The Tiled House. J.S. Le Fanu
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an undue proportion of muddy white, and had a certain indefinable character of insanity; the hue of the lips bearing the usual relation to that of the face, was sensual, malignant, and even satanic … There was something indescribably odd, even horrible, about all his motions, something undefinable, that was unnatural, unhuman; it was as if the limbs were guided and directed by a spirit unused to the management of bodily machinery.
The world in which Le Fanu’s characters – many of them victims – move is a hostile one, threatened both from without and within. Whereas many later ghost-story writers – M.R. James amongst them – wrote from an ostensible desire to entertain (the American writer Edith Wharton once spoke of ‘the fun of the shudder’), Le Fanu’s motives are altogether more enigmatic and complex. No reader of Le Fanu’s ghost stories can escape the conclusion that private anguish, in some degree, informs these public fictions. The stories are surrounded by an infinity of outer darkness, whilst at their heart is a similarly inpenetrable and menacing inner mystery. The closest Le Fanu came to articulating an explanatory metaphysic was through the character of Captain Barton in ‘The Familiar’, who confesses to Dr Macklin:
I am deeply and horribly convinced, that there does exist beyond this a spiritual world – a system whose workings are generally in mercy hidden from us – a system which may be, and which is sometimes, partially and terribly revealed. I am sure – I know … that there is a God – a dreadful God – and that retribution follows guilt, in ways the most mysterious and stupendous – by agencies the most inexplicable and terrific; – there is a spiritual system – great God, how I have been convinced! – a system malignant, and implacable, and omnipotent …
Just as the ghost story and the tale of detection are related literary forms, so Le Fanu’s work encompassed mystery as well as supernatural fiction: indeed elements of the mystery story frequently invade his ghost stories, and vice versa, whilst a pure ghost story like ‘Madam Crowl’s Ghost’ is found within the mystery novel A Strange Adventure in the Life of Miss Laura Mildmay (1871).
Though Le Fanu’s reputation is principally as a ghost-story writer, the bulk of his fiction actually falls within the Victorian mystery genre. One particular situation that fascinated him – and of which he was an early, probably the first, exponent – was the sealed-room/isolated-room mystery, the possibilities of which were explored in ‘Some Account of the Latter Days of the Hon. Richard Marston of Dunoran’ (DUM, 1848), later modified as ‘The Evil Guest’ (Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery, 1851) and expanded into the novel A Lost Name (1868). The motif is also used in ‘The Room in the Dragon Volant’, a tale of the Wilkie Collins type that E.F. Bleiler rightly called ‘easily one of the best mystery-adventure stories of the nineteenth century’.
Le Fanu’s stories – be they ghost stories or tales of mystery – are of the good old-fashioned type, best enjoyed in the sort of setting he himself described: ‘the old-fashioned parlour fire-side and its listening circle of excited faces, and, outside, the wintry blast and the moan of leafless boughs, with an occasional rattle of the clumsy old window-frame behind the shutter and curtain, as the blast [sweeps] by …’. The possibilities for the literary critic of Le Fanu’s stories are one thing; their success as stories to be enjoyed, savoured, and shivered at is another, and for most modern readers it is Le Fanu’s power as a storyteller and descriptive writer that will be appreciated most. This was principally what M.R. James admired about him:
As to his peculiar power: I think the origin of it is not far to seek. Le Fanu had both French and Irish blood in his veins, and in his works I seem to see both strains coming out, though the Irish predominates. The indefinable melancholy which the air of Ireland and its colouring inspire – a melancholy which inspires many Irish writers – is caught by Le Fanu and fixed in words with an almost complete success. He dwells very fondly and very frequently on sunset scenes over a horizon of dark hanging woods, on moonlight shining on a winding river with wooded banks, on a heavily-timbered park, a black tarn in a lonely glen, an old air heard in the distance at night, a ruined chapel or manor-house, a torchlight funeral in a gloomy church. Pictures like these strike his fancy and he makes them stand out for his readers.[14]
And so, draw the curtains; pull your chair towards the fire: Schalken, Madam Crowl, Squire. Toby, Captain Walshawe, Mr Justice Harbottle and the rest await you. And when at last you put the book down and return to the ‘real’ world you may perhaps be inclined to reflect on the words of Sir Victor Pritchett: ‘The evil of the justified ghost is not sportive, wilful, involuntary or extravagant. In Le Fanu the fright is that effect follows cause.’[15]
Be warned.
Michael Cox
Denford, Northamptonshire
April 1988
GHOST STORIES OF THE TILED HOUSE
I
Old Sally always attended her young mistress while she prepared for bed – not that Lilias required help, for she had the spirit of neatness and a joyous, gentle alacrity, and only troubled the good old creature enough to prevent her thinking herself grown old and useless.
Sally, in her quiet way, was garrulous, and she had all sorts of old-world tales of wonder and adventure, to which Lilias often went pleasantly to sleep; for there was no danger while old Sally sat knitting there by the fire, and the sound of the rector’s mounting upon his chairs, as was his wont, and taking down and putting up his books in the study beneath, though muffled and faint, gave evidence that that good and loving influence was awake and busy.
Old Sally was telling her young mistress, who sometimes listened with a smile, and sometimes lost a good five minutes together of her gentle prattle, how the young gentleman, Mr Mervyn, had taken that awful old haunted habitation, the Tiled House ‘beyant at Ballyfermot’, and was going to stay there, and wondered no one had told him of the mysterious dangers of that desolate mansion.
It stood by a lonely bend of the narrow road. Lilias had often looked up the short, straight, grass-grown avenue with an awful curiosity at the old house which she had learned in childhood to fear as the abode of shadowy tenants and unearthly dangers.
‘There are people, Sally, now-a-days, who call themselves freethinkers, and don’t believe in any thing – even in ghosts,’ said Lilias.
‘A then the place he’s stopping in now, Miss Lilly, ’ill soon cure him of freethinking, if the half they say about it’s true,’ answered Sally.
‘But I don’t say, mind, he’s a freethinker, for I don’t know any thing of Mr Mervyn; but if he be not, he must be very brave, or very good, indeed. I know, Sally, I should be horribly afraid, indeed, to sleep in it myself,’ answered Lilias, with a cosy little shudder, as the aërial image of the old house for a moment stood before her, with its peculiar malign, scared, and skulking aspect, as if it had drawn back in shame and guilt among the melancholy old elms and tall hemlock and nettles.
‘And now, Sally, I’m safe in bed. Stir the fire, my old darling.’ For although it was the first week in May, the night was frosty. ‘And tell me about the Tiled House again, and frighten me out of my wits.’
So good old Sally, whose faith in such matters was a religion, went off over the well-known ground in a gentle little amble – sometimes subsiding into a walk as she approached some special horror, and pulling up altogether – that is to say, suspending her knitting, and looking with a mysterious nod at her young mistress in the four-poster, or lowering her voice to a sort of whisper when the crisis came.
So she told her how when the neighbours hired the orchard that ran up to the windows at the back of the house, the dogs they kept then used to howl so wildly and wolfishly all night among the trees, and prowl under the walls of the house so dejectedly, that they were fain to open the door and let them in at last; and, indeed, small need there was there for dogs; for no one, young or old, dared go near the orchard after night-fall. No, the golden pippins that peeped so splendid through the leaves in the western rays of evening, and made