A Collection of Classic Ghost Stories Read online

  Then suddenly he desisted. He laughed.

  “What an absurdity,” he said easily. “Such a to-do about a shadow.”

  “That’s so,” assented Mrs. Brigham, in a scared voice which she tried to make natural. As she spoke she lifted a chair near her.

  “I think you have broken the chair that Edward was fond of,” said Caroline.

  Terror and wrath were struggling for expression on her face. Her mouth was set, her eyes shrinking. Henry lifted the chair with a show of anxiety.

  “Just as good as ever,” he said pleasantly. He laughed again, looking at his sisters. “Did I scare you?” he said. “I should think you might be used to me by this time. You know my way of wanting to leap to the bottom of a mystery, and that shadow does look - queer, like - and I thought if there was any way of accounting for it I would like to without any delay.”

  “You don’t seem to have succeeded,” remarked Caroline dryly, with a slight glance at the wall.

  Henry’s eyes followed hers and he quivered perceptibly.

  “Oh, there is no accounting for shadows,” he said, and he laughed again. “A man is a fool to try to account for shadows.”

  Then the supper bell rang, and they all left the room, but Henry kept his back to the wall - as did, indeed, the others.

  Henry led the way with an alert motion like a boy; Rebecca brought up the rear. She could scarcely walk, her knees trembled so.

  “I can’t sit in that room again this evening,” she whispered to Caroline after supper.

  “Very well; we will sit in the south room,” replied Caroline. “I think we will sit in the south parlor,” she said aloud; “it isn’t as damp as the study, and I have a cold.”

  So they all sat in the south room with their sewing. Henry read the newspaper, his chair drawn close to the lamp on the table. About nine o’clock he rose abruptly and crossed the hall to the study. The three sisters looked at one another. Mrs. Brigham rose, folded her rustling skirts compactly round her, and began tiptoeing toward the door.

  “What are you going to do?” inquired Rebecca agitatedly.

  “I am going to see what he is about,” replied Mrs. Brigham cautiously.

  As she spoke she pointed to the study door across the hall; it was ajar. Henry had striven to pull it together behind him, but it had somehow swollen beyond the limit with curious speed. It was still ajar and a streak of light showed from top to bottom.

  Mrs. Brigham folded her skirts so tightly that her bulk with its swelling curves was revealed in a black silk sheath, and she went with a slow toddle across the hall to the study door. She stood there, her eye at the crack.

  In the south room Rebecca stopped sewing and sat watching with dilated eyes. Caroline sewed steadily. What Mrs. Brigham, standing at the crack in the study door, saw was this:

  Henry Glynn, evidently reasoning that the source of the strange shadow must be between the table on which the lamp stood and the wall, was making systematic passes and thrusts with an old sword which had belonged to his father all over and through the intervening space. Not an inch was left unpierced. He seemed to have divided the space into mathematical sections. He brandished the sword with a sort of cold fury and calculation; the blade gave out flashes of light, the shadow remained unmoved. Mrs. Brigham, watching, felt herself cold with horror.

  Finally Henry ceased and stood with the sword in hand and raised as if to strike, surveying the shadow on the wall threateningly. Mrs. Brigham toddled back across the hall and shut the south room door behind her before she related what she had seen.

  “He looked like a demon,” she said again. “Have you got any of that old wine in the house, Caroline? I don’t feel as if I could stand much more.”

  “Yes, there’s plenty,” said Caroline; “you can have some when you go to bed.”

  “I think we had all better take some,” said Mrs. Brigham. “Oh, Caroline, what - - ”

  “Don’t ask; don’t speak,” said Caroline.

  “No, I’m not going to,” replied Mrs. Brigham; “but - - ”

  Soon the three sisters went to their chambers and the south parlor was deserted. Caroline called to Henry in the study to put out the light before he came upstairs. They had been gone about an hour when he came into the room bringing the lamp which had stood in the study. He set it on the table, and waited a few minutes, pacing up and down. His face was terrible, his fair complexion showed livid, and his blue eyes seemed dark blanks of awful reflections.

