THE TERRACES OF NIGHT Read online

  At the foot of the hill an old stone bridge, its side-niches for foot-passengers, proclaiming its antiquity, crossed the tiny river, narrow, but rapid and deep, which, twisting at right angles beyond the bridge, ran on beside the road as if trying to outpace us in our swift little Whippet. The valley was spread, like a carpet, with patches of colour; yellow cornfields and silvery wheat, the browns and reds of turned earth, with here and there a patch of purple beet, and far-off, the shimmering emerald of the water-meadows beyond Nannory House, standing in its island of dark green clustering trees—as we ran into the first straggling outliers of these the road grew cool and shadowed, and presently the low flower-sprinkled bank beyond the little river gave place to a stout grey stonewall, once high but now crumbling and green, with moss and weeds where the water licked its base. About half a mile along this was broken by a modern wooden gate, with two great flag-stones, laid flat, serving to bridge the stream before it—the gate was standing hospitably open, and in we swept, up a wide semi-circular drive to a great white house, set against a backing of ancient trees. Staring up at it, I wondered, for a brief puzzled moment, why, on the crest of the hill, I had ‘seen’ it larger, more spreading, as it were, and certainly definitely grey, not white—but I had no time to speculate, for Lina, gay, red-headed and untidy as ever, bounced out of the front door, and kissed me soundly as I climbed out of the car, while George beamed in huge approval as he heaved out parcel after parcel from the back.

  ‘Frank, darling, I am glad to see you! You’ll have real pot luck you know—but there’s a decent room for you to sleep in, and some sort of a meal to eat, thanks to my hard work and the invaluable Menken!’

  ‘Who’s Menken?’ I asked interestingly.

  ‘He’s a darling!’ said Lina emphatically.

  ‘Damn’ useful old bird,’ struck in George. ‘Lina found him working at the vicar’s as odd-job man, and asked him if he’d put in some time gardening here, and he’s simply followed her about like a dog ever since. Funny solitary old devil, “without chick nor child,” as the saying is. . . .’

  As he spoke a figure appeared round the corner of the house; a lean handsome old man, hawk-eyed, with thick tousled greying hair, in shirt sleeves and heavy boots, wearing the traditional gardener’s apron of green baize tied with a length of bass about his waist. He looked at me, then at Lina, and back again at me, and I was irresistibly reminded of the quick suspicious glance of a faithful dog, standing beside his mistress’ skirts, ready to start forward on the faintest hint from her—but on the second glance at me the element of suspicion in his eyes had vanished, and I had that same half-flattered, satisfied feeling that one has at being ‘accepted’ by a guardian watch-dog. He addressed Lina brusquely, yet respectfully, in a deep voice which was curiously pleasant despite its peasant burr.

  ‘Supper’s ready, marm. Shall I put these tins in the cupboard for ye?’

  ‘Oh, do, Menken,’ said Lina. Then added with a faint note of apology in her voice. ‘I’m ever so sorry to give you so much indoor work to do, you know, when you came as gardener. I hope soon we’ll get a maid and be able to release you. . . .’

  Menken stooped, and sweeping up the heap of parcels into his green apron, turned away.

  ‘Ye won’t never get a girl hereabouts, marm, as I’ve told ye!’ he said cryptically over one shoulder. ‘And if you get one down fra’ London, all I can say is, I hope she’ll stay!’

  He disappeared into the house with his load, and George frowned and glanced furtively at me. It was obvious that any hint of ‘strangeness’ at Nannory House faintly annoyed him. He would have preferred to ignore it—but not so Lina! She spoke blithely over one shoulder as she led the way through the wide handsome entrance hall that was lounge, dining-room and drawing-room in one, towards the stairs that wound upwards at one end.

  ‘Oh yes, Frank—we’ve got a haunted house! A real live one—though I can’t find out yet just what haunts it. Menken can’t or won’t tell me details . . . but he can’t deny there is a ghost! I wonder whether it’s a Wailing Lady, or a Head rolling about by itself, or a Thing that Gibbers. . . .’

  ‘Shut up, you little idiot!’ I said forcibly.

