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Title: The Haunted Dolls' House
Author: James, Montague Rhodes (1862-1936)
Date of first publication: 1923 (Empire Review); included in
   "A Warning to the Curious, and Other Ghost Stories" (1925)
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   "The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James"
   (New York: Longmans, Green;
   London: Edward Arnold, 1931)
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 27 February 2010
Date last updated: 27 February 2010
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #492

This ebook was produced by:
David T. Jones, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net




THE HAUNTED DOLLS' HOUSE


"I suppose you get stuff of that kind through your hands pretty
often?" said Mr. Dillet, as he pointed with his stick to an object
which shall be described when the time comes: and when he said it, he
lied in his throat, and knew that he lied. Not once in twenty
years--perhaps not once in a lifetime--could Mr. Chittenden, skilled
as he was in ferreting out the forgotten treasures of half a dozen
counties, expect to handle such a specimen. It was collectors'
palaver, and Mr. Chittenden recognized it as such.

"Stuff of that kind, Mr. Dillet! It's a museum piece, that is."

"Well, I suppose there are museums that'll take anything."

"I've seen one, not as good as that, years back," said Mr. Chittenden
thoughtfully. "But that's not likely to come into the market: and I'm
told they 'ave some fine ones of the period over the water. No: I'm
only telling you the truth, Mr. Dillet, when I say that if you was to
place an unlimited order with me for the very best that could be
got--and you know I 'ave facilities for getting to know of such
things, and a reputation to maintain--well, all I can say is, I should
lead you straight up to that one and say, 'I can't do no better for
you than that, sir.'"

"Hear, hear!" said Mr. Dillet, applauding ironically with the end of
his stick on the floor of the shop. "How much are you sticking the
innocent American buyer for it, eh?"

"Oh, I shan't be over hard on the buyer, American or otherwise. You
see, it stands this way, Mr. Dillet--if I knew just a bit more about
the pedigree----"

"Or just a bit less," Mr. Dillet put in.

"Ha, ha! you will have your joke, sir. No, but as I was saying, if I
knew just a little more than what I do about the piece--though anyone
can see for themselves it's a genuine thing, every last corner of it,
and there's not been one of my men allowed to so much as touch it
since it came into the shop--there'd be another figure in the price
I'm asking."

"And what's that: five and twenty?"

"Multiply that by three and you've got it, sir. Seventy-five's my
price."

"And fifty's mine," said Mr. Dillet.

The point of agreement was, of course, somewhere between the two, it
does not matter exactly where--I think sixty guineas. But half an hour
later the object was being packed, and within an hour Mr. Dillet had
called for it in his car and driven away. Mr. Chittenden, holding the
cheque in his hand, saw him off from the door with smiles, and
returned, still smiling, into the parlour where his wife was making
the tea. He stopped at the door.

"It's gone," he said.

"Thank God for that!" said Mrs. Chittenden, putting down the teapot.
"Mr. Dillet, was it?"

"Yes, it was."

"Well, I'd sooner it was him than another."

"Oh, I don't know; he ain't a bad feller, my dear."

"Maybe not, but in my opinion he'd be none the worse for a bit of a
shake up."

"Well, if that's your opinion, it's my opinion he's put himself into
the way of getting one. Anyhow, _we_ shan't have no more of it, and
that's something to be thankful for."

And so Mr. and Mrs. Chittenden sat down to tea.

And what of Mr. Dillet and of his new acquisition? What it was, the
title of this story will have told you. What it was like, I shall have
to indicate as well as I can.

There was only just room enough for it in the car, and Mr. Dillet had
to sit with the driver: he had also to go slow, for though the rooms
of the Dolls' House had all been stuffed carefully with soft
cotton-wool, jolting was to be avoided, in view of the immense number
of small objects which thronged them; and the ten-mile drive was an
anxious time for him, in spite of all the precautions he insisted
upon. At last his front door was reached, and Collins, the butler,
came out.

"Look here, Collins, you must help me with this thing--it's a delicate
job. We must get it out upright, see? It's full of little things that
mustn't be displaced more than we can help. Let's see, where shall we
have it? (After a pause for consideration.) Really, I think I shall
have to put it in my own room, to begin with at any rate. On the big
table--that's it."

It was conveyed--with much talking--to Mr. Dillet's spacious room on
the first floor, looking out on the drive. The sheeting was unwound
from it, and the front thrown open, and for the next hour or two Mr.
Dillet was fully occupied in extracting the padding and setting in
order the contents of the rooms.

