Kitabı oxu: «The Tiled House»

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction by Michael Cox

Ghost Stories of the Tiled House

Schalken the Painter

The Familiar

The Murdered Cousin

An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street

Wicked Captain Walshawe, of Wauling

Squire Toby’s Will

Green Tea

Madam Crowl’s Ghost

Mr Justice Harbottle

Footnotes

Publication Details

Select Bibliography

Also in the Series

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

‘Sheridan Le Fanu,’ wrote S.M. Ellis in 1916, ‘retains his own special place and fame as the Master of Horror and the Mysterious.’[1] Today, Le Fanu’s reputation is as high as ever amongst connoisseurs of supernatural fiction – a reflection not only of his historical importance in a literary genre that is gradually becoming critically respectable, but also of the enthusiastic endorsements bestowed on him by some of the most accomplished ghost fiction writers of the twentieth century. Amongst these, it was M.R. James who was largely responsible for Le Fanu’s rehabilitation after a long period of neglect and who first appreciated and described the peculiar blend of qualities that placed Le Fanu, in his opinion, ‘absolutely in the first rank as a writer of ghost stories … nobody sets the scene better than he, nobody touches in the effective detail more deftly’.[2]

James’s own tales – among them some of the best ghost stories ever written in English – are similarly characterized by close attention to scene setting and circumstantial detail, to the evocation of a richly particularized actuality into which the supernatural insidiously intrudes itself. But James’s admiration for Le Fanu – which began as a boy and continued with no loss of pleasure to the end of his life – did not translate itself into mere imitation. Far from it. Le Fanu’s influence on James – and on those who, in turn, were influenced by James – was confined to generalities, not to specifics; to strategies and approaches, rather than to congruity of style. Nor did James ever claim too much for his predecessor, noting that Le Fanu had attained supremacy in one particular line: ‘he succeeds in inspiring a mysterious terror better than any other writer’ – better, for example, than Edgar Allen Poe, whose tales to James’s mind had ‘such an essential flavour of 1830–40 as takes the whole edge off them’.[3]

The earliest tale in this present selection dates from just this period: ‘Schalken the Painter’, first published in the Dublin University Magazine (henceforth DUM) in May 1839; and it well illustrates James’s point. This, we feel, is good writing, not just good period writing. A good tale well told is undoubtedly one of the reasons why Le Fanu has held on to his readers. He was a born storyteller, acutely sensitive to the pace and dynamics of fictional narrative; above all, he had a genius for invoking exactly the right atmosphere for the kind of fiction in which he excelled. Take, as a random example, the opening of ‘Squire Toby’s Will’ (Temple Bar, 1868):

Many persons accustomed to travel the old York and London road, in the days of stage-coaches, will remember passing, in the afternoon, say, of an autumn day, in their journey to the capital, about three miles south of the town of Applebury, and a mile and a half before you reach the Old Angel Inn, a large black-and-white house, as those old-fashioned cage-work habitations are termed, dilapidated and weather-stained, with broad lattice windows glimmering all over in the evening sun with little diamond panes, and thrown into relief by a dense background of ancient elms. A wide avenue, now overgrown like a churchyard with grass and weeds, and flanked by double rows of the same dark trees, old and gigantic, with here and there a gap in their solemn files, and sometimes a fallen tree lying across the avenue, leads up to the hall door.

Yet Le Fanu was not, and did not regard himself as, a conscious artist – any more, interestingly, than M.R. James did. And though there is a distinct – if perplexing – metaphysical context to his stories, nor was Le Fanu self-consciously a philosopher or moralizer. In the best of his short tales – and supremely in his best known novel, Uncle Silas (1864) – he succeeded, as his most recent biographer observes, ‘through the synchronization of his own temperament with the inner logic of the material he chose’.[4]

This is another way of saying that elements of Le Fanu’s personal life are reflected in his fiction, though transformed by imagination and introspection. But whereas in the case of M.R. James it is external reality that is drawn on to sustain the imaginative fabric, for Le Fanu it was a deeply troubled internal world that provided the impetus and sustaining energy of his fiction. The complexities of Le Fanu’s inner life have yet to be fully unravelled, but on the available evidence he appears as a man in whom stirred deep currents of anxiety creating a potent nexus of fears and fantasies that found imaginative and symbolic expression in his novels and stories.

The Le Fanus were of Huguenot descent: one of them – Charlés de Cresserons, a name Le Fanu was to use as a literary pseudonym – had fought for William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne. By the eighteenth century they had become established as solid, respectable members of the Anglo-Irish ascendancy. But there was also a more volatile, literary and histrionic strain in the family, for Le Fanu’s grandmother on his father’s side was a sister of the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan: these opposite qualities are apparent in Le Fanu, in whom predictability and enigma, conservatism and erratic brilliance, mingled.

