On reaching a small secret chamber in the left wing,
he leaned up against a moonbeam to recover his breath,
and began to try and realize his position. Never,
in a brilliant and uninterrupted career of three hundred
years, had he been so grossly insulted. He thought
of the Dowager Duchess, whom he had frightened into
a fit as she stood before the glass in her lace and
diamonds; of the four housemaids, who had gone into
hysterics when he merely grinned at them through the
curtains on one of the spare bedrooms; of the rector
of the parish, whose candle he had blown out as he
was coming late one night from the library, and who
had been under the care of Sir William Gull ever since,
a perfect martyr to nervous disorders; and of old
Madame de Tremouillac, who, having wakened up one
morning early and seen a skeleton seated in an armchair
by the fire reading her diary, had been confined to
her bed for six weeks with an attack of brain fever,
and, on her recovery, had become reconciled to the
Church, and broken off her connection with that notorious
sceptic, Monsieur de Voltaire. He remembered the
terrible night when the wicked Lord Canterville was
found choking in his dressing-room, with the knave
of diamonds half-way down his throat, and confessed,
just before he died, that he had cheated Charles James
Fox out of L50,000 at Crockford’s by means of
that very card, and swore that the ghost had made
him swallow it. All his great achievements came
back to him again, from the butler who had shot himself
in the pantry because he had seen a green hand tapping
at the window-pane, to the beautiful Lady Stutfield,
who was always obliged to wear a black velvet band
round her throat to hide the mark of five fingers
burnt upon her white skin, and who drowned herself
at last in the carp-pond at the end of the King’s
Walk. With the enthusiastic egotism of the true
artist, he went over his most celebrated performances,
and smiled bitterly to himself as he recalled to mind
his last appearance as “Red Reuben, or the Strangled
Babe,” his debut as “Guant Gibeon,
the Blood-sucker of Bexley Moor,” and the furore
he had excited one lovely June evening by merely playing
ninepins with his own bones upon the lawn-tennis ground.
And after all this some wretched modern Americans
were to come and offer him the Rising Sun Lubricator,
and throw pillows at his head! It was quite unbearable.
Besides, no ghost in history had ever been treated
in this manner. Accordingly, he determined to
have vengeance, and remained till daylight in an attitude
of deep thought.
The next morning, when the Otis family met at breakfast,
they discussed the ghost at some length. The
United States Minister was naturally a little annoyed
to find that his present had not been accepted.
“I have no wish,” he said, “to do
the ghost any personal injury, and I must say that,
considering the length of time he has been in the house,
I don’t think it is at all polite to throw pillows
at him,”—a very just remark, at which,
I am sorry to say, the twins burst into shouts of laughter.
“Upon the other hand,” he continued, “if
he really declines to use the Rising Sun Lubricator,
we shall have to take his chains from him. It
would be quite impossible to sleep, with such a noise
going on outside the bedrooms.”
