_ PART I CHAPTER I. THE HAUNTED HOUSE OF MARNHOUL
I, Duncan MacAlpine, school-master's son and uncovenanted assistant to my father, stood watching the dust which the Highflyer coach had left between me and Sandy Webb, the little guard thereof, as he whirled onward into the eye of the west. It was the hour before afternoon school, and already I could hear my father's voice within declaiming as to unnecessary datives and the lack of all feeling for style in the Latin prose of the seniors.
A score of the fifth class, next in age and rank, were playing at rounders in an angle of the court, and I was supposed to be watching them. In reality I was more interested in a group of tall girls who were patrolling up and down under the shade of the trees at the head of their playground--where no boy but I dare enter, and even I only officially. For in kindly Scots fashion, the Eden Valley Academy was not only open to all comers of both sexes and ages, but was set in the midst of a wood of tall pines, in which we seniors were permitted to walk at our guise and pleasure during the "intervals."
Here the ground was thick and elastic with dry pine needles, two or three feet of them firmly compacted, and smelling delightfully of resin after a shower. Indeed, at that moment I was interested enough to let the boys run a little wild at their game, because, you see, I had found out within the last six months that girls were not made only to be called names and to put out one's tongue at.
There was, in especial, one--a dark, slim girl, very lissom of body and the best runner in the school. She wore a grey-green dress of rough stuff hardly ankle-long, and once when the bell-rope broke and I had sprained my ankle she mounted instead of me, running along the rigging of the roofs to ring the bell as active as a lamplighter. I liked her for this, also because she was pretty, or at least the short grey-green dress made her look it. Her name was Gertrude Gower, but Gerty Greensleeves was what she was most frequently called, except, of course, when I called the roll before morning and afternoon.
I had had a talk with Sandy Webb, the guard, as he paused to take in the mails. My father was also village postmaster, but, though there was a girl in the office to sell stamps and revenue licences, and my mother behind to say "that she did not know" in reply to any question whatsoever, I was much more postmaster than my father, though I suppose he really had the responsibility.
Sandy Webb always brought a deal of news to Eden Valley. And as I had official and private dealings with him--the public relating to way-bills and bag-receipts, and the private to a noggin of homebrewed out of the barrel in the corner of our cellar--he always gave me the earliest news, before he hurried away--as it were, the firstlings of the flock.
"There's a stir at Cairn Edward," he said casually, as he set down his wooden cup. "John Aitken, the mason, has fallen off a scaffolding and broken----"
"Not his leg?" I interrupted anxiously, for John was a third cousin of my mother's.
"No, more miraculous than that!" the guard averred serenely.
"His back?" I gasped--for John Aitken, as well as a relation, was a fellow-elder of my father's, and the two often met upon sacramental occasions.
"No," said Sandy, enjoying his grave little surprise, "only the trams of his mortar-barrow! And there's that noisy tinkler body, Tim Cleary, the Shire Irishman, in the lock-up for wanting to fight the Provost of Dumfries, and he'll get eight days for certain. But the Provost is paying the lodgings of his wife and family in the meantime. It will be a rest for them, poor things."
It was at this moment that Sandy Webb, square, squat, many-wrinkled man, sounded his horn and swung himself into his place as the driver, Andrew Haugh, gathered up his reins. But I knew his way, and waited expectantly. He always kept the pick of his news to the end, then let it off like a fire-cracker, and departed in a halo of dusty glory.
"Your private ghost is making himself comfortable over yonder at the Haunted House. I saw the reek of his four-hours fire coming up blue out of the chimbly-top as we drove past!"
It was thus that the most notable news of a decade came to Eden Valley. The Haunted House--we did not need to be told--was Marnhoul, a big, gaunt mansion, long deserted, sunk in woods, yet near enough to the Cairn Edward road to be visible in stray round towers and rows of chimneys, long unblacked by fire of kitchen or parlour. It had a great forest behind it, on the verges of which a camp of woodcutters and a rude saw-mill had long been established, eating deeper and deeper in, without, however, seeming to make any more difference than a solitary mouse might to a granary.