In July 1811 Thomas Le Fanu, a curate of Dr William Dobbin, rector of Finglas on the outskirts of Dublin, married Dr Dobbin’s daughter Emma. Thomas Le Fanu and his bride began their married life at 45 Lower Dominick Street in Dublin, where their first child, Catherine, was born in 1813. The following year, in August 1814, Joseph Thomas Sheridan Le Fanu was born in the same house, though his earliest memories were of the Hibernian Military School in the Phoenix Park, to where the family had moved in 1815 when Thomas Le Fanu was appointed Chaplain. Phoenix Park was then a place of pastoral seclusion dotted with picturesque villages such as Chapelizod: both the Park and, especially, Chapelizod took early hold of Le Fanu’s imagination and both reappear in his novels and stories.

In 1826 the family moved to Abington in Co. Limerick, Thomas Le Fanu having been appointed rector there, in addition to holding the deanship of Emly. In the rector’s library, besides conventional fare, there were books with a natural appeal to the future author of ghost stories and mysteries, such as Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho and The Mummy: a Tale of the Twenty-second Century. Beyond the civilized confines of the glebe house and its library discontent and violence among the native Catholic population also fed into the imagination of the young Le Fanu, producing a lasting image of the Great House under siege and isolated, threatened by violent intrusions from an anarchic outer world. In W.J. McCormack’s words: ‘The essence of society as Le Fanu grew to know it in his Abington years was the isolation of his people from “the people”.’ In spite of the antagonism of the Irish to the political and religious allegiances of his class, Le Fanu nurtured strong nationalistic sympathies, as well as a deep admiration for the Irish people. He also derived imaginative sustenance from Irish folklore and legends, imbued as the majority were with a deep supernaturalism. How potent was the effect of these Limerick years, in particular the landscape of his boyhood and adolescence, can be seen for instance in this passage from the late story ‘The Child that went with the Fairies’ (1870) describing the haunted hill of Lisnavoura in the Slievefelim mountains:

A deserted country. A wide, black bog, level as a lake, skirted with copse, spreads at the left, as you journey northward, and the long irregular line of mountain rises at the right, clothed in heath, broken with lines of grey rock that resemble the bold and irregular outlines of fortifications, and riven with many a gully … It was at the fall of the leaf, and an autumnal sunset threw the lengthening shadow of haunted Lisnavoura close in front of the solitary little cabin over the undulating slopes and sides of Slievefelim.

In 1832 Le Fanu went up to Trinity College, Dublin, to read classics and train for the law. His first story appeared in the Dublin University Magazine in January 1838: ‘The Ghost and the Bonesetter’, the first tale in the collection posthumously entitled The Purcell Papers, named after the eponymous narrator, Father Francis Purcell. It was not long before writing began to assume a greater importance in Le Fanu’s life than his legal studies. ‘Strange Event in the Life of Schalken the Painter’ (reprinted here) was published in the DUM in May 1839 (the year Le Fanu was called to the Irish Bar) and is the first of Le Fanu’s stories to hint at a synchronicity of the external themes of his fiction and personal disorientation. ‘Schalken’, a story of supernatural rape, is a variation on the demon lover theme, and though a certain ambiguity is conveyed by linking the climax of the story with Schalken’s dream, the whole thrust of the narrative is towards accepting the reality of supernatural intrusions. The death of his much-loved sister Catherine in March 1841 brought Le Fanu himself face to face with death for the first time, and from this date he began to show signs of morbidity and melancholy, coupled with the kind of religious and sexual anxiety reflected in ‘Spalatro’ (DUM, March 1843).

In December of that year Le Fanu married Susanna Bennett,[5] daughter of George Bennett, QC, a leading barrister on the Munster circuit, who lived at 18 Merrion Square South in Dublin. Le Fanu took his bride back to Abington for Christmas, writing to his sister-in-law Elizabeth: ‘I think I never saw my father and mother take such a fancy to my dear little wife … She is as merry as a lark, & for my part I am ten thousand times more in love with her than ever.’[6] Their first child, Eleanor, was born in February 1845, followed by another daughter, Emma, a year later and a son, christened Thomas Philip, in September 1847.

Le Fanu’s first novel was The Cock and Anchor, a costume romance of eighteenth-century Dublin and written in the popular style of W.H. Ainsworth and G.W.M. Reynolds. Another historical novel, The Fortunes of Colonel Torlogh O’Brien (illustrated by ‘Phiz’), followed in 1847, though historical romance was soon abandoned by Le Fanu for journalism and short tales.

In the New Year of 1851 Le Fanu published his first collection of stories, the now rare volume Ghost Stories and Tales of Mystery, containing ‘The Watcher’ (later reprinted as ‘The Familiar’ in In a Glass Darkly), ‘The Murdered Cousin’ (an early form of what was to become Uncle Silas), ‘Schalken the Painter’, and ‘The Evil Guest’ (an early short form of A Lost Name). At the same time, in January 1851, the DUM carried three ‘Ghost Stories of Chapelizod’: ‘The Village Bully’, ‘The Sexton’s Adventure’, and ‘The Spectre Lovers’ – all anticipations of The House by the Churchyard.

