From Out the Vast Deep: Occult & Supernatural Thriller. Marie Belloc Lowndes
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let on that Wyndfell Hall was well known to be a ghosty place.”
There was a pause, and then Pegler added: “Still, as you and I well know, ma’am, tales don’t lose nothing in the telling.”
“Indeed they don’t! Never mind what the people in the village say. This kind of strange, lonely, beautiful old house is sure to be said to be haunted. What I want to know is what you think you saw, Pegler—” The speaker looked sharply into the woman’s face.
“I don’t like to see you standing, ma’am,” said Pegler inconsequently. “If you’ll sit down in your chair again I’ll tell you what happened to me.”
Miss Farrow sank gracefully down into her deep, comfortable chair. Again she put out her feet to the fire, for it was very cold on this 23rd of December, and she knew she had a tiring, probably a boring, evening before her. Some strangers of whom she knew nothing, and cared less, excepting that they were the friends of her friend and host, Lionel Varick, were to arrive at Wyndfell Hall in time for dinner. It was now six o’clock.
“Well,” she said patiently, “begin at the beginning, Pegler. I wish you’d sit down too—somehow it worries me to see you standing there. You’ll be tempted to cut your story short.”
Pegler smiled a thin little smile. In the last twelve years Miss Farrow had several times invited her to sit down, but of course she had always refused, being one that knew her place. She had only sat in Miss Farrow’s presence during the days and nights when she had nursed her mistress through a serious illness—then, of course, everything had been different, and she had had to sit down sometimes.
“The day before yesterday—that is the evening Miss Bubbles arrived, ma’am—after I’d dressed you and you’d gone downstairs, and I’d unpacked for Miss Bubbles, I went into my room and thought how pleasant it looked. The curtains was drawn, and there was a nice fire, as you know, ma’am, which Mr. Varick so kindly ordered for me, and which I’ve had the whole week. Also, I will say for Annie that even if she is a temporary, she is a good housemaid, making the girls under her do their work properly.”
Pegler drew a long breath. Then she went on again: “I sat down just for a minute or two, and I turned over queer—so queer, ma’am, that I went and drew the curtains of one of the windows. Of course it’s a much bigger room than I’m generally accustomed to occupy, as you know, ma’am. And I just threw up the window—it’s what they call a guillotine window—and there I saw the water, you know, ma’am, in what they call the moat—”
“Yes,” said Miss Farrow languidly. “Yes, Pegler, go on.”
“As I looked down, ma’am, I had an awful turn. There seemed to me to be something floating about in the water, a little narrow thing like a child’s body—and—and all on a sudden a small white face seemed to look up into mine! Oh, it was ‘orrible!” Pegler did not often drop an aitch, but when she did so forget herself, she did it thoroughly.
“As I went on looking, fascinated-like”—she was speaking very slowly now—“whatever was down there seemed to melt away. I didn’t say nothing that evening of what had happened to me, but I couldn’t keep myself from thinking of it. Well, then, ma’am, as you know, I came and undressed you, and I asked you if you’d like the door kept open between our two rooms. But you said no, ma’am, you’d rather it was shut. So then I went to bed.”
“And you say—you admit, Pegler—that nothing did happen the night before last?”
Pegler hesitated. “Nothing happened exactly,” she said. “But I had the most awful feeling, ma’am. And yes—well, something did happen! I heard a kind of rustling in the room. It would leave off for a time, and, then begin again. I tried to put it down to a mouse or a rat—or something of that sort.”
“That,” said Miss Farrow quietly, “was probably what it was, Pegler.”
As if she had not heard her lady’s remark, the maid went on: “I’d go off to sleep, and then suddenly, I’d awake and hear this peculiar rustle, ma’am, like a dress swishing along—an old-fashioned, rich, soft silk, such as ladies wore in the old days, when I was a child. But that dress, the dress I heard rustling, ma’am, was a bit older than that.”
“What do you mean, Pegler?”
The maid remained silent, her eyes were fixed; it was as if she had forgotten where she was.
“And what exactly happened last night?”
“Last night,” said Pegler, drawing a long breath, “last night, ma’am—I know you won’t believe me—but I saw the spirit!”
Miss Farrow looked up into the woman’s face with an anxious, searching glance.
She felt disturbed and worried. A great deal of her material comfort—almost, she might have truly said, much of her happiness in life—depended on Jane Pegler. In a sense Blanche Farrow had but two close friends in the world—her host, Lionel Varick, the new owner of Wyndfell Hall; and the plain, spare, elderly woman standing now before her. She realized with a sharp pang of concern what Pegler’s mental defection would mean to her. It would be dreadful, dreadful, if Pegler began seeing ghosts, and turning hysterical.
“What was the spirit like?” she asked quietly.
And then, all at once, she had to suppress a violent inclination to burst out laughing. For Pegler answered with a kind of cry, “A ’orrible happarition, ma’am!”
Miss Farrow could not help observing a trifle satirically: “That certainly sounds most unpleasant.”
But Pegler went on, speaking with a touch of excitement very unusual with her: “It was a woman—a woman with a dreadful, wicked, spiteful face! Once she came up close to my bed, and I wanted to scream out, but I couldn’t—my throat seemed shut up.”
“D’you mean you actually saw what you took to be a ghost?”
“I did see a ghost, ma’am; not a doubt of it! She walked up and down that room in there, wringing her hands all the time—I’d heard the expression, ma’am, but I’d never seen anyone do it.”
“Did anything else happen?”
“At last she went over to the window, and—and I’m afraid you won’t believe me, ma’am—but there seemed no curtains there any more, nothing but just an opening into the darkness. I saw her bend over—” An expression of terror came over the woman’s face.
“But how could you see her,” asked Miss Farrow quickly, “if there was no light in the room?”
“In a sort of way,” said Pegler somberly, “the spirit was supplying the light, as it were. I could see her in the darkness, as if she was a lamp moving about.”
“Oh, Pegler, Pegler!” exclaimed Miss Farrow deprecatingly.
“It’s true, ma’am! It’s true as I’m standing here.” Pegler would have liked to add the words “So help me God!” but somehow she felt that these words would not carry any added conviction to her mistress. And, indeed, they would not have done so, for Miss Farrow, though she was much too polite and too well-bred ever to have said so, even to herself, did not believe in a Supreme Being. She was a complete materialist.
“And then, ma’am, after a bit, there it would begin, constant-like, all over again.”
“I don’t understand. . . . ”
“I’d go to sleep, and tell myself maybe that it was all a dream—argue with myself, ma’am, for I’m a sensible woman. And then all at once I’d hear that rustle again! I’d try not to open my eyes, but somehow I felt I must see what was happening. So I’d look at last—and there she’d be! Walking up and down, walking up and down, her face—oh, ma’am, her face staring-like most ‘orrible—and wringing her hands. Then she’d go over to the window, lean out, and disappear, down into the black water!”
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