Part 8 (1/2)

”But Miles shuddered, though he half laughed too.

”'No, thank you,' he said. 'I'm not going to travel with the evil thing.'

”'We can't hang it up again, though,' I said, 'after this last experience.'

”In the end we rolled up the two _portieres_, not to attract attention by only moving one, and--well, I thought it just possible the ghost might make a mistake, and I did not want any more scares while I was away--we rolled them up together, first carefully measuring the cut, and its position in the curtain, and then we hid them away in one of the lofts that no one ever enters, where they are at this moment, and where the ghost may have been disporting himself, for all I know, though I fancy he has given it up by this time, for reasons you shall hear.

”Then Miles and I, as you know, set off for Raxtrew. I smoothed my father down about it, by reminding him how good-natured they had been to us, and telling him Miles really needed me. We went straight to Hunter. He hummed and hawed a good deal--he had not distinctly promised not to give the name of the place the tapestry had come from, but he knew the gentleman he had bought it from did not want it known.

”'Why?' said Miles. 'Is it some family that has come down in the world, and is forced to part with things to get some ready money?'

”'Oh, dear no!' said Hunter. 'It is not that, at all. It was only that--I suppose I must give you the name--Captain Devereux--did not want any gossip to get about, as to ----'

”'Devereux!' repeated Miles, 'you don't mean the people at Hallinger?'

”'The same,' said Hunter. 'If you know them, sir, you will be careful, I hope, to a.s.sure the captain that I did my best to carry out his wishes?'

”'Certainly,' said Miles, 'I'll exonerate you.'

”And then Hunter told us that Devereux, who only came into the Hallinger property a few years ago, had been much annoyed by stories getting about of the place being haunted, and this had led to his dismantling one wing, and--Hunter thought, but was not quite clear as to this--pulling down some rooms altogether.

But he, Devereux, was very touchy on the subject--he did not want to be laughed at.

”'And the tapestry came from him--you are certain as to that?'

Miles repeated.

”'Positive, sir. I took it down with my own hands. It was fitted on to two panels in what they call the round room at Hallinger--there were, oh, I daresay, a dozen of them, with tapestry nailed on, but I only bought these two pieces--the others were sold to a London dealer.'

”'The round room,' I said. Leila, the expression struck me.

”Miles, it appeared, knew Devereux fairly well. Hallinger is only ten miles off. We drove over there, but found he was in London. So our next move was to follow him there. We called twice at his club, and then Miles made an appointment, saying that he wanted to see him on private business.

”He received us civilly, of course. He is quite a young fellow--in the Guards. But when Miles began to explain to him what we had come about, he stiffened.

”'I suppose you belong to the Psychical Society?' he said. 'I can only repeat that I have nothing to tell, and I detest the whole subject.'

”'Wait a moment,' said Miles, and as he went on I saw that Devereux changed. His face grew intent with interest and a queer sort of eagerness, and at last he started to his feet.

”'Upon my soul,' he said, 'I believe you've run him to earth for me--the ghost, I mean, and if so, you shall have my endless grat.i.tude. I'll go down to Hallinger with you at once--this afternoon, if you like, and see it out.'

”He was so excited that he spoke almost incoherently, but after a bit he calmed down, and told us all he had to tell--and that was a good deal--which would indeed have been nuts for the Psychical Society. What Hunter had said was but a small part of the whole. It appeared that on succeeding to Hallinger, on the death of an uncle, young Devereux had made considerable changes in the house. He had, among others, opened out a small wing--a sort of round tower--which had been completely dismantled and bricked up for, I think he said, over a hundred years. There was some story about it. An ancestor of his--an awful gambler--had used the princ.i.p.al room in this wing for his orgies. Very queer things went on there, the finish up being the finding of old Devereux dead there one night, when his servants were summoned by the man he had been playing with--with whom he had had an awful quarrel. This man, a low fellow, probably a professional cardsharper, vowed that he had been robbed of a jewel which his host had staked, and it was said that a ring of great value had disappeared. But it was all hushed up--Devereux had really died in a fit--though soon after, for reasons only hinted at, the round tower was shut up, till the present man rashly opened it again.

”Almost at once, he said, the annoyances, to use a mild term, began. First one, then another of the household were terrified out of their wits, just as we were, Leila. Devereux himself had seen it two or three times, the 'it,' of course, being his miserable old ancestor. A small man, with a big wig, and long, thin, claw-like fingers. It all corresponded. Mrs. Devereux is young and nervous. She could not stand it. So in the end the round tower was shut up again, all the furniture and hangings sold, and locally speaking, the ghost laid. That was all Devereux knew.

”We started, the three of us, that very afternoon, as excited as a party of schoolboys. Miles and I kept questioning Devereux, but he had really no more to tell. He had never thought of examining the walls of the haunted room--it was wainscotted, he said--and might be lined all through with secret cupboards, for all he knew. But he could not get over the extraordinariness of the ghost's sticking to the _tapestry_--and indeed it does rather lower one's idea of ghostly intelligence.

”We went at it at once--the tower was not _bricked_ up again, luckily--we got in without difficulty the next morning--Devereux making some excuse to the servants, a new set who had not heard of the ghost, for our eccentric proceedings. It was a tiresome business. There were so many panels in the room, as Hunter had said, and it was impossible to tell in which _the_ tapestry had been fixed. But we had our measures, and we carefully marked a line as near as we could guess at the height from the floor that the cut in the _portieres_ must have been. Then we tapped and pummelled and pressed imaginary springs till we were nearly sick of it--there was nothing to guide us. The wainscotting was dark and much shrunk and marked with age, and full of joins in the wood any one of which might have meant a door.

”It was Devereux himself who found it at last. We heard an exclamation from where he was standing by himself at the other side of the room. He was quite white and shaky.

”'Look here,' he said, and we looked.