Lanoe Falconer

“ My head and hands burned, the air of the room stifled me, I was losing my self-control.
I opened the window and leant out. The cool air revived me bodily, but to the fever of the spirit it brought no relief. To my heart, if not to my lips, sprang the old old cry for help which anguish has wrung from generation after generation. The agony of mine, I felt wildly, must pierce through sense, time, space, everything—even to the Living Heart of all, and bring thence some token of pity! For one instant my passion seemed to beat against the silent heavens, then to fall back bruised and bleeding. ”

“ Oh, George, oh, Mr. Lyndsay, how can I tell you what that moaning was like! Do you know how a little change in the face of some one you love, or a little tremble in his voice, can make you see quite clearly what nobody, not even the great poets, had been able to show you before?
"George, do you remember the day that grandmother died, when they all broke down and cried a little at dinner, all except Uncle Marmaduke? He sat up looking so white and stern at the end of the table. And I, foolish little child, thought he was not so grieved as the others—that he did not love his mother so much. ”

“ Lyndsay, your friend has made his choice, but you are dallying between belief and unbelief. Oh, do not dally long! We need no spirit from the dead to tell us life is short. Do we not feel it passing quicker and quicker every year? The one thing that is serious in all its shows and delusions is the question it puts to each one of us, and which we answer to our eternal loss or gain. Many different voices call to us in this age of false prophets, but one only threatens as well as invites. ”

“ Molyneux was not present, "where are you going to put Cissy to-night? Are you going to make a bachelor of her too?"
"Oh, such an uncomfortable arrangement!" said Lady Atherley. "But Lucinda has set her heart on having Cecilia near her; so they have put up a little bed in the dressing-room for her."
"Cissy is to keep the ghost at bay, is she?" said Atherley. "I hope she may. I don't want another night as lively as the last."
"Who else has seen the ghost?" asked Mrs. de Noël, thoughtfully. "Has Mr. Lyndsay?"
"No, Lindy will never see the ghost; he is too much of a sceptic. ”

“ Even the pain of solitary confinement, so it told me, which drives men mad, is only like a shadow or type of this loneliness of spirits. Others there might be, but it knew nothing of them—nothing besides this great empty darkness everywhere, except the place it had once lived in, and the people who were moving about it; and even those it could only perceive dimly as if looking through a mist, and always so unutterably away from them all. I am not giving its own words, you know, George, because I cannot remember them. ”

“ Many times during breakfast Denis looked thoughtfully at his great-uncle, and at last inquired—
"Do you preach very long sermons, Uncle Augustus?"
"They are not generally considered so," replied the Canon with some dignity.
"Denis, I have often told you not to ask questions," said Lady Atherley.
"When I am grown up," remarked Harold, "I will be an atheist."
"Do you know what an atheist is?" inquired his father.
"Yes, it is people who never go to church." ”

“ Lyndsay, strange as it sounds, the mere sight of that face made me realise in an instant what I had read and heard thousands of times, and what my mother and Henrietta had told me over and over again about the utter nothingness of earthly aims and comforts—of what in an ordinary way is called life. I had heard very fine sermons preached about the same thing: 'What is our life, it is even a vapour,' and the 'vain shadow' in which we walk. ”

“ Then Lady Atherley willingly repeated the story of her troubles.
"Preposterous! perfectly preposterous!" cried the Canon. "The Education Act in operation for all these years, and our lower orders still believe in bogies and hobgoblins! And yet it is hardly to be wondered at; their social superiors are not much wiser. The nonsense which is talked in society at present is perfectly incredible. Persons who are supposed to be in their right mind gravely relate to me such incidents that I could imagine myself transported to the Middle Ages. ”

“ Mostyn?"
"The ghost?"
"Yes."
Slowly, thoughtfully, she answered me—
"I am certain it was a lost soul: nothing else could have worn that dreadful look."
She paused for a few moments and then continued—
"Perhaps you are one of those who do not believe in the punishment of sin?"
"Who can disbelieve it, Mrs. Mostyn? Call it what we like, it is a fact. It confronts us on every side. We might as well refuse to believe in death."
"It is not that I meant! I was talking of punishment in the next world, Mr. Lyndsay." ”

“ Lyndsay, if I could tell any one; for you know what it is to be weak and suffering; you are as sympathetic as a woman, and more merciful than some women. But part of the horror of it all is that I cannot explain it. Words seem to be no good, just because I have used them so easily and so meaninglessly all my life—just as words and nothing more. ”

