A Thin Ghost | Page 3

up the steps
into the light of the lamp in the porch to be greeted by Dr. Ashton, he
was seen to be a thin youth of, say, sixteen years old, with straight
black hair and the pale colouring that is common to such a figure. He
took the accident and commotion calmly enough, and expressed a
proper anxiety for the people who had been, or might have been, hurt:
his voice was smooth and pleasant, and without any trace, curiously, of
an Irish brogue.
Frank Sydall was a younger boy, perhaps of eleven or twelve, but Lord
Saul did not for that reject his company. Frank was able to teach him
various games he had not known in Ireland, and he was apt at learning
them; apt, too, at his books, though he had had little or no regular
teaching at home. It was not long before he was making a shift to
puzzle out the inscriptions on the tombs in the minster, and he would
often put a question to the doctor about the old books in the library that
required some thought to answer. It is to be supposed that he made
himself very agreeable to the servants, for within ten days of his
coming they were almost falling over each other in their efforts to
oblige him. At the same time, Mrs. Ashton was rather put to it to find
new maidservants; for there were several changes, and some of the
families in the town from which she had been accustomed to draw
seemed to have no one available. She was forced to go further afield
than was usual.

These generalities I gather from the doctor's notes in his diary and from
letters. They are generalities, and we should like, in view of what has to
be told, something sharper and more detailed. We get it in entries
which begin late in the year, and, I think, were posted up all together
after the final incident; but they cover so few days in all that there is no
need to doubt that the writer could remember the course of things
accurately.
On a Friday morning it was that a fox, or perhaps a cat, made away
with Mrs. Ashton's most prized black cockerel, a bird without a single
white feather on its body. Her husband had told her often enough that it
would make a suitable sacrifice to Æsculapius; that had discomfited her
much, and now she would hardly be consoled. The boys looked
everywhere for traces of it: Lord Saul brought in a few feathers, which
seemed to have been partially burnt on the garden rubbish-heap. It was
on the same day that Dr. Ashton, looking out of an upper window, saw
the two boys playing in the corner of the garden at a game he did not
understand. Frank was looking earnestly at something in the palm of
his hand. Saul stood behind him and seemed to be listening. After some
minutes he very gently laid his hand on Frank's head, and almost
instantly thereupon, Frank suddenly dropped whatever it was that he
was holding, clapped his hands to his eyes, and sank down on the grass.
Saul, whose face expressed great anger, hastily picked the object up, of
which it could only be seen that it was glittering, put it in his pocket,
and turned away, leaving Frank huddled up on the grass. Dr. Ashton
rapped on the window to attract their attention, and Saul looked up as if
in alarm, and then springing to Frank, pulled him up by the arm and led
him away. When they came in to dinner, Saul explained that they had
been acting a part of the tragedy of Radamistus, in which the heroine
reads the future fate of her father's kingdom by means of a glass ball
held in her hand, and is overcome by the terrible events she has seen.
During this explanation Frank said nothing, only looked rather
bewilderedly at Saul. He must, Mrs. Ashton thought, have contracted a
chill from the wet of the grass, for that evening he was certainly
feverish and disordered; and the disorder was of the mind as well as the
body, for he seemed to have something he wished to say to Mrs.
Ashton, only a press of household affairs prevented her from paying

attention to him; and when she went, according to her habit, to see that
the light in the boys' chamber had been taken away, and to bid them
good-night, he seemed to be sleeping, though his face was unnaturally
flushed, to her thinking: Lord Saul, however, was pale and quiet, and
smiling in his slumber.
Next morning it happened that Dr. Ashton was occupied in church and
other business, and unable to take the boys' lessons.