  Then he took up the lamp and returned to the library. He set the lamp on the center table and the shadow sprang out on the wall. Again he studied the furniture and moved it about, but deliberately, with none of his former frenzy. Nothing affected the shadow. Then he returned to the south room with the lamp and again waited. Again he returned to the study and placed the lamp on the table, and the shadow sprang out upon the wall. It was midnight before he went upstairs. Mrs. Brigham and the other sisters, who could not sleep, heard him.

  The next day was the funeral. That evening the family sat in the south room. Some relatives were with them. Nobody entered the study until Henry carried a lamp in there after the others had retired for the night. He saw again the shadow on the wall leap to an awful life before the light.

  The next morning at breakfast Henry Glynn announced that he had to go to the city for three days. The sisters looked at him with surprise. He very seldom left home, and just now his practice had been neglected on account of Edward’s death.

  “How can you leave your patients now?” asked Mrs. Brigham wonderingly.

  “I don’t know how to, but there is no other way,” replied Henry easily. “I have had a telegram from Dr. Mitford.”

  “Consultation?” inquired Mrs. Brigham.

  “I have business,” replied Henry.

  Doctor Mitford was an old classmate of his who lived in a neighboring city and who occasionally called upon him in the case of a consultation.

  After he had gone, Mrs. Brigham said to Caroline that, after all, Henry had not said that he was going to consult with Doctor Mitford, and she thought it very strange.

  “Everything is very strange,” said Rebecca with a shudder.

  “What do you mean?” inquired Caroline.

  “Nothing,” replied Rebecca.

  Nobody entered the study that day, nor the next. The third day Henry was expected home, but he did not arrive and the last train from the city had come.

  “I call it pretty queer work,” said Mrs. Brigham. “The idea of a doctor leaving his patients at such a time as this, and the idea of a consultation lasting three days! There is no sense in it, and now he has not come. I don’t understand it, for my part.”

  “I don’t either,” said Rebecca.

  They were all in the south parlor. There was no light in the study; the door was ajar.

  Presently Mrs. Brigham rose - she could not have told why; something seemed to impel her - some will outside her own. She went out of the room, again wrapping her rustling skirts round that she might pass noiselessly, and began pushing at the swollen door of the study.

  “She has not got any lamp,” said Rebecca in a shaking voice.

  Caroline, who was writing letters, rose again, took the only remaining lamp in the room, and followed her sister. Rebecca had risen, but she stood trembling, not venturing to follow.

  The doorbell rang, but the others did not hear it; it was on the south door on the other side of the house from the study. Rebecca, after hesitating until the bell rang the second time, went to the door; she remembered that the servant was out.

  Caroline and her sister Emma entered the study. Caroline set the lamp on the table. They looked at the wall, and there were two shadows. The sisters stood clutching each other, staring at the awful things on the wall. Then Rebecca came in, staggering, with a telegra
m in her hand. “Here is - a telegram,” she gasped. “Henry is - dead.”

  The Messenger

  By Robert Chambers

  I

  “The bullet entered here,” said Max Fortin, and he placed his middle finger over a smooth hole exactly in the center of the forehead.

  I sat down upon a mound of dry seaweed and unslung my fowling piece.

  The little chemist cautiously felt the edges of the shot-hole, first with his middle finger, and then with his thumb.

  “Let me see the skull again,” said I.

  Max Fortin picked it up from the sod.

  “It’s like all the others,” he repeated, wiping his glasses on his handkerchief. “I thought you might care to see one of the skulls, so I brought this over from the gravel pit. The men from Bannalec are digging yet. They ought to stop.”

  “How many skulls are there altogether?” I inquired.

  “They found thirty-eight skulls; there are thirty-nine noted in the list. They lie piled up in the gravel pit on the edge of Le Bihan’s wheat field. The men are at work yet. Le Bihan is going to stop them.”