“ I dragged myself up after my usual fashion, and was preparing to follow him, when Lady Atherley, directly he was gone, began:
"It is such a pity that clever people can never see things as others do. George always goes on in this way as if the ghost were of no consequence, but I always knew how it would be. Of course it is nice that George should come in for the place, as he might not have done if his uncle had married, and people said it would be delightful to live in such an old house, but there are a good many drawbacks, I can assure you. ”

“ That a ghost should venture into Atherley's neighbourhood was less amazing than that it should continue to exist in his wife's presence, so much more fatal than his eloquence to all but the tangible and the solid. ”

“ And after that came to me that lovely feeling which we all have sometimes—in church, or when we are praying alone, or more often in the open air, on beautiful summer days when it is warm and still; as if one's heart were beating and overflowing with love towards everything in this world and in all the worlds; as if the very grasses and the stones were clear, but dearest of all, the creatures that still suffer, so that to wipe away their tears forever, one feels that one would die—oh die so gladly! ”

“ Any one can see a bogie. It is a real thing belonging to the external world. It may be a bright light, a white sheet, or a black shadow—always at night, you know, or at least in the dusk, when you are apt to be a little mixed in your observations. The best example of a bogie was Sir Walter Scott's. It looked—in the twilight remember—exactly like Lord Byron, who had not long departed this life at the time Sir Walter saw it. Nine men out of ten would have gone off and sworn they had seen a ghost ”

“ Lyndsay up late, George," said my kind hostess; "he looks so tired."
"You look dead beat," he said later on, in his own particular and untidy den, as he carefully stuffed the bowl of his pipe. "I think it would go better with you, old chap, if you did not hold yourself in quite so tight. I don't want you to rave or commit suicide in some untidy fashion, as the hero of a French novel does; but you are as well-behaved as a woman, without a woman's grand resources of hysterics and general unreasonableness all round. You always were a little too good for human nature's daily food. ”

“ Molyneux herself, would not say the fever faces, or the reptiles, or the spots, were supernatural. And in fact the ghost is, so far, more—more recherché, let us say, than the other things. It takes more than a bilious attack or a fever, or even D.T., to produce a ghost. It takes nothing less than a pretty high degree of nervous sensibility and excitable imagination. Now these two disorders have not been much developed yet by the masses, in spite of the school-boards: ergo, any apparition which leads to hysterics or brandy-and-water in the servants' hall is a bogie, not a ghost. ”

“ My memory was haunted that day by certain words spoken seven months ago by Atherley, and by me at the time very ungraciously received:
"Remember, if you do come a cropper, it will go hard with you, old man; you can't shoot or hunt or fish off the blues, like other men." ”

“ Charity, for instance, is a mischievous quality—it is too indulgent to weakness, which is not to be indulged or encouraged, but stamped out. Hope is another pernicious quality leading to all kinds of preposterous expectations which never are, or can be, fulfilled; and as to faith, it is simply a vice. So far from taking anything on trust, you must refuse to accept any statement whatsoever till it is proved so plainly you can't help believing it whether you like it or not; just as a theorem in—"
"George," said Lady Atherley, "what is that noise?" ”

“ There is no doubt which is the prettier of the two. The question is, do you want pretty colour or do you want clear daylight?" He paused, but neither of his listeners spoke. Lady Atherley was counting the stitches of her knitting; I was too tired; so he resumed: "For my part, I prefer the daylight and the glass, without any daubing. What does science discover in the universe? Precision, accuracy, reliability—any amount of it; but as to pity, mercy, love! The fact is, that famous simile of the angel playing at chess was a mistake. ”

“ I said: 'I hope, for one thing, you can live on air, old chap for you will get nothing more for dinner if you trust to Cissy to order it.'"
"I don't believe you said anything of the kind," observed Lady Atherley.
"No, dear Jane; of course he did not. He was very much pleased with our marriage. He said James was the only man he ever knew who was fit to marry me."
"So he was," agreed Atherley; "the only man whose temper could stand all he would have to put up with. ”