The Le Fanus’ fourth child, George Brinsley Le Fanu, was born in August 1854. By this time the family had moved into the Bennetts’ house in Merrion Square, George Bennett, his wife and unmarried daughters having taken up residence in Sodylt Hall, Shropshire, in July 1850. ‘An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’, published in the DUM in December 1853, was Le Fanu’s last piece of fiction for nine years – a reflection of increasing domestic tension generated by debts, Susanna’s ill health, family deaths, and, in 1855, his brother William’s religious conversion, which threw into relief his own and Susanna’s spiritual doubts. The death of her father in May 1856 had a devastating effect on Susanna, who was already tormented by religious uncertainty and whose mental stability was threatened by a near hysterical reaction to death. As Le Fanu recorded: ‘If she took leave of anyone who was dear to her she was always overpowered with an agonizing frustration that she would never see them again. If anyone she loved was ill, though not dangerously, she despaired of their recovery.’[7]

On 26 April 1858 Susanna herself was taken seriously ill. She died two days later. Le Fanu wrote immediately to his mother:

The greatest misfortune of my life has overtaken me. My darling wife is gone … Pray to God to help me. My light is gone … She was wiser than I & better & would have been to the children what no father could be … She was the light of my life & light in every day.[8]

Nelson Browne called the Le Fanus’ marriage ‘an exceptionally happy one’. It was not quite that. If Le Fanu was – as his brother William said – ‘devotedly attached’ to Susanna, there was also much anxiety, torment even, and negativity in the relationship. Of the extent of Susanna’s neurosis Le Fanu himself left a record:

She one night thought she saw the curtains of her bed at the side next the door drawn, & the darling old man [her father], dressed in his usual morning suit, holding it aside, stood close to her looking ten or (I think) twelve years younger than when he died, & with his delightful smile of fondness & affection beaming upon her … [he said] ‘There is room in the vault for you, my little Sue.’

After his wife’s death Le Fanu became progressively more withdrawn and painful introspection became habitual. But in spite of these apparent disabilities he continued to write and in 1861 purchased the Dublin University Magazine, in which The House by the Churchyard was serialized in 1861–2. The novel – long and rambling, with several romantic sub-plots interspersed with supernatural incidents – drew on his childhood memories of Chapelizod, the Phoenix Park, and the Royal Hibernian Military School. It was one of M.R. James’s favourite books (he once said that he’d lost count of how many times he had read it), and James left an interesting account of a visit he made to Chapelizod in 1927:

The only excursion I made was to Chapelizod to see the House by the Churchyard, which is quite unmistakable. The big factory of which Le Fanu speaks, on the site of the old Barracks, is just across the road. There are some other sizeable houses & gardens, but none that I could really identify with the Tyled [sic] House or the King’s House, etc.

The church etc. are on the right of the road as you come from Dublin, and the Phoenix Park slopes up from the wall of the churchyard, which is not very big. The river of course on the left of the road.[9]

The references here are to the nostalgic passages in Le Fanu’s opening chapter:

As for the barracks of the Royal Irish Artillery, the great gate leading into the parade ground, by the river side, and all that, I believe the earth, or rather that grim giant factory, which is now the grand feature and centre of Chapelizod, throbbing all over with steam, and whizzing with wheels, and vomiting pitchy smoke, has swallowed them all up.

The House by the Churchyard contains what S.M. Ellis considered to be ‘the most terrifying ghost story in the language’. Ellis’s verdict may be open to argument, but chapter ix, entitled ‘An Authentic Narrative of the Ghost of a Hand’, certainly illustrates Le Fanu’s ability to convey terror through a controlled and economic style that heightens the loathsomeness of the supernatural intruder:

He drew the curtain at the side of the bed, and saw Mrs Prosser lying, as for a few seconds he mortally feared, dead, her face being motionless, white, and covered with a cold dew; and on the pillow, close beside her head, and just within the curtains, was the same white, fattish hand, the wrist resting on the pillow, and the fingers extended towards her temple with a slow wavy motion.

In the context of Le Fanu’s life, this incident – which is completely irrelevant to the plot, such as it is, of The House by the Churchyard – brings to mind Susanna Le Fanu’s disturbing dream of her dead father; and later, in Uncle Silas, Maud Ruthyn is troubled by a vision of her dead father’s face – ‘sometimes white and sharp as ivory, sometimes strangely transparent like glass, sometimes hanging in cadaverous folds, always with the same unnatural expression of diabolical fury’. These correlations with actual personal trauma should remind us that Le Fanu was not a mere ‘sensationalist’ writing only for effect. His fascination – or even obsession – with the supernatural and the macabre coincided with embedded psychological characteristics, with dimensions of his nature that were linked to emotional disturbance and guilt.