  “Let’s go over,” said I; and I picked up my gun and started across the cliffs, Portin on one side, Môme on the other.

  “Who has the list?” I asked, lighting my pipe. “You say there is a list?”

  “The list was found rolled up in a brass cylinder,” said the chemist. He added: “You should not smoke here. You know that if a single spark drifted into the wheat - ”

  “Ah, but I have a cover to my pipe,” said I, smiling.

  Fortin watched me as I closed the pepper-box arrangement over the glowing bowl of the pipe. Then he continued:

  “The list was made out on thick yellow paper; the brass tube has preserved it. It is as fresh to-day as it was in 1760. You shall see it.”

  “Is that the date?”

  “The list is dated ‘April, 1760.’ The Brigadier Durand has it. It is not written in French.”

  “Not written in French!” I exclaimed.

  “No,” replied Fortin solemnly, “it is written in Breton.”

  “But,” I protested, “the Breton language was never written or printed in 1760.”

  “Except by priests,” said the chemist.

  “I have heard of but one priest who ever wrote the Breton language,” I began.

  Fortin stole a glance at my face.

  “You mean - the Black Priest?” he asked.

  I nodded.

  Fortin opened his mouth to speak again, hesitated, and finally shut his teeth obstinately over the wheat stem that he was chewing.

  “And the Black Priest?” I suggested encouragingly. But I knew it was useless; for it is easier to move the stars from their courses than to make an obstinate Breton talk. We walked on for a minute or two in silence.

  “Where is the Brigadier Durand?” I asked, motioning Môme to come out of the wheat, which he was trampling as though it were heather. As I spoke we came in sight of the farther edge of the wheat field and the dark, wet mass of cliffs beyond.

  “Durand is down there - you can see him; he stands just behind the mayor of St. Gildas.”

  “I see,” said I; and we struck straight down, following a sun-baked cattle path across the heather.

  When we reached the edge of the wheat field, Le Bihan, the mayor of St. Gildas, called to me, and I tucked my gun under my arm and skirted the wheat to where he stood.

  “Thirty-eight skulls,” he said in his thin, high-pitched voice; “there is but one more, and I am opposed to further search. I suppose Fortin told you?”

  I shook hands with him, and returned the salute of the Brigadier Durand.

  “I am opposed to further search,” repeated Le Bihan, nervously picking at the mass of silver buttons which covered the front of his velvet and broadcloth jacket like a breastplate of scale armor.

  Durand pursed up his lips, twisted his tremendous mustache, and hooked his thumbs in his saber belt.

  “As for me,” he said, “I am in favor of further search.”

  “Further search for what - for the thirty-ninth skull?” I asked.

  Le Bihan nodded. Durand frowned at the sunlit sea, rocking like a bowl of molten gold from the cliffs to the horizon. I followed his eyes. On the dark glistening cliffs, silhouetted against the glare of the sea, sat a cormorant, black, motionless, its horrible head raised toward heaven.

  “Where is that list, Durand?” I asked.

  The gendarme rummaged in his despatch pouch and produced a brass cylinder about a foot long. Very gravely he unscrewed the head and dumped out a scroll of thick yellow paper closely covered with writing on both sides. At a nod from Le Bihan he handed me the scroll. But I could make nothing of the coarse writing, now faded to a dull brown.

  “Come, come, Le Bihan,” I said impatiently, “translate it, won’t you? You and Max Fortin make a lot of mystery out of nothing, it seems.”

  Le Bihan went to the edge of the pit where the three Bannalec men were digging, gave an order or two in Breton, and turned to me.

  As I came to the edge of the pit the Bannalec men were removing a square piece of sailcloth from what appeared to be a pile of cobblestones.

  “Look!” said Le Bihan shrilly. I looked. The pile below was a heap of skulls. After a moment I clambered down the gravel sides of the pit and walked over to the men of Bannalec. They saluted me gravely, leaning on their picks and shovels, and wiping their sweating faces with sunburned hands.

