Page:Once a Week Volume 7.djvu/530

 522 gaze at him, and wait in wonder for what was coming.

“Sir, it was the face of one who has been dead this two years past—Mr. Frederick Massingbird.”

If the rector had gazed at old Matthew before, he could only stare now. That the calm, sensible old man should fall into so extraordinary a delusion, was incomprehensible. He might have believed it of Deerham in general, but not of Matthew Frost.

“Matthew, you must have been deceived,” was his quiet answer.

“No, sir. There never was another face like Mr. Frederick Massingbird’s. Other features may have been made like his—it’s not for me to say they have not—but whose else would have the black mark upon it? The moonlight was full upon it, and I could see even the little lines shooting out from the cheek, so bright was the night. The face was turned right upon me as it passed, and I am as clear about its being his as I am that it was me looking at it.”

“But you know it is a thing absolutely impossible,” urged Mr. Bourne. “I think you must have dreamt this, Matthew.”

Old Matthew shook his head.

“I wouldn’t have told you a dream, sir. It turned me all in amaze. I never felt the fatigue of a step all the way home after it. When I got in, I couldn’t eat my supper; I couldn’t go to bed. I sat up thinking, and the wife, she came in and asked what ailed me that I didn’t go to rest. I had got no sleep in my eyes, I told her, which was true: for, when I did get to bed, it was hours afore I could close ’em.”

“But, Matthew, I tell you that it is impossible. You must have been mistaken.”

“Sir, until last night, had anybody told me such a thing, I should have said it was impossible. You know, sir, I have never been given to such fancies. There’s no doubt, sir; there’s no doubt that it was the spirit of Mr. Frederick Massingbird.”

Matthew’s clear intelligent eye was fixed firmly on Mr. Bourne’s—his face, as usual, bending a little forward. Mr. Bourne had never believed in “spirits:” clergymen, as a rule, do not. A half smile crossed his lips.

“Were you frightened?” he asked.

“I was not frightened, sir, in the sense that you, perhaps, put the question. I was surprised, startled. Like I might have been surprised and startled at seeing anybody I least expected to see—somebody that I had thought was miles away. Since poor Rachel’s death, sir, I have lived, so to say, in communion with spirits: what with Robin’s talking of his hope to see hers, and my constantly thinking of her, knowing also that it can’t be long, in the course of nature, before I am one myself, I have grown to be, as it were, familiar with the dead in my mind. Thus, sir, in that sense, no fear came upon me last night. I don’t think, sir, I should feel fear at meeting or being alone with a spirit, any more than I should at meeting a man. But I was startled and disturbed.”

“Matthew,” cried Mr. Bourne, in some perplexity, “I had always believed you superior to these foolish things. Ghosts might do well enough for the old days, but the world has grown older and wiser. At any rate, the greater portion of it has.”

“If you mean, sir, that I was superior to the belief in ghosts, you are right. I never had a grain of faith in such superstition in my life; and I have tried all means to convince my son what folly it was of him to hover round about the willow pond, with any thought that Rachel might ‘come again.’ No, sir, I have never been given to it.”

“And yet you deliberately assure me, Matthew, that you saw a ghost last night!”

“Sir, that it was Mr. FerderickFrederick [sic] Massingbird, dead or alive, that I saw, I must hold to. We know that he is dead, sir: his wife buried him in that far land: so what am I to believe? The face looked ghastly white: not like a person’s living.”

Mr. Bourne mused. That Frederick Massingbird was dead and buried, there could not be the slightest doubt. He hardly knew what to make of old Matthew. The latter resumed.

“Had I been flurried or terrified by it, sir, so as to lose my presence of mind, or if I was one of those timid ones that see signs in dreams, or take every white post to be a ghost, that they come to on a dark night, you might laugh at and disbelieve me. But I tell it to you, sir, as you say, deliberate: just as it happened. I can’t have much longer time to live, sir; but I’d stake it all on the truth that it was the spirit of Mr. Frederick Massingbird. When you have once known a man, there are a hundred points by which you may recognise him, beyond possibility of being mistaken. They have got a story in the place, sir, to-day—as you may have heard—that my poor child’s ghost appeared to Dan Duff last night, and that the boy has been senseless ever since. It has struck me, sir, that, perhaps, he also saw what I did.”

Mr. Bourne paused. “Did you say anything of this to Mr. Verner?”

“Not I, sir. As I tell you, I felt like a guilty man in his presence, one with something to hide. He married Mr. Fred’s widow, pretty creature, and it don’t seem a nice thing to tell him. If it had been the other gentleman’s spirit, Mr. John’s, I should have told him at once.”

Mr. Bourne rose. To argue with old Matthew in his present state of mind, appeared to be about as useless a waste of time as to argue with Susan Peckaby on the subject of the white donkey. He told him he would see him again in a day or two, and took his departure.

But he did not dismiss the subject from his mind. No, he could not do that. He was puzzled. Such a tale from one like old Matthew—calm, pious, sensible, and verging on the grave, made more impression on Mr. Bourne than all Deerham could have made. Had Deerham come to him with the story, he would have flung it to the winds.

He began to think that some person, from evil design or love of mischief, must be personating Frederick Massingbird. It was a natural