Knight, you will pay the fares? I am not above travelling second-class.”
I took the tickets accordingly, and entered a carriage that was pretty full of people; for I felt rather shy of my companion.
To beguile the tedium of the journey, I tried to engage him in conversation, but with little success. He appeared to be totally uninterested in politics, and in reply to my remarks on our financial prosperity, said:
“I believe in Billy Pitt, sir. Look at his Sinking Fund. There’s a masterpiece!”
Now, if the man who uttered these words had been eighty years old, I should have regarded him with interest as a harmless old fossil of the past; but here was a young man of five-and-twenty, who invariably spoke of guineas instead of pounds, called the French Emperor Bonaparte, and mentioned Pitt, as if that financier were still living. I could make nothing of him; so I drew out the “Evening Standard,” and plunged into Manhattan’s last letter.
Presently I heard the rustling of paper opposite, and peeping over my own broadsheet, observed that Mr. Batesford was also engaged with a newspaper. I felt anxious to know what journal he patronised, and was surprised to see the name of a well-known daily paper which has recently become extinct. The diminutive size of the sheet also astonished me; it appeared to have shrunk to half its normal bulk. I peeped again; and being an adept at the old schoolboy accomplishment of reading upside down, managed to spell out the date—19th October, 1863.
“To-day’s paper!” thought I; “and yet, certainly, that journal has ceased to exist for months past.” My curiosity was on tiptoe. I determined to have an explanation.
“Mr. Batesford, would you oblige me by exchanging papers?”
“Thank you,” he replied, blandly; “I shall take no interest in yours, and I do not care to part with my own. However, you may just look at it.”
He reversed the sheet, so as to hold the title before my eyes. I had made a slight mistake in my topsy-turvy decipherings. I had added a flourish to a figure where no such flourish existed; for Mr. Batesford’s paper was the “Morning Chronicle” of the 19th October, 1803!”
“Sixty years ago, this very day! I should like to read that paper. It must be quite a curiosity.”
“Wait till we get home,” said Mr. Batesford, smiling, and folding up the newspaper. “Come, here we are at Netherwood. There is your carpet-bag. We will walk across to the Grange, as it is dry under foot.”
Mr. Batesford was probably an Essex man, and connected by Darwinian affiliation with the frogs of his native swamps; for in my opinion it was as damp, greasy, oozy, and slushy a walk as I ever took on a murky, lowering October night. We traversed lanes where the water dripped down our backs from the overhanging hedgerows; we got over stiles which led into clayey footpaths by the side of slow-moving streams; we entered, at last, upon a region of bulrushes, where the chilly water actually gurgled up about my ankles. I endeavoured to keep up a stout heart. I said:
“A. W. Knight, remember that you are a Searcher after Truth; remember, also, that there are a pair of dry shoes and socks in your carpet-bag.”
At length, after three miles of this glutinous journeying, we came out upon a firm high-road. I blessed the memory of Macadam, and strode merrily onwards. Presently we halted in front of a house separated from the road by a small garden.
“Marshland Grange,” observed my companion, breaking a long-continued silence.
I looked up at the house with a sigh of disappointment: it was such an utterly commonplace dwelling. I had pictured Marshland Grange as a rambling old edifice, exhibiting in its wings, gables, and additions, specimens of half-a-dozen architectural eras, and situated far from other human abode in a desolate swamp. In place of this, I beheld a common ten-roomed brown brick box, built evidently about the end of the last century, when picturesqueness was deemed a barbarism, and within hail of half-a-dozen labourers’ cottages.
“This a haunted house?” I asked, half-contemptuously, as Mr. Batesford led the way into the parlour.
“So the neighbours say,” replied my companion.
For some seconds I was unable to tell why he was such a long time striking a light. I then saw that he used a flint, steel, and tinder-box.
“You are singularly old-fashioned,” I remarked. “To be consistent, you should have travelled down from London in the old Essex Highflyer, Mr. Batesford.”
“The railway was more convenient, this evening,” he answered quietly: as much as to say, “On other evenings I should prefer the Highflyer.”
As soon as he had lighted the candle (which, by the way, was a common, guttering, snuff-accumulating dip) I looked round the room. It was desolate enough: several windows were broken, while the furniture consisted of a couple of rickety chairs and a dilapidated deal table.
“Change your boots, Mr. Knight, and then I will show you over the house.”
He took up the candle and preceded me. We went upstairs and downstairs, examining both kitchens and attics. The remainder of the rooms were entirely bare of furniture; and the house was a regular formal up-and-down affair, which might have been situated on the Duke of Bedford’s Bloomsbury estate. There were no gloomy corridors—no deep-sunk unexpected cupboards—no possibility of secret doors or passages. It was damp, mouldy, and depressing, but perfectly commonplace.
“No room for a ghost to hide here,” said I, jocularly.
“It don’t look like it,” observed Mr. Batesford; “still the neighbours say otherwise. Let us return to the parlour, close the shutters, and make ourselves as comfortable as we can till twelve o’clock strikes. That is, I believe, the legitimate hour for ghostly visitants.”
We took our seats in the comfortless apartment,