  “How many?” said I in Breton.

  “Thirty-eight,” they replied.

  I glanced around. Beyond the heap of skulls lay two piles of human bones. Beside these was a mound of broken, rusted bits of iron and steel. Looking closer, I saw that this mound was composed of rusty bayonets, saber blades, scythe blades, with here and there a tarnished buckle attached to a bit of leather hard as iron.

  I picked up a couple of buttons and a belt plate. The buttons bore the royal arms of England; the belt plate was emblazoned with the English arms and also with the number “27.”

  “I have heard my grandfather speak of the terrible English regiment, the 27th Foot, which landed and stormed the fort up there,” said one of the Bannalec men.

  “Oh!” said I; “then these are the bones of English soldiers?”

  “Yes,” said the men of Bannalec.

  Le Bihan was calling to me from the edge of the pit above, and I handed the belt plate and buttons to the men and climbed the side of the excavation.

  “Well,” said I, trying to prevent Môme from leaping up and licking my face as I emerged from the pit, “I suppose you know what these bones are. What are you going to do with them?”

  “There was a man,” said Le Bihan angrily, “an Englishman, who passed here in a dog-cart on his way to Quimper about an hour ago, and what do you suppose he wished to do?”

  “Buy the relics?” I asked, smiling.

  “Exactly - the pig!” piped the mayor of St. Gildas. “Jean Marie Tregunc, who found the bones, was standing there where Max Fortin stands, and do you know what he answered? He spat upon the ground, and said: ‘Pig of an Englishman, do you take me for a desecrator of graves?’“

  I knew Tregunc, a sober, blue-eyed Breton, who lived from one year’s end to the other without being able to afford a single bit of meat for a meal.

  “How much did the Englishman offer Tregunc?” I asked.

  “Two hundred francs for the skulls alone.”

  I thought of the relic hunters and the relic buyers on the battlefields of our civil war.

  “Seventeen hundred and sixty is long ago,” I said.

  “Respect for the dead can never die,” said Fortin.

  “And the English soldiers came here to kill your fathers and burn your homes,” I conti
nued.

  “They were murderers and thieves, but - they are dead,” said Tregunc, coming up from the beach below, his long sea rake balanced on his dripping jersey.

  “How much do you earn every year, Jean Marie?” I asked, turning to shake hands with him.

  “Two hundred and twenty francs, monsieur.”

  “Forty-five dollars a year,” I said. “Bah! you are worth more, Jean. Will you take care of my garden for me? My wife wished me to ask you. I think it would be worth one hundred francs a month to you and to me. Come on, Le Bihan - come along, Fortin - and you, Durand. I want somebody to translate that list into French for me.”

  Tregunc stood gazing at me, his blue eyes dilated.

  “You may begin at once,” I said, smiling, “if the salary suits you?”

  “It suits,” said Tregunc, fumbling for his pipe in a silly way that annoyed Le Bihan.

  “Then go and begin your work,” cried the mayor impatiently; and Tregunc started across the moors toward St. Gildas, taking off his velvet-ribboned cap to me and gripping his sea rake very hard.

  “You offer him more than my salary,” said the mayor, after a moment’s contemplation of his silver buttons.

  “Pooh!” said I, “what do you do for your salary except play dominoes with Max Portin at the Groix Inn?”

  Le Bihan turned red, but Durand rattled his saber and winked at Max Fortin, and I slipped my arm through the arm of the sulky magistrate, laughing.

  “There’s a shady spot under the cliff,” I said; “come on, Le Bihan, and read me what is in the scroll.”

  In a few moments we reached the shadow of the cliff, and I threw myself upon the turf, chin on hand, to listen.

  The gendarme, Durand, also sat down, twisting his mustache into needlelike points. Fortin leaned against the cliff, polishing his glasses and examining us with vague, near-sighted eyes; and Le Bihan, the mayor, planted himself in our midst, rolling up the scroll and tucking it under his arm.