, all we three, – so very happy. Then this blackness, it is turned on us just like – ah, I know what I mean now – like the head-lamp of a motor, and we are eclipsed. And there is another thing –”

The dressing gong roared, and we entered the over-lighted hall. My dressing was a brisk athletic performance, varied with outbursts of song – careful attention paid to articulation and expression. But nothing happened. As I hurried downstairs, I thanked Heaven that nothing had happened.

Dinner was served breakfast fashion; the dishes were placed on the sideboard over heaters, and we helped ourselves.

“We always do this when we are alone, so we talk better,” said Mr M’Leod.

“And we are always alone,” said the daughter.

“Cheer up, Thea. It will all come right,” he insisted.

“No, papa.” She shook her dark head. “Nothing is right while it comes.”

“It is nothing that we ourselves have ever done in our lives – that I will swear to you,” said Mrs M’Leod suddenly. “And we have changed our servants several times. So we know it is not them.”

“Never mind. Let us enjoy ourselves while we can,” said Mr M’Leod, opening the champagne.

But we did not enjoy ourselves. The talk failed. There were long silences.

“I beg your pardon,” I said, for I thought some one at my elbow was about to speak.

“Ah! That is the other thing!” said Miss M’Leod. Her mother groaned.

We were silent again, and, in a few seconds it must have been, a live grief beyond words – not ghostly dread or horror, but aching, helpless grief – overwhelmed us, each, I felt, according to his or her nature, and held steady like the beam of a burning-glass. Behind that pain I was conscious there was a desire on somebody’s part to explain something on which some tremendously important issue hung.

Meantime I rolled bread pills and remembered my sins; M’Leod considered his own reflection in a spoon; his wife seemed to be praying, and the girl fidgeted desperately with hands and feet, till the darkness passed on – as though the malignant rays of a burning glass had been shifted from us.

“There,” said Miss M’Leod, half rising. “Now you see what makes a happy home. Oh, sell it – sell it, father mine, and let us go away!”

“But I’ve spent thousands on it. You shall go to Harrogate next week, Thea dear.”

“I’m only just back from hotels. I am so tired of packing.”

“Cheer up, Thea. It is over. You know it does not often come here twice in the same night. I think we shall dare now to be comfortable.”

He lifted a dish-cover, and helped his wife and daughter. His face was lined and fallen like an old man’s after debauch, but his hand did not shake, and his voice was clear. As he worked to restore us by speech and action, he reminded me of a grey-muzzled collie herding demoralized sheep.