The Uninhabited House / Riddell, Mrs. J. H., 1832-1906

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Title: The Uninhabited House

Author: Mrs. J. H. Riddell

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THE UNINHABITED HOUSE

MRS. J.H. RIDDELL



1. MISS BLAKE--FROM MEMORY


If ever a residence, "suitable in every respect for a family of
position," haunted a lawyer's offices, the "Uninhabited House," about
which I have a story to tell, haunted those of Messrs. Craven and Son,
No. 200, Buckingham Street, Strand.

It did not matter in the least whether it happened to be let or unlet:
in either case, it never allowed Mr. Craven or his clerks, of whom I was
one, to forget its existence.

When let, we were in perpetual hot water with the tenant; when unlet, we
had to endeavour to find some tenant to take that unlucky house.

Happy were we when we could get an agreement signed for a couple of
years--although we always had misgivings that the war waged with the
last occupant would probably have to be renewed with his successor.

Still, when we were able to let the desirable residence to a solvent
individual, even for twelve months, Mr. Craven rejoiced.

He knew how to proceed with the tenants who came blustering, or
threatening, or complaining, or bemoaning; but he did not know what
to do with Miss Blake and her letters, when no person was liable
for the rent.

All lawyers--I am one myself, and can speak from a long and varied
experience--all lawyers, even the very hardest, have one client, at all
events, towards whom they exhibit much forbearance, for whom they feel a
certain sympathy, and in whose interests they take a vast deal of
trouble for very little pecuniary profit.

A client of this kind favours me with his business--he has favoured me
with it for many years past. Each first of January I register a vow he
shall cost me no more time or money. On each last day of December I
find he is deeper in my debt than he was on the same date a
twelvemonth previous.

I often wonder how this is--why we, so fierce to one human being,
possibly honest and well-meaning enough, should be as wax in the hand of
the moulder, when another individual, perhaps utterly disreputable,
refuses to take "No" for an answer.

Do we purchase our indulgences in this way? Do we square our accounts
with our own consciences by remembering that, if we have been as stone
to Dick, Tom, and Harry, we have melted at the first appeal of Jack?

My principal, Mr. Craven--than whom a better man never breathed--had an
unprofitable client, for whom he entertained feelings of the profoundest
pity, whom he treated with a rare courtesy. That lady was Miss Blake;
and when the old house on the Thames stood tenantless, Mr. Craven's bed
did not prove one of roses.

In our firm there was no son--Mr. Craven had been the son; but the old
father was dead, and our chief's wife had brought him only daughters.

Still the title of the firm remained the same, and Mr. Craven's own
signature also.

He had been junior for such a number of years, that, when Death sent a
royal invitation to his senior, he was so accustomed to the old form,
that he, and all in his employment, tacitly agreed it was only fitting
he should remain junior to the end.

A good man. I, of all human beings, have reason to speak well of him.
Even putting the undoubted fact of all lawyers keeping one unprofitable
client into the scales, if he had not been very good he must have washed
his hands of Miss Blake and her niece's house long before the period at
which this story opens.

The house did not belong to Miss Blake. It was the property of her
niece, a certain Miss Helena Elmsdale, of whom Mr. Craven always spoke
as that "poor child."

She was not of age, and Miss Blake managed her few pecuniary affairs.

Besides the "desirable residence, suitable," etcetera, aunt and niece
had property producing about sixty-five pounds a year. When we could let
the desirable residence, handsomely furnished, and with every
convenience that could be named in the space of a half-guinea
advertisement, to a family from the country, or an officer just returned
from India, or to an invalid who desired a beautiful and quiet abode
within an easy drive of the West End--when we could do this, I say, the
income of aunt and niece rose to two hundred and sixty-five pounds a
year, which made a very material difference to Miss Blake.

When we could not let the house, or when the payment of the rent was in
dispute, Mr. Craven advanced the lady various five and ten pound notes,
which, it is to be hoped, were entered duly to his credit in the Eternal
Books. In the mundane records kept in our offices, they always appeared
as debits to William Craven's private account.

As for the young men about our establishment, of whom I was one, we
anathematised that house. I do not intend to reproduce the language we
used concerning it at one period of our experience, because eventually
the evil wore itself out, as most evils do, and at last we came to look
upon the desirable residence as an institution of our firm--as a sort of
_cause celebre_, with which it was creditable to be associated--as a
species of remarkable criminal always on its trial, and always certain
to be defended by Messrs. Craven and Son.

In fact, the Uninhabited House--for uninhabited it usually was, whether
anyone was answerable for the rent or not--finally became an object of
as keen interest to all Mr. Craven's clerks as it became a source of
annoyance to him.

So the beam goes up and down. While Mr. Craven pooh-poohed the
complaints of tenants, and laughed at the idea of a man being afraid of
a ghost, we did not laugh, but swore. When, however, Mr. Craven began to
look serious about the matter, and hoped some evil-disposed persons were
not trying to keep the place tenantless, our interest in the old house
became absorbing. And as our interest in the residence grew, so,
likewise, did our appreciation of Miss Blake.

We missed her when she went abroad--which she always did the day a fresh
agreement was signed--and we welcomed her return to England and our
offices with effusion. Safely I can say no millionaire ever received
such an ovation as fell to the lot of Miss Blake when, after a foreign
tour, she returned to those lodgings near Brunswick Square, which her
residence ought, I think, to have rendered classic.

She never lost an hour in coming to us. With the dust of travel upon
her, with the heat and burden of quarrels with railway porters, and
encounters with cabmen, visible to anyone who chose to read the signs
of the times, Miss Blake came pounding up our stairs, wanting to see
Mr. Craven.

If that gentleman was engaged, she would sit down in the general office,
and relate her latest grievance to a posse of sympathising clerks.

"And he says he won't pay the rent," was always the refrain of these
lamentations.

"It is in Ireland he thinks he is, poor soul!" she was wont to declare.

"We'll teach him different, Miss Blake," the spokesman of the party
would declare; whilst another ostentatiously mended a pen, and a
third brought down a ream of foolscap and laid it with a thump before
him on the desk.

"And, indeed, you're all decent lads, though full of your tricks,"
Miss Blake would sometimes remark, in a tone of gentle reproof. "But
if you had a niece just dying with grief, and a house nobody will live
in on your hands, you would not have as much heart for fun, I can tell
you that."

Hearing which, the young rascals tried to look sorrowful, and failed.

In the way of my profession I have met with many singular persons,
but I can safely declare I never met with any person so singular as
Miss Blake.

She was--I speak of her in the past tense, not because she is dead, but
because times and circumstances have changed since the period when we
both had to do with the Uninhabited House, and she has altered in
consequence--one of the most original people who ever crossed my path.

Born in the north of Ireland, the child of a Scottish-Ulster mother and
a Connaught father, she had ingeniously contrived to combine in her own
person the vices of two distinct races, and exclude the virtues of both.

Her accent was the most fearful which could be imagined. She had the
brogue of the West grafted on the accent of the North. And yet there
was a variety about her even in this respect. One never could tell,
from visit to visit, whether she proposed to pronounce "written" as
"wrutten" or "wretten";[Footnote: The wife of a celebrated Indian
officer stated that she once, in the north of Ireland, heard Job's
utterance thus rendered--"Oh! that my words were wr_u_tten, that they
were pr_e_nted in a b_u_ke."] whether she would elect to style her
parents, to whom she made frequent reference, her "pawpaw and mawmaw,"
or her "pepai and memai."

It all depended with whom Miss Blake had lately been most intimate. If
she had been "hand and glove" with a "nob" from her own country--she was
in no way reticent about thus styling her grander acquaintances, only
she wrote the word "knob"--who thought to conceal his nationality by
"awing" and "hawing," she spoke about people being "morried" and wearing
"sockcloth and oshes." If, on the contrary, she had been thrown into the
society of a lady who so far honoured England as to talk as some people
do in England, we had every A turned into E, and every U into O, while
she minced her words as if she had been saying "niminy piminy" since she
first began to talk, and honestly believed no human being could ever
have told she had been born west of St. George's Channel.

But not merely in accent did Miss Blake evidence the fact that her birth
had been the result of an injudicious cross; the more one knew of her,
the more clearly one saw the wrong points she threw out.

Extravagant to a fault, like her Connaught father, she was in no respect
generous, either from impulse or calculation.

Mean about minor details, a turn of character probably inherited from
the Ulster mother, she was utterly destitute of that careful and honest
economy which is an admirable trait in the natives of the north of
Ireland, and which enables them so frequently, after being strictly
just, to be much more than liberal.

Honest, Miss Blake was not--or, for that matter, honourable either. Her
indebtedness to our firm could not be considered other than a matter of
honour, and yet she never dreamt of paying her debt to Mr. Craven.

Indeed, to do Miss Blake strict justice, she never thought of paying the
debts she owed to anyone, unless she was obliged to do so.

Nowadays, I fear it would fare hard with her were she to try her old
tactics with the British tradesman; but, in the time of which I am
writing, co-operative societies were not, and then the British tradesman
had no objection, I fancy, to be gulled.

Perhaps, like the lawyer and the unprofitable client, he set-off being
gulled on one side his ledger against being fleeced on the other.

Be this as it may, we were always compounding some liability for Miss
Blake, as well as letting her house and fighting with the tenants.

At first, as I have said, we found Miss Blake an awful bore, but we
generally ended by deciding we could better spare a better man. Indeed,
the months when she did not come to our office seemed to want flavour.

Of gratitude--popularly supposed to be essentially characteristic of the
Irish--Miss Blake was utterly destitute. I never did know--I have never
known since, so ungrateful a woman.

Not merely did she take everything Mr. Craven did for her as a right,
but she absolutely turned the tables, and brought him in her debtor.

Once, only once, that I can remember, he ventured to ask when it would
be convenient for her to repay some of the money he had from time to
time advanced.

Miss Blake was taken by surprise, but she rose equal to the occasion.

"You are joking, Mr. Craven," she said. "You mean, when will I want to
ask you to give me a share of the profits you have made out of the
estate of my poor sister's husband. Why, that house has been as good as
an annuity to you. For six long years it has stood empty, or next to
empty, and never been out of law all the time."

"But, you know, Miss Blake, that not a shilling of profit has accrued to
me from the house being in law," he pleaded. "I have always been too
glad to get the rent for you, to insist upon my costs, and, really--."

"Now, do not try to impose upon me," she interrupted, "because it is of
no use. Didn't you make thousands of the dead man, and now haven't you
got the house? Why, if you never had a penny of costs, instead of all
you have pocketed, that house and the name it has brought to you, and
the fame which has spread abroad in consequence, can't be reckoned as
less than hundreds a year to your firm. And yet you ask me for the
return of a trumpery four or five sovereigns--I am ashamed of you! But I
won't imitate your bad example. Let me have five more to-day, and you
can stop ten out of the Colonel's first payment."

"I am very sorry," said my employer, "but I really have not five pounds
to spare."

"Hear him," remarked Miss Blake, turning towards me. "Young man"--Miss
Blake steadily refused to recognise the possibility of any clerk being
even by accident a gentleman--"will you hand me over the newspaper?"

I had not the faintest idea what she wanted with the newspaper, and
neither had Mr. Craven, till she sat down again deliberately--the latter
part of this conversation having taken place after she rose, preparatory
to saying farewell--opened the sheet out to its full width, and
commenced to read the debates.

"My dear Miss Blake," began Mr. Craven, after a minute's pause, "you
know my time, when it is mine, is always at your disposal, but at the
present moment several clients are waiting to see me, and--"

"Let them wait," said Miss Blake, as he hesitated a little. "Your time
and their time is no more valuable than mine, and I mean to stay
_here_," emphasising the word, "till you let me have that five pounds.
Why, look, now, that house is taken on a two years' agreement, and you
won't see me again for that time--likely as not, never; for who can tell
what may happen to anybody in foreign parts? Only one charge I lay upon
you, Mr. Craven: don't let me be buried in a strange country. It is bad
enough to be so far as this from my father and my mother's remains, but
I daresay I'll manage to rest in the same grave as my sister, though
Robert Elmsdale lies between. He separated us in life--not that she ever
cared for him; but it won't matter much when we are all bones and dust
together--"

"If I let you have that five pounds," here broke in Mr. Craven, "do I
clearly understand that I am to recoup myself out of Colonel Morris'
first payment?"

"I said so as plain as I could speak," agreed Miss Blake; and her speech
was very plain indeed.

Mr. Craven lifted his eyebrows and shrugged his shoulders, while he drew
his cheque-book towards him.

"How is Helena?" he asked, as he wrote the final legendary flourish
after Craven and Son.

"Helena is but middling, poor dear," answered Miss Blake--on that
occasion she called her niece Hallana. "She frets, the creature, as is
natural; but she will get better when we leave England. England is a
hard country for anyone who is all nairves like Halana."

"Why do you never bring her to see me?" asked Mr. Craven, folding up
the cheque.

"Bring her to be stared at by a parcel of clerks!" exclaimed Miss Blake,
in a tone which really caused my hair to bristle. "Well-mannered, decent
young fellows in their own rank, no doubt, but not fit to look at my
sister's child. Now, now, Mr. Craven, ought Kathleen Blake's--or,
rather, Kathleen Elmsdale's daughter to serve as a fifth of November guy
for London lads? You know she is handsome enough to be a duchess, like
her mother."