After its serialization The House by the Churchyard was published in three volumes by Le Fanu himself: five hundred copies were sold to the London publisher William Tinsley, who issued the work in a new binding in 1863. Le Fanu then contracted with Richard Bentley for what became Wylder’s Hand, written to Bentley’s specifications and squarely in a recognizably ‘sensationalist’ style. What is generally regarded as Le Fanu’s masterpiece, Uncle Silas, appeared in 1864. His nephew, T.P. Le Fanu, suggested that the character of Austin Ruthyn was a sketch of the author himself: ‘It was a peculiar figure, strongly made, thick-set, with a face large, and very stern; he wore a loose, black velvet coat and waistcoat … he married, and his beautiful young wife died … he had left the Church of England for some odd sect … and ultimately became a Swedenborgian.’

Though Susanna’s death had encouraged Le Fanu’s naturally reclusive habits, and though he became known in Dublin as the ‘Invisible Prince’, he continued to keep in touch to a degree with the literary and political life of the city. Nor did the loss of his wife affect his writing output. After the purchase of the DUM in July 1861 he produced a succession of serialized novels for the magazine: The House by the Churchyard (1861–2), Wylder’s Hand (1863–4), Uncle Silas (1864), Guy Deverell (1865), All in the Dark (1866), The Tenants of Malory (1867), Haunted Lives (1868), and The Wyvern Mystery (1869). But the influence of the DUM on the reading public was not sufficient to place Le Fanu’s career as a novelist on a higher and more secure footing and his attempts to have his novels serialized in other magazines were unsuccessful. So in 1869 he sold the DUM to a London printer, Charles Adams, for £1,500.

In the last twelve years of his life Le Fanu wrote eleven full-length novels, in addition to publishing two collections of tales (Chronicles of Golden Friars, 3 vols., 1871, and In a Glass Darkly, 3 vols., 1872) and a mass of journalism. At the same time the biographical record is virtually silent. The late novels contain much bad writing, whereas amongst the short stories of the 1860s are some of Le Fanu’s best – including ‘Wicked Captain Walshawe, of Wauling’ (1864) and ‘Squire Toby’s Will’ (1868).

With the sale of the DUM to Adams, Le Fanu’s links with the cultural and social world of Dublin were effectively severed: his world in fact was now bounded by the walls of the memory-filled house in Merrion Square. Brinsley Le Fanu gave S.M. Ellis the following celebrated account of his father’s solitary working habits in these last years:

He wrote mostly in bed at night, using copy-books for his manuscript. He always had two candles by his side on a small table; one of these dimly glimming tapers would be left burning while he took a brief sleep. Then, when he awoke about 2 a.m. amid the darkling shadows of the heavy furnishings and hangings of his old-fashioned room, he would brew himself some strong tea – which he drank copiously and frequently throughout the day – and write for a couple of hours in that eerie period of the night when human vitality is at its lowest ebb.[10]

At the end of January 1873 Le Fanu suffered an attack of bronchitis, though by the 31st he appeared to be recovering. He died on 7 February and was buried four days later in the Mount Jerome cemetery, in the Bennett tomb that contained his beloved Susan. His daughter Emma, in a letter to Lord Dufferin, remarked: ‘He lived only for us, and his life was a most troubled one.’

With J.S. Le Fanu a new type of ghost appeared in English supernatural fiction. From ‘Schalken the Painter’ onwards Le Fanu created new ways of describing violations of the mundane by the supernatural that utilized suggestion, obliquity, and what Jack Sullivan called ‘anti-Gothic restraint’.[11] Gone are the sheeted spooks rattling rusty chains and the peripatetic headless ladies that infest late eighteenth-century Gothic fiction. In their place Le Fanu conjured up ‘real ghosts who stubbornly refused to confine themselves to the shabby psyches of aristocratic neurotics, yet somehow managed to emerge from within as well as invade from without’.[12] Le Fanu was the first writer to explore the psychological dimensions of the ghost story; at the same time he was adept at invoking the physical presence of supernatural malevolence. The range of his supernatural fiction is described by E.F. Bleiler;

He wrote stories of folkloristic themes, in which the fairy lore of his Ireland was transformed into stories of quaint menace and sometimes rough humour; he also wrote sombre fate-stories, tales of supernatural vengeance for past injuries … there are also strangely involuted tales in which the universe is a vast living machine that parallels the human mind … Best of all are his highly personal stories of tortuous psychologies, of remarkable guilts and their hypostarization, of strange states of consciousness and unconsciousness, where the boundaries of the fanciful and the real swirl away in a mist of pain and terror.[13]

Above all, Le Fanu established what we can now judge to be the correct and most effective narrational mode for ghost fiction, a descriptive method in which precision and ambivalence are held in balance by the voice of a detached narrator. This potent blend of objective reportage and careful manipulation of the reader’s responses is characteristic of Le Fanu’s style at its best. Take this passage from ‘Schalken the Painter’ describing the horrendous Vanderhausen, a passage that juxtaposes half-glimpses and indirection with images of terrible clarity:

A quantity of grizzled hair descended in long tresses from his head, and rested upon the plaits of a stiff ruff, which effectually concealed his neck. So far all was well; but the face! – all the flesh was coloured with the bluish leaden hue, which is sometimes produced by metallic medicines, administered in excessive quantities; the eyes showed 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 the mouths of the Ballyfermot schoolboys water, glowed undisturbed in the morning sunbeams, and secure in the mysterious tutelage of the night, smiled coyly on their predatory longings. And this was no fanciful reserve and avoidance. Mick Daly, when he had the orchard, used to sleep in the loft over the kitchen; and he swore that within five or six weeks, while he lodged there, he twice saw the same thing, and that was a lady in a hood and a loose dress, her head drooping, and her finger on her lip, walking in silence among the crooked stems, with a little child by the hand, who ran smiling and skipping beside her. And the Widow Cresswell once met them at night-fall on the path through the orchard to the back-door, and she did not know what it was until she saw the men looking at one another as she told it.

