The Collected Supernatural and Weird Fiction of Sabine Baring-Gould Read online

  “I can’t see, and I can’t hear,” she went on, “except just a little scrap o’ light which I take to be a link. I gets blinder and ever blinder, till in time I shall look into the sun and see only blackness and darkness forever. I gets deafer and deafer, but I can hear the bells still. I can also feel a little with my skin, but not much. I’ve one tooth remains in my head, and I hang on by that. I drive it into the oak beam, and cling around the beam wi’ my arms, and strike my nails in too, and so I hold fast. But I knowed very well that the wood were rotten; I knowed it by a sort of instink, and so I’ve a-comed down today. I reckon my hair be all failed off now: I can’t tell by the feel, my hands be that numb wi’ clinging that the feeling be most gone from them. But you can see for yourself.”

  She put her hand to her head and thrust back a leathery hood that had covered it. The little skull was bald. I opened the door of my lanthorn and took out the candle to inspect her better. The head was as if cut out of a thornstick. Only at the back at the junction with the neck was a little frizzle of ragged white hair. I observed as she moved that her neck creased like old hide that threatened to crack at the creases. The flexibility was gone from it.

  “Hold the candle before my eyes,” she said; “I like the light. I can feel it shining through my dull eyes down into my stomick. What be your name, now?”

  “George Rosedhu.” I yelled my name into her ear,

  “Ah, George! George!” exclaimed old Margery, “you put off and off too long. You should have married when the fancy first took you. Now it be too late; we be shrumped up (dried up) like old apples.”

  What could this extraordinary creature mean?

  “Ah, George! George” she went on, “that were a cruel, unkind act of yours, keeping company with me so long, and then giving me the slip after all. Do you mind how we used to meet here of Sundays, and how on the windy days you helped me up the rock, and on windy and rainy days you wrapped your cloak round the both of us, and how, when the days were foggy, we used to lose our way in the mist, and never were able to find the church door till the service were over? And do you recall how one day you took me round to the west end of the church, after service, where we could stand at the edge of the rock, wi’ our backs to the tower, and you said you wanted to point out Kit Hill to me—”

  I sprang forward and put my hand over her mouth.

  “Good heavens!” I exclaimed. “Will you drive me mad? What do you mean? Who are you?”

  She went on, when I withdrew my hand. “Ah, George, George, you knew there was not much to be got with me. There were my brothers and a swarm of little ones coming on, and so you left me out in the cold, and took up with Mary Cake, of Wringworthy, who was twenty years older than me. You said I were too young; and now Mary Cake, that became Mary Rosedhu be dead and mouldered these hundreds of years, and I—I be alive and old enough even for a Rosedhu.”

  Then the old creature began to laugh, but stopped with a short scream. “I must not do it. I dare not laugh. I be too old, and I shall crack my sides and tear my skin. Then what is cracked bides cracked, and what is tore bides tore.”

  What did the creature mean by her allusion to Mary Cake? That was my great, great—I’m afraid to say how many times removed—grandmother. She died about two hundred years ago. She brought an addition to the property of fifty-three acres, which I now possess. I have the marriage settlements in the iron deeds-chest under my bed, the date 1605.

  ‘‘Well, well,” the little old woman went on, “we all make mistakes. Life is but a string of them. Coming into the world is the first; courting, marrying, everything in succession is a mistake. You, George, made a mistake in taking Mary Cake instead of me. Her led you a cruel, sour life to my thinking. Her had a vixenish temper as would worry any man, out of conceit with life. I, on the other hand, was all lightsomeness and fun. You knew that; but what cared you for a pretty face and a sunny temper alongside of a few acres of moorland? You Rosedhus are a calkelating familv. and you reckon up everything wi’ a bit o’ chalk on the table.

  ‘‘I hadn’t the land that Mary brought, but I’d youth and energy and a cheerful disposition. But, Rosedhus, you are all afraid of long families, and are a grasping and a keeping set. You always marry late in life, and oldish women, lest a lot of children should eat the property as mice eat cheese. It be a mistake, a gashly error. But there, now, I won’t aggravate you. Now tell me this: How come you alive at this time? I thought you’d been dead these two hundred and fifty years. Can’t you find your rest no more nor I? Did you also pray that you might never die?”