  Why, I don’t know, but all of a sudden, as she spoke I felt an odd stab of superstitious fear—I realised that I would sooner not joke about ghosts in Nannory House! I felt as if something listened as we spoke, mounting the winding stairs in single file—stood by and smiled, quietly and terribly . . . it was a sunny September evening, and I a sober business man of forty-two, but I got that feeling just the same, and it sent a cold shiver down my spine! A shiver that speeded up my dressing and washing considerably, despite the charm of my little attic bedroom with the sloping roof, blue and green flowered chintzes and quaint low wooden bed . . . however, it passed away after a while, and I descended the stairs in good spirits to the big lounge.

  The room was curiously built. It ran from side to side of the house, as it were, with the front door and two leaded-paned windows set in the middle of the outer wall, the stairs and a door leading to the kitchen quarters at one end, and at the other an old brick fireplace and two wide French windows (as obviously modern as the fireplace was old) standing open upon a paved veranda. The walls were washed light sunshiny yellow, and long art-green linen curtains and cushions and bowls of late pink roses lightened the sturdy oak of the furniture—yet despite its charm, the room seemed to me remote, aloof, a little ‘chilly’ as it were; perhaps because of the flooring, which was paved with brick tiles laid in a quaint herring-bone design of black and grey and red. This flooring, uneven and cracked in places, was obviously much older than the rest of the room—Lina caught my glance upon it, and laughed.

  ‘Quaint, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘And nice and cool now. But a stone floor’ll be rather chilly in winter. We shall have to put down matting or carpets then. Funny—I shan’t want to, you know. I love the house as it is. I’m awfully happy here.’

  ‘Odd old place!’ I said pouring myself out a glass of sherry as an apéritif, and hungrily eyeing a dish of real country cream, while George made an attack upon a gigantic cold veal-and-ham pie, and Lina mixed the salad, crisp green lettuce and sliced tomatoes, in a deep blue Delft dish.

  ‘It’s a darling place!’ said Lina blithely. ‘I felt, the very minute I saw it, that I wanted to come and live here. It felt like coming home. . . .’ Afterwards I remembered her words with an odd qualm, but at the moment dinner was pre-eminently important. We had a very merry meal, and a most excellent one, for which Lina’s apologies were completely unnecessary, and after dinner we removed ourselves out upon the veranda, where the ubiquitous Menken had already placed three lounge-chairs and a table for coffee. Stretched out luxuriously opposite George, smoking an excellent cigar, with Lina presiding over the bubbling Cona like a pretty red-headed witch over some infernal brew, I felt well-pleased with life, and lay surveying the twilit scene before me in great content—it was too dark to see much of the garden, but I could make out the sweep of the lawn dotted with flowerbeds, and beyond that a dark bank of the old trees with which the house was as it were surrounded, almost imprisoned. I mentioned it to George, who nodded acquiescence, and said that much of the old greenery was to be cut away.

  ‘Of course,’ he added quickly. ‘I shall have it done very carefully—don’t want to spoil the character of the place. But at present there’s too much gloom. Too many trees—one feels shut in, somehow.’

  ‘I feel that, quite often,’ interrupted Lina dreamily. Her face, set in its nimbus of shining hair, and lit by the flame from the lamp beneath the glass coffee-globe, looked for the moment curiously ethereal, almost ghostly. ‘Much as I love the place, sometimes I feel, do you know, when I’m quite alone, as if there was something here keeping me from getting out . . . a sort of prisoned feeling. As if the great barred gate were there again, and the old wall high and solid as it used to be, with the river beyond hemming one side like a moat, and the marshes the other . . . so that
you could only hope to escape if someone threw a silken ladder over the wall, and a strong man on a swift horse stood waiting outside to carry you away. . . .’

  I interrupted. Somehow I did not like the tone of Lina’s remarks at all, nor the rapt dreamy look on her face; my brief sense of placid content had fled.

  ‘Oh, all old houses have some such atmosphere, Lina—it’s nothing!’

  She turned and looked at me, startled—the ‘fey’ look had fled.

  ‘Of course, it isn’t anything,’ she said, wide-eyed, surprised. ‘I only get the ‘prison feeling’ sometimes, generally when I’m alone—it’s missing Georgie-boy, of course. But when I told old Menken the other day he stared at me as if I’d said something awful!’

  Her bright laugh rang out as she pulled the flame away and stirred the bubbling coffee—I stared about me, up at the crazy roof of the veranda, a cheap and obviously more or less modern construction upheld by rusty iron posts whose native ugliness was only partially hidden by twining festoons of late-flowering rambler roses in every shade of pink and red, and dissented.

