Hugh Lamb – In the Dark: Tales of Terror by E. Nesbit (страница 6)

The ‘bodies drawed out man-size’ were gone, and their marble slabs lay wide and bare in the vague moonlight that slanted through the west window.

Were they really gone? or was I mad? Clenching my nerves, I stooped and passed my hand over the smooth slabs and felt their flat unbroken surface. Had someone taken the things away? Was it some vile practical joke? I would make sure, anyway. In an instant I had made a torch of a newspaper which happened to be in my pocket, and lighting it held it high above my head. Its yellow glare illumined the dark arches and those slabs. The figures were gone. And I was alone in the church; or was I alone?

And then a horror seized me, a horror indefinable and indescribable – an overwhelming certainty of supreme and accomplished calamity. I flung down the torch and tore along the aisle and out through the door, biting my lips as I ran to keep myself from shrieking aloud. Was I mad – or what was this that possessed me? I leaped the churchyard wall and took the straight cut across the fields, led by the light from our windows. Just as I got over the first stile, a dark figure seemed to spring out of the ground. Mad still with the certainty of misfortune, I made for the thing that stood in my path, shouting ‘Get out of the way, can’t you?’

But my push met with a very vigorous resistance. My arms were caught just above the elbow and held as in a vice, and the raw-boned Irish doctor actually shook me.

‘Would ye?’ he cried in his own unmistakable accents – ‘would ye, then?’

‘Let me go, you fool,’ I gasped. ‘The marble figures have gone from the church; I tell you they’ve gone.’

He broke into a ringing laugh. ‘I’ll have to give ye a draught tomorrow, I see. Ye’ve been smoking too much and listening to old wives’ tales.’

‘I’ll tell you I’ve seen the bare slabs.’

‘Well, come back with me. I’m going up to old Palmer’s – his daughter’s ill – it’s only hysteria, but it’s as bad as it can be; we’ll look in at the church and let me see the bare slabs.’

‘You go if you like,’ I said, a little less frantic for his laughter, ‘I’m going home to my wife.’

‘Rubbish, man,’ said he; ‘D’ye think I’ll permit of that? Are ye to go saying all yer life that ye’ve seen solid marble endowed with vitality, and me to go all my life saying ye were a coward? No, sir – ye shan’t do ut!’

The night – a human voice – and I think also the physical contact with this six feet of solid common sense, brought me back a little to my ordinary self, and the word ‘coward’ was a shower-bath.

‘Come on, then,’ I said sullenly, ‘perhaps you’re right.’

He still held my arm tightly. We got over the stile and back to the church. All was still as death. The place smelt very damp and earthy. We walked up the aisle. I am not ashamed to confess I shut my eyes; I knew the figures would not be there, I heard Kelly strike a match.

‘Here they are, ye see, right enough; ye’ve been dreaming or drinking, asking yer pardon for the imputation.’

I opened my eyes. By Kelly’s expiring vesta I saw two shapes lying ‘in their marble’ on their slabs. I drew a deep breath and caught his hand.

‘I’m awfully indebted to you,’ I said. ‘It must have been some trick of the light, or I have been working rather hard, perhaps that’s it. Do you know, I was quite convinced they were gone.’

‘I’m aware of that,’ he answered rather grimly; ‘ye’ll have to be careful of that brain of yours, my friend, I assure you.’

He was leaning over and looking at the right-hand figure, whose stone face was the most villainous and deadly in expression. He struck another match.

‘By Jove!’ he said, ‘something has been going on here – this hand is broken.’

And so it was. I was certain that it had been perfect the last time Laura and I had been there.

‘Perhaps someone has tried to remove them,’ said the young doctor.

‘That won’t account for my impression,’ I objected.

‘Too much painting and tobacco will account for what you call your impression,’ he said.

‘Come along,’ I said, ‘or my wife will be getting anxious. You’ll come in and have a drop of whisky, and drink confusion to ghosts and better sense to me.’

‘I ought to go up to Palmer’s, but it’s so late now, I’d best leave it till the morning,’ he replied. ‘I was kept late at the Union, and I’ve had to see a lot of people since. All right, I’ll come back with ye.’