‘It’s often she told it to me,’ said old Sally; ‘and how she came on them all of a sudden at the turn of the path, just by the thick clump of alder trees; and how she stopped, thinking it was some lady that had a right to be there; and how they went by as swift as the shadow of a cloud, though she only seemed to be walking slow enough, and the little child pulling by her arm, this way and that way, and took no notice of her, nor even raised her head, though she stopped and curtsied. And old Clinton, don’t you remember old Clinton, Miss Lilly?’

‘I think I do, the old man who limped, and wore the odd black wig?’

‘Yes, indeed, acushla, so he did. See how well she remembers? That was by a kick of one of the earl’s horses – he was groom then,’ resumed Sally. ‘He used to be troubled with hearing the very sounds his master used to make to bring him and old Oliver to the door, when he came back late. It was only on very dark nights when there was no moon. They used to hear, all on a sudden, the whimpering and scraping of dogs at the hall-door, and the sound of the whistle, and the light stroke across the window with the lash of the whip, just like as if the earl himself – may his poor soul find rest – was there. First the wind ’id stop, like you’d be holding your breath, then came these sounds they knew so well, and when they made no sign of stirring or opening the door, the wind ’id begin again with such a hoo-hoo-o-o-high, you’d think it was laughing, and crying, and hooting, all at once.’

Here old Sally resumed her knitting, suspended for a moment, as if she were listening to the wind outside the haunted precincts of the Tiled House, and she took up her parable again.

‘The very night he met his death in London, old Oliver, the butler, was listening to Clinton – for Clinton was a scholar – reading the letter that came to him through the post that day, telling him to get things ready, for his troubles were nearly over, and he expected to be with them again in a few days, and maybe almost as soon as the letter; and sure enough, while he was reading, there came a frightful rattle to the window, like some one all in a tremble, trying to shake it open, and the earl’s voice, as they both conceited, cries from the outside, “Let me in, let me in, let me in!” “It’s him,” says the butler. “’Tis so, bedad,” says Clinton, and they both looked at the windy, and at one another – and then back again – overjoyed and frightened all at onst. Old Oliver was bad with the rheumatiz in his knee, and went lame like. So away goes Clinton to the hall-door, and he calls, who’s there? and no answer. Maybe, says Clinton, to himself, ’tis what he’s rid round to the back-door; so to the back-door with him, and there he shouts again – and no answer, and not a sound outside – and he began to feel quare, and to the hall-door with him back again. “Who’s there? do you hear, who’s there?” he shouts, and receiving no answer still. “I’ll open the door at any rate,” says he, “maybe it’s what he’s made his escape,” for they knew all about his troubles, “and wants to get in without noise,” so praying all the time – for his mind misgave him, it might not be all right – he shifts the bars and unlocks the door; but neither man, woman, nor child, nor horse, nor any living shape, was standing there, only something or another slipt into the house close by his leg; it might be a dog, or something that way, he could not tell, for he only seen it for a moment with the corner of his eye, and it went in just like as if it belonged to the place. He could not see which way it went, up or down, but the house was never a happy one, or a quiet house after; and Clinton bangs the hall-door, and he took a sort of a turn and a thrembling, and back with him to Oliver, the butler, looking as white as the blank leaf of his master’s letter that was flutering between his finger and thumb. “What is it? what is it?” says the butler, catching his crutch like a waypon, fastening his eyes on Clinton’s white face, and growing almost as pale himself. “The master’s dead,” says Clinton – and so he was, signs on it.

‘After the turn she got by what she seen in the orchard, when she came to know the truth of what it was, Jinny Cresswell, you may be sure, did not stay there any longer than she could help; and she began to take notice of things she did not mind before – such as when she went into the big bedroom over the hall that the lord used to sleep in, whenever she went in at one door the other door used to be pulled to very quick, as if some one avoiding her was getting out in haste; but the thing that frightened her most was just this – that sometimes she used to find a long, straight mark from the head to the foot of her bed, as if ’twas made by something heavy lying there, and the place where it was used to feel warm, as if – whoever it was – they only left it as she came into the room.