We boys knew all about the Haunted House. Since our earliest years it had been the very touchstone of courage to go to the gate on a moonlight night, hold the bars and cry three times, "I'm no feared!" Some had done this, I myself among the number. But--though, of course, being a school-master's son, I did not believe in ghosts--I admit that the return journey was the more pleasant of the two, especially after I got within cry of the dwellings of comfortable burgesses, and felt the windows all alight on either side of me, so near that I could almost touch them with my hand.
Not that I
saw anything! I knew from the first it was all nonsense. My father had told me so a score of times. But having been reared in the superstitious Galloway of the ancient days--well, there are certain chills and creeps for which a man is not responsible, inexplicable twitchings of the hairy scalp of his head, maybe even to the breaking of a cold sweat over his body, which do not depend upon belief. I kept saying to myself, "There is nothing! I do not believe a word of it! 'Tis naught but old wives' fables!" But, all the same, I took with a great deal of thankfulness the dressing-down I had got from my father for being late for home lessons on a trigonometry night. You see, I was born and reared in Galloway, and I suppose it was just what they have come to call in these latter days "the influence of environment."
Well, at that moment, who should come up but Jo Kettle, a good fellow and friend of mine, but of no account in the school, being a rich farmer's son, who was excused from taking Latin because he was going to succeed his father in the farm. Jo had a right to the half of my secrets, because we both liked Gerty Greensleeves pretty well; and I was certain that she cared nothing about Jo, while Jo could swear that she counted me not worth a button.
So I told Jo Kettle about the Haunted House, and he was for starting off there and then. But it was perfectly evident that I could not with these fifth class boys to look after, and afternoon school just beginning. And if I could not, I was very sure that he had better not. More than once or twice I had proved that it was his duty to do as I said. Jo understood this, but grew so excited that he bolted into school in a moment with the noise of a runaway colt. His entrance disarranged the attention of the senior Latiners of the sixth. My father frowned, and said, "What do you mean, boy, by tumbling through the classroom door like a cart of bricks? Come quietly; and sit down, Agnes Anne!"
This was my poor unfortunate sister, aged fourteen, whom a pitiless parent compelled to do classics with the senior division.
Jo Kettle sat down and pawed about for his mensuration book, which he studied for some time upside down. Then he extracted his box of instruments from his bag and set himself to do over again a proposition with which he had been familiar for weeks. This, however, was according to immemorial school-boy habit, and sometimes succeeded with my father, who was dreamy wherever the classics were not concerned, and regarded a mere land-measuring agricultural scholar as outside the bounds of human interest, if not of Christian charity.
In two minutes my father was again immersed in Horace, which (with Tacitus) was his chief joy. Then Jo leaned nearer to Agnes Anne and whispered the dread news about the Haunted House. My sister paled, gasped, and clutched at the desk. Jo, fearful that she would begin, according to the sympathetic school phrase, "to cluck like a hen," threatened first to run the point of his compasses into her if she did not sit up instantly; and then, this treatment proving quite inadequate to the occasion, he made believe to pour ink upon her clean cotton print, fresh put on that morning. This brought Agnes Anne round, and, with a face still pale, she asked for details. Jo supplied them in a voice which the nearness of my father reduced to a whisper. He sat with his fingers and thumbs making an isosceles triangle and his eyes gently closed, while he listened to the construing of Fred Esquillant, the pale-faced genius of the school. At such times my father almost purred with delight, and Agnes Anne said that it was "just sweet to watch him." But even this pleasure palled before the tidings from the Haunted House as edited and expanded by Jo Kettle.
"Yes, Duncan had told him, and Sandy Webb had told
him. There were daylight ghosts abroad about Marnhoul. Everybody on the coach had seen them----"
"What were they like?" queried Agnes Anne in an awestruck whisper; so well poised, however, that it only reached Jo's ear, and never caused my enraptured father to wink an eyelid. I really believe that, like a good Calvinist with a sound minister tried and proven, my father allowed himself a little nap by way of refreshment while Fred Esquillant was construing.
