CHAPTER
I - THE MORTALS IN THE HOUSE
Under
none of the accredited ghostly circumstances, and environed by none of the
conventional ghostly surroundings, did I first make acquaintance with the house
which is the subject of this Christmas piece. I saw it in the daylight, with
the sun upon it. There was no wind, no rain, no lightning, no thunder, no awful
or unwonted circumstance, of any kind, to heighten its effect. More than that:
I had come to it direct from a railway station: it was not more than a mile
distant from the railway station; and, as I stood outside the house, looking back
upon the way I had come, I could see the goods train running smoothly along the
embankment in the valley. I will not say that everything was utterly
commonplace, because I doubt if anything can be that, except to utterly
commonplace people- -and there my vanity steps in; but, I will take it on
myself to say that anybody might see the house as I saw it, any fine autumn
morning.
The manner of my lighting on it was this.
I was travelling towards London out of the
North, intending to stop by the way, to look at the house. My health required a
temporary residence in the country; and a friend of mine who knew that, and who
had happened to drive past the house, had written to me to suggest it as a
likely place. I had got into the train at midnight, and had fallen asleep, and
had woke up and had sat looking out of window at the brilliant Northern Lights
in the sky, and had fallen asleep again, and had woke up again to find the
night gone, with the usual discontented conviction on me that I hadn't been to
sleep at all; -- upon which question, in the first imbecility of that
condition, I am ashamed to believe that I would have done wager by battle with
the man who sat opposite me.
That opposite man had had, through the night -- as
that opposite man always has -- several legs too many, and all of them too
long. In addition to this unreasonable conduct (which was only to be expected
of him), he had had a pencil and a pocket-book, and had been perpetually
listening and taking notes. It had appeared to me that these aggravating notes
related to the jolts and bumps of the carriage, and I should have resigned
myself to his taking them, under a general supposition that he was in the civil-engineering
way of life, if he had not sat staring straight over my head whenever he
listened. He was a goggle-eyed gentleman of a perplexed aspect, and his
demeanour became unbearable.