"Yes, yes, I know," agreed Mr. Craven, and handed over the cheque.

After I had held the door open for Miss Blake to pass out, and closed it
securely and resumed my seat, Miss Blake turned the handle and treated
us to another sight of her bonnet.

"Good-bye, William Craven, for two years at any rate; and if I never see
you again, God bless you, for you've been a true friend to me and that
poor child who has nobody else to look to," and then, before Mr. Craven
could cross the room, she was gone.

"I wonder," said I, "if it will be two years before we see her again?"

"No, nor the fourth of two years," answered my employer. "There is
something queer about that house."

"You don't think it is haunted, sir, do you?" I ventured.

"Of course not," said Mr. Craven, irritably; "but I do think some one
wants to keep the place vacant, and is succeeding admirably."

The question I next put seemed irrelevant, but really resulted from a
long train of thought. This was it:

"Is Miss Elmsdale very handsome, sir?"

"She is very beautiful," was the answer; "but not so beautiful as her
mother was."

Ah me! two old, old stories in a sentence. He had loved the mother, and
he did not love the daughter. He had seen the mother in his bright,
hopeful youth, and there was no light of morning left for him in which
he could behold the child.

To other eyes she might, in her bright spring-time, seem lovely as an
angel from heaven, but to him no more such visions were to be
vouchsafed.

If beauty really went on decaying, as the ancients say, by this time
there could be no beauty left. But oh! greybeard, the beauty remains,
though our eyes may be too dim to see it; the beauty, the grace, the
rippling laughter, and the saucy smiles, which once had power to stir to
their very depths our hearts, friend--our hearts, yours and mine,
comrade, feeble, and cold, and pulseless now.



2. THE CORONER'S INQUEST


The story was told to me afterwards, but I may as well weave it in with
mine at this juncture.

From the maternal ancestress, the Demoiselles Blake inherited a certain
amount of money. It was through no fault of the paternal Blake--through
no want of endeavours on his part to make ducks and drakes of all
fortune which came in his way, that their small inheritance remained
intact; but the fortune was so willed that neither the girls nor he
could divert the peaceful tenure of its half-yearly dividends.

The mother died first, and the father followed her ere long, and then
the young ladies found themselves orphans, and the possessors of a fixed
income of one hundred and thirty pounds a year.

A modest income, and yet, as I have been given to understand, they might
have married well for the money.

In those days, particularly in Ireland, men went very cheap, and the
Misses Blake, one and both, could, before they left off mourning, have
wedded, respectively, a curate, a doctor, a constabulary officer, and
the captain of a government schooner.

The Misses Blake looked higher, however, and came to England, where rich
husbands are presumably procurable. Came, but missed their market. Miss
Kathleen found only one lover, William Craven, whose honest affection
she flouted; and Miss Susannah found no lover at all.

Miss Kathleen wanted a duke, or an earl--a prince of the blood royal
being about that time unprocurable; and an attorney, to her Irish ideas,
seemed a very poor sort of substitute. For which reason she rejected the
attorney with scorn, and remained single, the while dukes and earls were
marrying and intermarrying with their peers or their inferiors.

Then suddenly there came a frightful day when Kathleen and Susannah
learned they were penniless, when they understood their trustee had
robbed them, as he had robbed others, and had been paying their interest
out of what was left of their principal.

They tried teaching, but they really had nothing to teach. They tried
letting lodgings. Even lodgers rebelled against their untidiness and
want of punctuality.

The eldest was very energetic and very determined, and the youngest very
pretty and very conciliatory. Nevertheless, business is business, and
lodgings are lodgings, and the Misses Blake were on the verge of
beggary, when Mr. Elmsdale proposed for Miss Kathleen and was accepted.

Mr. Craven, by that time a family man, gave the bride away, and secured
Mr. Elmsdale's business.

Possibly, had Mrs. Elmsdale's marriage proved happy, Mr. Craven might
have soon lost sight of his former love. In matrimony, as in other
matters, we are rarely so sympathetic with fulfilment as with
disappointment. The pretty Miss Blake was a disappointed woman after she
had secured Mr. Elmsdale. She then understood that the best life could
offer her was something very different indeed from the ideal duke her
beauty should have won, and she did not take much trouble to conceal her
dissatisfaction with the arrangements of Providence.

Mr. Craven, seeing what Mr. Elmsdale was towards men, pitied her.
Perhaps, had he seen what Mrs. Elmsdale was towards her husband, he
might have pitied him; but, then, he did not see, for women are
wonderful dissemblers.

There was Elmsdale, bluff in manner, short in person, red in the face,
cumbersome in figure, addicted to naughty words, not nice about driving
fearfully hard bargains, a man whom men hated, not undeservedly; and
yet, nevertheless, a man capable of loving a woman with all the veins of
his heart, and who might, had any woman been found to love him, have
compassed earthly salvation.

There were those who said he never could compass eternal; but they
chanced to be his debtors--and, after all, that question lay between
himself and God. The other lay between himself and his wife, and it must
be confessed, except so far as his passionate, disinterested love for an
utterly selfish woman tended to redeem and humanise his nature, she
never helped him one step along the better path.

But, then, the world could not know this, and Mr. Craven, of whom I am
speaking at the moment, was likely, naturally, to think Mr. Elmsdale all
in the wrong.

On the one hand he saw the man as he appeared to men: on the other he
saw the woman as she appeared to men, beautiful to the last; fragile,
with the low voice, so beautiful in any woman, so more especially
beautiful in an Irish woman; with a languid face which insured
compassion while never asking for it; with the appearance of a martyr,
and the tone and the manner of a suffering saint.

Everyone who beheld the pair together, remarked, "What a pity it was
such a sweet creature should be married to such a bear!" but Mr.
Elmsdale was no bear to his wife: he adored her. The selfishness, the
discontent, the ill-health, as much the consequence of a peevish,
petted temper, as of disease, which might well have exhausted the
patience and tired out the love of a different man, only endeared her
the more to him.

She made him feel how inferior he was to her in all respects; how
tremendously she had condescended, when she agreed to become his wife;
and he quietly accepted her estimation of him, and said with a humility
which was touching from its simplicity:

"I know I am not worthy of you, Kathleen, but I do my best to make
you happy."

For her sake, not being a liberal man, he spent money freely; for her
sake he endured Miss Blake; for her sake he bought the place which
afterwards caused us so much trouble; for her sake, he, who had always
scoffed at the folly of people turning their houses into stores for
"useless timber," as he styled the upholsterer's greatest triumphs,
furnished his rooms with a lavish disregard of cost; for her sake, he,
who hated society, smiled on visitors, and entertained the guests she
invited, with no grudging hospitality. For her sake he dressed well,
and did many other things which were equally antagonistic to his
original nature; and he might just as well have gone his own way, and
pleased himself only, for all the pleasure he gave her, or all the
thanks she gave him.

If Mr. Elmsdale had come home drunk five evenings a week, and beaten his
wife, and denied her the necessaries of life, and kept her purse in a
chronic state of emptiness, she might very possibly have been extremely
grateful for an occasional kind word or smile; but, as matters stood,
Mrs. Elmsdale was not in the least grateful for a devotion, as beautiful
as it was extraordinary, and posed herself on the domestic sofa in the
character of a martyr.

Most people accepted the representation as true, and pitied her. Miss
Blake, blissfully forgetful of that state of impecuniosity from which
Mr. Elmsdale's proposal had extricated herself and her sister, never
wearied of stating that "Katty had thrown herself away, and that Mr.
Elmsdale was not fit to tie her shoe-string."

She generously admitted the poor creature did his best; but, according
to Blake, the poor creature's best was very bad indeed.

"It's not his fault, but his misfortune," the lady was wont to remark,
"that he's like dirt beside her. He can't help his birth, and his
dragging-up, and his disreputable trade, or business, or whatever he
likes to call it; he can't help never having had a father nor mother to
speak of, and not a lady or gentleman belonging to the family since it
came into existence. I'm not blaming him, but it is hard for Kathleen,
and she reared as she was, and accustomed to the best society in
Ireland,--which is very different, let me tell you, from the best
anybody ever saw in England."

There were some who thought, if Mrs. Elmsdale could tolerate her
sister's company, she might without difficulty have condoned her
husband's want of acquaintance with some points of grammar and
etiquette; and who said, amongst themselves, that whereas he only
maltreated, Miss Blake mangled every letter in the alphabet; but these
carping critics were in the minority.

Mrs. Elmsdale was a beauty, and a martyr; Mr. Elmsdale a rough beast,
who had no capacity of ever developing into a prince. Miss Blake was a
model of sisterly affection, and if eccentric in her manner, and
bewildering in the vagaries of her accent, well, most Irish people, the
highest in rank not excepted, were the same. Why, there was Lord
So-and-so, who stated at a public meeting that "roight and moight were
not always convartible tarms"; and accepted the cheers and laughter
which greeted his utterance as evidence that he had said something
rather neat.

Miss Blake's accent was a very different affair indeed from those
wrestles with his foe in which her brother-in-law always came off
worsted. He endured agonies in trying to call himself Elmsdale, and
rarely succeeded in styling his wife anything except Mrs. HE. I am told
Miss Blake's mimicry of this peculiarity was delicious: but I never was
privileged to hear her delineation, for, long before the period when
this story opens, Mr. Elmsdale had departed to that land where no
confusion of tongues can much signify, and where Helmsdale no doubt
served his purpose just as well as Miss Blake's more refined
pronunciation of his name.

Further, Miss Helena Elmsdale would not allow a word in depreciation of
her father to be uttered when she was near, and as Miss Helena could on
occasion develop a very pretty little temper, as well as considerable
power of satire, Miss Blake dropped out of the habit of ridiculing Mr.
Elmsdale's sins of omission and commission, and contented herself by
generally asserting that, as his manner of living had broken her poor
sister's heart, so his manner of dying had broken her--Miss
Blake's--heart.

"It is only for the sake of the orphan child I am able to hold up at
all," she would tell us. "I would not have blamed him so much for
leaving us poor, but it was hard and cruel to leave us disgraced into
the bargain"; and then Miss Blake would weep, and the wag of the office
would take out his handkerchief and ostentatiously wipe his eyes.

She often threatened to complain of that boy--a merry, mischievous young
imp--to Mr. Craven; but she never did so. Perhaps because the clerks
always gave her rapt attention; and an interested audience was very
pleasant to Miss Blake.

Considering the nature of Mr. Elmsdale's profession, Miss Blake had
possibly some reason to complain of the extremely unprofitable manner in
which he cut up. He was what the lady described as "a dirty
money-lender."

Heaven only knows how he drifted into his occupation; few men, I
imagine, select such a trade, though it is one which seems to exercise
an enormous fascination for those who have adopted it.

The only son of a very small builder who managed to leave a few hundred
pounds behind him for the benefit of Elmsdale, then clerk in a
contractor's office, he had seen enough of the anxieties connected with
his father's business to wash his hands of bricks and mortar.

Experience, perhaps, had taught him also that people who advanced money
to builders made a very nice little income out of the capital so
employed; and it is quite possible that some of his father's
acquaintances, always in want of ready cash, as speculative folks
usually are, offered such terms for temporary accommodation as tempted
him to enter into the business of which Miss Blake spoke so
contemptuously.

Be this as it may, one thing is certain--by the time Elmsdale was thirty
he had established a very nice little connection amongst needy men:
whole streets were mortgaged to him; terraces, nominally the property of
some well-to-do builder, were virtually his, since he only waited the
well-to-do builder's inevitable bankruptcy to enter into possession. He
was not a sixty per cent man, always requiring some very much better
security than "a name" before parting with his money; but still even
twenty per cent, usually means ruin, and, as a matter of course, most of
Mr. Elmsdale's clients reached that pleasant goal.

They could have managed to do so, no doubt, had Mr. Elmsdale never
existed; but as he was in existence, he served the purpose for which it
seemed his mother had borne him; and sooner or later--as a rule, sooner
than later--assumed the shape of Nemesis to most of those who "did
business" with him.

There were exceptions, of course. Some men, by the help of exceptional
good fortune, roguery, or genius, managed to get out of Mr. Elmsdale's
hands by other paths than those leading through Basinghall or Portugal
Streets; but they merely proved the rule.

Notably amongst these fortunate persons may be mentioned a Mr. Harrison
and a Mr. Harringford--'Arrison and 'Arringford, as Mr. Elmsdale called
them, when he did not refer to them as the two Haitches.

Of these, the first-named, after a few transactions, shook the dust of
Mr. Elmsdale's office off his shoes, sent him the money he owed by his
lawyer, and ever after referred to Mr. Elmsdale as "that thief," "that
scoundrel," that "swindling old vagabond," and so forth; but, then,
hard words break no bones, and Mr. Harrison was not very well thought
of himself.

His remarks, therefore, did Mr. Elmsdale very little harm--a
money-lender is not usually spoken of in much pleasanter terms by those
who once have been thankful enough for his cheque; and the world in
general does not attach a vast amount of importance to the opinions of a
former borrower. Mr. Harrison did not, therefore, hurt or benefit his
quondam friend to any appreciable extent; but with Mr. Harringford the
case was different.