When this thoroughly congenial task was finished, I must say that it
would have been difficult to find a more perfect and attractive
specimen of a Dolls' House in Strawberry Hill Gothic than that which
now stood on Mr. Dillet's large kneehole table, lighted up by the
evening sun which came slanting through three tall sash-windows.

It was quite six feet long, including the Chapel or Oratory which
flanked the front on the left as you faced it, and the stable on the
right. The main block of the house was, as I have said, in the Gothic
manner: that is to say, the windows had pointed arches and were
surmounted by what are called ogival hoods, with crockets and finials
such as we see on the canopies of tombs built into church walls. At
the angles were absurd turrets covered with arched panels. The Chapel
had pinnacles and buttresses, and a bell in the turret and coloured
glass in the windows. When the front of the house was open you saw
four large rooms, bedroom, dining-room, drawing-room and kitchen,
each with its appropriate furniture in a very complete state.

The stable on the right was in two storeys, with its proper complement
of horses, coaches and grooms, and with its clock and Gothic cupola
for the clock bell.

Pages, of course, might be written on the outfit of the mansion--how
many frying-pans, how many gilt chairs, what pictures, carpets,
chandeliers, four-posters, table linen, glass, crockery and plate it
possessed; but all this must be left to the imagination. I will only
say that the base or plinth on which the house stood (for it was
fitted with one of some depth which allowed of a flight of steps to
the front door and a terrace, partly balustraded) contained a shallow
drawer or drawers in which were neatly stored sets of embroidered
curtains, changes of raiment for the inmates, and, in short, all the
materials for an infinite series of variations and refittings of the
most absorbing and delightful kind.

"Quintessence of Horace Walpole, that's what it is: he must have had
something to do with the making of it." Such was Mr. Dillet's murmured
reflection as he knelt before it in a reverent ecstasy. "Simply
wonderful! this is my day and no mistake. Five hundred pound coming in
this morning for that cabinet which I never cared about, and now this
tumbling into my hands for a tenth, at the very most, of what it would
fetch in town. Well, well! It almost makes one afraid something'll
happen to counter it. Let's have a look at the population, anyhow."

Accordingly, he set them before him in a row. Again, here is an
opportunity, which some would snatch at, of making an inventory of
costume: I am incapable of it.

There were a gentleman and lady, in blue satin and brocade
respectively. There were two children, a boy and a girl. There was a
cook, a nurse, a footman, and there were the stable servants, two
postilions, a coachman, two grooms.

"Anyone else? Yes, possibly."

The curtains of the four-poster in the bedroom were closely drawn
round all four sides of it, and he put his finger in between them and
felt in the bed. He drew the finger back hastily, for it almost seemed
to him as if something had--not stirred, perhaps, but yielded--in an
odd live way as he pressed it. Then he put back the curtains, which
ran on rods in the proper manner, and extracted from the bed a
white-haired old gentleman in a long linen night-dress and cap, and
laid him down by the rest. The tale was complete.

Dinner-time was now near, so Mr. Dillet spent but five minutes in
putting the lady and children into the drawing-room, the gentleman
into the dining-room, the servants into the kitchen and stables, and
the old man back into his bed. He retired into his dressing-room next
door, and we see and hear no more of him until something like eleven
o'clock at night.

His whim was to sleep surrounded by some of the gems of his
collection. The big room in which we have seen him contained his bed:
bath, wardrobe, and all the appliances of dressing were in a
commodious room adjoining: but his four-poster, which itself was a
valued treasure, stood in the large room where he sometimes wrote, and
often sat, and even received visitors. To-night he repaired to it in a
highly complacent frame of mind.

There was no striking clock within earshot--none on the staircase,
none in the stable, none in the distant church tower. Yet it is
indubitable that Mr. Dillet was startled out of a very pleasant
slumber by a bell tolling One.

He was so much startled that he did not merely lie breathless with
wide-open eyes, but actually sat up in his bed.

He never asked himself, till the morning hours, how it was that,
though there was no light at all in the room, the Dolls' House on the
kneehole table stood out with complete clearness. But it was so. The
effect was that of a bright harvest moon shining full on the front of
a big white stone mansion--a quarter of a mile away it might be, and
yet every detail was photographically sharp. There were trees about
it, too--trees rising behind the chapel and the house. He seemed to be
conscious of the scent of a cool still September night. He thought he
could hear an occasional stamp and clink from the stables, as of
horses stirring. And with another shock he realized that, above the
house, he was looking, not at the wall of his room with its pictures,
but into the profound blue of a night sky.

