Humorous Ghost Stories by Dorothy Scarborough (best historical fiction books of all time txt) 📕

“Right in both analyses,” said the pipe-poaching Tim. “Castle Gauntmoor is from the Middle Ages, and we all know about where in Ohio Perkinsville is. But is it possible that you, twenty-seven years old and a college graduate, haven't heard of Thaddeus Hobson, the Marvelous Millionaire?” I shook my head. “The papers have been full of Hobson in the past two or three years,” said Tim. “It was in 1898, I think, that Fate jumped Thaddeus Hobson to the golden Olympus. He was first head salesman in the village hardware store, then he formulated so successful a scheme to clean up the Tin Plate Combine that he put away a fabulous number of millions in a year, and subsequently went to England. Finally he set his heart on Norman architecture. After a search he found the ancient Castle Gauntmoor still habitable and for sale. He thrilled the British comic papers by his offer to buy the castle and move it to America. Hobson saw the property, telegraphed to London, and closed the deal in two hours. And an army of laborers at once began taking the Gauntmoor to pieces, stone by stone.

“Transporting that relic to America involved a cost in labor and ingenuity comparable with nothing that has yet happened. Moving the Great Pyramid would be a lighter job, perhaps. Thousands of tons of scarred and medieval granite were carried to the railroads, freighted to the sea, and dragged across the Atlantic in whopping big lighters chartered for the job. And the next the newspapers knew, the monster was set up in Perkinsville, Ohio.”

“But why did he do it?” I asked.

“Who knows?” said Tim. “Ingrowing sentiment—unlimited capital—wanted to do something for the Home Town, probably; wanted to beautify the village that gave him his start—and didn't know how to go at it. Well, so long!” he called out, as I seized my hat and streaked for the train.

It was dinner time when the train pulled in at Perkinsville. The town was as undistinguished as I expected. I was too hungry to care about castles at the moment, so I took the 'bus for the Commercial Hotel, an establishment that seemed to live up to its name, both in sentiment and in accommodation. The landlord, Mr. Spike, referred bitterly to the castle, which, he explained, was, by its dominating presence, “spoilin' the prosperous appearance of Perkinsville.” Dinner over, he led me to a side porch.

“How does Perkinsville look with that—with that curio squattin' on top of it?” asked Mr. Spike sternly, as he pointed over the local livery stable, over Smith Brothers' Plow Works, over Odd Fellows' Hall, and up, up to the bleak hills beyond, where, poised like a stony coronet on a giant's brow, rose the great Norman towers and frowning buttresses of Gauntmoor Castle. I rubbed my eyes. No, it couldn't be real—it must be a wizard's work!

“What's old Hobson got out of it?” said Mr. Spike in my ear. “Nothin' but an old stone barn, where he can set all day nursin' a grouch and keepin' his daughter Anita—they do say he does—under lock and key for fear somebody's goin' to marry her for her money.”

Mr. Spike looked up at the ramparts defiantly, even as the Saxon churl must have gazed in an earlier, far sadder land.

“It's romantic,” I suggested.

“Yes, darn rheumatic,” agreed Mr. Spike.

“Is it open for visitors?” I asked innocently.

“Hobson?” cackled Spike. “He'd no more welcome a stranger to that place than he'd welcome—a ghost. He's a hol-ee terror, Hobson!”

Mr. Spike turned away to referee a pool game down in the barroom.

The fires of a December sunset flared behind Gauntmoor and cast the grim shadows of Medievalism over Mediocrity, which lay below. Presently the light faded, and I grew tired of gazing. Since Hobson would permit no tourists to inspect his castle, why was I here on this foolish trip? Already I was planning to wire Aunt Elizabeth a sarcastic reference to being marooned at Christmas with a castle on my hands, when a voice at my shoulder said suddenly:

“Mr. Hobson sends his compliments, sir, and wants to know would Mr. Pierrepont come up to Gauntmoor for the night?”

A groom in a plum-colored livery stood at my elbow. A light station wagon was waiting just outside. How the deuce did Hobson know my name? What did he want of me at Gauntmoor this time of night? Yet prospects of bed and breakfast away from the Commercial lured me strangely.

“Sure, Mr. Pierrepont will be delighted,” I announced, leaping into the vehicle, and soon we were mounting upward, battling with the winds around the time-scarred walls. The wagon stopped at the great gate. A horn sounded from within, the gate swung open, a drawbridge fell with a hideous creaking of machinery, and we passed in, twenty or thirty feet above the snow-drifted moat. Beyond the portcullis a dim door swung open. Some sort of seneschal met us with a light and led us below the twilight arches, where beyond, I could catch glimpses of the baileys and courts and the donjon tower against the heavy ramparts.

The wind hooted through the high galleries as we passed; but the west wing, from its many windows and loopholes, blazed with cheerful yellow light. It looked nearly cozy. Into a tall, gaunt tower we plunged, down a winding staircase, and suddenly we came into a vast hall, stately with tapestries and innumerable monkish carvings—and all brightly lighted with electricity!

A little fat man sat smoking in a chair near the fire. When I entered he was in his shirt sleeves, reading a newspaper, but when a footman announced my name the little man, in a state of great nervousness, jumped to his feet and threw on a coat, fidgeting painfully with the armholes. As he came toward me, I noticed that he was perfectly bald. He looked dyspeptic and discontented, like a practical man trying vainly to adjust his busy habits to a lazy life. Obviously he didn't go with the rest of the furniture.