He and Elmsdale had been doing business together for years, "everything
he possessed in the world," he stated to an admiring coroner's jury
summoned to sit on Mr. Elmsdale's body and inquire into the cause of
that gentleman's death--"everything he possessed in the world, he owed
to the deceased. Some people spoke hardly of him, but his experience of
Mr. Elmsdale enabled him to say that a kinder-hearted, juster, honester,
or better-principled man never existed. He charged high interest,
certainly, and he expected to be paid his rate; but, then, there was no
deception about the matter: if it was worth a borrower's while to take
money at twenty per cent, why, there was an end of the matter. Business
men are not children," remarked Mr. Harringford, "and ought not to
borrow money at twenty per cent, unless they can make thirty per cent,
out of it." Personally, he had never paid Mr. Elmsdale more than twelve
and a half or fifteen per cent.; but, then, their transactions were on a
large scale. Only the day before Mr. Elmsdale's death--he hesitated a
little over that word, and became, as the reporters said, "affected"--he
had paid him twenty thousand pounds. The deceased told him he had urgent
need of the money, and at considerable inconvenience he raised the
amount. If the question were pressed as to whether he guessed for what
purpose that sum was so urgently needed, he would answer it, of course;
but he suggested that it should not be pressed, as likely to give pain
to those who were already in terrible affliction.

Hearing which, the jury pricked up their ears, and the coroner's
curiosity became so intense that he experienced some difficulty in
saying, calmly, that, "as the object of his sitting there was to elicit
the truth, however much he should regret causing distress to anyone, he
must request that Mr. Harringford, whose scruples did him honour, would
keep back no fact tending to throw light upon so sad an affair."

Having no alternative after this but to unburden himself of his secret,
Mr. Harringford stated that he feared the deceased had been a heavy
loser at Ascot. Mr. Harringford, having gone to that place with some
friends, met Mr. Elmsdale on the race-course. Expressing astonishment at
meeting him there, Mr. Elmsdale stated he had run down to look after a
client of his who he feared was going wrong. He said he did not much
care to do business with a betting man. In the course of subsequent
conversation, however, he told the witness he had some money on the
favourite.

As frequently proves the case, the favourite failed to come in first:
that was all Mr. Harringford knew about the matter. Mr. Elmsdale never
mentioned how much he had lost--in fact, he never referred again, except
in general terms, to their meeting. He stated, however, that he must
have money, and that immediately; if not the whole amount, half, at all
events. The witness found, however, he could more easily raise the
larger than the smaller sum. There had been a little unpleasantness
between him and Mr. Elmsdale with reference to the demand for money made
so suddenly and so peremptorily, and he bitterly regretted having even
for a moment forgotten what was due to so kind a friend.

He knew of no reason in the world why Mr. Elmsdale should have committed
suicide. He was, in business, eminently a cautious man, and Mr.
Harringford had always supposed him to be wealthy; in fact, he believed
him to be a man of large property. Since the death of his wife, he had,
however, noticed a change in him; but still it never crossed the
witness's mind that his brain was in any way affected.

Miss Blake, who had to this point postponed giving her evidence, on
account of the "way she was upset," was now able to tell a sympathetic
jury and a polite coroner all she knew of the matter.

"Indeed," she began, "Robert Elmsdale had never been the same man since
her poor sister's death; he mooned about, and would sit for half an
hour at a time, doing nothing but looking at a faded bit of the
dining-room carpet."

He took no interest in anything; if he was asked any questions about the
garden, he would say, "What does it matter? _she_ cannot see it now."

"Indeed, my lord," said Miss Blake, in her agitation probably
confounding the coroner with the chief justice, "it was just pitiful to
see the creature; I am sure his ways got to be heart-breaking."

"After my sister's death," Miss Blake resumed, after a pause, devoted by
herself, the jury, and the coroner to sentiment, "Robert Elmsdale gave
up his office in London, and brought his business home. I do not know
why he did this. He would not, had she been living, because he always
kept his trade well out of her sight, poor man. Being what she was, she
could not endure the name of it, naturally. It was not my place to say
he shouldn't do what he liked in his own house, and I thought the
excitement of building a new room, and quarrelling with the builder, and
swearing at the men, was good for him. He made a fireproof place for his
papers, and he fitted up the office like a library, and bought a
beautiful large table, covered with leather; and nobody to have gone in
would have thought the room was used for business. He had a Turkey
carpet on the floor, and chairs that slipped about on castors; and he
planned a covered way out into the road, with a separate entrance for
itself, so that none of us ever knew who went out or who came in. He
kept his affairs secret as the grave."

"No," in answer to the coroner, who began to think Miss Blake's
narrative would never come to an end. "I heard no shot: none of us
did: we all slept away from that part of the house; but I was restless
that night, and could not sleep, and I got up and looked out at the
river, and saw a flare of light on it. I thought it odd he was not
gone to bed, but took little notice of the matter for a couple of
hours more, when it was just getting gray in the morning, and I
looked out again, and still seeing the light, slipped on a
dressing-wrapper and my slippers, and ran downstairs to tell him he
would ruin his health if he did not go to his bed.

"When I opened the door I could see nothing; the table stood between me
and him; but the gas was flaring away, and as I went round to put it
out, I came across him lying on the floor. It never occurred to me he
was dead; I thought he was in a fit, and knelt down to unloose his
cravat, then I found he had gone.

"The pistol lay on the carpet beside him--and that," finished Miss
Blake, "is all I have to tell."

When asked if she had ever known of his losing money by betting, she
answered it was not likely he would tell her anything of that kind.

"He always kept his business to himself," she affirmed, "as is the way
of most men."

In answer to other questions, she stated she never heard of any losses
in business; there was plenty of money always to be had for the asking.
He was liberal enough, though perhaps not so liberal latterly, as before
his wife's death; she didn't know anything of the state of his affairs.
Likely, Mr. Craven could tell them all about that.

Mr. Craven, however, proved unable to do so. To the best of his belief,
Mr. Elmsdale was in very easy circumstances. He had transacted a large
amount of business for him, but never any involving pecuniary loss or
anxiety; he should have thought him the last man in the world to run
into such folly as betting; he had no doubt Mrs. Elmsdale's death had
affected him disastrously. He said more than once to witness, if it were
not for the sake of his child, he should not care if he died that night.

All of which, justifying the jury in returning a verdict of "suicide
while of unsound mind," they expressed their unanimous opinion to that
effect--thus "saving the family the condemnation of _felo de se_"
remarked Miss Blake.

The dead man was buried, the church service read over his remains, the
household was put into mourning, the blinds were drawn up, the windows
flung open, and the business of life taken up once more by the
survivors.



3. OUR LAST TENANT


It is quite competent for a person so to manage his affairs, that,
whilst understanding all about them himself, another finds it next to
impossible to make head or tail of his position.

Mr. Craven found that Mr. Elmsdale had effected this feat; entries there
were in his books, intelligible enough, perhaps, to the man who made
them, but as so much Hebrew to a stranger.

He had never kept a business banking account; he had no regular journal
or ledger; he seemed to have depended on memoranda, and vague and
uncertain writings in his diary, both for memory and accuracy; and as
most of his business had been conducted _viva voce_, there were few
letters to assist in throwing the slightest light on his transactions.

Even from the receipts, however, one thing was clear, viz., that he had,
since his marriage, spent a very large sum of money; spent it lavishly,
not to say foolishly. Indeed, the more closely Mr. Craven looked into
affairs, the more satisfied he felt that Mr. Elmsdale had committed
suicide simply because he was well-nigh ruined.

Mortgage-deeds Mr. Craven himself had drawn up, were nowhere to be
found; neither could one sovereign of the money Mr. Harringford paid be
discovered.

Miss Blake said she believed "that Harringford had never paid at all";
but this was clearly proved to be an error of judgment on the part of
that impulsive lady. Not merely did Harringford hold the receipt for the
money and the mortgage-deeds cancelled, but the cheque he had given to
the mortgagee bore the endorsement--"Robert Elmsdale"; while the clerk
who cashed it stated that Mr. Elmsdale presented the order in person,
and that to him he handed the notes.

Whatever he had done with the money, no notes were to be found; a
diligent search of the strong room produced nothing more important than
the discovery of a cash-box containing three hundred pounds; the
title-deeds of River Hall--such being the modest name by which Mr.
Elmsdale had elected to have his residence distinguished; the leases
relating to some small cottages near Barnes; all the letters his wife
had ever written to him; two locks of her hair, one given before
marriage, the other cut after her death; a curl severed from the head of
my "baby daughter"; quantities of receipts--and nothing more.

"I wonder he can rest in his grave," said Miss Blake, when at last she
began to realize, in a dim sort of way, the position of affairs.

According to the River Hall servants' version, Mr. Elmsdale did anything
rather than rest in his grave. About the time the new mourning had been
altered to fit perfectly, a nervous housemaid, who began perhaps to find
the house dull, mooted the question as to whether "master walked."

Within a fortnight it was decided in solemn conclave that master did;
and further, that the place was not what it had been; and moreover, that
in the future it was likely to be still less like what it had been.

There is a wonderful instinct in the lower classes, which enables them
to comprehend, without actual knowledge, when misfortune is coming upon
a house: and in this instance that instinct was not at fault.

Long before Mr. Craven had satisfied himself that his client's estate
was a very poor one, the River Hall servants, one after another, had
given notice to leave--indeed, to speak more accurately, they did not
give notice, for they left; and before they left they took care to
baptize the house with such an exceedingly bad name, that neither for
love nor money could Miss Blake get a fresh "help" to stay in it for
more than twenty-four hours.

First one housemaid was taken with "the shivers"; then the cook had "the
trembles"; then the coachman was prepared to take his solemn affidavit,
that, one night long after everyone in the house to his knowledge was in
bed, he "see from his room above the stables, a light a-shining on the
Thames, and the figures of one or more a passing and a repassing across
the blind." More than this, a new page-boy declared that, on a certain
evening, before he had been told there was anything strange about the
house, he heard the door of the passage leading from the library into
the side-road slam violently, and looking to see who had gone out by
that unused entrance, failed to perceive sign of man, woman, or child,
by the bright moonlight.

Moved by some feeling which he professed himself unable to "put a name
on," he proceeded to the door in question, and found it barred, chained,
and bolted. While he was standing wondering what it meant, he noticed
the light as of gas shining from underneath the library door; but when
he softly turned the handle and peeped in, the room was dark as the
grave, and "like cold water seemed running down his back."

Further, he averred, as he stole away into the hall, there was a sound
followed him as between a groan and a cry. Hearing which statement, an
impressionable charwoman went into hysterics, and had to be recalled to
her senses by a dose of gin, suggested and taken strictly as a medicine.

But no supply of spirituous liquors, even had Miss Blake been disposed
to distribute anything of the sort, could induce servants after a time
to remain in, or charwomen to come to, the house. It had received a bad
name, and that goes even further in disfavour of a residence than it
does against a man or woman.

Finally, Miss Blake's establishment was limited to an old creature
almost doting and totally deaf, the advantages of whose presence might
have been considered problematical; but, then, as Miss Blake remarked,
"she was somebody."

"And now she has taken fright," proceeded the lady. "How anyone could
make her hear their story, the Lord in heaven alone knows; and if there
was anything to see, I am sure she is far too blind to see it; but she
says she daren't stay. She does not want to see poor master again till
she is dead herself."

"I have got a tenant for the house the moment you like to say you will
leave it," said Mr. Craven, in reply. "He cares for no ghost that ever
was manufactured. He has a wife with a splendid digestion, and several
grown-up sons and daughters. They will soon clear out the shadows; and
their father is willing to pay two hundred and fifty pounds a year."

"And you think there is really nothing more of any use amongst
the papers?"

"I am afraid not--I am afraid you must face the worst."

"And my sister's child left no better off than a street beggar,"
suggested Miss Blake.

"Come, come," remonstrated Mr. Craven; "matters are not so bad as all
that comes to. Upon three hundred a year, you can live very comfortable
on the Continent; and--"

"We'll go," interrupted Miss Blake; "but it is hard lines--not that
anything better could have been expected from Robert Elmsdale."

"Ah! dear Miss Blake, the poor fellow is dead. Remember only his
virtues, and let his faults rest."

"I sha'n't have much to burden my memory with, then," retorted Miss
Blake, and departed.

Her next letter to my principal was dated from Rouen; but before that
reached Buckingham Street, our troubles had begun.

For some reason best known to himself, Mr. Treseby, the good-natured
country squire possessed of a wife with an excellent digestion, at the
end of two months handed us half a year's rent, and requested we should
try to let the house for the remainder of his term, he, in case of our
failure, continuing amenable for the rent. In the course of the three
years we secured eight tenants, and as from each a profit in the way of
forfeit accrued, we had not to trouble Mr. Treseby for any more money,
and were also enabled to remit some small bonuses--which came to her,
Miss Blake assured us, as godsends--to the Continent.

After that the place stood vacant for a time. Various care-takers were
eager to obtain the charge of it, but I only remember one who was not
eager to leave.

That was a night-watchman, who never went home except in the daytime,
and then to sleep, and he failed to understand why his wife, who was a
pretty, delicate little creature, and the mother of four small
children, should quarrel with her bread and butter, and want to leave
so fine a place.

