Page:Once a Week June to Dec 1863.pdf/96

86 For example, noises! Dreadfully unaccountable are the noises that a person, sitting up late at night, and alone, “and when a’ the weary world to rest are gone,” may hear in some houses. I say alone, because it is not to be supposed that when several persons are together, some talking and laughing, some moving about, some occupied one way and some another, that they should pay any attention to the mysterious noises of which I am speaking. I am not nervous, but really I could not live in a house that was so afflicted—no, not if I might have it rent free, and, moreover, be paid a rent for living in it.

And, again, there are still worse things than mere noises that make some houses very undesirable habitations for the living; such things, for instance, as shadowy figures to be seen flitting by, when there is apparently no substance to cause them; or a trembling to be felt in the air which makes the bellwires vibrate, or even the bells to ring at unseasonable hours. I cannot say that I ever actually saw these things myself, but I confess that once, just at midnight,—no, I will not say what it was now. I do not wish to make my friends either nervous or uncomfortable; still more unwilling am I to give them any cause for distrusting my veracity, so I will pass over that strange affair for the present at least, and merely give a true and faithful account of what happened in a house that I was well acquainted with, and then they must judge for themselves whether or not that house was.

The house in question is a large and substantially-built mansion, standing in a beautiful, sheltered spot, although scarcely more than a furlong from the sea, and on the eastern coast of England. I know no other such spot on the whole line of coast from Berwick-on-Tweed to Dover. You already imagine that it is a stately edifice with gables, and turrets, partly clad with ivy, with deep-set, narrow-pointed windows, and winding-stairs complete? No such thing—neither is it a great staring modern house, standing stark naked with neither an evergreen shrub outside, nor a superstitious legend inside, to enliven it. On the contrary, the garden can boast of fig-trees of a magnitude seldom attained in our island except upon the southern coast, and the myrtle, which, farther inland, can only be kept alive through the winter months in a green-house, covers the walls with its shining dark-green leaves and fragrant silvery blossoms, to a height far above the drawing-room windows. The house may be a hundred years old—it may be more, or it may be less, though I should not think it. Who lives there now is no matter; our business is with the “good old Squire,” as he was commonly called in the neighbourhood, who lived there five-and-twenty years ago. I knew him well, and a hearty, hospitable old trump he was, too. He was a widower, and had no family; but as his means were ample, his house large and well appointed, and, moreover, his disposition somewhat jovial, it seldom happened that he was without visitors. Of all the places I ever knew, it was the most pleasant to stay in: there was no trying to be cheerful or gay, it all came naturally; it seemed to be in the very air of the place. There was plenty of shooting in the autumn; in the winter, hunting with two or three packs of harriers that were kept in the neighbourhood; in the summer an endless variety of amusements on sea or land, and for wet days there was a billiard-table and a good library for those who were inclined to be studious, or quiet, or lazy—everybody did as he liked—Liberty Hall it was.

And yet—I had heard, certainly, for I remembered it afterwards, though I paid very little attention to the matter at the time—I had heard that the house once had the reputation for being—for not being quite pleasant in all respects; but such things are said of so many country houses, that I looked upon this as mere idle gossip. Besides, the house had no appearance of the kind to warrant such reports. If such things had been said of Cranberry Hall, which was only two miles distant, inland, I should not so much wonder; its gloomy battlements, its windows divided by heavy stone mullions, its stacks of twisted and fretted chimneys, and, above all, that great dismal pine wood at the back, whose spiry tops by moonlight always looked to me like an enormous army of giants with their javelins piercing the sky—these might justify such a popular belief, but I never heard that there was even any suspicion of the kind attached to that melancholy-looking place. This, however, is an idle digression.

It was the last week in September, the weather was remarkably fine, we were a large party at the Squire’s, and he was in the best possible spirits, for he expected a visit from an old schoolfellow whom he had not seen for many years, but who had just written to say that he would come and give the pheasants a benefit on the first of October, as he had done some twenty years before. The Major, as I now learned from my host, was born and had spent his early youth in this neighbourhood; the two boys had gone to Eton together, and had always kept up a friendly correspondence, though their way in life had been so different that they had not met for twenty years.

On the last day of the month, just as we were sitting down to breakfast, the Squire evidently a little disappointed at not finding a letter in the post-bag from the Major, to our great surprise, in the old soldier walked. He had come down from London the day before, slept at the inn of the little market-town of Sandiland, where the coach stopped in the evening, had risen betimes, and now walked over to his old friend’s house.

After the first hearty salutations had passed between the two friends, and sundry rough schoolboyish jokes on the alteration that time had wrought in their personal appearance had been exchanged, it was decided that when breakfast was over, the rest of this day should be spent in reconnoitring certain favourite old haunts of their youth, and in paying visits to some half-dozen aged labourers and fishermen, whom the Major’s kind heart had not suffered him to forget. The next day was to be dedicated to the slaughter of partridges and pheasants. Well, there is no need to dwell upon the unimportant events of the day. We dispersed in small parties, according to our