"Well, I don't think you mentioned it to me, but it's a rare good idea."
That evening my cook, Timbs, told me he'd be sorry to leave me, but he was afraid he'd find the place too slow for him--not enough doing. Then old Silas informed me that he hadn't meant to retire so early, but he wasn't sure--the place was livelier than he had expected, and there would be more work than he could get through. I asked no questions. I knew the billiard-room was somehow or other at the bottom of it, and so it turned out. In three days' time the workmen were in the house and bricking up the billiard-room door; and after that Timbs and old Silas found the Regency suited them very well after all. And it was not just to oblige Harry, or Timbs, or Silas that I had the alteration made. That unfinished game was in my mind; I had played it, and wanted never to play it again. It was of no use for me to tell myself that it had all been a delusion, for I knew better. My health was good, and I had no delusions. I had played it with Josiah Ham--with the lost soul of Josiah Ham--and that thought filled me not with fear, but with a feeling of sickness and disgust.
It was two years later that I heard the story of Josiah Ham, and it was not from old Mrs Parker. An old tramp came into the saloon bar begging, and Miss Hesketh was giving him the rough side of her tongue.
"Nice treatment!" said the old chap. "Thirty years ago I worked here, and made good money, and was respected, and now it's insults."
And then I struck in. "What did you do here?" I asked.
"Waited at table and marked at billiards."
"Till I resigned from a strange circumstance."
I sent him out of the bar, and took him down the garden, saying I'd find him an hour or two's work. "Now, then," I said, as soon as I had got him alone, "what made you leave?"
He looked at me curiously. "I expect you know, sir," he said. "Sixty-six. Unfinished."
And then he told me of a game played in that old billiard-room on a wet summer afternoon thirty years before. He, the marker, was one of the players. The other man was a commercial traveller, who used the house pretty regularly. "A fat man, ugly-looking, with a nasty laugh. Josiah Ham his name was. He was at sixty-six when he got himself into a tight place. He moved his ball--did it when he thought I wasn't looking. But I saw it in the glass, and I told him of it. He got very angry. He said he wished he might be struck dead if he ever touched the ball."