He argued the matter with her in so practical a fashion, that the
nearest magistrate had to be elected umpire between them.

The whole story of the place was repeated in court, and the
night-watchman's wife, who sobbed during the entire time she stood in
the witness-box, made light of her black eye and numerous bruises, but
said, "Not if Tim murdered her, could she stay alone in the house
another night."

To prevent him murdering her, he was sent to gaol for two months, and
Mr. Craven allowed her eight shillings a week till Tim was once more a
free man, when he absconded, leaving wife and children chargeable to
the parish.

"A poor, nervous creature," said Mr. Craven, who would not believe that
where gas was, any house could be ghost-ridden. "We must really try to
let the house in earnest."

And we did try, and we did let, over, and over, and over again,
always with a like result, till at length Mr. Craven said to me: "Do
you know, Patterson, I really am growing very uneasy about that house
on the Thames. I am afraid some evil-disposed person is trying to
keep it vacant."

"It certainly is very strange," was the only remark I felt capable
of making.

We had joked so much about the house amongst ourselves, and ridiculed
Miss Blake and her troubles to such an extent, that the matter bore no
serious aspect for any of us juniors.

"If we are not soon able to let it," went on Mr. Craven, "I shall advise
Miss Blake to auction off the furniture and sell the place. We must not
always have an uninhabited house haunting our offices, Patterson."

I shook my head in grave assent, but all the time I was thinking the day
when that house ceased to haunt our offices, would be a very dreary one
for the wags amongst our clerks. "Yes, I certainly shall advise Miss
Blake to sell," repeated Mr. Craven, slowly.

Although a hard-working man, he was eminently slow in his ideas
and actions.

There was nothing express about our dear governor; upon no special
mental train did he go careering through life. Eminently he preferred
the parliamentary pace: and I am bound to say the life-journey so
performed was beautiful exceedingly, with waits not devoid of interest
at little stations utterly outside his profession, with kindly talk to
little children, and timid women, and feeble men; with a pleasant smile
for most with whom he came in contact, and time for words of kindly
advice which did not fall perpetually on stony ground, but which
sometimes grew to maturity, and produced rich grain of which himself
beheld the garnering.

Nevertheless, to my younger and quicker nature, he did seem often
very tardy.

"Why not advise her now?" I asked.

"Ah! my boy," he answered, "life is very short, yet it is long enough to
have no need in it for hurry."

The same day, Colonel Morris appeared in our office. Within a fortnight,
that gallant officer was our tenant; within a month, Mrs. Morris, an
exceedingly fine lady, with grown-up children, with very young children
also, with ayahs, with native servants, with English servants, with a
list of acquaintances such as one may read of in the papers the day
after a Queen's drawing-room, took possession of the Uninhabited House,
and, for about three months, peace reigned in our dominions.

Buckingham Street, as represented by us, stank in the nostrils of no
human being.

So far we were innocent of offence, we were simply ordinary solicitors
and clerks, doing as fully and truly as we knew how, an extremely good
business at rates which yielded a very fair return to our principal.

The Colonel was delighted with the place, he kindly called to say; so
was Mrs. Morris; so were the grown-up sons and daughters of Colonel and
Mrs. Morris; and so, it is to be presumed, were the infant branches of
the family.

The native servants liked the place because Mr. Elmsdale, in view of his
wife's delicate health, had made the house "like an oven," to quote Miss
Blake. "It was bad for her, I know," proceeded that lady, "but she would
have her own way, poor soul, and he--well, he'd have had the top brick
of the chimney of a ten-story house off, if she had taken a fancy for
that article."

Those stoves and pipes were a great bait to Colonel Morris, as well as a
source of physical enjoyment to his servants.

He, too, had married a woman who was not always easy to please; but
River Hall did please her, as was natural, with its luxuries of heat,
ease, convenience, large rooms opening one out of another, wide
verandahs overlooking the Thames, staircases easy of ascent; baths, hot,
cold, and shower; a sweet, pretty garden, conservatory with a door
leading into it from the spacious hall, all exceedingly cheap at two
hundred pounds a year.

Accordingly, at first, the Colonel was delighted with the place, and not
the less so because Mrs. Morris was delighted with it, and because it
was also so far from town, that he had a remarkably good excuse for
frequently visiting his club.

Before the new-comers, local tradesmen bowed down and did worship.

Visitors came and visitors went, carriages appeared in shoals, and
double-knocks were plentiful as blackberries. A fresh leaf had evidently
been turned over at River Hall, and the place meant to give no more
trouble for ever to Miss Blake, or Mr. Craven, or anybody. So, as I have
said, three months passed. We had got well into the dog-days by that
time; there was very little to do in the office. Mr. Craven had left for
his annual holiday, which he always took in the company of his wife and
daughters--a correct, but possibly a depressing, way of spending a
vacation which must have been intended to furnish some social variety in
a man's life; and we were all very idle, and all very much inclined to
grumble at the heat, and length, and general slowness of the days, when
one morning, as I was going out in order to send a parcel off to Mrs.
Craven, who should I meet coming panting up the stairs but Miss Blake!

"Is that you, Patterson?" she gasped. I assured her it was I in the
flesh, and intimated my astonishment at seeing her in hers.

"Why, I thought you were in France, Miss Blake," I suggested.

"That's where I have just come from," she said. "Is Mr. Craven in?" I
told her he was out of town.

"Ay--that's where everybody can be but me," she remarked, plaintively.
"They can go out and stay out, while I am at the beck and call of all
the scum of the earth. Well, well, I suppose there will be quiet for me
sometime, if only in my coffin."

As I failed to see that any consolatory answer was possible, I made no
reply. I only asked:

"Won't you walk into Mr. Craven's office, Miss Blake?"

"Now, I wonder," she said, "what good you think walking into his office
will do me!"

Nevertheless, she accepted the invitation. I have, in the course of
years, seen many persons suffering from heat, but I never did see any
human being in such a state as Miss Blake was that day.

Her face was a pure, rich red, from temple to chin; it resembled nothing
so much as a brick which had been out for a long time, first in the sun
and the wind, and then in a succession of heavy showers of rain. She
looked weather-beaten, and sun-burnt, and sprayed with salt-water, all
at once. Her eyes were a lighter blue than I previously thought eyes
could be. Her cheek-bones stood out more prominently than I had thought
cheek-bones capable of doing. Her mouth--not quite a bad one, by the
way--opened wider than any within my experience; and her teeth, white
and exposed, were suggestive of a set of tombstones planted outside a
stonemason's shop, or an upper and lower set exhibited at the entrance
to a dentist's operating-room. Poor dear Miss Blake, she and those
pronounced teeth parted company long ago, and a much more becoming
set--which she got exceedingly cheap, by agreeing with the maker to
"send the whole of the city of London to her, if he liked"--now occupy
their place.

But on that especial morning they were very prominent. Everything, in
fact, about the lady, or belonging to her, seemed exaggerated, as if the
heat of the weather had induced a tropical growth of her mental and
bodily peculiarities. Her bonnet was crooked beyond even the ordinary
capacity of Miss Blake's head-gear; the strings were rolled up till they
looked like ropes which had been knotted under her chin. A veil, as
large and black as a pirate's flag, floated down her back; her shawl was
at sixes and sevens; one side of her dress had got torn from the bodice,
and trailed on the ground leaving a broadly-marked line of dust on the
carpet. She looked as if she had no petticoats on; and her boots--those
were the days ere side-springs and buttons obtained--were one laced
unevenly, and the other tied on with a piece of ribbon.

As for her gloves, they were in the state we always beheld them; if she
ever bought a new pair (which I do not believe), she never treated us to
a sight of them till they had been long past decent service. They never
were buttoned, to begin with; they had a wrinkled and haggard
appearance, as if from extreme old age. If their colour had originally
been lavender, they were always black with dirt; if black, they were
white with wear.

As a bad job, she had, apparently, years before, given up putting a
stitch in the ends of the fingers, when a stitch gave way; and the
consequence was that we were perfectly familiar with Miss Blake's
nails--and those nails looked as if, at an early period of her life, a
hammer had been brought heavily down upon them. Mrs. Elmsdale might well
be a beauty, for she had taken not only her own share of the good looks
of the family, but her sister's also.

We used often, at the office, to marvel why Miss Blake ever wore a
collar, or a tucker, or a frill, or a pair of cuffs. So far as clean
linen was concerned, she would have appeared infinitely brighter and
fresher had she and female frippery at once parted company. Her laces
were always in tatters, her collars soiled, her cuffs torn, and her
frills limp. I wonder what the natives thought of her in France! In
London, we decided--and accurately, I believe--that Miss Blake, in the
solitude of her own chamber, washed and got-up her cambrics and fine
linen--and it was a "get-up" and a "put-on" as well.

Had any other woman, dressed like Miss Blake, come to our office, I fear
the clerks would not have been over-civil to her. But Miss Blake was our
own, our very own. She had grown to be as our very flesh and blood. We
did not love her, but she was associated with us by the closest ties
that can subsist between lawyer and client. Had anything happened to
Miss Blake, we should, in the event of her death, have gone in a body to
her funeral, and felt a want in our lives for ever after.

But Miss Blake had not the slightest intention of dying: we were not
afraid of that calamity. The only thing we really did dread was that
some day she might insist upon laying the blame of River Hall remaining
uninhabited on our shoulders, and demand that Mr. Craven should pay her
the rent out of his own pocket.

We knew if she took that, or any other pecuniary matter, seriously in
hand, she would carry it through; and, between jest and earnest, we were
wont to speculate whether, in the end, it might not prove cheaper to our
firm if Mr. Craven were to farm that place, and pay Miss Blake's niece
an annuity of say one hundred a year.

Ultimately we decided that it would, but that such a scheme was
impracticable, because Miss Blake would always think we were making a
fortune out of River Hall, and give us no peace till she had a share of
the profit.

For a time, Miss Blake--after unfastening her bonnet-strings, and taking
out her brooch and throwing back her shawl--sat fanning herself with a
dilapidated glove, and saying, "Oh dear! oh dear! what is to become of
me I cannot imagine." But, at length, finding I was not to be betrayed
into questioning, she observed:

"If William Craven knew the distress I am in, he would not be out of
town enjoying himself, I'll be bound."

"I am quite certain he would not," I answered, boldly. "But as he is
away, is there nothing we can do for you?"

She shook her head mournfully. "You're all a parcel of boys and children
together," was her comprehensive answer.

"But there is our manager, Mr. Taylor," I suggested.

"Him!" she exclaimed. "Now, if you don't want me to walk out of the
office and never set foot in it again, don't talk to me about Taylor."

"Has Mr. Taylor offended you?" I ventured to inquire.

"Lads of your age should not ask too many questions," she replied. "What
I have against Taylor is nothing to you; only don't make me desperate by
mentioning his name."

I hastened to assure her that it should never be uttered by me again in
her presence, and there ensued a pause, which she filled by looking
round the office and taking a mental inventory of everything it
contained.

Eventually, her survey ended in this remark, "And he can go out of town
as well, and keep a brougham for his wife, and draw them daughters of
his out like figures in a fashion-book, and my poor sister's child
living in a two-pair lodging."

"I fear, Miss Blake," I ventured, "that something is the matter at
River Hall."

"You fear, do you, young man?" she returned. "You ought to get a
first prize for guessing. As if anything else could ever bring me
back to London."

"Can I be of no service to you in the matter?"

"I don't think you can, but you may as well see his letter." And diving
into the depths of her pocket, she produced Colonel Morris'
communication, which was very short, but very much to the purpose.

    "Not wishing," he said, "to behave in any unhandsome manner, I send
    you herewith" (herewith meant the keys of River Hall and his letter)
    "a cheque for one half-year's rent. You must know that, had I been
    aware of the antecedents of the place, I should never have become
    your tenant; and I must say, considering I have a wife in delicate
    health, and young children, the deception practised by your lawyers
    in concealing the fact that no previous occupant has been able to
    remain in the house, seems most unpardonable. I am a soldier, and,
    to me, these trade tricks appear dishonourable. Still, as I
    understand your position is an exceptional one, I am willing to
    forgive the wrong which has been done, and to pay six months' rent
    for a house I shall no longer occupy. In the event of these
    concessions appearing insufficient, I beg to enclose the names of my
    solicitors, and have the honour, madam, to remain

    "Your most obedient servant,

    "HERCULES MORRIS."

In order to gain time, I read this letter twice over; then,
diplomatically, as I thought, I said:

"What are you going to do, Miss Blake?"

"What are _you_ going to do, is much nearer the point, I am thinking!"
retorted that lady. "Do you imagine there is so much pleasure or profit
in keeping a lawyer, that people want to do lawyer's work for
themselves?"

Which really was hard upon us all, considering that so long as she
could do her work for herself, Miss Blake ignored both Mr. Craven and
his clerks.

Not a shilling of money would she ever, if she could help it, permit to
pass through our hands--not the slightest chance did she ever
voluntarily give Mr. Craven of recouping himself those costs or loans in
which her acquaintance involved her sister's former suitor.

Had he felt any inclination--which I am quite certain he never did--to
deduct Miss Helena's indebtedness, as represented by her aunt, out of
Miss Helena's income, he could not have done it. The tenant's money
usually went straight into Miss Blake's hands.