“ If ever any one had an excuse for seeing a ghost it would be a man whose spine was jarred. But I meant nothing personal by the pronoun—only to give greater force to my remarks. The first person singular will do instead. The ghost belongs to the same lot, as the faces that make mouths at me when I have brain-fever, the reptiles that crawl about when I have an attack of the D.T., or—to take a more familiar example—the spots I see floating before my eyes when my liver is out of order. ”

“ I never will have them; they are almost as bad as politics, they make people so cross."
Then she rose and explained her visit to Mrs. de Noël.
"But, Mr. Lyndsay," said Mrs. Mostyn, "are you going to desert the old woman for the young one, or are you going to stay and see my gardens and have tea? That is right. Good-bye, my dearest Jane. Give my dear love to Cissy, and tell her to come over and see me—but I shall have a glimpse of her on your way back." ”

“ I looked at him, deadly pale, with blue shadows about the mouth and eyes, his head thrown helplessly back, and then I remembered some brandy I had in my dressing-bag. He took the glass from me and raised it to his lips with a trembling hand. I stood watching him, debating within myself whether I should disobey him by calling for help or not; but presently, to my great relief, I saw the stimulant take effect, and life come slowly surging back in colour to his cheeks, in strength to his whole prostrate frame. ”

“ The, last time I went to church the preacher gave as minute an account of what our post-mortem experiences were to be as if he had gone through it all himself several times."
"Well, does the ghost usually appear in a ruff or in armour?"
"It depends entirely upon who sees it—a ghost always does. Last night, for instance, I lay you odds it wore neither ruff nor armour, because Mrs. Mallet is not likely to have heard of either the one or the other. Not that she saw the ghost—not she. What she saw was a bogie, not a ghost." ”

“ CHAPTER V AUSTYN'S GOSPEL
"He did not see the ghost, you say; he only felt it? I should think he did—on his chest. I never heard of a clearer case of nightmare. You must be careful whom you tell the story to, old chap; for at the first go-off it sounds as if it was not merely eating too much that was the matter. It was, however, indigestion sure enough. No wonder! If a man of his age who takes no exercise will eat three square meals a day, what else can he expect? ”

“ I may as well have a lift down to the other end of the village."
"What do you want to do at the other end of the village?"
"I don't want to do anything, but my unlucky fate as a landowner compels me to go over and look at an eel-weir which has just burst. Lindy, come along with me, and cheer me up with one of your ghost stories. You are as good as a Christmas annual."
"And on your way back," said Lady Atherley, "would you mind the carriage stopping to leave some brandy at Monk's? Mr. Austyn told me last night he was so weak, and the doctor has ordered him brandy every hour." ”

“ What I am trying to show you is that side of the religion you will really approve—the unanthropomorphic side. It is not anything like atheism, you know, as some ill-natured people have said; it does not declare there is no God; it only declares that it is worse than useless to try and think of Him, far less pray to Him—because it is simply impossible. And that is quite scientific and philosophical, is it not? For all the great men are agreed now that the conditioned can know nothing of the unconditioned, and the finite can know nothing of the infinite. It is quite absurd to try, you know ”

“ George even now, I will say that for him, knows his Bible better than a good many clergymen. And the Sabbath, too. They were taught to reverence the Lord's day in a way children never are nowadays. All games and picture-books put away on Saturday night; regularly to church morning and afternoon, and in the evening Henrietta would talk to them and question them about the sermon. And after all, here is George who says he believes in nothing; and as to Cecilia, I never can make out what she does or does not believe. However, I am quite happy in my mind about them. I feel they are of the elect. ”

“ The swing door closed behind her, and the sounds of her grief and her reiterated appeals to Mrs. de Noël died slowly away in the distance.
"What on earth have you been saying to her?" said Atherley to his wife, who had come out into the hall.
"Only that she behaved very badly indeed in speaking about the ghost to Mrs. Molyneux's maid, who, of course, repeated it all directly and made Lucinda nervous. She is a most troublesome, mischievous old woman."
"But she can cook. Pray what are we to do for dinner?" ”

“ These are precisely the lines on which a spiritual séance is conducted, only instead of plaster, which is not always so obliging as to fall in the nick of time, you have a paid medium who supplies the material for your fancy to work upon. Mrs. Mallet, you see, has discovered all this for herself—that woman is a born genius. Just think what she might have been and seen if she had lived in a sphere where neither cooking nor any other rational occupation interfered with her pursuit of the supernatural. Mrs. Molyneux would be nowhere beside her. ”