The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

“I have expressed myself clumsily as usual. The facts as God knows ’em – may be different – even after the most clinching evidence. I’ve always said that – both as a lawyer and a man, but some people won’t – I don’t want to judge ’em – we’ll say they can’t – believe it; whereas I say there’s always a working chance – a certainty – that the worst hasn’t happened.” He stopped and cleared his throat. “Now, let’s come on! This time next week I shall be taking my holiday.”

“What links?” I asked carelessly, while twins in a perambulator got out of our line of fire.

“A potty little nine-hole affair at a Hydro in the Midlands. My cousins stay there. Always will. Not but what the fourth and the seventh holes take some doing. You could manage it, though,” he said encouragingly. “You’re doing much better. It’s only your approach shots that are weak.”

“You’re right. I can’t approach for nuts! I shall go to pieces while you’re away – with no one to coach me,” I said mournfully.

“I haven’t taught you anything,” he said, delighted with the compliment.

“I owe all I’ve learned to you, anyhow. When will you come back?”

“Look here,” he began. “I don’t know your engagements, but I’ve no one to play with at Burry Mills. Never have. Why couldn’t you take a few days off and join me there? I warn you it will be rather dull. It’s a throat and gout place – baths, massage, electricity, and so forth. But the fourth and the seventh holes really take some doing.”

“I’m for the game,” I answered valiantly, Heaven well knowing that I hated every stroke and word of it.

“That’s the proper spirit. As their lawyer I must ask you not to say anything to my cousins about Holmescroft. It upsets ’em. Always did. But speaking as man to man, it would be very pleasant for me if you could see your way to–”

I saw it as soon as decency permitted, and thanked him sincerely. According to my now well-developed theory he had certainly misappropriated his aged cousins’ monies under power of attorney, and had probably driven poor Agnes Moultrie out of her wits, but I wished that he was not so gentle, and good-tempered, and innocent-eyed.

Before I joined him at Burry Mills Hydro, I spent a night at Holmescroft. Miss M’Leod had returned from her Hydro, and first we made very merry on the open lawn in the sunshine over the manners and customs of the English resorting to such places. She knew dozens of hydros, and warned me how to behave in them, while Mr and Mrs M’Leod stood aside and adored her.

“Ah! That’s the way she always comes back to us,” he said. “Pity it wears off so soon, ain’t it? You ought to hear her sing ‘With mirth, thou pretty bird.’ ”

We had the house to face through the evening, and there we neither laughed nor sang. The gloom fell on us as we entered, and did not shift till ten o’clock, when we crawled out, as it were, from beneath it.

“It has been bad this summer,” said Mrs M’Leod in a whisper after we realized that we were freed. “Sometimes I think the house will get up and cry out – it is so bad.”

“How?”

“Have you forgotten what comes after the depression?”

So then we waited about the small fire, and the dead air in the room presently filled and pressed down upon us with the sensation (but words are useless here) as though some dumb and bound power were striving against gag and bond to deliver its soul of an articulate word. It passed in a few minutes, and I fell to thinking about Mr Baxter’s conscience and Agnes Moultrie, gone mad in the well-lit bedroom that waited me. These reflections secured me a night during which I rediscovered how, from purely mental causes, a man can be physically sick; but the sickness was bliss compared to my dreams when the birds waked. On my departure, M’Leod gave me a beautiful narwhal’s horn, much as a nurse gives a child sweets for being brave at a dentist’s.

“There’s no duplicate of it in the world,” he said, “else it would have come to old Max M’Leod,” and he tucked it into the motor. Miss M’Leod on the far side of the car whispered, “Have you found out anything, Mr Perseus?”

I shook my head.

“Then I shall be chained to my rock all my life,” she went on. “Only don’t tell papa.”

I supposed she was thinking of the young gentleman who specialized in South American rails, for I noticed a ring on the third finger of her left hand.