What she did with it, Heaven only knows. I know she did not buy
herself gloves!

Twirling the Colonel's letter about, I thought the position over.

"What, then," I asked, "do you wish us to do?"

Habited as I have attempted to describe, Miss Blake sat at one side of a
library-table. In, I flatter myself, a decent suit of clothes, washed,
brushed, shaved, I sat on the other. To ordinary observers, I know I
must have seemed much the best man of the two--yet Miss Blake got the
better of me.

She, that dilapidated, red-hot, crumpled-collared, fingerless-gloved
woman, looked me over from head to foot, as I conceived, though my boots
were hidden away under the table, and I declare--I swear--she put me out
of countenance. I felt small under the stare of a person with whom I
would not then have walked through Hyde Park in the afternoon for almost
any amount of money which could have been offered to me.

"Though you are only a clerk," she said at length, apparently quite
unconscious of the effect she had produced, "you seem a very decent sort
of young man. As Mr. Craven is out of the way, suppose you go and see
that Morris man, and ask him what he means by his impudent letter."

I rose to the bait. Being in Mr. Craven's employment, it is unnecessary
to say I, in common with every other person about the place, thought I
could manage his business for him very much better than he could manage
it for himself; and it had always been my own personal conviction that
if the letting of the Uninhabited House were entrusted to me, the place
would not stand long empty.

Miss Blake's proposition was, therefore, most agreeable; but still, I
did not at once swallow her hook. Mr. Craven, I felt, might scarcely
approve of my taking it upon myself to call upon Colonel Morris while
Mr. Taylor was able and willing to venture upon such a step, and I
therefore suggested to our client the advisability of first asking Mr.
Craven's opinion about the affair.

"And keep me in suspense while you are writing and answering and running
up a bill as long as Midsummer Day," she retorted. "No, thank you. If
you don't think my business worth your attention, I'll go to somebody
that may be glad of it." And she began tying her strings and feeling
after her shawl in a manner which looked very much indeed like carrying
out her threat.

At that moment I made up my mind to consult Taylor as to what ought to
be done. So I appeased Miss Blake by assuring her, in a diplomatic
manner, that Colonel Morris should be visited, and promising to
communicate the result of the interview by letter.

"That you won't," she answered. "I'll be here to-morrow to know what he
has to say for himself. He is just tired of the house, like the rest of
them, and wants to be rid of his bargain."

"I am not quite sure of that," I said, remembering my principal's
suggestion. "It is strange, if there really is nothing objectionable
about the house, that _no one_ can be found to stay in it. Mr. Craven
has hinted that he fancies some evil-disposed person must be playing
tricks, in order to frighten tenants away."

"It is likely enough," she agreed. "Robert Elmsdale had plenty of
enemies and few friends; but that is no reason why we should
starve, is it?"

I failed to see the logical sequence of Miss Blake's remark,
nevertheless I did not dare to tell her so; and agreed it was no reason
why she and her niece should be driven into that workhouse which she
frequently declared they "must come to."

"Remember," were her parting words, "I shall be here to-morrow morning
early, and expect you to have good news for me."

Inwardly resolving not to be in the way, I said I hoped there would be
good news for her, and went in search of Taylor.

"Miss Blake has been here," I began. "THE HOUSE is empty again. Colonel
Morris has sent her half a year's rent, the keys, and the address of his
solicitors. He says we have acted disgracefully in the matter, and she
wants me to go and see him, and declares she will be back here first
thing to-morrow morning to know what he has to say for himself. What
ought I to do?"

Before Mr. Taylor answered my question, he delivered himself of a
comprehensive anathema which included Miss Blake, River Hall, the late
owner, and ourselves. He further wished he might be essentially
etceteraed if he believed there was another solicitor, besides Mr.
Craven, in London who would allow such a hag to haunt his offices.

"Talk about River Hall being haunted," he finished; "it is we who are
witch-ridden, I call it, by that old Irishwoman. She ought to be burnt
at Smithfield. I'd be at the expense of the faggots!"

"What have you and Miss Blake quarrelled about?" I inquired. "You say
she is a witch, and she has made me take a solemn oath never to mention
your name again in her presence."

"I'd keep her presence out of these offices, if I was Mr. Craven," he
answered. "She has cost us more than the whole freehold of River Hall
is worth."

Something in his manner, more than in his words, made me comprehend that
Miss Blake had borrowed money from him, and not repaid it, so I did not
press for further explanation, but only asked him once again what I
ought to do about calling upon Colonel Morris.

"Call, and be hanged, if you like!" was the reply; and as Mr. Taylor was
not usually a man given to violent language, I understood that Miss
Blake's name acted upon his temper with the same magical effect as a red
rag does upon that of a turkey-cock.



4. MYSELF AND MISS BLAKE


Colonel Morris, after leaving River Hall, had migrated temporarily to a
fashionable West End hotel, and was, when I called to see him, partaking
of tiffin in the bosom of his family, instead of at his club.

As it was notorious that he and Mrs. Morris failed to lead the most
harmonious of lives, I did not feel surprised to find him in an
extremely bad temper.

In person, short, dapper, wiry, thin, and precise, his manner matched
his appearance. He had martinet written on every square foot of his
figure. His moustache was fiercely waxed, his shirt-collar inflexible,
his backbone stiff, while his shoulder-blades met flat and even behind.
He held his chin a little up in the air, and his walk was less a march
than a strut.

He came into the room where I had been waiting for him, as I fancied he
might have come on a wet, cold morning to meet an awkward-squad. He held
the card I sent for his inspection in his hand, and referred to it,
after he had looked me over with a supercilious glance.

"Mr. Patterson, from Messrs. Craven and Son," he read slowly out loud,
and then added:

"May I inquire what Mr. Patterson from Messrs. Craven and Son
wants with me?"

"I come from Miss Blake, sir," I remarked.

"It is here written that you come from Messrs. Craven and Son," he said.

"So I do, sir--upon Miss Blake's business. She is a client of ours, as
you may remember."

"I do remember. Go on."

He would not sit down himself or ask me to be seated, so we stood
throughout the interview. I with my hat in my hand, he twirling his
moustache or scrutinising his nails while he talked.

"Miss Blake has received a letter from you, sir, and has requested me to
ask you for an explanation of it."

"I have no further explanation to give," he replied.

"But as you took the house for two years, we cannot advise Miss Blake to
allow you to relinquish possession in consideration of your having paid
her six months' rent."

"Very well. Then you can advise her to fight the matter, as I suppose
you will. I am prepared to fight it."

"We never like fighting, if a matter can be arranged amicably," I
answered. "Mr. Craven is at present out of town; but I know I am only
speaking his words, when I say we shall be glad to advise Miss Blake to
accept any reasonable proposition which you may feel inclined to make."

"I have sent her half a year's rent," was his reply; "and I have
refrained from prosecuting you all for conspiracy, as I am told I might
have done. Lawyers, I am aware, admit they have no consciences, and I
can make some allowance for a person in Miss Blake's position,
otherwise."

"Yes, sir?" I said, interrogatively.

"I should never have paid one penny. It has, I find, been a well-known
fact to Mr. Craven, as well as to Miss Blake, that no tenant can remain
in River Hall. When my wife was first taken ill there--in consequence of
the frightful shock she received--I sent for the nearest medical man,
and he refused to come; absolutely sent me a note, saying, 'he was very
sorry, but he must decline to attend Mrs. Morris. Doubtless, she had her
own physician, who would be happy to devote himself to the case.'"

"And what did you do?" I asked, my pulses tingling with awakened
curiosity.

"Do!" he repeated, pleased, perhaps, to find so appreciative a listener.
"I sent, of course, for the best advice to be had in London, and I went
to the local doctor--a man who keeps a surgery and dispenses
medicines--myself, to ask what he meant by returning such an insolent
message in answer to my summons. And what do you suppose he said by way
of apology?"

"I cannot imagine," I replied.

"He said he would not for ten times over the value of all the River
Hall patients, attend a case in the house again. 'No person can live in
it,' he went on, 'and keep his, her, or its health. Whether it is the
river, or the drains, or the late owner, or the devil, I have not an
idea. I can only tell you no one has been able to remain in it since
Mr. Elmsdale's death, and if I attend a case there, of course I say,
Get out of this at once. Then comes Miss Blake and threatens me with
assault and battery--swears she will bring an action against me for
libelling the place; declares I wish to drive her and her niece to the
workhouse, and asserts I am in league with some one who wants to keep
the house vacant, and I am sick of it. Get what doctor you choose, but
don't send for me.'"

"Well, sir?" I suggested.

"Well! I don't consider it well at all. Here am I, a man returning to
his native country--and a beastly country it is!--after nearly thirty
years' absence, and the first transaction upon which I engage proves a
swindle. Yes, a swindle, Mr. Patterson. I went to you in all good faith,
took that house at your own rent, thought I had got a desirable home,
and believed I was dealing with respectable people, and now I find I was
utterly deceived, both as regards the place and your probity. You knew
the house was uninhabitable, and yet you let it to me."

"I give you my word," I said, "that we really do not know yet in what
way the house is uninhabitable. It is a good house, as you know; it is
well furnished; the drainage is perfect; so far as we are concerned, we
do not believe a fault can be found with the place. Still, it has been a
fact that tenants will not stay in it, and we were therefore glad to let
it to a gentleman like yourself, who would, we expected, prove above
subscribing to that which can only be a vulgar prejudice."

"What is a vulgar prejudice?" he asked.

"The idea that River Hall is haunted," I replied.

"River Hall is haunted, young man," he said, solemnly.

"By what?" I asked.

"By some one who cannot rest in his grave," was the answer.

"Colonel Morris," I said, "some one _must_ be playing tricks in
the house."

"If so, that some one does not belong to this world," he remarked.

"Do you mean really and seriously to tell me you believe in ghosts?" I
asked, perhaps a little scornfully.

"I do, and if you had lived in River Hall, you would believe in them
too," he replied. "I will tell you," he went on, "what I saw in the
house myself. You know the library?"

I nodded in assent. We did know the library. There our trouble seemed to
have taken up its abode.

"Are you aware lights have frequently been reflected from that room,
when no light has actually been in it?"

I could only admit this had occasionally proved a ground of what we
considered unreasonable complaint.

"One evening," went on the Colonel, "I determined to test the matter for
myself. Long before dusk I entered the room and examined it
thoroughly--saw to the fastenings of the windows, drew up the blinds,
locked the door, and put the key in my pocket. After dinner I took a
cigar and walked up and down the grass path beside the river, until
dark. There was no light--not a sign of light of any kind, as I turned
once more and walked up the path again; but as I was retracing my steps
I saw that the room was brilliantly illuminated. I rushed to the nearest
window and looked in. The gas was all ablaze, the door of the strong
room open, the table strewed with papers, while in an office-chair drawn
close up to the largest drawer, a man was seated counting over
bank-notes. He had a pile of them before him, and I distinctly saw that
he wetted his fingers in order to separate them."

"Most extraordinary!" I exclaimed. I could not decently have said
anything less; but I confess that I had in my recollection the fact of
Colonel Morris having dined.

"The most extraordinary part of the story is still to come," he
remarked. "I hurried at once into the house, unlocked the door, found
the library in pitch darkness, and when I lit the gas the strong room
was closed; there was no office-chair in the room, no papers were on the
table--everything, in fact, was precisely in the same condition as I had
left it a few hours before. Now, no person in the flesh could have
performed such a feat as that."

"I cannot agree with you there," I ventured. "It seems to me less
difficult to believe the whole thing a trick, than to attribute the
occurrence to supernatural agency. In fact, while I do not say it is
impossible for ghosts to be, I cannot accept the fact of their
existence."

"Well, I can, then," retorted the Colonel. "Why, sir, once at the Cape
of Good Hope--" but there he paused. Apparently he recollected just in
time that the Cape of Good Hope was a long way from River Hall.

"And Mrs. Morris," I suggested, leading him back to the banks of the
Thames. "You mentioned some shock--"

"Yes," he said, frankly. "She met the same person on the staircase I saw
in the library. He carried in one hand a lighted candle, and in the
other a bundle of bank-notes. He never looked at her as he passed--never
turned his head to the spot where she stood gazing after him in a
perfect access of terror, but walked quietly downstairs, crossed the
hall, and went straight into the library without opening the door. She
fainted dead away, and has never known an hour's good health since."

"According to all accounts, she had not before, or good temper either,"
I thought; but I only said, "You had told Mrs. Morris, I presume, of
your adventure in the library?"

"No," he answered; "I had not; I did not mention it to anyone except a
brother officer, who dined with me the next evening."

"Your conversation with him might have been overheard, I
suppose," I urged.

"It is possible, but scarcely probable," he replied. "At all events, I
am quite certain it never reached my wife's ears, or she would not have
stayed another night in the house."

I stood for a few moments irresolute, but then I spoke. I told him how
much we--meaning Messrs. Craven and Son--his manager and his cashier,
and his clerks, regretted the inconvenience to which he had been put;
delicately I touched upon the concern we felt at hearing of Mrs. Morris'
illness. But, I added, I feared his explanation, courteous and ample as
it had been, would not satisfy Miss Blake, and trusted he might, upon
consideration, feel disposed to compromise the matter.