‘But the worst of all was poor Kitty Halpin, the young woman that died of what she seen. Her mother said it was how she was kept awake all the night with the walking about of some one in the next room, tumbling about boxes and pulling open drawers and talking and sighing to himself, and she, poor thing, wishing to go to sleep and wondering who it could be, when in he comes, a fine man, in a sort of loose silk morning-dress an’ no wig, but a velvet cap on, and to the windy with him quiet and aisy, and she makes a turn in the bed to let him know there was some one there, thinking he’d go away, but instead of that, over he comes to the side of the bed, looking very bad, and says something to her – but his speech was thick and queer, like a dummy’s that ’id be trying to spake – and she grew very frightened, and says she, “I ask your honour’s pardon, sir, but I can’t hear you right,” and with that he stretches up his neck high out of his cravat, turning his face up towards the ceiling, and – grace between us and harm! – his throat was cut across like another mouth, wide open, laughing at her; she seen no more, but dropped in a dead faint in the bed, and back to her mother with her in the morning, and she never swallied bit or sup more, only she just sat by the fire holding her mother’s hand, crying and trembling, and peepin’ over her shoulder, and starting with every sound, till she took the fever and died, poor thing, not five weeks after.’—

And so on, and on, and on flowed the stream of old Sally’s narrative, while Lilias dropped into a dreamless sleep, and then the story-teller stole away to her own tidy bedroom and innocent slumbers.

II

I’m sure she believed every word she related, for old Sally was veracious. But all this was worth just so much as such talk commonly is – marvels, fabulae, what our ancestors call winter’s tales – which gathered details from every narrator and dilated in the act of narration. Still it was not quite for nothing that the house was held to be haunted. Under all this smoke there smouldered just a little spark of truth – an authenticated mystery, for the solution of which some of my readers may possibly suggest a theory, though I confess I can’t.

Miss Rebecca Chattesworth, in a letter dated late in the autumn of 1753, gives a minute and curious relation of occurrences in the Tiled House, which, it is plain, although at starting she protests against all such fooleries, she has heard with a peculiar sort of interest, and relates it certainly with an awful sort of particularity.

I was for printing the entire letter, which is really very singular as well as characteristic. But my publisher meets me with his veto; and I believe he is right. The worthy old lady’s letter is, perhaps, too long; and I must rest content with a few hungry notes of its tenor.

That year, and somewhere about the 24th October, there broke out a strange dispute between Mr Alderman Harper, of High-street, Dublin, and my Lord Castlemallard, who, in virtue of his cousinship to the young heir’s mother, had undertaken for him the management of the tiny estate on which the Tiled or Tyled House – for I find it spelt both ways – stood.

This Alderman Harper had agreed for a lease of the house for his daughter, who was married to a gentleman named Prosser. He furnished it and put up hangings, and otherwise went to considerable expense. Mr and Mrs Prosser came there some time in June, and after having parted with a good many servants in the interval, she made up her mind that she could not live in the house, and her father waited on Lord Castlemallard and told him plainly that he would not take out the lease because the house was subjected to annoyances which he could not explain. In plain terms, he said it was haunted, and that no servants would live there more than a few weeks, and that after what his son-in-law’s family had suffered there, not only should he be excused from taking a lease of it, but that the house itself ought to be pulled down as a nuisance and the habitual haunt of something worse than human malefactors.

Lord Castlemallard filed a bill in the Equity side of Exchequer to compel Mr Alderman Harper to perform his contract, by taking out the lease. But the alderman drew an answer, supported by no less than seven long affidavits, copies of all which were furnished to his lordship, and with the desired effect; for rather than compel him to place them upon the file of the court, his lordship struck, and consented to release him.

I am sorry the cause did not proceed at least far enough to place upon the records of the court the very authentic and unaccountable story which Miss Rebecca relates.

The annoyances described did not begin till the end of August, when, one evening, Mrs Prosser, quite alone, was sitting in the twilight at the back parlour window, which was open, looking out into the orchard, and plainly saw a hand stealthily placed upon the stone windowsill outside, as if by some one beneath the window, at her right side, intending to climb up. There was nothing but the hand, which was rather short, but handsomely formed, and white and plump, laid on the edge of the windowsill; and it was not a very young hand, but one aged, somewhere above forty, as she conjectured. It was only a few weeks before that the horrible robbery at Clondalkin had taken place, and the lady fancied that the hand was that of one of the miscreants who was now about to scale the windows of the Tiled House. She uttered a loud scream and an ejaculation of terror, and at the same moment the hand was quietly withdrawn.

Search was made in the orchard, but there were no indications of any person’s having been under the window, beneath which, ranged along the wall, stood a great column of flower-pots, which it seemed must have prevented any one’s coming within reach of it.

The same night there came a hasty tapping, every now and then, at the window of the kitchen. The women grew frightened, and the servant-man, taking fire-arms with him, opened the back-door, but discovered nothing. As he shut it, however, he said ‘a thump came on it’, and a pressure as of somebody striving to force his way in, which frightened him; and though the tapping went on upon the kitchen window-panes, he made no further explorations.