“Pleased to see you, Mr. Pierrepont,” he said, looking me over carefully as if he thought of buying me. “Geoffray Pierrepont—tut, tut!—ain't it queer!”

“Queer!” I said rather peevishly. “What's queer about it?”

“Excuse me, did I say queer? I didn't mean to be impolite, sir—I was just thinking, that's all.”

You could hear the demon Army of the Winds scaling the walls outside.

“Maybe you thought it kind of abrupt, Mr. Pierrepont, me asking you up here so unceremonious,” he said. “My daughter Annie, she tells me I ought to live up to the looks of the place; but I've got my notions. To tell you the truth, I'm in an awful quandary about this Antique Castle business and when I heard you was at the hotel, I thought you might help me out some way. You see you——”

He led me to a chair and offered me a fat cigar.

“Young man,” he said, “when you get your head above water and make good in the world—if you ever do—don't fool with curios, don't monkey with antiques. Keep away from castles. They're like everything else sold by curio dealers—all humbug. Look nice, yes. But get 'em over to America and they either fall to pieces or the paint comes off. Whether it's a chair or a castle—same old story. The sly scalawags that sell you the goods won't live up to their contracts.”

“Hasn't Gauntmoor all the ancient inconveniences a Robber Baron could wish?” I asked.

“It ain't,” announced Mr. Hobson. “Though it looks all right to a stranger, perhaps. There may be castles in the Old World got it on Gauntmoor for size—thank God I didn't buy 'em!—but for looks you can't beat Gauntmoor.”

“Comfortable?” I asked.

“Can't complain. Modern plumbed throughout. Hard to heat, but I put an electric-light plant in the cellar. Daughter Annie's got a Colonial suite in the North Tower.”

“Well,” I suggested, “if there's anything the castle lacks, you can buy it.”

“There's one thing money can't buy,” said Mr. Hobson, leaning very close and speaking in a sibilant whisper. “And that's ghosts!”

“But who wants ghosts?” I inquired.

“Now look here,” said Mr. Hobson. “I'm a business man. When I bought Gauntmoor, the London scalawags that sold it to me gave me distinctly to understand that this was a Haunted Castle. They showed me a haunted chamber, showed me the haunted wall where the ghost walks, guaranteed the place to be the Spook Headquarters of the British Isles—and see what I got!” He snapped his fingers in disgust.

“No results?”

“Results? Stung! I've slept in that haunted room upstairs for a solid year. I've gazed night after night over the haunted rampart. I've even hired spiritualists to come and cut their didoes in the towers and donjon keep. No use. You can't get ghosts where they ain't.”

I expressed my sympathy.

“I'm a plain man,” said Hobson. “I ain't got any ancestors back of father, who was a blacksmith, and a good one, when sober. Somebody else's ancestors is what I looked for in this place—and I've got 'em, too, carved in wood and stone in the chapel out back of the tower. But statues and carvings ain't like ghosts to add tone to an ancient lineage.”

“Is there any legend?” I asked.

“Haven't you heard it?” he exclaimed, looking at me sharply out of his small gray eyes. “It seems, 'way back in the sixteenth century, there was a harum-scarum young feller living in a neighboring castle, and he took an awful shine to Lady Katherine, daughter of the Earl of Cummyngs, who was boss of this place at that time. Now the young man who loved Miss—I mean Lady—Katherine was a sort of wild proposition. Old man wouldn't have him around the place; but young man kept hanging on till Earl ordered him off. Finally the old gent locked Lady Kitty in the donjon tower,” said Mr. Hobson.

“Too much shilly-shallying in this generation,” he went on. “Every house that's got a pretty girl ought to have a donjon keep. I've got both.” He paused and wiped his brow.

“This fresh young kid I'm telling you about, he thought he knew more than the old folks, so he got a rope ladder and climbed up the masonry one night, intending to bust into the tower where the girl was. But just as he got half across the wall—out yonder—his foot slipped and he broke his neck in the moat below. Consequence, Lady Kitty goes crazy and old Earl found dead a week later in his room. It was Christmas Eve when the boy was killed. That's the night his ghost's supposed to walk along the ramparts, give a shriek, and drop off—but the irritating thing about it all is, it don't ever happen.”

“And now, Mr. Hobson,” I said, throwing away the butt of my cigar, “why am I here? What have I got to do with all this ghost business?”

“I want you to stay,” said Hobson, beseechingly. “To-morrow night's Christmas Eve. I've figured it out that your influence, somehow, you being of the same blood, as it were, might encourage the ghost to come out and save the reputation of the castle.”

A servant brought candles, and Hobson turned to retire.

“The same blood!” I shouted after him. “What on earth is the name of the ghost?”

“When he was alive his name was—Sir Geoffray de Pierrepont,” said Thaddeus Hobson, his figure fading into the dimness beyond.

I followed the servant with the candle aloft through chill and carven corridors, through galleries lined with faded portraits of forgotten lords. “Wheels!” I kept saying to myself. “The old man evidently thinks it takes a live Pierrepont to coax a dead one,” and I laughed nervously as I entered the vast brown bedroom. I had to get on a chair in order to climb into the four-poster, a cheerful affair that