"We," I added, "will be only too happy to recommend our client to accept
any reasonable proposal you may think it well to make."

Whereupon it suddenly dawned upon the Colonel that he had been
showing me all his hand, and forthwith he adopted a very natural
course. He ordered me to leave the room and the hotel, and not to
show my face before him again at my peril. And I obeyed his
instructions to the letter.

On the same evening of that day I took a long walk round by the
Uninhabited House.

There it was, just as I had seen it last, with high brick walls dividing
it from the road; with its belt of forest-trees separating it from the
next residence, with its long frontage to the river, with its closed
gates and shuttered postern-door.

The entrance to it was not from the main highway, but from a lane which
led right down to the Thames; and I went to the very bottom of that lane
and swung myself by means of a post right over the river, so that I
might get a view of the windows of the room with which so ghostly a
character was associated. The blinds were all down and the whole place
looked innocent enough.

The strong, sweet, subtle smell of mignonette came wafted to my senses,
the odours of jessamine, roses, and myrtle floated to me on the evening
breeze. I could just catch a glimpse of the flower-gardens, radiant with
colour, full of leaf and bloom.

"No haunted look there," I thought. "The house is right enough, but some
one must have determined to keep it empty." And then I swung myself back
into the lane again, and the shadow of the high brick wall projected
itself across my mind as it did across my body.

"Is this place to let again, do you know?" said a voice in my ear, as I
stood looking at the private door which gave a separate entrance to that
evil-reputed library.

The question was a natural one, and the voice not unpleasant, yet I
started, having noticed no one near me.

"I beg your pardon," said the owner of the voice. "Nervous, I fear!"

"No, not at all, only my thoughts were wandering. I beg your pardon--I
do not know whether the place is to let or not."

"A good house?" This might have been interrogative, or uttered as an
assertion, but I took it as the former, and answered accordingly.

"Yes, a good house--a very good house, indeed," I said.

"It is often vacant, though," he said, with a light laugh.

"Through no fault of the house," I added.

"Oh! it is the fault of the tenants, is it?" he remarked, laughing once
more. "The owners, I should think, must be rather tired of their
property by this time."

"I do not know that," I replied. "They live in hope of finding a good
and sensible tenant willing to take it."

"And equally willing to keep it, eh?" he remarked. "Well, I, perhaps, am
not much of a judge in the matter, but I should say they will have to
wait a long time first."

"You know something about the house?" I said, interrogatively.

"Yes," he answered, "most people about here do, I fancy--but least said
soonest mended"; and as by this time we had reached the top of the lane,
he bade me a civil good-evening, and struck off in a westerly direction.

Though the light of the setting sun shone full in my face, and I had to
shade my eyes in order to enable me to see at all, moved by some feeling
impossible to analyse, I stood watching that retreating figure.
Afterwards I could have sworn to the man among ten thousand.

A man of about fifty, well and plainly dressed, who did not appear to be
in ill-health, yet whose complexion had a blanched look, like forced
sea-kale; a man of under, rather than over middle height, not of slight
make, but lean as if the flesh had been all worn off his bones; a man
with sad, anxious, outlooking, abstracted eyes, with a nose slightly
hooked, without a trace of whisker, with hair thin and straight and
flaked with white, active and lithe in his movements, a swift walker,
though he had a slight halt. While looking at him thrown up in relief
against the glowing western sky, I noticed, what had previously escaped
my attention, that he was a little deformed. His right shoulder was
rather higher than the other. A man with a story in his memory, I
imagined; a man who had been jilted by the girl he loved, or who had
lost her by death, or whose wife had proved faithless; whose life, at
all events, had been marred by a great trouble. So, in my folly, I
decided; for I was young then, and romantic, and had experienced some
sorrow myself connected with pecuniary matters.

For the latter reason, it never perhaps occurred to me to associate the
trouble of my new acquaintance, if he could be so called, with money
annoyances. I knew, or thought I knew, at all events, the expression
loss of fortune stamps on a man's face; and the look which haunted me
for days after had nothing in it of discontent, or self-assertion, or
struggling gentility, or vehement protest against the decrees of
fortune. Still less was it submissive. As I have said, it haunted me for
days, then the memory grew less vivid, then I forgot the man altogether.
Indeed, we shortly became so absorbed in the fight between Miss Blake
and Colonel Morris, that we had little time to devote to the
consideration of other matters.

True to her promise, Miss Blake appeared next morning in Buckingham
Street. Without bestowing upon me even the courtesy of "good morning,"
she plunged into the subject next her heart.

"Did you see him?" she asked.

I told her I had. I repeated much of what he said; I assured her he
was determined to fight the matter, and that although I did really not
think any jury would give a verdict in his favour, still I believed,
if the matter came into court, it would prevent our ever letting the
house again.

"I should strongly recommend you, Miss Blake," I finished, "to keep what
he offers, and let us try and find another tenant."

"And who asked you to recommend anything, you fast young man?" she
demanded. "I am sure I did not, and I am very sure Mr. Craven would not
be best pleased to know his clerks were setting themselves up higher
than their master. You would never find William Craven giving himself
airs such as you young whipper-snappers think make you seem of some
consequence. I just tell him what I want done, and he does it, and you
will please to do the same, and serve a writ on that villain without an
hour's delay."

I asked on what grounds we were to serve the writ. I pointed out that
Colonel Morris did not owe her a penny, and would not owe her a penny
for some months to come; and in reply she said she would merely inquire
if I meant that she and her poor niece were to go to the workhouse.

To this I answered that the amount already remitted by Colonel Morris
would prevent such a calamity, but she stopped my attempt at consolation
by telling me not to talk about things I did not understand.

"Give me William Craven's address," she added, "and I will write to
him direct. I wonder what he means by leaving a parcel of ignorant
boys to attend to his clients while he is away enjoying himself! Give
me his address, and some paper and an envelope, and I can write my
letter here."

I handed her the paper and the envelope, and placed pen and ink
conveniently before her, but I declined to give her Mr. Craven's
address. We would forward the letter, I said; but when Mr. Craven went
away for his holiday, he was naturally anxious to leave business behind
as much as possible.

Then Miss Blake took steady aim, and fired at me. Broadside after
broadside did she pour into my unprotected ears; she opened the vials of
her wrath and overwhelmed me with reproaches; she raked up all the
grievances she had for years been cherishing against England, and by
some sort of verbal legerdemain made me responsible for every evil she
could recollect as ever having happened to her. Her sister's marriage,
her death, Mr. Elmsdale's suicide, the unsatisfactory state of his
affairs, the prejudice against River Hall, the defection of Colonel
Morris--all these things she laid at my door, and insisted on making me
responsible for them.

"And now," she finished, pushing back her bonnet and pulling off her
gloves, "I'll just write my opinion of you to Mr. Craven, and I'll wait
till you direct the envelope, and I'll go with you to the post, and I'll
see you put the letter in the box. If you and your fine Colonel Morris
think you can frighten or flatter me, you are both much mistaken, I can
tell you that!"

I did not answer her. I was too greatly affronted to express what I felt
in words. I sat on the other side of the table--for I would not leave
her alone in Mr. Craven's office--sulking, while she wrote her letter,
which she did in a great, fat, splashing sort of hand, with every other
word underlined; and when she had done, and tossed the missive over to
me, I directed it, took my hat, and prepared to accompany her to the
Charing Cross office.

We went down the staircase together in silence, up Buckingham Street,
across the Strand, and so to Charing Cross, where she saw me drop the
letter into the box. All this time we did not exchange a syllable, but
when, after raising my hat, I was about to turn away, she seized hold of
my arm, and said, "Don't let us part in bad blood. Though you are only a
clerk, you have got your feelings, no doubt, and if in my temper I hurt
them, I am sorry. Can I say more? You are a decent lad enough, as times
go in England, and my bark is worse than my bite. I didn't write a word
about you to William Craven. Shake hands, and don't bear malice to a
poor lonely woman."

Thus exhorted, I took her hand and shook it, and then, in token of
entire amity, she told me she had forgotten to bring her purse with her
and could I let her have a sovereign. She would pay me, she declared
solemnly, the first day she came again to the office.

This of course I did not believe in the least, nevertheless I gave
her what she required--and Heaven knows, sovereigns were scarce
enough with me then--thankfully, and felt sincerely obliged to her
for making herself my debtor. Miss Blake did sometimes ruffle one's
feathers most confoundedly, and yet I knew it would have grieved me
had we parted in enmity.

Sometimes, now, when I look upon her quiet and utterly respectable old
age--when I contemplate her pathetic grey hair and conventional lace
cap--when I view her clothed like other people and in her right mind, I
am very glad indeed to remember I had no second thought about that
sovereign, but gave it to her--with all the veins of my heart, as she
would have emphasised the proceeding.

"Though you have no name to speak of," observed Miss Blake as she
pocketed the coin, "I think there must be some sort of blood in you. I
knew Pattersons once who were connected by marriage with a great duke in
the west of Ireland. Can you say if by chance you can trace relationship
to any of them?"

"I can say most certainly not, Miss Blake," I replied. "We are
Pattersons of nowhere and relations of no one."

"Well, well," remarked the lady, pityingly, "you can't help that, poor
lad. And if you attend to your duties, you may yet be a rich City
alderman."

With which comfort she left me, and wended her homeward way through St.
Martin's Lane and the Seven Dials.



5. THE TRIAL


Next day but one Mr. Craven astonished us all by walking into the office
about ten o'clock. He looked stout and well, sunburnt to a degree, and
all the better physically for his trip to the seaside. We were
unfeignedly glad to see him. Given a good employer, and it must be an
extremely bad employe who rejoices in his absence. If we were not
saints, we were none of us very black sheep, and accordingly, from the
porter to the managing clerk, our faces brightened at sight of our
principal.

But after the first genial "how are you" and "good morning," Mr.
Craven's face told tales: he had come back out of sorts. He was vexed
about Miss Blake's letter, and, astonishing to relate, he was angry with
me for having called upon Colonel Morris.

"You take too much upon you, Patterson," he remarked. "It is a growing
habit with you, and you must try to check it."

I did not answer him by a word; my heart seemed in my mouth; I felt as
if I was choking. I only inclined my head in token that I heard and
understood, and assented; then, having, fortunately, work to attend to
out of doors, I seized an early opportunity of slipping down the
staircase and walking off to Chancery Lane. When I returned, after
hours, to Buckingham Street, one of the small boys in the outer office
told me I was to go to Mr. Craven's room directly.

"You'll catch it," remarked the young fiend. "He has asked for you a
dozen times, at least."

"What can be wrong now?" I thought, as I walked straight along the
passage to Mr. Craven's office.

"Patterson," he said, as I announced my return.

"Yes, sir?"

"I spoke hastily to you this morning, and I regret having done so."

"Oh! sir," I cried. And that was all. We were better friends than ever.
Do you wonder that I liked my principal? If so, it is only because I am
unable to portray him as he really was. The age of chivalry is past; but
still it is no exaggeration to say I would have died cheerfully if my
dying could have served Mr. Craven.

Life holds me now by many and many a nearer and dearer tie than was the
case in those days so far and far away; nevertheless, I would run any
risk, encounter any peril, if by so doing I could serve the man who in
my youth treated me with a kindness far beyond my deserts.

He did not, when he came suddenly to town in this manner, stop at
his own house, which was, on such occasions, given over to charwomen
and tradespeople of all descriptions; but he put up at an
old-fashioned family hotel where, on that especial evening, he asked
me to dine with him.

Over dessert he opened his mind to me on the subject of the "Uninhabited
House." He said the evil was becoming one of serious magnitude. He
declared he could not imagine what the result might prove. "With all the
will in the world," he said, "to assist Miss Blake and that poor child,
I cannot undertake to provide for them. Something must be done in the
affair, and I am sure I cannot see what that something is to be. Since
Mr. Elmsdale bought the place, the neighbourhood has gone down. If we
sold the freehold as it stands, I fear we should not get more than a
thousand pounds for it, and a thousand pounds would not last Miss Blake
three years; as for supposing she could live on the interest, that is
out of the question. The ground might be cut up and let for business
purposes, of course, but that would be a work of time. I confess, I do
not know what to think about the matter or how to act in it."

"Do you suppose the place really is haunted?" I ventured to inquire.

"Haunted?--pooh! nonsense," answered Mr. Craven, pettishly. "Do I
suppose this room is haunted; do I believe my offices are haunted? No
sane man has faith in any folly of the kind; but the place has got a bad
name; I suspect it is unhealthy, and the tenants, when they find that
out, seize on the first excuse which offers. It is known we have
compromised a good many tenancies, and I am afraid we shall have to
fight this case, if only to show we do not intend being patient for
ever. Besides, we shall exhaust the matter: we shall hear what the
ghost-seers have to say for themselves on oath. There is little doubt of
our getting a verdict, for the British juryman is, as a rule, not
imaginative."

"I think we shall get a verdict," I agreed; "but I fancy we shall never
get another tenant."

"There are surely as good fish in the sea as ever came out of it," he
answered, with a smile; "and we shall come across some worthy country
squire, possessed of pretty daughters, who will be delighted to find so
cheap and sweet a nest for his birds, when they want to be near London."