Nothing loath, Jo launched headlong into the grisly. Through the matted undergrowth of years, over the high-spiked barriers of the deer-park, the Highflyer had seen not only the familiar Grey Lady in robes of rustling silk (through which you could discern the gravel and weeds on the path), but little green demons with chalk-white heads and long ears. These leaped five-barred gates and pursued the coach and its shrieking inmates as far as the little Mains brook that passes the kirk door at the entrance of the village. Then there was a huge, undistinct, crawling horror, half sea-serpent, half slow-worm, that had looked at them over the hedge, and, flinging out a sudden loop, had lassoed Peter Chafts, the running footman, whose duty it was to leap down and clear stones out of the horses' hoofs. Whether Little Peter had been recovered or not, Jo Kettle very naturally could not tell. How, indeed, could he? But, with an apparition like that, it was not at all probable.
Jo was preparing a further instalment, including clanking chains, gongs that sounded unseen in the air, hands that gripped the passengers and tried to pull them from their seats--all the wild tales of Souter Gowans, the village cobbler, and of ne'er-do-well farm lads, idle and reckless, whose word would never have been taken in any ordinary affair of life. Jo had not time, however, for Agnes Anne had a strong imagination, coupled with a highly nervous organization. She laughed out suddenly, in the middle of a solemn Horatian hush, a wild, hysterical laugh, which brought my father to his feet, broad awake in a second. The class gazed open-mouthed, the pale face of Fred Esquillant alone twitching responsively.
"What have you been saying to Agnes Anne MacAlpine?" demanded my father, who would sooner have resigned than been obliged to own son or daughter as such in school-time.
"Nothing!" said Jo Kettle, speaking according to the honour that obliges schoolboys to untruth as a mode of professional honour. Then Jo, seeing the frown on the master's face, and forestalling the words that were ready to come from his lips, "But, sirrah, I saw you!" amended hastily, "At least, I was only asking Agnes Anne to sit a little farther along!"
"What!" cried my father, with the snap of the eye that meant punishment, "to sit farther along, when you had no interest in this classical lesson, sir--a lesson you are incapable of understanding, and--all the length of an empty bench at your left hand! You shall speak with me at the close of the lesson, and that, sirrah, is now! The class is dismissed! I shall have the pleasure of a little interview with Master Joseph Kettle, student of mensuration."
Jo had his interview, in which figured a certain leathern strap, called "Lochgelly" after its place of manufacture--a branch of native industry much cursed by Scottish school-children. "Lochgelly" was five-fingered, well pickled in brine, well rubbed with oil, well used on the boys, but, except by way of threat, unknown to the girls. Jo emerged tingling but triumphant. Indeed, several new ideas had occurred to him. Eden Valley Academy stood around and drank in the wondrous tale with all its ears and, almost literally, with one mouth. Jo Kettle told the story so well that I well-nigh believed it myself. He even turned to me for corroboration.
"Didn't he tell you that, Duncan? That was the way of it, eh, Duncan?"
I denied, indeed, and would have stated the truth as it was in Guard Webb. But my futile and feeble negations fell unheeded, swept away by the pour of Jo's circumstantial lying.
Finally he ran off into the village and was lost to sight. I have little doubt that he played truant, in full recognition of pains and penalties to come, for the mere pleasure of going from door to door and "raising the town," as he called it. I consoled myself by the thought that he would find few but womenfolk at home at that hour, while the shopkeepers would have too much consideration for their tills and customers to follow a notorious romancer like Jo on such a fool's errand.
I cannot tell how that afternoon's lessons were got over in Eden Valley Academy. The hum of disturbance reached even the juniors, skulking peacefully under little Mr. Stephen, the assistant. Only Miss Huntingdon, in the Infant Department, remained quiet and neat as a dove new-preened among her murmuring throng of unconscious little folk.
But in the senior school, though I never reported a boy to my father (preferring to postpone his case for private dealing in the playground), the lid of the desk was opened and snapped sharply every five minutes to give exit and entrance to "Lochgelly." Seldom have I seen my father so roused. He hated not to understand everything that was going on in the school. He longed to ask me what I knew about it, but, according to his habit, generously forbore, lest he should lead me to tell tales upon my fellows. For, though actually junior assistant to my father, I was still a scholar, which made my position difficult indeed. To me it seemed as if the clock on the wall above the fireplace would never strike the hour of four. _