  I could not answer. I have no imagination, and I was unable to follow her, mixing up the past and the present in such an unaccountable manner. As far as I could understand, she confused me with a remote ancestor of the same name who died in 1623. That was the George Rosedhu who married Mary Cake, of Wringworthy, in 1605.

  “I made my mistake when I prayed for life,” said the old woman. “I was so joyous and fond of life and full of giddiness that I used to pray every Sunday when I came to church, and every evening when I said my Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, that I might never die. I were also mortal afraid of death. The graves here be digged out of the living stone, and be full of water afore the coffins be splashed into them, and the corpses don’t moulder; they sop away and go off the bones just as if they was boiled to rags. That terrified me, so I always prayed for one only thing, that I might never die, and my prayer hev been heard and answered. I cannot die, but I can grow older and more decrepit and dried, for I never considered to pray that I might always bide young.

  ‘‘So you see, even when we pray, we make mistakes. Now I cannot die. I get older and older, and shrump (wither) up more and more, and get drier, and blinder, and deafer. I can no longer taste, and I cannot smell, and I can hardly feel. I have no pleasure in life at all now, and the only feeling in me is fear—fear lest I should get broke or tore, for I be past mending; if I be broke or tore I must so bide to the end of time. On a very hot day, when the sun shines, I seem to have a sort o’ a sense of warmth, and the frost must cake me up in ice before I knows I’m cold. I reckon in another hundred years my tongue will have dried up, and then I sha’n’t be able to talk no more; but that is the last organ to go in a woman, as her temper is the first; her mind may go, her teeth may go, her sight may go, her hearing may go—but her tongue dies hard.

  “In another hundred years I shall not be able to feel the streak of midsummer sun that falls on my back, nor the winter icicle that hangs from my nose. I sit bunched up on a beam above the bells, and hold on with a tooth drove fast into the wood right home to the gum, and my nails hev grown till they go round the beam I clutch. The dry rot has got into the wood, and it be turned to powder, so that the crust has given way and I’ve sunk into the dust and mildew.

  “You must put me away where I can be safe for another two or three hundred years, out o’ the way of dogs, and rats, and boys. Dogs would tear my skin, and rats gnaw holes in me, and boys pelt me wi’ stones and break my bones. What is broke is broke, and what is tore is tore—I be past all healing. I were put up in the belfry above the bells as the place where I might be safest, but now that the rafters and joists be rotten and falling about me, it b’aint safe no more.”

  She ceased, and sat blinking at me. The skin of her eyelids was the only part of her that retained any flexibility, and any likeness to human skin in colour and texture. The eyelashes were white like frost needles. I was touched with compassion. As I have already said, I have no intention of disguising or hiding my faults, and I frankly confess that a too great readiness to be moved by a tale or stirred by a spectacle appealing to human sympathy is one of my worst faults. I fear it is ineradicably ingrained in my constitution; I was born with this just as some unfortunates come into the world with the germs of scrofula in their blood and tubercles in their lungs.

  I remembered now to have heard, when a boy, of a certain girl who was said to have been so much in love with life that she had prayed
she might never die, and who, accordingly, was doomed to live forever; but I thought that she raced on stormy nights with a white owl hooting before her over the moors in the train of the Black Hunter and the Wisht Hounds. I know my old nurse had told me some such a tale to draw a moral from it of content with what Providence disposes; but it was news to me that this Undying One had been put away to wither up among the bells of Brentor Church. What a wretched existence this poor creature had dragged on!

  My ancestor, who had flirted with her, and then jilted her, had lived over two hundred years ago, and she would be alive, drier and more wretched two hundred years hence, when Margaret and I are fallen to dust, and our lineal descendant in the male line is reigning at Foggaton. My kindly disposition was touched—my heart softened. In a sudden access of pity, I put my arms round the poor old creature, she was as light as a doll, and crooking my finger through the ring of the lanthorn, I said, “I will carry you home, old Margery! You shall feel a Christmas fire, and taste Christmas beef and plum-pudding.”