"I wish sir," I said, "you would see Colonel Morris yourself. I am quite
certain that every statement he made to me is true in his belief. I do
not say, I believe him; I only say, what he told me justifies the
inference that some one is playing a clever game in River Hall," and
then I repeated in detail all the circumstances Colonel Morris had
communicated to me, not excepting the wonderful phenomenon witnessed by
Mr. Morris, of a man walking through a closed door.

Mr. Craven listened to me in silence, then he said, "I will not see
Colonel Morris. What you tell me only confirms my opinion that we must
fight this question. If he and his witnesses adhere to the story you
repeat, on oath, I shall then have some tangible ground upon which to
stand with Miss Blake. If they do not--and, personally, I feel satisfied
no one who told such a tale could stand the test of cross-examination--we
shall then have defeated the hidden enemy who, as I believe, lurks behind
all this. Miss Blake is right in what she said to you: Robert Elmsdale
must have had many a good hater. Whether he ever inspired that different
sort of dislike which leads a man to carry on a war in secret, and try to
injure this opponent's family after death, I have no means of knowing. But
we must test the matter now, Patterson, and I think you had better call
upon Colonel Morris and tell him so."

This service, however, to Mr. Craven's intense astonishment, I
utterly declined.

I told him--respectfully, of course: under no possible conditions of
life could I have spoken other than respectfully to a master I loved so
well--that if a message were to be delivered _viva voce_ from our
office, it could not be so delivered by me.

I mentioned the fact that I felt no desire to be kicked downstairs. I
declared that I should consider it an unseemly thing for me to engage in
personal conflict with a gentleman of Colonel Morris's years and social
position, and, as a final argument, I stated solemnly that I believed no
number of interviews would change the opinions of our late tenant or
induce him to alter his determination.

"He says he will fight," I remarked, as a finish to my speech, "and I am
confident he will till he drops."

"Well, well," said Mr. Craven, "I suppose he must do so then; but
meantime it is all very hard upon me."

And, indeed, so it proved; what with Miss Blake, who, of course,
required frequent advances to sustain her strength during the
approaching ordeal; what with policemen, who could not "undertake to be
always a-watching River Hall"; what with watchmen, who kept their vigils
in the nearest public-house as long as it was open, and then peacefully
returned home to sleep; what with possible tenants, who came to us
imagining the place was to let, and whom we referred to Colonel Morris,
who dismissed them, each and all, with a tale which disenchanted them
with the "desirable residence"--it was all exceeding hard upon Mr.
Craven and his clerks till the quarter turned when we could take action
about the matter.

Before the new year was well commenced, we were in the heat of the
battle. We had written to Colonel Morris, applying for one quarter's
rent of River Hall. A disreputable blackguard of a solicitor would have
served him with a writ; but we were eminently respectable: not at the
bidding of her most gracious Majesty, whose name we invoked on many and
many of our papers, would Mr. Craven have dispensed with the
preliminary letter; and I feel bound to say I follow in his footsteps
in that respect.

To this notice, Colonel Morris replied, referring us to his solicitors.

We wrote to them, eliciting a reply to the effect that they would
receive service of a writ. We served that writ, and then, as Colonel
Morris intended to fight, instructed counsel.

Meanwhile the "Uninhabited House," and the furniture it contained, was,
as Mr. Taylor tersely expressed the matter, "Going to the devil."

We could not help that, however--war was put upon us, and go to war we
felt we must.

Which was all extremely hard upon Mr. Craven. To my knowledge, he had
already, in three months, advanced thirty pounds to Miss Blake, besides
allowing her to get into his debt for counsel's fees, and costs out of
pocket, and cab hire, and Heaven knows what besides--with a
problematical result also. Colonel Morris' solicitors were sparing no
expenses to crush us. Clearly they, in a blessed vision, beheld an
enormous bill, paid without difficulty or question. Fifty guineas here
or there did not signify to their client, whilst to us--well, really,
let a lawyer be as kind and disinterested as he will, fifty guineas
disbursed upon the suit of an utterly insolvent, or persistently
insolvent, client means something eminently disagreeable to him.

Nevertheless, we were all heartily glad to know the day of war was come.
Body and soul, we all went in for Miss Blake, and Helena, and the
"Uninhabited House." Even Mr. Taylor relented, and was to be seen
rushing about with papers in hand relating to the impending suit of
Blake _v_. Morris.

"She is a blank, blank woman," he remarked to me; "but still the case is
interesting. I don't think ghosts have ever before come into court in my
experience."

And we were all of the same mind. We girt up our loins for the fight.
Each of us, I think, on the strength of her celebrity, lent Miss Blake a
few shillings, and one or two of our number franked her to luncheon.

She patronized us all, I know, and said she should like to tell our
mothers they had reason to be proud of their sons. And then came a
dreadfully solemn morning, when we went to Westminster and championed
Miss Blake.

Never in our memory of the lady had she appeared to such advantage as
when we met her in Edward the Confessor's Hall. She looked a little
paler than usual, and we felt her general get-up was a credit to our
establishment. She wore an immense fur tippet, which, though then of an
obsolete fashion, made her look like a three-per-cent. annuitant going
to receive her dividends. Her throat was covered with a fine white lawn
handkerchief; her dress was mercifully long enough to conceal her
boots; her bonnet was perfectly straight, and the strings tied by some
one who understood that bows should be pulled out and otherwise
fancifully manipulated. As she carried a muff as large as a big drum,
she had conceived the happy idea of dispensing altogether with gloves,
and I saw that one of the fingers she gave me to shake was adorned with
a diamond ring.

"Miss Elmsdale's," whispered Taylor to me. "It belonged to her mother."

Hearing which, I understood Helena had superintended her aunt's toilet.

"Did you ever see Miss Elmsdale?" I inquired of our manager.

"Not for years," was the answer. "She bade fair to be pretty."

"Why does not Miss Blake bring her out with her sometimes?" I asked.

"I believe she is expecting the Queen to give her assent to her marrying
the Prince of Wales," explained Taylor, "and she does not wish her to
appear much in public until after the wedding."

The court was crammed. Somehow it had got into the papers--probably
through Colonel Morris' gossips at the club--that ours was likely to
prove a very interesting case, and though the morning was damp and
wretched, ladies and gentlemen had turned out into the fog and drizzle,
as ladies and gentlemen will when there seems the least chance of a new
sensation being provided for them.

Further, there were lots of reporters.

"It will be in every paper throughout the kingdom," groaned Taylor. "We
had better by far have left the Colonel alone."

That had always been my opinion, but I only said, "Well, it is of no use
looking back now."

I glanced at Mr. Craven, and saw he was ill at ease. We had considerable
faith in ourselves, our case, and our counsel; but, then, we could not
be blind to the fact that Colonel Morris' counsel were men very much
better known than our men--that a cloud of witnesses, thirsting to
avenge themselves for the rent we had compelled them to pay for an
uninhabitable house, were hovering about the court--(had we not seen and
recognized them in the Hall?)--that, in fact, there were two very
distinct sides to the question, one represented by Colonel Morris and
his party, and the other by Miss Blake and ourselves.

Of course our case lay in a nutshell. We had let the place, and Colonel
Morris had agreed to take it. Colonel Morris now wanted to be rid of his
bargain, and we were determined to keep him to it. Colonel Morris said
the house was haunted, and that no one could live in it. We said the
house was not haunted, and that anybody could live in it; that River
Hall was "in every respect suited for the residence of a family of
position"--see advertisements in _Times_ and _Morning Post_.

Now, if the reader will kindly consider the matter, it must be an
extremely difficult thing to prove, in a court of law, that a house, by
reason solely of being haunted, is unsuitable for the residence of a
gentleman of position.

Smells, bad drainage, impure water, unhealthiness of situation,
dampness, the absence of advantages mentioned, the presence of small
game--more odious to tenants of furnished houses than ground game to
farmers--all these things had, we knew, been made pretexts for
repudiation of contracts, and often successfully, but we could find no
precedent for ghosts being held as just pleas upon which to relinquish a
tenancy; and we made sure of a favourable verdict accordingly.

To this day, I believe that our hopes would have been justified by the
result, had some demon of mischief not put it into the head of
Taylor--who had the management of the case--that it would be a good
thing to get Miss Blake into the witness-box.

"She will amuse the jury," he said, "and juries have always a kindly
feeling for any person who can amuse them."

Which was all very well, and might be very true in a general way, but
Miss Blake proved the exception to his rule.

Of course she amused the jury, in fact, she amused everyone. To get her
to give a straightforward answer to any question was simply impossible.

Over and over again the judge explained to her that "yes" or "no" would
be amply sufficient; but all in vain. She launched out at large in
reply to our counsel, who, nevertheless, when he sat down, had gained
his point.

Miss Blake declared upon oath she had never seen anything worse than
herself at River Hall, and did not believe anybody else ever had.

She had never been there during Colonel Morris' tenancy, or she must
certainly have seen something worse than a ghost, a man ready and
anxious to "rob the orphan," and she was going to add the "widow" when
peals of laughter stopped her utterance. Miss Blake had no faith in
ghosts resident at River Hall, and if anybody was playing tricks about
the house, she should have thought a "fighting gentleman by profession"
capable of getting rid of them.

"Unless he was afraid," added Miss Blake, with withering irony.

Then up rose the opposition counsel, who approached her in an easy,
conversational manner.

"And so you do not believe in ghosts, Miss Blake?" he began.

"Indeed and I don't," she answered.

"But if we have not ghosts, what is to become of the literature of your
country?" he inquired.

"I don't know what you mean, by talking about my country," said Miss
Blake, who was always proclaiming her nationality, and quarrelling with
those who discovered it without such proclamation.

"I mean," he explained, "that all the fanciful legends and beautiful
stories for which Ireland is celebrated have their origin in the
supernatural. There are, for instance, several old families who have
their traditional banshee."

"For that matter, we have one ourselves," agreed Miss Blake, with
conscious pride.

At this junction our counsel interposed with a suggestion that there was
no insinuation about any banshee residing at River Hall.

"No, the question is about a ghost, and I am coming to that. Different
countries have different usages. In Ireland, as Miss Blake admits, there
exists a very ladylike spirit, who announces the coming death of any
member of certain families. In England, we have ghosts, who appear after
the death of some members of some families. Now, Miss Blake, I want you
to exercise your memory. Do you remember a night in the November after
Mr. Elmsdale's death?"

"I remember many nights in many months that I passed broken-hearted in
that house," she answered, composedly; but she grew very pale; and
feeling there was something unexpected behind both question and answer,
our counsel looked at us, and we looked back at him, dismayed.

"Your niece, being nervous, slept in the same room as that occupied by
you?" continued the learned gentleman.

"She did," said Miss Blake. Her answer was short enough, and direct
enough, at last.

"Now, on the particular November night to which I refer, do you
recollect being awakened by Miss Elmsdale?"

"She wakened me many a time," answered Miss Blake, and I noticed that
she looked away from her questioner, and towards the gallery.

"Exactly so; but on one especial night she woke you, saying, her father
was walking along the passage; that she knew his step, and that she
heard his keys strike against the wall?"

"Yes, I remember that," said Miss Blake, with suspicious alacrity.
"She kept me up till daybreak. She was always thinking about him,
poor child."

"Very natural indeed," commented our adversary. "And you told her not to
be foolish, I daresay, and very probably tried to reassure her by saying
one of the servants must have passed; and no doubt, being a lady
possessed of energy and courage, you opened your bedroom door, and
looked up and down the corridor?"

"Certainly I did," agreed Miss Blake.

"And saw nothing--and no one?"

"I saw nothing."

"And then, possibly, in order to convince Miss Elmsdale of the full
extent of her delusion, you lit a candle, and went downstairs."

"Of course--why wouldn't I?" said Miss Blake, defiantly.

"Why not, indeed?" repeated the learned gentleman, pensively. "Why
not?--Miss Blake being brave as she is witty. Well, you went
downstairs, and, as was the admirable custom of the house--a custom
worthy of all commendation--you found the doors opening from the hall
bolted and locked?"

"I did."

"And no sign of a human being about?"

"Except myself," supplemented Miss Blake.

"And rather wishing to find that some human being besides yourself was
about, you retraced your steps, and visited the servants' apartments?"

"You might have been with me," said Miss Blake, with an angry sneer.

"I wish I had," he answered. "I can never sufficiently deplore the fact
of my absence. And you found the servants asleep?"

"Well, they seemed asleep," said the lady; "but that does not prove that
they were so."

"Doubtless," he agreed. "Nevertheless, so far as you could judge, none
of them looked as if they had been wandering up and down the corridors?"

"I could not judge one way or another," said Miss Blake: "for the tricks
of English servants, it is impossible for anyone to be up to."

"Still, it did not occur to you at the time that any of them was
feigning slumber?"

"I can't say it did. You see, I am naturally unsuspicious," explained
Miss Blake, naively.

"Precisely so. And thus it happened that you were unable to confute Miss
Elmsdale's fancy?"

"I told her she must have been dreaming," retorted Miss Blake. "People
who wake all of a sudden often confound dreams with realities."

"And people who are not in the habit of awaking suddenly often do the
same thing," agreed her questioner; "and so, Miss Blake, we will pass
out of dreamland, and into daylight--or rather foglight. Do you
recollect a particularly foggy day, when your niece, hearing a favourite
dog moaning piteously, opened the door of the room where her father
died, in order to let it out?"

