The Canterville Ghost | Page 4

our most eminent native divines. I shall
leave it here for you by the bedroom candles, and will be happy to
supply you with more, should you require it." With these words the
United States Minister laid the bottle down on a marble table, and,
closing his door, retired to rest.
[Illustration: "I REALLY MUST INSIST ON YOUR OILING THOSE
CHAINS"]
For a moment the Canterville ghost stood quite motionless in natural
indignation; then, dashing the bottle violently upon the polished floor,
he fled down the corridor, uttering hollow groans, and emitting a
ghastly green light. Just, however, as he reached the top of the great
oak staircase, a door was flung open, two little white-robed figures
appeared, and a large pillow whizzed past his head! There was
evidently no time to be lost, so, hastily adopting the Fourth dimension
of Space as a means of escape, he vanished through the wainscoting,
and the house became quite quiet.
On reaching a small secret chamber in the left wing, he leaned up
against a moonbeam to recover his breath, and began to try and realize
his position. Never, in a brilliant and uninterrupted career of three
hundred years, had he been so grossly insulted. He thought of the
Dowager Duchess, whom he had frightened into a fit as she stood
before the glass in her lace and diamonds; of the four housemaids, who
had gone into hysterics when he merely grinned at them through the
curtains on one of the spare bedrooms; of the rector of the parish,
whose candle he had blown out as he was coming late one night from
the library, and who had been under the care of Sir William Gull ever
since, a perfect martyr to nervous disorders; and of old Madame de
Tremouillac, who, having wakened up one morning early and seen a

skeleton seated in an armchair by the fire reading her diary, had been
confined to her bed for six weeks with an attack of brain fever, and, on
her recovery, had become reconciled to the Church, and broken off her
connection with that notorious sceptic, Monsieur de Voltaire. He
remembered the terrible night when the wicked Lord Canterville was
found choking in his dressing-room, with the knave of diamonds
half-way down his throat, and confessed, just before he died, that he
had cheated Charles James Fox out of £50,000 at Crockford's by means
of that very card, and swore that the ghost had made him swallow it.
All his great achievements came back to him again, from the butler
who had shot himself in the pantry because he had seen a green hand
tapping at the window-pane, to the beautiful Lady Stutfield, who was
always obliged to wear a black velvet band round her throat to hide the
mark of five fingers burnt upon her white skin, and who drowned
herself at last in the carp-pond at the end of the King's Walk. With the
enthusiastic egotism of the true artist, he went over his most celebrated
performances, and smiled bitterly to himself as he recalled to mind his
last appearance as "Red Reuben, or the Strangled Babe," his début as
"Guant Gibeon, the Blood-sucker of Bexley Moor," and the furore he
had excited one lovely June evening by merely playing ninepins with
his own bones upon the lawn-tennis ground. And after all this some
wretched modern Americans were to come and offer him the Rising
Sun Lubricator, and throw pillows at his head! It was quite unbearable.
Besides, no ghost in history had ever been treated in this manner.
Accordingly, he determined to have vengeance, and remained till
daylight in an attitude of deep thought.

III
The next morning, when the Otis family met at breakfast, they
discussed the ghost at some length. The United States Minister was
naturally a little annoyed to find that his present had not been accepted.
"I have no wish," he said, "to do the ghost any personal injury, and I
must say that, considering the length of time he has been in the house, I
don't think it is at all polite to throw pillows at him,"--a very just
remark, at which, I am sorry to say, the twins burst into shouts of

laughter. "Upon the other hand," he continued, "if he really declines to
use the Rising Sun Lubricator, we shall have to take his chains from
him. It would be quite impossible to sleep, with such a noise going on
outside the bedrooms."
For the rest of the week, however, they were undisturbed, the only
thing that excited any attention being the continual renewal of the
blood-stain on the library floor. This certainly was very strange, as the
door was always locked at night by Mr. Otis, and the windows kept
closely barred. The