Hugh Lamb – In the Dark: Tales of Terror by E. Nesbit (страница 11)

And then suddenly, I became aware that this was the 31st of August, and that tomorrow was the day on which I was to meet my cousin Selwyn and ‘the family’, and come to a decision about the house. I had never, to my knowledge, heard of my cousin Selwyn. We were a family rich in collateral branches. I hoped he would be a reasonable young man. Also, I had never seen Sefton Manor House, except in a print. It occurred to me that I would rather see the house before I saw the cousin.

I caught the next train to Sefton.

‘It’s but a mile by the field way,’ said the railway porter. ‘You take the stile – the first on the left – and follow the path till you come to the wood. Then skirt along the left of it, cater across the meadow at the end, and you’ll see the place right below you in the vale.’

‘It’s a fine old place, I hear,’ said I.

‘All to pieces, though,’ said he. ‘I shouldn’t wonder if it cost a couple o’ hundred to put it to rights. Water coming through the roof and all.’

‘But surely the owner—’

‘Oh, he never lived there; not since his son was taken. He lived in the lodge; it’s on the brow of the hill looking down on the Manor House.’

‘Is the house empty?’

‘As empty as a rotten nutshell, except for the old sticks o’ furniture. Anyone who likes,’ added the porter, ‘can lie there o’ nights. But it wouldn’t be me!’

‘Do you mean there’s a ghost?’ I hope I kept any note of undue elation out of my voice.

‘I don’t hold with ghosts,’ said the porter firmly, ‘but my aunt was in service at the lodge, and there’s no doubt but something walks there.’

‘Come,’ I said, ‘this is very interesting. Can’t you leave the station, and come across to where beer is?’

‘I don’t mind if I do,’ said he. ‘That is so far as your standing a drop goes. But I can’t leave the station, so if you pour my beer you must pour it dry, sir, as the saying is.’

So I gave the man a shilling, and he told me about the ghost at Sefton Manor House. Indeed, about the ghosts, for there were, it seemed, two; a lady in white, and a gentleman in a slouch hat and black riding cloak.

‘They do say,’ said my porter, ‘as how one of the young ladies once on a time was wishful to elope, and started so to do – not getting further than the hall door; her father, thinking it to be burglars, fired out of the window, and the happy pair fell on the doorstep, corpses.’

‘Is it true, do you think?’

The porter did not know. At any rate there was a tablet in the church to Maria Sefton and George Ballard – ‘and something about in their death them not being divided.’

I took the stile, I skirted the wood, I ‘catered’ across the meadow – and so I came out on a chalky ridge held in a net of pine roots, where dog violets grew. Below stretched the green park, dotted with trees. The lodge, stuccoed but solid, lay below me. Smoke came from its chimneys. Lower still lay the Manor House – red brick with grey lichened mullions, a house in a thousand, Elizabethan – and from its twisted beautiful chimneys no smoke arose. I hurried across the short turf towards the Manor House.

I had no difficulty in getting into the great garden. The bricks of the wall were everywhere displaced or crumbling. The ivy had forced the coping stones away; each red buttress offered a dozen spots for foothold. I climbed the wall and found myself in a garden – oh! but such a garden. There are not half a dozen such in England – ancient box hedges, rosaries, fountains, yew tree avenues, bowers of clematis (now feathery in its seeding time), great trees, grey-grown marble balustrades and steps, terraces, green lawns, one green lawn, in especial, girt round with a sweet briar hedge, and in the middle of this lawn a sundial. All this was mine, or, to be more exact, might be mine, should my cousin Selwyn prove to be a person of sense. How I prayed that he might not be a person of taste! That he might be a person who liked yachts or racehorses or diamonds, or motor-cars, or anything that money can buy, not a person who liked beautiful Elizabethan houses, and gardens old beyond belief.

The sundial stood on a mass of masonry, too low and wide to be called a pillar. I mounted the two brick steps and leaned over to read the date and the motto:

Tempus fugit manet amor.

The date was 1617, the initials S.S. surmounted it. The face of the dial was unusually ornate – a wreath of stiffly drawn roses was traced outside the circle of the numbers. As I leaned there a sudden movement on the other side of the pedestal compelled my attention. I leaned over a little further to see what had rustled – a rat – a rabbit? A flash of pink struck at my eyes. A lady in a pink dress was sitting on the step at the other side of the sundial.