Miss Blake set her lips tight, and looked up at the gallery. There was
a little stir in that part of the court, a shuffling of feet, and
suppressed whispering. In vain the crier shouted, "Silence! silence,
there!" The bustle continued for about a minute, and then all became
quiet again. A policeman stated "a female had fainted," and our
curiosity being satisfied, we all with one accord turned towards our
learned friend, who, one hand under his gown, holding it back, and the
other raised to emphasise his question, had stood in this picturesque
attitude during the time occupied in carrying the female out, as if
done in stone.

"Miss Blake, will you kindly answer my question?" he said, when order
once again reigned in court.

"You're worse than a heathen," remarked the lady, irrelevantly.

"I am sorry you do not like me," he replied, "for I admire you very
much; but my imperfections are beside the matter in point. What I want
you to tell us is, did Miss Elmsdale open that door?"

"She did--the creature, she did," was the answer; "her heart was always
tender to dumb brutes."

"I have no doubt the young lady's heart was everything it ought to be,"
was the reply; "and for that reason, though she had an intense
repugnance to enter the room, she opened the door to let the dog out."

"She said so: I was not there," answered Miss Blake.

Whereupon ensued a brisk skirmish between counsel as to whether Miss
Blake could give evidence about a matter of mere hearsay. And after they
had fought for ten minutes over the legal bone, our adversary said he
would put the question differently, which he did, thus:

"You were sitting in the dining-room, when you were startled by hearing
a piercing shriek."

"I heard a screech--you can call it what you like," said Miss Blake,
feeling an utter contempt for English phraseology.

"I stand corrected; thank you, Miss Blake. You heard a screech, in
short, and you hurried across the hall, and found Miss Elmsdale in a
fainting condition, on the floor of the library. Was that so?"

"She often fainted: she is all nairves," explained poor Miss Blake.

"No doubt. And when she regained consciousness, she entreated to be
taken out of that dreadful room."

"She never liked the room after her father's death: it was natural,
poor child."

"Quite natural. And so you took her into the dining-room, and there,
curled upon the hearthrug, fast asleep, was the little dog she fancied
she heard whining in the library."

"Yes, he had been away for two or three days, and came home hungry
and sleepy."

"Exactly. And you have, therefore, no reason to believe he was
shamming slumber."

"I believe I am getting very tired of your questions and
cross-questions," she said, irritably.

"Now, what a pity!" remarked her tormentor; "for I could never tire of
your answers. At all events, Miss Elmsdale could not have heard him
whining in the library--so called."

"She might have heard some other dog," said Miss Blake.

"As a matter of fact, however, she stated to you there was no dog in
the room."

"She did. But I don't think she knew whether there was or not."

"In any case, she did not see a dog; you did not see one; and the
servants did not."

"I did not," replied Miss Blake; "as to the servants, I would not
believe them on their oath."

"Hush! hush! Miss Blake," entreated our opponent. "I am afraid you must
not be quite so frank. Now to return to business. When Miss Elmsdale
recovered consciousness, which she did in that very comfortable
easy-chair in the dining-room--what did she tell you?"

"Do you think I am going to repeat her half-silly words?" demanded Miss
Blake, angrily. "Poor dear, she was out of her mind half the time, after
her father's death."

"No doubt; but still, I must just ask you to tell us what passed. Was it
anything like this? Did she say, 'I have seen my father. He was coming
out of the strong-room when I lifted my head after looking for Juan, and
he was wringing his hands, and seemed in some terrible distress'?"

"God forgive them that told you her words," remarked Miss Blake; "but
she did say just those, and I hope they'll do you and her as played
eavesdropper all the good I wish."

"Really, Miss Blake," interposed the judge.

"I have no more questions to ask, my lord," said Colonel Morris'
counsel, serenely triumphant. "Miss Blake can go down now."

And Miss Blake did go down; and Taylor whispered in my ear:

"She had done for us."



6. WE AGREE TO COMPROMISE


Colonel Morris' side of the case was now to be heard, and heads were
bending eagerly forward to catch each word of wisdom that should fall
from the lips of Serjeant Playfire, when I felt a hand, cold as ice,
laid on mine, and turning, beheld Miss Blake at my elbow.

She was as white as the nature of her complexion would permit, and her
voice shook as she whispered:

"Take me away from this place, will you?"

I cleared a way for her out of the court, and when we reached
Westminster Hall, seeing how upset she seemed, asked if I could get
anything for her--"a glass of water, or wine," I suggested, in my
extremity.

"Neither water nor wine will mend a broken heart," she answered,
solemnly; "and mine has been broken in there"--with a nod she indicated
the court we had just left.

Not remembering at the moment an approved recipe for the cure of such a
fracture, I was cudgelling my brains to think of some form of reply not
likely to give offence, when, to my unspeakable relief, Mr. Craven came
up to where we stood.

"I will take charge of Miss Blake now, Patterson," he said,
gravely--very gravely; and accepting this as an intimation that he
desired my absence, I was turning away, when I heard Miss Blake say:

"Where is she--the creature? What have they done with her at all?"

"I have sent her home," was Mr. Craven's reply. "How could you be so
foolish as to mislead me as you have done?"

"Come," thought I, smelling the battle afar off, "we shall soon have
Craven _v_. Blake tried privately in our office." I knew Mr. Craven
pretty well, and understood he would not readily forgive Miss Blake for
having kept Miss Helena's experiences a secret from him.

Over and over I had heard Miss Blake state there was not a thing really
against the house, and that Helena, poor dear, only hated the place
because she had there lost her father.

"Not much of a loss either, if she could be brought to think so,"
finished Miss Blake, sometimes.

Consequently, to Mr. Craven, as well as to all the rest of those
connected with the firm, the facts elicited by Serjeant Playfire were
new as unwelcome.

If the daughter of the house dreamed dreams and beheld visions, why
should strangers be denied a like privilege? If Miss Elmsdale believed
her father could not rest in his grave, how were we to compel belief as
to calm repose on the part of yearly tenants?

"Playfire has been pitching into us pretty strong," remarked Taylor,
when I at length elbowed my way back to where our manager sat. "Where is
Mr. Craven?"

"I left him with Miss Blake."

"It is just as well he has not heard all the civil remarks Playfire made
about our connection with the business. Hush! he is going to call his
witnesses. No, the court is about to adjourn for luncheon."

Once again I went out into Westminster Hall, and was sauntering idly up
and down over its stones when Mr. Craven joined me.

"A bad business this, Patterson," he remarked.

"We shall never get another tenant for that house," I answered.

"Certainly no tenant will ever again be got through me," he said,
irritably; and then Taylor came to him, all in a hurry, and explaining
he was wanted, carried him away.

"They are going to compromise," I thought, and followed slowly in the
direction taken by my principal.

How I knew they were thinking of anything of the kind, I cannot say, but
intuitively I understood the course events were taking.

Our counsel had mentally decided that, although the jury might feel
inclined to uphold contracts and to repudiate ghosts, still, it would be
impossible for them to overlook the fact that Colonel Morris had rented
the place in utter ignorance of its antecedents, and that we had, so
far, taken a perhaps undue advantage of him; moreover, the gallant
officer had witnesses in court able to prove, and desirous of proving,
that we had over and over again compromised matters with dissatisfied
tenants, and cancelled agreements, not once or twice, but many, times;
further, on no single occasion had Miss Blake and her niece ever slept a
single night in the uninhabited house from the day when they left it; no
matter how scarce of money they chanced to be, they went into lodgings
rather than reside at River Hall. This was beyond dispute and Miss
Blake's evidence supplied the reason for conduct so extraordinary.

For some reason the house was uninhabitable. The very owners could not
live in it; and yet--so in imagination we heard Serjeant Playfire
declaim--"The lady from whom the TRUTH had that day been reluctantly
wrung had the audacity to insist that delicate women and tender children
should continue to inhabit a dwelling over which a CURSE seemed
brooding--a dwelling where the dead were always striving for mastery
with the living; or else pay Miss Blake a sum of money which should
enable her and the daughter of the suicide to live in ease and luxury on
the profits of DECEPTION."

And looking at the matter candidly, our counsel did not believe the jury
could return a verdict. He felt satisfied, he said, there was not a
landlord in the box, that they were all tenants, who would consider the
three months' rent paid over and above the actual occupation rent,
ample, and more than ample, remuneration.

On the other hand, Serjeant Playfire, whose experience of juries was
large, and calculated to make him feel some contempt for the judgment of
"twelve honest men" in any case from pocket-picking to manslaughter, had
a prevision that, when the judge had explained to Mr. Foreman and
gentlemen of the jury, the nature of a contract, and told them
supernatural appearances, however disagreeable, were not recognized in
law as a sufficient cause for breaking an agreement, a verdict would be
found for Miss Blake.

"There must be one landlord amongst them," he considered; "and if there
is, he will wind the rest round his finger. Besides, they will take the
side of the women, naturally; and Miss Blake made them laugh, and the
way she spoke of her niece touched them; while, as for the Colonel, he
won't like cross-examination, and I can see my learned friend means to
make him appear ridiculous. Enough has been done for honour--let us
think of safety."

"For my part," said Colonel Morris, when the question was referred to
him, "I am not a vindictive man, nor, I hope, an ungenerous foe; I do
not like to be victimized, and I have vindicated my principles. The
victory was mine in fact, if not in law, when that old Irishwoman's
confession was wrung out of her. So, therefore, gentlemen, settle the
matter as you please--I shall be satisfied."

And all the time he was inwardly praying some arrangement might be come
to. He was brave enough in his own way, but it is one thing to go into
battle, and another to stand legal fire without the chance of sending a
single bullet in return. Ridicule is the vulnerable spot in the heel of
many a modern Achilles; and while the rest of the court was "convulsed
with laughter" over Miss Blake's cross-examination, the gallant Colonel
felt himself alternately turning hot and cold when he thought that
through even such an ordeal he might have to pass. And, accordingly, to
cut short this part of my story, amongst them the lawyers agreed to
compromise the matter thus--

Colonel Morris to give Miss Blake a third quarter's rent--in other
words, fifty pounds more, and each side to pay its own costs.

When this decision was finally arrived at, Mr. Craven's face was a
study. Full well he knew on whom would fall the costs of one side. He
saw in prophetic vision the fifty pounds passing out of his hands into
those of Miss Blake, but no revelation was vouchsafed on the subject of
loans unpaid, of costs out of pocket, or costs at all. After we left
court he employed himself, I fancy, for the remainder of the afternoon
in making mental calculations of how much poorer a man Mrs. Elmsdale's
memory, and the Uninhabited House had left him; and, upon the whole, the
arithmetical problem could not have proved satisfactory when solved.

The judge complimented everyone upon the compromise effected. It was
honourable in every way, and creditable to all parties concerned, but
the jury evidently were somewhat dissatisfied at the turn affairs had
taken, while the witnesses were like to rend Colonel Morris asunder.

"They had come, at great inconvenience to themselves, to expose the
tactics of that Blake woman and her solicitor," so they said; "and they
thought the affair ought not to have been hushed up."

As for the audience, they murmured openly. They received the statement
that the case was over, with groans, hisses, and other marks of
disapproval, and we heard comments on the matter uttered by disappointed
spectators all the way up Parliament Street, till we arrived at that
point where we left the main thoroughfare, in order to strike across to
Buckingham Street.

There--where Pepys once lived--we betook ourselves to our books and
papers, with a sense of unusual depression in the atmosphere. It was a
gray, dull, cheerless afternoon, and more than one of us, looking out
at the mud bank, which, at low water, then occupied the space now laid
out as gardens, wondered how River Hall, desolate, tenantless,
uninhabited, looked under that sullen sky, with the murky river flowing
onward, day and night, day and night, leaving, unheeding, an unsolved
mystery on its banks.

For a week we saw nothing of Miss Blake, but at the end of that time, in
consequence of a somewhat imperative summons from Mr. Craven, she called
at the office late one afternoon. We comprehended she had selected that,
for her, unusual time of day for a visit, hoping our principal might
have left ere she arrived; but in this hope she was disappointed: Mr.
Craven was in, at leisure, and anxious to see her.

I shall never forget that interview. Miss Blake arrived about five
o'clock, when it was quite dark out of doors, and when, in all our
offices except Mr. Craven's, the gas was flaring away triumphantly. In
his apartment he kept the light always subdued, but between the fire and
the lamp there was plenty of light to see that Miss Blake looked ill and
depressed, and that Mr. Craven had assumed a peculiar expression, which,
to those who knew him best, implied he had made up his mind to pursue a
particular course of action, and meant to adhere to his determination.

"You wanted to see me," said our client, breaking the ice.

"Yes; I wanted to tell you that our connection with the River Hall
property must be considered at an end."

"Well, well, that is the way of men, I suppose--in England."

"I do not think any man, whether in England or Ireland, could have done
more for a client than I have tried to do for you, Miss Blake," was the
offended answer.

"I am sure I have never found fault with you," remarked Miss Blake,
deprecatingly.

"And I do not think," continued Mr. Craven, unheeding her remark, "any
lawyer ever met with a worse return for all his trouble than I have
received from you."

"Dear, dear," said Miss Blake, with comic disbelief in her tone, "that
is very bad."

"There are two classes of men