E. Nesbit - In the Dark - Tales of Terror by E. Nesbit

But when they did go away they left the local constable on guard. He kept guard like a man till daylight began to creep over the hill, and then he crawled into the hayloft and fell asleep, small blame to him.

But through those long hours I sat beside her and held her hand. At first she clung to me as a frightened child clings, and her tears were the prettiest, saddest things to see. As we grew calmer we talked.

‘I did it to frighten my cousin,’ I owned. ‘I meant to have told you today, I mean yesterday, only you went away. I am Lawrence Sefton, and the place is to go either to me or to my cousin Selwyn. And I wanted to frighten him off it. But you, why did you—?’

Even then I couldn’t see. She looked at me.

‘I don’t know how I ever could have thought I was brave enough to do it, but I did want the house so, and I wanted to frighten you—’

‘To frighten me . Why?’

‘Because I am your cousin Selwyn,’ she said, hiding her face in her hands.

‘And you knew me?’ I asked.

‘By your ring,’ she said. ‘I saw your father wear it when I was a little girl. Can’t we get back to the inn now?’

‘Not unless you want everyone to know how silly we have been.’

‘I wish you’d forgive me,’ she said when we had talked awhile, and she had even laughed at the description of the pallid young man on whom I had bestowed, in my mind, her name.

‘The wrong is mutual,’ I said; ‘we will exchange forgivenesses.’

‘Oh, but it isn’t,’ she said eagerly. ‘Because I knew it was you, and you didn’t know it was me: you wouldn’t have tried to frighten me .’

‘You know I wouldn’t.’ My voice was tenderer than I meant it to be.

She was silent.

‘And who is to have the house?’ she said.

‘Why you, of course.’

‘I never will.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, because!’

‘Can’t we put off the decision?’ I asked.

‘Impossible. We must decide tomorrow – today I mean.’

‘Well, when we meet tomorrow – I mean today – with lawyers and chaperones and mothers and relations, give me one word alone with you.’

‘Yes,’ she answered, with docility.

‘Do you know,’ she said presently, ‘I can never respect myself again? To undertake a thing like that, and then be so horribly frightened. Oh! I thought you really were the other ghost.’

‘I will tell you a secret,’ said I. ‘I thought you were, and I was much more frightened than you.’

‘Oh well,’ she said, leaning against my shoulder as a tired child might have done, ‘if you were frightened too, Cousin Lawrence, I don’t mind so very, very much.’

It was soon afterwards that, cautiously looking out of the parlour window for the twentieth time, I had the happiness of seeing the local policeman disappear into the stable rubbing his eyes.

We got out of the window on the other side of the house, and went back to the inn across the dewy park. The French window of the sitting-room which had let her out let us both in. No one was stirring, so no one save she and I were any the wiser as to that night’s work.

It was like a garden party next day, when lawyers and executors and aunts and relations met on the terrace in front of Sefton Manor House.

Her eyes were downcast. She followed her aunt demurely over the house and the grounds.

‘Your decision,’ said my great-uncle’s solicitor, ‘has to be given within the hour.’

‘My cousin and I will announce it within that time,’ I said, and I at once gave her my arm.

Arrived at the sundial we stopped.

‘This is my proposal,’ I said: ‘We will say that we decide that the house is yours – we will spend the £20,000 in restoring it and the grounds. By the time that’s done we can decide who is to have it.’

‘But how?’

‘Oh, we’ll draw lots, or toss a halfpenny, or anything you like.’

‘I’d rather decide now,’ she said; ‘ you take it.’

‘No, you shall.’

‘I’d rather you had it. I – I don’t feel so greedy as I did yesterday,’ she said.

‘Neither do I. Or at any rate not in the same way.’

‘Do – do take the house,’ she said very earnestly.

Then I said: ‘My cousin Selwyn, unless you take the house, I shall make you an offer of marriage.’

‘ Oh! ’ she breathed.

‘And when you have declined it, on the very proper ground of our too slight acquaintance, I will take my turn at declining. I will decline the house. Then, if you are obdurate, it will become an asylum. Don’t be obdurate. Pretend to take the house and—’

She looked at me rather piteously.

‘Very well,’ she said, ‘I will pretend to take the house, and when it is restored—’

‘We’ll spin the penny.’

So before the waiting relations the house was adjudged to my cousin Selwyn. When the restoration was complete I met Selwyn at the sundial. We had met there often in the course of the restoration, in which business we both took an extravagant interest.

‘Now,’ I said, ‘we’ll spin the penny. Heads you take the house, tails it comes to me.’

I spun the coin – it fell on the brick steps of the sundial, and stuck upright there, wedged between two bricks. She laughed; I laughed.

‘It’s not my house,’ I said.

‘It’s not my house,’ said she.

‘Dear,’ said I, and we were neither of us laughing then, ‘can’t it be our house?’

And, thank God, our house it is.

I

Roger Wroxham looked round his studio before he blew out the candle, and wondered whether, perhaps, he looked for the last time. It was large and empty, yet his trouble had filled it, and, pressing against him in the prison of those four walls, forced him out into the world, where lights and voices and the presence of other men should give him room to draw back, to set a space between it and him, to decide whether he would ever face it again – he and it alone together. The nature of his trouble is not germane to this story. There was a woman in it, of course, and money, and a friend, and regrets and embarrassments – and all of those reached out tendrils that wove and interwove till they made a puzzle-problem of which heart and brain were now weary. It was as though his life depended on his deciphering the straggling characters traced by some spider who, having fallen into the ink-well, had dragged clogged legs in a black zig-zag across his map of the world.

He blew out the candle and went quietly downstairs. It was nine at night, a soft night of May in Paris. Where should he go? He thought of the Seine, and took – an omnibus. The chestnut trees of the Boulevards brushed against the sides of the one that he boarded blindly in the first light street. He did not know where the omnibus was going. It did not matter. When at last it stopped he got off, and so strange was the place to him that for an instant it almost seemed as though the trouble itself had been left behind. He did not feel it in the length of three or four streets that he traversed slowly. But in the open space, very light and lively, where he recognised the Taverne de Paris and knew himself in Montmartre, the trouble set its teeth in his heart again, and he broke away from the lamps and the talk to struggle with it in the dark quiet streets beyond.

A man braced for such a fight has little thought to spare for the detail of his surroundings. The next thing that Wroxham knew of the outside world was the fact that he had known for some time that he was not alone in the street. There was someone on the other side of the road keeping pace with him – yes, certainly keeping pace, for, as he slackened his own, the feet on the other pavement also went more slowly. And now they were four feet, not two. Where had the other man sprung from? He had not been there a moment ago. And now, from an archway a little ahead of him, a third man came.