I suppose some exclamation escaped me – the lady looked up. Her hair was dark, and her eyes; her face was pink and white, with a few little gold-coloured freckles on nose and on cheek bones. Her dress was of pink cotton stuff, thin and soft. She looked like a beautiful pink rose.

Our eyes met.

‘I beg your pardon,’ said I, ‘I had no idea—’ there I stopped and tried to crawl back to firm ground. Graceful explanations are not best given by one sprawling on his stomach across a sundial.

By the time I was once more on my feet she too was standing.

‘It is a beautiful old place,’ she said gently, and, as it seemed, with a kindly wish to relieve my embarrassment. She made a movement as if to turn away.

‘Quite a show place,’ said I stupidly enough, but I was still a little embarrassed, and I wanted to say something – anything – to arrest her departure. You have no idea how pretty she was. She had a straw hat in her hand, dangling by soft black ribbons. Her hair was all fluffy-soft – like a child’s. ‘I suppose you have seen the house?’ I asked.

She paused, one foot still on the lower step of the sundial, and her face seemed to brighten at the touch of some idea as sudden as welcome.

‘Well – no,’ she said. ‘The fact is – I wanted frightfully to see the house; in fact, I’ve come miles and miles on purpose, but there’s no one to let me in.’

‘The people at the lodge?’ I suggested.

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘I – the fact is I – I don’t want to be shown round. I want to explore!’

She looked at me critically. Her eyes dwelt on my right hand, which lay on the sundial. I have always taken reasonable care of my hands, and I wore a good ring, a sapphire, cut with the Sefton arms: an heirloom, by the way. Her glance at my hand preluded a longer glance at my face. Then she shrugged her pretty shoulders.

‘Oh well,’ she said, and it was as if she had said plainly, ‘I see that you are a gentleman and a decent fellow. Why should I not look over the house in your company? Introductions? Bah!’

All this her shrug said without ambiguity as without words.

‘Perhaps,’ I hazarded, ‘I could get the keys.’

‘Do you really care very much for old houses?’

‘I do,’ said I; ‘and you?’

‘I care so much that I nearly broke into this one. I should have done it quite if the windows had been an inch or two lower.’

‘I am an inch or two higher,’ said I, standing squarely so as to make the most of my six-feet beside her five-feet-five or thereabouts.

‘Oh – if you only would!’ she said.

‘Why not?’ said I.

She led the way past the marble basin of the fountain, and along the historic yew avenue, planted, like all old yew avenues, by that industrious gardener our Eighth Henry. Then across a lawn, through a winding, grassy, shrubbery path, that ended at a green door in the garden wall.

‘You can lift this latch with a hairpin,’ said she, and therewith lifted it.

We walked into a courtyard. Young grass grew green between the grey flags on which our steps echoed.

‘This is the window,’ said she. ‘You see there’s a pane broken. If you could get on to the window-sill, you could get your hand in and undo the hasp, and—’

‘And you?’

‘Oh, you’ll let me in by the kitchen door.’

I did it. My conscience called me a burglar – in vain. Was it not my own, or as good as my own house?

I let her in at the back door. We walked through the big dark kitchen where the old three-legged pot towered large on the hearth, and the old spits and firedogs still kept their ancient place. Then through another kitchen where red rust was making its full meal of a comparatively modern range.

Then into the great hall, where the old armour and the buff-coats and round-caps hang on the walls, and where the carved stone staircases run at each side up to the gallery above.

The long tables in the middle of the hall were scored by the knives of the many who had eaten meat there – initials and dates were cut into them. The roof was groined, the windows low-arched.

‘Oh, but what a place!’ said she; ‘this must be much older than the rest of it—’

‘Evidently. About 1300, I should say.’

‘Oh, let us explore the rest,’ she cried; ‘it is really a comfort not to have a guide, but only a person like you who just guesses comfortably at dates. I should hate to be told exactly when this hall was built.’

We explored ballroom and picture gallery, white parlour and library. Most of the rooms were furnished – all heavily, some magnificently – but everything was dusty and faded.