The Vultures | Page 7

a house known as the Signal House. Why it is so called no
one knows and very few care to inquire. It is presumably a square
house of the Jacobean period--presumably because it is so hidden by
trees, so wrapped in grimy ivy, so dust-laden and so impossible to get
at, that its outward form is no longer to be perceived.
It is within sound of the bells that jingle dismally on the heads of the
tram-car horses, plying their trade on the high-road, and yet it is
haunted. Its two great iron gates stand on the very pavement, and they
are never opened. Indeed, a generation or two of painters have painted
them shut, and grime and dirt have laid their seals upon the hinges. A
side gate gives entrance to such as come on foot. A door in the wall, up
an alley, is labelled "Tradesman's Entrance," but the tradesmen never
linger there. No merry milkman leaves the latest gossip with his thin,
blue milk on that threshold. The butcher's chariot wheels never tarry at
the corner of that alley. Indeed, the local butcher has no chariot. His
clients mostly come in a shawl, and take their purchases away with
them wrapped in a doubtful newspaper beneath its folds. The
better-class buyers wear a cloth cricketing cap, coquettishly attached to
a knob of hair by a hat-pin.
The milkman, moreover, is not a merry man, hurrying on his rounds.
He goes slowly and pessimistically, and likes to see the halfpenny
before he tips his measure.
This, in a word, is a poor district, where no one would live if he could
live elsewhere, with the Signal House stranded in the midst of it--a
noble wreck on a barren, social shore. For the Signal House was once a
family mansion; later it was described as a riverside residence, then as a

quaint and interesting demesne. Finally its price fell with a crash, and
an elderly lady of weak intellect was sent by her relations to live in it,
with two servants, who were frequently to be met in Gravesend in the
evening hours, at which time, it is to be presumed, the elderly lady of
weak intellect was locked in the Signal House alone. But the house
never had a ghost. Haunted houses very seldom have. The ghost was
the mere invention of some kitchen-maid.
Haunted or not, the house stood empty for years, until suddenly a
foreigner took it--a Russian banker, it was understood. A very nice,
pleasant-spoken little gentleman this foreigner, who liked quiet and the
river view. He was quite as broad as he was long, though he was not
preposterously stout. There was nothing mysterious about him. He was
well known in the City. He had merely mistaken an undesirable suburb
for a desirable one, a very easy mistake for a foreigner to make; and he
was delighted at the cheapness of the house, the greenness of the old
lawn, the height of the grimy trees within the red brick wall.
He lived there all one summer, and the cement smoke got into his
throat in the autumn and gave him asthma, for which complaint he had
obviously been designed by Providence, for he had no neck. He used
the Signal House occasionally from Saturday till Monday. Then he
gave it up altogether, and tried to sell it. It stood empty for some years,
while the Russian banker extended his business and lived virtuously
elsewhere. Then he suddenly began using the house again as a house of
recreation, and brought his foreign servants, and his foreign friends and
their foreign servants, to stay from Saturday till Monday.
And all these persons behaved in an odd, Continental way, and played
bowls on the lawn at the back of the house on Sundays. The neighbors
could hear them but could see nothing, owing to the thickness of the
grimy trees and the height of the old brick wall. But no one worried
much about the Signal House; for they were a busy people who lived
all around, and had to earn their living, in addition to the steady and
persistent assuagement of a thirst begotten of cement dust and the
pungent smell of bone manure. One or two local amateurs had made
sure of the fact that there was nothing in the house that would repay a
burglarious investigation, which, added to the fact that the police
station is only a few doors off, tended to allay a natural curiosity as to
the foreign gentleman's possessions.

When he came he drove in a close cab from Gravesend Station, and
usually told the cabman when his services would again be required. He
came thus with three friends one summer afternoon, some years ago,
and came without luggage. The servants, who