About six o’clock on Saturday evening, the cook, ‘an honest, sober woman, now aged nigh sixty years’, being alone in the kitchen, saw, on looking up, it is supposed, the same fat but aristocratic-looking hand laid with its palm against the glass, near the side of the window, and this time moving slowly up and down, pressed all the while against the glass, as if feeling carefully for some inequality in its surface. She cried out, and said something like a prayer, on seeing it. But it was not withdrawn for several seconds after.

After this, for a great many nights, there came at first a low, and afterwards an angry rapping, as it seemed with a set of clenched knuckles, at the back-door. And the servant-man would not open it, but called to know who was there; and there came no answer, only a sound as if the palm of the hand was placed against it, and drawn slowly from side to side, with a sort of soft, groping motion.

All this time, sitting in the back parlour, which, for the time, they used as a drawing-room, Mr and Mrs Prosser were disturbed by rappings at the window, sometimes very low and furtive, like a clandestine signal, and at others sudden and so loud as to threaten the breaking of the pane.

This was all at the back of the house, which looked upon the orchard, as you know. But on a Tuesday night, at about half-past nine, there came precisely the same rapping at the hall-door, and went on, to the great annoyance of the master and terror of his wife, at intervals, for nearly two hours.

After this, for several days and nights, they had no annoyance whatsoever, and began to think that the nuisance had expended itself. But on the night of the 13th September, Jane Easterbrook, an English maid, having gone into the pantry for the small silver bowl in which her mistress’s posset was served, happening to look up at the little window of only four panes, observed through an auger-hole which was drilled through the window-frame, for the admission of a bolt to secure the shutter, a white pudgy finger – first the tip, and then the two first joints introduced, and turned about this way and that, crooked against the inside, as if in search of a fastening which its owner designed to push aside. When the maid got back into the kitchen, we are told ‘she fell into “A swounde”, and was all the next day very weak.’

Mr Prosser being, I’ve heard, a hard-headed and conceited sort of fellow, scouted the ghost, and sneered at the fears of his family. He was privately of opinion that the whole affair was a practical joke or a fraud, and waited an opportunity of catching the rogue flagrante delicto. He did not long keep this theory to himself, but let it out by degrees with no stint of oaths and threats, believing that some domestic traitor held the thread of the conspiracy.

Indeed it was time something were done; for not only his servants, but good Mrs Prosser herself, had grown to look unhappy and anxious, and kept at home from the hour of sunset, and would not venture about the house after nightfall, except in couples.

The knocking had ceased for about a week; and one night, Mrs Prosser being in the nursery, her husband, who was in the parlour, heard it begin very softly at the hall-door. The air was quite still, which favoured his hearing distinction. This was the first time there had been any disturbance at that side of the house, and the character of the summons also was changed.

Mr Prosser, leaving the parlour door open, it seems, went quietly into the hall. The sound was that of beating on the outside of the stout door, softly and regularly, ‘with the flat of the hand’. He was going to open it suddenly, but changed his mind; and went back very quietly, and on to the head of the kitchen stair, where was a ‘strong closet’ over the pantry, in which he kept his ‘fire-arms, swords, and canes’.

Here he called his man-servant, whom he believed to be honest; and with a pair of loaded pistols in his own coat-pockets, and giving another pair to him, he went as lightly as he could, followed by the man, and with a stout walking-cane in his hand, forward to the door.

Every thing went as Mr Prosser wished. The besieger of his house, so far from taking fright at their approach, grew more impatient; and the sort of patting which had roused his attention at first, assumed the rhythm and emphasis of a series of double-knocks.

Mr Prosser, angry, opened the door with his right arm across, cane in hand. Looking, he saw nothing; but his arm was jerked up oddly, as it might be with the hollow of a hand, and something passed under it, with a kind of gentle squeeze. The Servant neither saw nor felt any thing, and did not know why his master looked back so hastily, and shut the door with so sudden a slam.

From that time, Mr Prosser discontinued his angry talk and swearing about it, and seemed nearly as averse from the subject as the rest of his family. He grew, in fact, very uncomfortable, feeling an inward persuasion that when, in answer to the summons, he had opened the hall-door, he had actually given admission to the besieger.

He said nothing to Mrs Prosser, but went up earlier to his bedroom where ‘he read a while in his Bible, and said his prayers:’ I hope the particular relation of this circumstance does not indicate its singularity. He lay awake a good while, it appears; and as he supposed, about a quarter past twelve, he heard the soft palm of a hand patting on the outside of the bedroom door, and then brushed slowly along it.

Up bounced Mr Prosser, very much frightened, and locked the door, crying, ‘Who’s there?’ but receiving no answer but the same brushing sound of a soft hand drawn over the panels, which he knew only too well.

In the morning the housemaid was terrified by the impression of a hand in the dust of the ‘little parlour’ table, where they had been unpacking delft and other things the day before. The print of the naked foot in the sea-sand did not frighten Robinson Crusoe half so much. They were by this time all nervous, and some of them half crazed, about the hand.

