CHAPTER XI.
SOME TALK ABOUT THE HAUNTED HOUSE—BEING, AS I SUPPOSE, ONLY OLD WOMAN'S
TALES.
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
upon 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, nowadays, who call themselves free-thinkers, and don't believe in anything—even in ghosts,' said Lilias.
'A then the place he's stopping in now, Miss Lily, 'ill soon cure him of
free-thinking, if the half they say about it's true,' answered Sally.
'But I don't say, mind, he's a free-thinker, for I don't know anything
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, sacred, and skulking aspect, as if it had drawn back in shame and guilt under the melancholy old elms among the 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 all 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 there 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 was there for
dogs; for no one, young or old, dared go near the orchard after
night-fall. No, the burnished golden pippins that peeped through the
leaves in the western rays of evening, and made the mouths of the
Ballyfermot school-boys 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.