There were lights, more than one, in the windows, and he quickly saw
that this was no four-roomed house with a movable front, but one of
many rooms, and staircases--a real house, but seen as if through the
wrong end of a telescope. "You mean to show me something," he muttered
to himself, and he gazed earnestly on the lighted windows. They would
in real life have been shuttered or curtained, no doubt, he thought;
but, as it was, there was nothing to intercept his view of what was
being transacted inside the rooms.

Two rooms were lighted--one on the ground floor to the right of the
door, one upstairs, on the left--the first brightly enough, the other
rather dimly. The lower room was the dining-room: a table was laid,
but the meal was over, and only wine and glasses were left on the
table. The man of the blue satin and the woman of the brocade were
alone in the room, and they were talking very earnestly, seated close
together at the table, their elbows on it: every now and again
stopping to listen, as it seemed. Once _he_ rose, came to the window
and opened it and put his head out and his hand to his ear. There was
a lighted taper in a silver candlestick on a sideboard. When the man
left the window he seemed to leave the room also; and the lady, taper
in hand, remained standing and listening. The expression on her face
was that of one striving her utmost to keep down a fear that
threatened to master her--and succeeding. It was a hateful face, too;
broad, flat and sly. Now the man came back and she took some small
thing from him and hurried out of the room. He, too, disappeared, but
only for a moment or two. The front door slowly opened and he stepped
out and stood on the top of the _perron_, looking this way and that;
then turned towards the upper window that was lighted, and shook his
fist.

It was time to look at that upper window. Through it was seen a
four-post bed: a nurse or other servant in an arm-chair, evidently
sound asleep; in the bed an old man lying: awake, and, one would say,
anxious, from the way in which he shifted about and moved his fingers,
beating tunes on the coverlet. Beyond the bed a door opened. Light was
seen on the ceiling, and the lady came in: she set down her candle on
a table, came to the fireside and roused the nurse. In her hand she
had an old-fashioned wine bottle, ready uncorked. The nurse took it,
poured some of the contents into a little silver saucepan, added some
spice and sugar from casters on the table, and set it to warm on the
fire. Meanwhile the old man in the bed beckoned feebly to the lady,
who came to him, smiling, took his wrist as if to feel his pulse, and
bit her lip as if in consternation. He looked at her anxiously, and
then pointed to the window, and spoke. She nodded, and did as the man
below had done; opened the casement and listened--perhaps rather
ostentatiously: then drew in her head and shook it, looking at the
old man, who seemed to sigh.

By this time the posset on the fire was steaming, and the nurse poured
it into a small two-handled silver bowl and brought it to the bedside.
The old man seemed disinclined for it and was waving it away, but the
lady and the nurse together bent over him and evidently pressed it
upon him. He must have yielded, for they supported him into a sitting
position, and put it to his lips. He drank most of it, in several
draughts, and they laid him down. The lady left the room, smiling good
night to him, and took the bowl, the bottle and the silver saucepan
with her. The nurse returned to the chair, and there was an interval
of complete quiet.

Suddenly the old man started up in his bed--and he must have uttered
some cry, for the nurse started out of her chair and made but one step
of it to the bedside. He was a sad and terrible sight--flushed in the
face, almost to blackness, the eyes glaring whitely, both hands
clutching at his heart, foam at his lips.

For a moment the nurse left him, ran to the door, flung it wide open,
and, one supposes, screamed aloud for help, then darted back to the
bed and seemed to try feverishly to soothe him--to lay him
down--anything. But as the lady, her husband, and several servants,
rushed into the room with horrified faces, the old man collapsed under
the nurse's hands and lay back, and the features, contorted with agony
and rage, relaxed slowly into calm.

A few moments later, lights showed out to the left of the house, and a
coach with flambeaux drove up to the door. A white-wigged man in black
got nimbly out and ran up the steps, carrying a small leather
trunk-shaped box. He was met in the doorway by the man and his wife,
she with her handkerchief clutched between her hands, he with a tragic
face, but retaining his self-control. They led the new-comer into the
dining-room, where he set his box of papers on the table, and, turning
to them, listened with a face of consternation at what they had to
tell. He nodded his head again and again, threw out his hands
slightly, declined, it seemed, offers of refreshment and lodging for
the night, and within a few minutes came slowly down the steps,
entering the coach and driving off the way he had come. As the man in
blue watched him from the top of the steps, a smile not pleasant to
see stole slowly over his fat white face. Darkness fell over the whole
scene as the lights of the coach disappeared.