  She did not understand. I do not think she heard me, but she laid hold of me tenaciously, as she had laid hold of the beam on which she had crouched for two centuries: she drove her single tooth through my coat and waistcoat, even cutting my skin, and her bat-like hands and claws clutched me, the nails going into me like knife-blades, I left the church with her, and carried her home; that is to say, she adhered to me so tenaciously—I might say voraciously—that I had no occasion to use my arms for her support; she was like a knapsack slung on the wrong way, and quite as securely fastened—faster, for a knapsack will oscillate, but old Margery stuck to me as tight as a tick on a dog.

  When I got home I said, “Now, old Margery, shake yourself off and sit by the brave big fire, and I’ll give you something warm to drink that will cheer the cockles of your leathery heart.” But not a bit would she budge. I shouted into her ear, but she could or would not hear. Her tooth, which was driven into my chest like the proboscis of a mosquito, held her fast, and her hands were no more to be unlocked from my arms than the laces of old ivy from an oak. There was nothing for it but for me to sit down in my armchair nursing her.

  The situation was almost grotesque; it was altogether undignified. So I sat on, occasionally expostulating, and always in vain: and I thought I should have next morning to get a man with a knife to slit up my coat and waistcoat behind so as to let the old creature slip off with the garments. But I was saved this annoyance by her tooth gradually being withdrawn and her fingers relaxing. She fell off, and dropped on my knees, and lay there like a sleeping infant after its meal.

  I threw a bunch of gorse on the fire, and it roared up the chimney in a sheet of golden flame, filling the little parlour with light. I was able now to study the face of the little creature on my lap, entirely at my ease. It struck me now that old Margery looked younger than I had taken her to be when I saw her in the belfry. She was a very old woman, indeed, still, but there was a human-like moisture on the leathery skin, which also looked less liable to part at the folds, and there was even a rosy tinge on the lips. I suppose that from holding her so long I was somewhat more able to appreciate her weight. It was not that of a doll stuffed with bran, but of a baby with milk and flesh and blood in it adapted to its age. I thought her also rather larger than I had at first supposed, but that may be because she was now asleep on my knees, and there is a gain of an inch or two in repose, owing to muscular relaxation.

  I put her down very gently on my sofa, and set a chair against the side, lest she should roll off on the floor; then I went in quest of a clothes basket, which I filled with soft pillows. This I set in the ingle nook, and laid old Margery in the maund. I covered her over with an eider-down quilt taken from my own bed, and she seemed very cosy in the extemporised cradle. I did more. I got a Florence flask that had contained sweet oil, and rinsed it well out with a strong solution of soda. When it was quite clean, I filled it with hot strong rum and sugar and water. I wished I could find a flexible india-rubber tube, but I was unprovided with such things. There had been no call for them hitherto, in my house—Hold! there was, though! I recollected that one of the cows after calving had died of milk-fever, and the calf had been brought up by hand. I remembered a vulcanised india-rubber contrivance that had been tried but had not answered, as the calf disliked the taste of the sulphur; I now found this, and with some little ingenuity adapted it to the Florence flask, and then put into the basket beside Margery. I put my finger into her mouth first to encourage her, but she only played with it, and then I inserted between her almost toothless gums the vulcanised india-rubber contrivance—I forget its proper name. I thought it would keep her quiet, but she dragged so hard at it that the tube came out, and all the rum and water ran among the pillows. So I had to take her out again, and dry the cushions before the fire, and make up the bassinet, with fresh pillows. Poor little thing, she slept through it all like an angel.

  All this took me a long time, and gave me great exertion: it called into requisition faculties of the mind and heart that had not been previously exercised. I was very tired; I sat back in my chair and fell asleep. I did not dare to go to bed lest old Margery should wake and want me. When I opened my eyes it was Christmas Day. The clerk was ill, I was churchwarden, and must be at St. Michael de Rupe on that sacred festival to give the good day and the best wishes of the season to all my neighbours—sweet, blooming Margaret Palmer of Quether included. I went upstairs and dressed myself in my Sunday suit, and a blue neck-cloth, and I put on my cairngorm pin with a terrier’s head in it, put some pomatum on my hair—that I always do on Sunday the last thing before going to church—and before I left I drew down the coverlets and looked at old Margery.

