The Haunted House

THE
HAUNTED HOUSE

BY

HILAIRE BELLOC

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter I

In the English County of Sussex, upon the clay thereof, and upon a slight eminence of that clay, stood and stands a squire’s house called Rackham.

Rackham is a common enough name in that part of the world, attached to perhaps half a dozen widely-different places and things; downs, woods, fields. But no one had ever bothered to call Rackham anything extra to make it a special Rackham. Rackham it had been and remained during its three hundred years as a cell of Lewes Priory and its four hundred of various lay owners.

Its master at the end of the nineteenth century was a certain Mr. Henry Maple, of a good ordinary position, born to no great fortune, but a sufficient master of his countryside.

By birth he was what one might expect, a great-grandson. A Maple who had begun as a smith and cattle dealer and had gone on as a general broker, sometimes advancing cash to his fellows and sometimes making a lucky purchase and sale in stock, had bought out the former immemorial squires of Rackham when George III. was king. Those whom he had bought out were an impoverished line, whose founder (a Lewes tallow chandler) had got it, rather more than a century before, after the Civil Wars, from a ruined cavalier family, which, in its turn, had been started by a scullion in Thomas Cromwell’s kitchen, who, yet a century earlier, had nobbled this parcel of his master’s loot during the great break-up.

So you see that Rackham was just like scores and hundreds of its kind up and down England, and possessed, after the fashion of any one of the others, by a very amiable man, a gentleman (which is saying a great deal), a man formed by Public School and University, and having behind him two generations of Public School and University, and three of sufficient wealth.

Rackham was a rather absurd looking house, but dignified. Half of it was the original Elizabethan living house, with a few stones left of the earlier monastic building and great oak beams for its framework, but transmogrified by eighteenth-century additions and internal changes. From the lawn in front you saw at one end two low stories of wood and plaster, a tiled roof above that; at the other a brick wall pierced at regular intervals by a particularly ugly set of windows. At the back, looking north, was a dreary stucco addition of kitchens and offices, greenish with damp weather. The later half of the house, all brick, had been added, as had certain changes in the older part, before 1790, by the fortunate smith and cattle dealer. The stucco offices to the north had been built by his son during the high corn prices of the Napoleonic wars.

Inside, the house was what you would expect from such a history. Nothing whatever told you, even in its oldest part, that there was work many hundred years old, save the few stones of the monastic building at the base of a wall, certain beams still exposed in the servants’ quarters, a box room, and one of the smaller bedrooms. The other beams had been covered long ago with plaster ceilings. Some of them had been cut clean away to raise the height of the living-rooms after the later fashion. There was a bathroom with hot and cold water, which was thought a fine new thing in the middle of the nineteenth century, when it had been fitted up. There was a small, rather dingy hall; a passage running from this to the various living-rooms; one simple staircase for the family, with rather nicely carved oaken banisters, and a very much worn and very ugly carpet. There were plenty of books and plenty of pictures—pictures of all sorts and kinds; many a bad water-colour by ladies of the place, living and dead; a few portraits in the drawing-room, one of which, almost black, was reputed to be a Gainsborough. The house was comfortable, it was homely, and it exactly suited its master, who was, in the first years of the twentieth century, a man of about forty, very much liked in the neighbourhood, and with something of a reputation for scholarship; a widower with one young child—a boy called John.

Thus lived Henry Maple, on what he felt, as all such men feel, to be ancestral land descended to him from beyond all human record; and in sober truth possessed by his own blood for a good deal more than a hundred years; which is quite a long succession for such English land.

He was part of it: of the outlook from that slight eminence towards the Downs ten miles off along the southern sky; of the rather dishevelled little park (if you liked to call it that) with its ill-kept gravel way and its little lodge at the gates; of half a dozen farms which had provided an income sufficient for his father and grandfather before him, and the rents of which heavily reduced during the depression of the 80’s had since remained unchanged; sleeping, like most things in that good world. Part of him also were the two or three horses in his stables, the two or three vehicles, and particularly the little brougham in which he drove to the domestic country station three miles off, where the very asphalte and palings seemed to talk with the Sussex burr and to think of London, forty miles away, as a place utterly remote.

London was not properly part of Henry Maple’s life. He had his club, of course, for which his father had put him down when he was born, just as he had put him down for his Public School and for his College. He used it perhaps twenty times in a year.

The staff of Rackham was consonant with all the rest. A butler of much the same age as his master, and of twenty years’ standing, knowing the names of wines, but far more familiar with beer. A lad who cleaned boots, ran messages, and took the blame for mishaps; a few maids; a fixed, elderly cook called Mrs. Marwell, and a kitchen-maid; and she that had been the child’s nurse, and still was after a fashion (even after he had begun to go to a Preparatory School). She was kept on, and would be kept on till she died.

There was Rackham; and (one would have said) the benediction of God upon it. I knew it well enough.

The first thing that began to threaten such unchangeable things with change was an unaccountable creeping oddity in the relation of income to expenditure. Henry Maple, in the intervals of his reading and his quiet entertainment, heard of it vaguely as “these times.” It might also be called certain new habits of a changing age; rather more travel, a few more visitors, farmers coming shamefacedly and very privately to ask for some small reduction in rent, or rather heavy piece of repair, which was granted as a matter of course; coming again a year or two later to ask for another, which was also granted as a matter of course, but at last with a little misgiving.

The century was thus nine years old, and his lonely, affectionate little son, of whom his father made a close companion, was nine years old also, when Henry Maple realised that there were a good many things he ought to have done to the house and did not from lack of funds—wear and tear come so gradually. He was used to the fences beginning to look tumbled down, and to a good deal of grass on the few paths; for the gardener was getting old, and not over lively.

Henry Maple had grown used also to an overdraft at his bank; though he was rather disturbed when, a few years earlier, the manager had told him in a pleasant conversation that it would be well to fix a limit—and did so. But he got used to that too.

He very reluctantly and in rather haphazard, expensive fashion mortgaged two of the outlying farms; then a third.