I think he fancied I needed him more than did Palmer’s girl, so, discussing how such an illusion could have been possible, and deducing from this experience large generalities concerning ghostly apparitions, we saw, as we walked up the garden path, that bright light streamed out of the front door, and presently saw that the parlour door was open too. Had she gone out?

‘Come in,’ I said, and Dr Kelly followed me into the parlour. It was all ablaze with candles, not only the wax ones, but at least a dozen guttering, glaring, tallow dips, stuck in vases and ornaments in unlikely places. Light, I knew, was Laura’s remedy for nervousness. Poor child! Why had I left her? Brute that I was.

We glanced round the room, and at first we did not see her. The window was open and the draught set all the candles flaring one way. Her chair was empty, and her handkerchief and book lay on the floor. I turned to the window. There, in the recess of the window, I saw her. Oh, my child, my love, had she gone to that window to watch for me? And what had come into the room behind her? To what had she turned with that look of frantic fear and horror? Had she thought that it was my step she heard and turned to meet – what?

She had fallen back against a table in the window, and her body lay half on it and half on the window-seat, and her head hung down over the table, the brown hair loosened and fallen to the carpet. Her lips were drawn back and her eyes wide, wide open. They saw nothing now. What had they last seen?

The doctor moved towards her. But I pushed him aside and sprang to her; caught her in my arms, and cried:

‘It’s all right, Laura! I’ve got you safe, dear!’

She fell into my arms in a heap. I clasped her and kissed her, and called her by all her pet names, but I think I knew all the time that she was dead. Her hands were tightly clenched. In one of them she held something fast. When I was quite sure that she was dead, and that nothing mattered at all any more, I let him open her hand to see what she held.

It was a grey marble finger.

UNCLE ABRAHAM’S ROMANCE

‘No, my dear,’ my Uncle Abraham answered me, ‘no – nothing romantic ever happened to me – unless – but no; that wasn’t romantic either—’

I was. To me, I being eighteen, romance was the world. My Uncle Abraham was old and lame. I followed the gaze of his faded eyes, and my own rested on a miniature that hung at his elbow-chair’s right hand, a portrait of a woman, whose loveliness even the miniature painter’s art had been powerless to disguise – a woman with large eyes that shone, and face of that alluring oval which one hardly sees nowadays.

I rose to look at it. I had looked at it a hundred times. Often enough in my baby days I had asked, ‘Who’s that, uncle?’ and always the answer was the same: ‘A lady who died long ago, my dear.’

As I looked again at this picture, I asked, ‘Was she like this?’

‘Who?’

‘Your – your romance!’

Uncle Abraham looked hard at me. ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘Very – very like.’

I sat down on the floor by him. ‘Won’t you tell me about her?’

‘There’s nothing to tell,’ he said. ‘I think it was fancy mostly, and folly; but it’s the realest thing in my life, my dear.’

A long pause. I kept silent. You should always give people time, especially old people.

‘I remember,’ he said in the dreamy tone always promising so well to the ear that loves a story – ‘I remember, when I was a young man, I was very lonely indeed. I never had a sweetheart. I was always lame, my dear, from quite a boy; and the girls used to laugh at me.’

Silence again. Presently he went on:

‘And so I got into the way of mooning off by myself in lonely places, and one of my favourite walks was up through our churchyard, which was set on a hill in the middle of the marsh country. I liked that because I never met anyone there. It’s all over, years ago. I was a silly lad; but I couldn’t bear of a summer evening to hear a rustle and a whisper from the other side of the hedge, or maybe a kiss, as I went by.

‘Well, I used to go and sit all by myself in the churchyard, which was always sweet with the thyme and quite light (on account of its being so high) long after the marshes were dark. I used to watch the bats flitting about in the red light, and wonder why God didn’t make everyone’s legs straight and strong, and wicked follies like that. But by the time the light was gone I had always worked it off, so to speak, and could go home quietly, and say my prayers without bitterness.

‘Well, one hot night in August, when I had watched the sunset fade and the crescent moon grow golden, I was just stepping over the low stone wall of the churchyard when I heard a rustle behind me. I turned round, expecting it to be a rabbit or a bird. It was a woman.’