Ghost Stories of an Antiquary | Page 7

almost a horror of the place
when we were alone. It was towards the evening of one very hot
autumn day, when Frank had disappeared mysteriously about the
grounds, and I was looking for him to fetch him to tea, and going down
this path I suddenly saw him, not hiding in the bushes, as I rather
expected, but sitting on the bench in the old summer-house--there was a
wooden summer-house here, you know--up in the corner, asleep, but
with such a dreadful look on his face that I really thought he must be ill
or even dead. I rushed at him and shook him, and told him to wake up;
and wake up he did, with a scream. I assure you the poor boy seemed
almost beside himself with fright. He hurried me away to the house,
and was in a terrible state all that night, hardly sleeping. Someone had
to sit up with him, as far as I remember. He was better very soon, but
for days I couldn't get him to say why he had been in such a condition.
It came out at last that he had really been asleep and had had a very odd
disjointed sort of dream. He never saw much of what was around him,
but he felt the scenes most vividly. First he made out that he was
standing in a large room with a number of people in it, and that
someone was opposite to him who was "very powerful", and he was
being asked questions which he felt to be very important, and,
whenever he answered them, someone--either the person opposite to
him, or someone else in the room--seemed to be, as he said, making
something up against him. All the voices sounded to him very distant,
but he remembered bits of the things that were said: "Where were you
on the 19th of October?" and "Is this your handwriting?" and so on. I
can see now, of course, that he was dreaming of some trial: but we
were never allowed to see the papers, and it was odd that a boy of eight
should have such a vivid idea of what went on in a court. All the time
he felt, he said, the most intense anxiety and oppression and
hopelessness (though I don't suppose he used such words as that to me).
Then, after that, there was an interval in which he remembered being
dreadfully restless and miserable, and then there came another sort of
picture, when he was aware that he had come out of doors on a dark

raw morning with a little snow about. It was in a street, or at any rate
among houses, and he felt that there were numbers and numbers of
people there too, and that he was taken up some creaking wooden steps
and stood on a sort of platform, but the only thing he could actually see
was a small fire burning somewhere near him. Someone who had been
holding his arm left hold of it and went towards this fire, and then he
said the fright he was in was worse than at any other part of his dream,
and if I had not wakened him up he didn't know what would have
become of him. A curious dream for a child to have, wasn't it? Well, so
much for that. It must have been later in the year that Frank and I were
here, and I was sitting in the arbour just about sunset. I noticed the sun
was going down, and told Frank to run in and see if tea was ready while
I finished a chapter in the book I was reading. Frank was away longer
than I expected, and the light was going so fast that I had to bend over
my book to make it out. All at once I became conscious that someone
was whispering to me inside the arbour. The only words I could
distinguish, or thought I could, were something like "Pull, pull. I'll push,
you pull."
'I started up in something of a fright. The voice--it was little more than
a whisper--sounded so hoarse and angry, and yet as if it came from a
long, long way off--just as it had done in Frank's dream. But, though I
was startled, I had enough courage to look round and try to make out
where the sound came from. And--this sounds very foolish, I know, but
still it is the fact--I made sure that it was strongest when I put my ear to
an old post which was part of the end of the seat. I was so certain of
this that I remember making some marks on the post--as deep as I
could with the scissors out of my work-basket.