Some Christmas Stories | Page 9

she fixes her eyes on the portrait of the cavalier in

green, and says, in a low, terrible voice, "The stags know it!" After that,
she wrings her hands again, passes the bedside, and goes out at the door.
We hurry on our dressing-gown, seize our pistols (we always travel
with pistols), and are following, when we find the door locked. We turn
the key, look out into the dark gallery; no one there. We wander away,
and try to find our servant. Can't be done. We pace the gallery till
daybreak; then return to our deserted room, fall asleep, and are
awakened by our servant (nothing ever haunts him) and the shining sun.
Well! we make a wretched breakfast, and all the company say we look
queer. After breakfast, we go over the house with our host, and then we
take him to the portrait of the cavalier in green, and then it all comes
out. He was false to a young housekeeper once attached to that family,
and famous for her beauty, who drowned herself in a pond, and whose
body was discovered, after a long time, because the stags refused to
drink of the water. Since which, it has been whispered that she
traverses the house at midnight (but goes especially to that room where
the cavalier in green was wont to sleep), trying the old locks with the
rusty keys. Well! we tell our host of what we have seen, and a shade
comes over his features, and he begs it may be hushed up; and so it is.
But, it's all true; and we said so, before we died (we are dead now) to
many responsible people.
There is no end to the old houses, with resounding galleries, and dismal
state-bedchambers, and haunted wings shut up for many years, through
which we may ramble, with an agreeable creeping up our back, and
encounter any number of ghosts, but (it is worthy of remark perhaps)
reducible to a very few general types and classes; for, ghosts have little
originality, and "walk" in a beaten track. Thus, it comes to pass, that a
certain room in a certain old hall, where a certain bad lord, baronet,
knight, or gentleman, shot himself, has certain planks in the floor from
which the blood WILL NOT be taken out. You may scrape and scrape,
as the present owner has done, or plane and plane, as his father did, or
scrub and scrub, as his grandfather did, or burn and burn with strong
acids, as his great- grandfather did, but, there the blood will still be--no
redder and no paler--no more and no less--always just the same. Thus,
in such another house there is a haunted door, that never will keep open;
or another door that never will keep shut, or a haunted sound of a

spinning-wheel, or a hammer, or a footstep, or a cry, or a sigh, or a
horse's tramp, or the rattling of a chain. Or else, there is a turret-clock,
which, at the midnight hour, strikes thirteen when the head of the
family is going to die; or a shadowy, immovable black carriage which
at such a time is always seen by somebody, waiting near the great gates
in the stable-yard. Or thus, it came to pass how Lady Mary went to pay
a visit at a large wild house in the Scottish Highlands, and, being
fatigued with her long journey, retired to bed early, and innocently said,
next morning, at the breakfast-table, "How odd, to have so late a party
last night, in this remote place, and not to tell me of it, before I went to
bed!" Then, every one asked Lady Mary what she meant? Then, Lady
Mary replied, "Why, all night long, the carriages were driving round
and round the terrace, underneath my window!" Then, the owner of the
house turned pale, and so did his Lady, and Charles Macdoodle of
Macdoodle signed to Lady Mary to say no more, and every one was
silent. After breakfast, Charles Macdoodle told Lady Mary that it was a
tradition in the family that those rumbling carriages on the terrace
betokened death. And so it proved, for, two months afterwards, the
Lady of the mansion died. And Lady Mary, who was a Maid of Honour
at Court, often told this story to the old Queen Charlotte; by this token
that the old King always said, "Eh, eh? What, what? Ghosts, ghosts?
No such thing, no such thing!" And never left off saying so, until he
went to bed.
Or, a friend of somebody's whom most of us know, when he was a
young man at college, had a particular friend, with whom he made the
compact that, if it were possible for the Spirit to return to