  She was sleeping still—bless her! —with her old brown thumb in her mouth. I was uneasy because the nail was so long, I thought it might scratch her palate or irritate the uvula, so I got a pair of scissors and cut it. I felt strangely moved with pity, and with that pity there awoke in me a sort of sense of personal property in old Margery. Also, I presume, because of that, I was aware of some pride in her. I knew that she was wizen and old and hideous, and I knew also, that if any woman had come into my house with her baby in her arms and had asked me to admire it, and then had looked disparagingly at Margery, I should have hated that woman ever after. As it was, that day a child was christened in the church. I looked at its soft pink skin, and went away from the sacred edifice with envy and anger rankling in my heart.

  CHAPTER 2

  I left Foggaton that morning with great reluctance, and all the time of divine service I was thinking far more of old Margery than of young Margaret, as I ought—and I do not mind confessing my fault openly. My seat is a little forward of the Quether pew on the other side. Usually, when standing for the psalms and hymns, I stand sideways, that the light may fall on my book, and I may look over the top at Margaret, who does the same; but as she is on the other side and the window opposite mine, she turns towards me that she may get the light on her print, and so our eyes are always meeting. When the parson is praying to us, I lean forward with my head on the book-board, and let my eyes go diagonally backward; Margaret leans her head in an opposite fashion, and so her eyes go diagonally forward, and our eyes are always meeting in the prayers, as in the psalms.

  During the sermon I am obliged to turn round on my seat, as I am hard of hearing in my right ear, owing to a cricket ball having hit it when I was at Tavistock Grammar School. Margaret always somehow has her bonnet string over her left ear, so she is forced to sit roundabout on her seat and expose the hearing ear to the preacher, and so it always comes about that during the sermon, our eyes are meeting. This Christmas Day it was other with me; I could think of nothing but my poor little old Margery in her bassinet by the fire, and I kept on wondering whether she would wake up in my absence and fret for want of me. Then I had all through the sermon a pricking feeling in my chest—I suppose where her teeth and nails had held so tight—and I was restless and uncomfortable to be back
at Foggaton.

  After service, as I was shaking hands all round, feeling eager to get it over and be off, Farmer Palmer said to me, “Come home to Quether with us, Rosedhu, and eat your Christmas dinner there. We are old friends and hope to be closer friends in time than we are now. I don’t like, nor does Margaret here, to think of you sitting lonely down to your meal on Christmas Day. There is a knife and fork laid ready for you, and I will take no refusal.”

  I made a lame sort of excuse. I said I was unwell.

  “That is true enough,” said Palmer; “you don’t look yourself at all today, and Margaret is uneasy about you. Your face is white, your hand shakes, and you look older by some years than when I last saw you. When was that?”

  “Sunday, father,” said Margaret with a sigh.

  I assured them that I was too indisposed to accept their kind invitation, and I saw that they believed me. Margaret’s brown eyes were fixed anxiously and intently on me. I had been up all night, and much worried, that was why I looked older and unwell, but I only said by way of explanation to Palmer, that I had something “on the nerve,” which covers all kinds of ailments.

  As I walked home every person I passed and spoke to said, “How oldened you are!” or “How ill you look!” or “Why, surely that baint you, Mr. George, looking nigher forty than twenty.”

  I wish Mr. Palmer would not try to thrust Margaret on me. Margaret invites me to dinner. Margaret is concerned at my looks. Margaret remembers when last we met. That is all hyperbole and figure and flower of speech, and means in plain English, I want you to take my eldest daughter off my hands, but I am not going to give more than a trifle with her.

  I never was more pleased than on this occasion when I got home again. I unlocked my parlour door, and ran in and up to the clothes’ basket, and cried in a sort of fond foolish rapture, “Bless it! bless it! O my Beauty!”