But Mr. Dillet remained sitting up in the bed: he had rightly guessed
that there would be a sequel. The house front glimmered out again
before long. But now there was a difference. The lights were in other
windows, one at the top of the house, the other illuminating the range
of coloured windows of the chapel. How he saw through these is not
quite obvious, but he did. The interior was as carefully furnished as
the rest of the establishment, with its minute red cushions on the
desks, its Gothic stall-canopies, and its western gallery and
pinnacled organ with gold pipes. On the centre of the black and white
pavement was a bier: four tall candles burned at the corners. On the
bier was a coffin covered with a pall of black velvet.

As he looked the folds of the pall stirred. It seemed to rise at one
end: it slid downwards: it fell away, exposing the black coffin with
its silver handles and name-plate. One of the tall candlesticks swayed
and toppled over. Ask no more, but turn, as Mr. Dillet hastily did,
and look in at the lighted window at the top of the house, where a boy
and girl lay in two truckle-beds, and a four-poster for the nurse rose
above them. The nurse was not visible for the moment; but the father
and mother were there, dressed now in mourning, but with very little
sign of mourning in their demeanour. Indeed, they were laughing and
talking with a good deal of animation, sometimes to each other, and
sometimes throwing a remark to one or other of the children, and again
laughing at the answers. Then the father was seen to go on tiptoe out
of the room, taking with him as he went a white garment that hung on a
peg near the door. He shut the door after him. A minute or two later
it was slowly opened again, and a muffled head poked round it. A bent
form of sinister shape stepped across to the truckle-beds, and
suddenly stopped, threw up its arms and revealed, of course, the
father, laughing. The children were in agonies of terror, the boy with
the bedclothes over his head, the girl throwing herself out of bed
into her mother's arms. Attempts at consolation followed--the parents
took the children on their laps, patted them, picked up the white gown
and showed there was no harm in it, and so forth; and at last putting
the children back into bed, left the room with encouraging waves of
the hand. As they left it, the nurse came in, and soon the light died
down.

Still Mr. Dillet watched immovable.

A new sort of light--not of lamp or candle--a pale ugly light, began
to dawn around the door-case at the back of the room. The door was
opening again. The seer does not like to dwell upon what he saw
entering the room: he says it might be described as a frog--the size
of a man--but it had scanty white hair about its head. It was busy
about the truckle-beds, but not for long. The sound of cries--faint,
as if coming out of a vast distance--but, even so, infinitely
appalling, reached the ear.

There were signs of a hideous commotion all over the house: lights
moved along and up, and doors opened and shut, and running figures
passed within the windows. The clock in the stable turret tolled one,
and darkness fell again.

It was only dispelled once more, to show the house front. At the
bottom of the steps dark figures were drawn up in two lines, holding
flaming torches. More dark figures came down the steps, bearing, first
one, then another small coffin. And the lines of torch-bearers with
the coffins between them moved silently onward to the left.

The hours of night passed on--never so slowly, Mr. Dillet thought.
Gradually he sank down from sitting to lying in his bed--but he did
not close an eye: and early next morning he sent for the doctor.

The doctor found him in a disquieting state of nerves, and recommended
sea-air. To a quiet place on the East Coast he accordingly repaired by
easy stages in his car.

One of the first people he met on the sea front was Mr. Chittenden,
who, it appeared, had likewise been advised to take his wife away for
a bit of a change.

Mr. Chittenden looked somewhat askance upon him when they met: and not
without cause.

"Well, I don't wonder at you being a bit upset, Mr. Dillet. What? yes,
well, I might say 'orrible upset, to be sure, seeing what me and my
poor wife went through ourselves. But I put it to you, Mr. Dillet, one
of two things: was I going to scrap a lovely piece like that on the
one 'and, or was I going to tell customers: 'I'm selling you a regular
picture-palace-dramar in reel life of the olden time, billed to
perform regular at one o'clock a.m.'? Why, what would you 'ave said
yourself? And next thing you know, two Justices of the Peace in the
back parlour, and pore Mr. and Mrs. Chittenden off in a spring cart to
the County Asylum and everyone in the street saying, 'Ah, I thought it
'ud come to that. Look at the way the man drank!'--and me next door,
or next door but one, to a total abstainer, as you know. Well, there
was my position. What? Me 'ave it back in the shop? Well, what do
_you_ think? No, but I'll tell you what I will do. You shall have your
money back, bar the ten pound I paid for it, and you make what you
can."

Later in the day, in what is offensively called the "smoke-room" of
the hotel, a murmured conversation between the two went on for some
time.

"How much do you really know about that thing, and where it came
from?"

