Cecilia de Noël | Page 4

it never has told it,
and no one else rightly knows it. It--I mean the ghost--is older than the
family. We found it here when we came into the place about two
hundred years ago, and it refused to be dislodged. It is rather uncertain
in its habits. Sometimes it is not heard of for years; then all at once it
reappears, generally, I may observe, when some imaginative female in
the house is in love, or out of spirits, or bored in any other way. She
sees it, and then, of course--the complaint being highly infectious--so
do a lot more. One of the family started the theory it was the ghost of
the portrait, or rather the unknown individual whose portrait hangs high
up over the sideboard in the dining-room."
"You don't mean the lady in green velvet with the snuff-box?"
"Certainly not; that is my own great-grand-aunt. I mean a square of
black canvas with one round yellow spot in the middle and a dirty
white smudge under the spot. There are members of this family--Aunt
Eleanour, for instance--who tell me the yellow spot is a man's face and
the dirty white smudge is an Elizabethan ruff. Then there is a picture of
a man in armour in the oak room, which I don't believe is a portrait at
all; but Aunt Henrietta swears it is, and of the ghost, too--as he was
before he died, of course. And very interesting details both my aunts
are ready to furnish concerning the two originals. It is extraordinary
what an amount of information is always forthcoming about things of
which nobody can know anything--as about the next world, for instance.
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."
"Why, what is the difference?"
"Immense! As big as that which separates the objective from the
subjective. 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; why, religions have been founded on
just such stuff: but Sir Walter, as sane a man as ever lived--though he
did write poetry--kept his head clear and went up closer to his ghost,
which proved on examination to be a waterproof."
"A waterproof?"
"Or a railway rug--I forget which: the moral is the same."
"Well, what is a ghost?"
"A ghost is nothing--an airy nothing manufactured by your own
disordered senses of your own over-excited brain."
"I beg to observe that I never saw a ghost in my life."
"I am glad to hear it. It does you credit. 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. You will allow there is
nothing supernatural in all that?"

"Certainly. Though, did not that pretty niece of Mrs. Molyneux's say
she used to see those spots floating before her eyes when a misfortune
was impending?"
"I fancy she did, and true enough too, as such spots would very likely
precede a bilious attack, which is misfortune enough while it lasts. But
still, even Mrs. Molyneux's niece, even Mrs. 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,