  ‘This is modern enough, Lina! Stuck on within the last ten years, I should say! But I suppose you mean the main part of the house is old. How old is it?’

  ‘I don’t know a bit,’ said Lina vaguely. ‘It’s been a manor-house, of course. It’s been a farmhouse, and there’s still a dairy, with flat stone shelves for cream pans, like Lorna Doone; but that’s too damp to use now except as an outhouse. Then it’s been an inn at one time—there are some old stables still—and during the last fifty years Menken tells me somebody tried to turn it into a summer hotel and failed; then it was a hospital for soldiers, and then some lunatics took it for running a “Nature Colony” where they went about without clothes and scandalised the villagers to death! But nobody, lately anyway, seems to have stayed very long.

  ‘But it’s the place’s earlier history that really interests me. I fancy the original building must date back to the Middle Ages—the cellars are enormous, and run right under the road; Menken told me so, and I went down to explore, but couldn’t get far. They’re blocked up or fallen in—but they’re far too big for an ordinary house. Then I’m perpetually finding odd pieces of stone flooring, or corners of broken walls, right far out in the garden, that proves the foundations stretch ever so much farther than the present house?.’

  ‘No?’ I said, startled and interested. ‘It must have been a thundering big place once!’

  ‘It was,’ said Lina sombrely. She pushed the flame beneath the globe again and stood staring down at it, rapt, dreamy—with a swift little uncanny shiver I heard the ‘fey’ note creep once more into her voice. ‘It was a huge rambling grey pile, with barred windows and long cold stone-floored passageways . . . and the great outer wall—so high it was, so strong—stretched far down the road, and far behind into the fields, and shut out all but the sunshine, and the waving tree-tops! Then, the water-meadows behind were all marshland, coloured like a carpet in the spring with yellow kingcups and blue forget-me-nots and bog-myrtle—and there sometimes one might go and gather rushes for basket-weaving, and herbs to make simples for the peasants’ ills. From the marshes one could glimpse the winding road and long to fly to it—to gallop away from a prisoned world where all went clad in duffle-grey, where colour and scent, song and laughter were all alike accounted sinful. . . .’

  Surely it was never slangy, modern Lina who was speaking? George and I were sitting bolt upright in our chairs by this time, startled, staring, and as we gaped, with a sudden bubbling snort the coffee boiled up and over, and a spurting drop fell upon Lina’s wrist. With a sharp little shriek of pain she sprang back—George and I sprang to our feet, I to rescue the coffee, and he, husband-like, to apply a cooling handkerchief, when there came a quick running step, and at the far end of the veranda appeared old Menken, breathing hard and fearfully. He fell back on seeing the three of us together, and paused, and George, already somewhat ruffled and alarmed by Lina’s curious outburst, snapped out at him angrily.

  ‘Well—what on earth’s the matter, Menken? What brings you here?’

  Half-hesitating, the old man advanced a few steps along the paved terrace, and halted—my attention was attracted to the paving by his movement, and for a moment I paid no attention to his answer, in my sudden interest. Comparatively modern as was the iron veranda built over it, the brick flooring of the ‘walk’ was obviously of the same period as that in the dining-room—but this narrow passageway, barely four feet wide, was worn down in an even groove, near the house wall, as if by the passage of many hundreds of weary feet up and down, up and down! Worn precisely as the cloisters of some cathedral are worn . . . Cloisters! I started, for on the instant I knew I had discovered the origin of Nannory House. A convent. ‘Nannory’, a nunnery—what a fool I had been. Of course! I was so thrilled by this discovery that I did not hear Menken’s answer to George, but I heard George’s rejoinder, and turned, arrested.

  ‘Thought she might have “seen” . . . don’t be a superstitious fool, man! Now take yourself and your idiotic stories to bed!’

  The stooping figure shambled swiftly off into the dusk, and Lina, her bright normal self again, dabbed ruefully at her smarting wrist.

  ‘Don’t be snappy to him, Georgie dear,’ she said soothingly. ‘Suppose he thought I’d seen the ghost, and came to help—the dear thing! Thank goodness the coffee’s made—let’s see, what were we talking about when this damn’ stuff boiled up?’

  ‘My dear,’ said George, aggrievedly. You were doing all the talking, so you ought to remember?’