Mr Prosser went to examine the mark, and made light of it, but, as he swore afterwards, rather to quiet his servants than from any comfortable feeling about it in his own mind; however, he had them all, one by one, into the room, and made each place his or her hand, palm downward, on the same table, thus taking a similar impression from every person in the house, including himself and his wife; and his ‘affidavit’ deposed that the formation of the hand so impressed differed altogether from those of the living inhabitants of the house and corresponded exactly with that of the hand seen by Mrs Prosser and by the cook.

Whoever or whatever the owner of that hand might be, they all felt this subtle demonstration to mean that it was declared he was no longer out of doors, but had established himself in the house.

And now Mrs Prosser began to be troubled with strange and horrible dreams, some of which, as set out in detail, in Aunt Rebecca’s long letter, are really very appalling nightmares. But one night, as Mr Prosser closed his bedchamber door, he was struck somewhat by the utter silence of the room, there being no sound of breathing, which seemed unaccountable to him, as he knew his wife was in bed, and his ears were particularly sharp.

There was a candle burning on a small table at the foot of the bed, besides the one he held in one hand, a heavy leger connected with his father-in-law’s business being under his arm. He drew the curtain at the side of the bed, and saw Mrs Prosser lying, as for a few seconds he mortally feared, dead, her face being motionless, white, and covered with a cold dew; and on the pillow, close beside her head, and just within the curtains, was the same white, fattish hand, the wrist resting on the pillow, and the fingers extended towards her temple with a slow, wavy motion.

Mr Prosser, with a horrified jerk, pitched the leger right at the curtains behind which the owner of the hand might be supposed to stand. The hand was instantaneously and smoothly snatched away, the curtains made a great wave, and Mr Prosser got round the bed in time to see the closet-door, which was at the other side, drawn close by the same white, puffy hand, as he believed.

He drew the door open with a fling, and stared in; but the closet was empty, except for the clothes hanging from the pegs on the wall, and the dressing-table and looking-glass facing the windows. He shut it sharply, and locked it, and felt for a minute, he says, ‘as if he were like to lose his wits’; then, ringing at the bell, he brought the servants, and with much ado they recovered Mrs Prosser from a sort of ‘trance’, in which, he says, from her looks, she seemed to have suffered ‘the pains of death’; and Aunt Rebecca adds, ‘from what she told me of her visions, with her own lips, he might have added “and of hell also”’.

But the occurrence which seems to have determined the crisis was the strange sickness of their eldest child, a little girl aged between two and three years. It lay awake, seemingly in paroxysms of terror, and the doctors who were called in set down the symptoms to incipient water on the brain. Mrs Prosser used to sit up with the nurse, by the nursery fire, much troubled in mind about the condition of her child.

Its bed was placed sideways along the wall, with its head against the door of a press or cupboard, which, however, did not shut quite close. There was a little valance, about a foot deep, round the top of the child’s bed, and this descended within some ten or twelve inches of the pillow on which it lay.

They observed that the little creature was quieter whenever they took it up and held it on their laps. They had just replaced it, as it seemed to have grown quite sleepy and tranquil, but it was not five minutes in its bed when it began to scream in one of its frenzies of terror; at the same moment the nurse for the first time detected, and Mrs Prosser equally plainly saw, following the direction of her eyes, the real cause of the child’s sufferings.

Protruding through the aperture of the press, and shrouded in the shade of the valance, they plainly saw the white fat hand, palm downwards, presented towards the head of the child. The mother uttered a scream, and snatched the child from its little bed, and she and the nurse ran down to the lady’s sleeping-room, where Mr Prosser was in bed, shutting the door as they entered; and they had hardly done so, when a gentle tap came to it from the outside.

There is a great deal more, but this will suffice. The singularity of the narrative seems to me to be this, that it describes the ghost of a hand, and no more. The person to whom that hand belonged never once appeared; nor was it a hand separated from a body, but only a hand so manifested and introduced, that its owner was always, by some crafty accident, hidden from view.

In the year 1819, at a college breakfast, I met a Mr Prosser – a thin, grave, but rather chatty old gentleman, with very white hair, drawn back into a pigtail – and he told us all, with a concise particularity, a story of his cousin, James Prosser, who, when an infant, had slept for some time in what his mother said was a haunted nursery in an old house near Chapelizod, and who, whenever he was ill, overfatigued, or in anywise feverish, suffered all through his life, as he had done from a time he could scarce remember, from a vision of a certain gentleman, fat and pale, every curl of whose wig, every button and fold of whose laced clothes, and every feature and line of whose sensual, malignant, and unwholesome face, was as minutely engraven upon his memory as the dress and lineaments of his father’s portrait, which hung before him every day at breakfast, dinner, and supper.

Mr Prosser mentioned this as an instance of a curiously monotonous, individualized, and persistent nightmare, and hinted the extreme horror and anxiety with which his cousin, of whom he spoke in the past tense as ‘poor Jemmie’, was at any time induced to mention it.

I hope the reader will pardon me for loitering so long in the Tiled House, but this sort of lore has always had a charm for me; and people, you know, especially old people, will talk of what most interests themselves, too often forgetting that others may have had more than enough of it.