"Honest, Mr. Dillet, I don't know the 'ouse. Of course, it came out of
the lumber room of a country 'ouse--that anyone could guess. But I'll
go as far as say this, that I believe it's not a hundred miles from
this place. Which direction and how far I've no notion. I'm only
judging by guess-work. The man as I actually paid the cheque to ain't
one of my regular men, and I've lost sight of him; but I 'ave the idea
that this part of the country was his beat, and that's every word I
can tell you. But now, Mr. Dillet, there's one thing that rather
physicks me. That old chap,--I suppose you saw him drive up to the
door--I thought so: now, would he have been the medical man, do you
take it? My wife would have it so, but I stuck to it that was the
lawyer, because he had papers with him, and one he took out was folded
up."

"I agree," said Mr. Dillet. "Thinking it over, I came to the
conclusion that was the old man's will, ready to be signed."

"Just what I thought," said Mr. Chittenden, "and I took it that will
would have cut out the young people, eh? Well, well! It's been a
lesson to me, I know that. I shan't buy no more dolls' houses, nor
waste no more money on the pictures--and as to this business of
poisonin' grandpa, well, if I know myself, I never 'ad much of a turn
for that. Live and let live: that's bin my motto throughout life, and
I ain't found it a bad one."

Filled with these elevated sentiments, Mr. Chittenden retired to his
lodgings. Mr. Dillet next day repaired to the local Institute, where
he hoped to find some clue to the riddle that absorbed him. He gazed
in despair at a long file of the Canterbury and York Society's
publications of the Parish Registers of the district. No print
resembling the house of his nightmare was among those that hung on the
staircase and in the passages. Disconsolate, he found himself at last
in a derelict room, staring at a dusty model of a church in a dusty
glass case: _Model of St. Stephen's Church, Coxham. Presented by J.
Merewether, Esq., of Ilbridge House_, 1877. _The work of his ancestor
James Merewether, d._ 1786. There was something in the fashion of it
that reminded him dimly of his horror. He retraced his steps to a wall
map he had noticed, and made out that Ilbridge House was in Coxham
Parish. Coxham was, as it happened, one of the parishes of which he
had retained the name when he glanced over the file of printed
registers, and it was not long before he found in them the record of
the burial of Roger Milford, aged 76, on the 11th of September, 1757,
and of Roger and Elizabeth Merewether, aged 9 and 7, on the 19th of
the same month. It seemed worth while to follow up this clue, frail as
it was; and in the afternoon he drove out to Coxham. The east end of
the north aisle of the church is a Milford chapel, and on its north
wall are tablets to the same persons; Roger, the elder, it seems, was
distinguished by all the qualities which adorn "the Father, the
Magistrate, and the Man": the memorial was erected by his attached
daughter Elizabeth, "who did not long survive the loss of a parent
ever solicitous for her welfare, and of two amiable children." The
last sentence was plainly an addition to the original inscription.

A yet later slab told of James Merewether, husband of Elizabeth, "who
in the dawn of life practised, not without success, those arts which,
had he continued their exercise, might in the opinion of the most
competent judges have earned for him the name of the British
Vitruvius: but who, overwhelmed by the visitation which deprived him
of an affectionate partner and a blooming offspring, passed his Prime
and Age in a secluded yet elegant Retirement: his grateful Nephew and
Heir indulges a pious sorrow by this too brief recital of his
excellences."

The children were more simply commemorated. Both died on the night of
the 12th of September.

Mr. Dillet felt sure that in Ilbridge House he had found the scene of
his drama. In some old sketchbook, possibly in some old print, he may
yet find convincing evidence that he is right. But the Ilbridge House
of to-day is not that which he sought; it is an Elizabethan erection
of the forties, in red brick with stone quoins and dressings. A
quarter of a mile from it, in a low part of the park, backed by
ancient, stag-horned, ivy-strangled trees and thick undergrowth, are
marks of a terraced platform overgrown with rough grass. A few stone
balusters lie here and there, and a heap or two, covered with nettles
and ivy, of wrought stones with badly-carved crockets. This, someone
told Mr. Dillet, was the site of an older house.

As he drove out of the village, the hall clock struck four, and Mr.
Dillet started up and clapped his hands to his ears. It was not the
first time he had heard that bell.

Awaiting an offer from the other side of the Atlantic, the dolls'
house still reposes, carefully sheeted, in a loft over Mr. Dillet's
stables, whither Collins conveyed it on the day when Mr. Dillet
started for the sea coast.

    *    *    *    *    *

[It will be said, perhaps, and not unjustly, that this is no more than
a variation on a former story of mine called _The Mezzotint_. I can
only hope that there is enough of variation in the setting to make the
repetition of the _motif_ tolerable.]




[End of _The Haunted Dolls' House_ by M. R. James]