  ‘I talking?’ retorted Lina, wide-eyed. ‘Why, I wasn’t. I remember that Frank was just saying what a big place this must have been—and then the coffee boiled up!’

  ‘Rubbish!’ said George roundly. ‘You were going on at a simply frightful rate, yearning about what this place used to be like. . . .’

  Obeying some curious warning instinct I kicked him on the ankle and he subsided, as Lina rounded upon him in indignant denial. For she did deny it! It was obvious that she had no memory whatever of that ‘fey’ moment, no notion that she had even been speaking—obedient to my hint, George said nothing more until she went upstairs to bed, and then he turned instantly to me, amazed and aggrieved.

  ‘What’s the game, Frank? She must have been having us on, you know—why wouldn’t you let me pin her down to it?’

  ‘Because I don’t want her scared—neither do you,’ I said firmly. ‘Because, believe it or not, George, Lina isn’t rotting! I know something about this sort of thing, as you know, and I was watching her, and I assure you that for the moment she was in a sort of trance—talking quite mechanically, without consciousness, if you know what I mean?’

  George scowled and fidgeted—he hates, after the manner of the thoroughly healthy male, anything even remotely resembling the abnormal.

  ‘You aren’t trying to tell me?’ he began, but I interrupted, firmly and definitely. I knew how to manage George!

  ‘I mean that Lina’s the type of which mediums are made—it’s no use your frowning or objecting, because it’s a fact. It’s a gift like any other, though I don’t advise its being deliberately developed except in unusual cases. But I’ve always thought Lina psychic, and now I’m sure. I think that tonight, just for a moment, she “tapped”, as it were, one of the thought-currents that hang about his old house, and described to us, quite literally and truthfully, what it was like—it’s an old convent you know. I’m sure of that.’

  ‘Menken’s been telling you about the ghost, evidently!’ said George moodily.

  ‘He hasn’t,’ I said. ‘What is it?’

  George opened his mouth, and, shutting it again, shook his head.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not going to put ideas into your head. You’re a damn’ Celt, and imaginative enough of your own accord—if I told you what to expect, you might start seeing it just to complete things! Anyway, for God’s sake don’t discuss anything of this sort
with Lina, if you can avoid it. I daresay you’re right about her—but I hope it doesn’t happen again, that’s all.’

  * * * * *

  I must say that during the ensuing week nothing even remotely resembling the curious episode of that first evening happened. The weather remained perfect, and the three of us, forgetting our ages and responsibilities, frolicked about the old house, the garden, the water-meadow and countryside generally in the most irresponsible and delightful way. We picnicked, fished in the tiny stream—which I found broadened out beyond the house into a widish pool, obviously once the fishpool of the old convent—for, as was subsequently proved, I was entirely right in my conclusion as to the origin of Nannory House. We went over to Freyne in the car, helped Menken in the apple-gathering in the orchard, weeded and dug and planted, and spent our evenings playing bridge, listening to the radio, or merely talking, as in the old days—so, peacefully and uneventfully, passed an entire week after my advent.

  It was as if, having frowned upon me to start with, Nannory House now chose to smile, bland, charming, innocent, so that my first faint feeling of vague distrust faded; all but disappeared, lulled for the moment into security. ‘The influence’, the atmosphere that hung about the house, whatever it was, that I had sensed—thanks, I suppose to the Celtic blood about which George had teased me—so sharply at the beginning—had retreated, was standing back. Biding its time. . . . The phrase occurred to me once or twice, and I hastily thrust it into the background.

  It wasn’t a very pleasant or comfortable phrase to think about. I felt, I repeat, lulled, as it were, into security, yet deep in my heart I knew it was only temporary; that very soon something would move swiftly forward towards its appointed end—it was not mere chance, but the slow and steady march of Fate that had brought the Merediths to Nannory House!

  We were sitting one afternoon, Lina and I, on the wall by the gate, dangling our bare legs over the swift-running stream that ran below it. Lina, sunburnt as an Indian, clad in a skimpy butcher-blue linen frock, wearing a pair of shabby espadrilles, her ruddy hair in a bush about her face, looked a mere schoolgirl, instead of a woman married fully ten years—I teased her about it as we sat, watching the long dusty ribbon of the road for George and the car, and she laughed and frowned, screwing up her eyes in the funny adorable way she had.