The Rovers Secret | Page 4

pallid
moonlight, gaunt and ruinous chambers, the wainscot of which rattled,
and the tattered tapestry of which swayed and rustled mysteriously;
gloomy passages through which unearthly sighs were audibly wafted;
dismal cellars, with never-opened doors, from whose profoundest
recesses came at dead of night the muffled sound of shrieks and groans
and clanking chains; "of calling shapes, and beckoning shadows dire,
and airy tongues that syllable men's names on sands, and shores, and
desert wildernesses," until not one of the party, excepting myself, dared
move or look round for fear of seeing some dread presence, some
shapeless dweller upon the threshold, some horrible apparition, the
sight of which, Medusa-like, should blast them into stone. Not
infrequently the situation was rendered additionally harrowing by the
cook, who would suddenly interrupt the narrative, send an icy thrill
down our spines, and cause the unhappy Tim's scalp to bristle even
more than usual, by exclaiming in a low startling whisper:
"Hark! didn't you hear something move in the passage just then?"
Whereupon Jane and Mary would spring to their feet, and, with pallid
faces, starting eyes, and blanched lips, cling convulsively to each other,
convinced that at last their unspoken fears were about to be dreadfully
realised.
It will naturally be supposed that these seances would have a dreadfully
trying effect upon my infantile nerves; but, strangely enough, they did
not. I never looked beneath my cot with the expectation of discovering
a midnight assassin; for, in the first place, the outer doors of the house

were always kept so carefully closed that I did not see how such an
individual could well get in; and, in the second place, admitting, for
argument's sake, the possibility of his effecting an entrance, I did not
for a moment believe he would give himself the wholly unnecessary
trouble of murdering a little boy, or girl either, for that matter. Then, as
to the ghosts, though it never occurred to me to doubt their existence, I
entirely failed to understand why people should be afraid of them. I felt
that, in regarding these beings as objects of dread and apprehension, the
housemaid, the cook, and in fact everybody who took this view of them,
entirely misunderstood them, and were doing the poor shadows a most
grievous injustice. My own experience of ghosts led me to the
conclusion that, so far from their being inimical to mankind, they were
distinctly benign. There was one ghost in particular to whose visitations
I used to look forward with the greatest delight; and I was never so
happy as when I awoke in the morning with the vague remembrance
that, at some time during the silent watches of the past night, I had
become conscious of a sweet and gracious presence beside my cot,
bending over me with eyes which looked unutterable love into mine,
and with lips which mingled kisses of tenderest affection with
softly-breathed blessings upon my infant head. At first I used to
mention these visitations to Mary, my nurse, but I soon forbore to do so,
noticing that she always looked uncomfortably startled for a moment or
two afterwards, and generally dismissed the subject somewhat
hurriedly by remarking:
"Ah, poor lamb! you've been dreaming about your mother."
Which remark annoyed me, for I felt convinced that so realistic an
experience could not possibly result from a mere dream.
It sometimes happened that there were no tragedies or other horrors in
the newspapers sufficiently piquant to tempt the cook's intellectual
palate; and in the absence of these, if it happened also to be Jane's
"evening out," Mary would occasionally produce a well-thumbed copy
of the Arabian Nights, or some old volume of fairy tales, from which
she read aloud.
How I enjoyed those evenings with the old Eastern romancist! How I

revelled in the imaginary delights and wonders of fairydom! Of course
I pictured myself the hero of every story, the truth of the most
outrageous of which it never occurred to me to doubt. Sitting at Mary's
feet, on a low stool before the fire, with the old cat blinking and purring
with drowsy satisfaction upon my knee, I used to gaze abstractedly at
the glowing coals, now thinking myself the prince in "Cinderella," now
the happy owner of "Puss in Boots," and now the adventurous Sindbad.
There was one story, however--I quite forget its title--which, in strong
contrast with the others, instead of affording me gratification, was a
source of keen annoyance and vexation to me whenever I heard it. It
related to a boy who on one occasion had the good fortune to meet, in
the depths of the forest, a little old man in red cap and green jerkin--a
gnome or fairy, of course--who with the utmost good-nature offered to
gratify any single wish that