Free The Mammoth Book of Ghost Stories by Women (Mammoth Books) by Marie O'Regan

trot about and wash up, and help the old lady. She’s getting weak on her legs, poor soul. We’ve none of us grown younger in the last twenty years.”
    “Twenty years!” echoed Michael Bascom scornfully. “What is twenty years in the formation of a strata – what even in the growth of an oak – the cooling of a volcano!”
    “Not much, perhaps, but it’s apt to tell upon the bones of a human being.”
    “The manganese staining to be seen upon some skulls would certainly indicate—” began the scientist dreamily.
    “I wish my bones were only as free from rheumatics as they were twenty years ago,” pursued Daniel testily; “and then, perhaps, I should make light of twenty years. Howsoever, the long and the short of it is, my missus must have a girl. She can’t go on trotting up and down these everlasting passages, and standing in that stone scullery year after year, just as if she was a young woman. She must have a girl to help.”
    “Let her have twenty girls,” said Mr Bascom, going back to his book.
    “What’s the use of talking like that, sir? Twenty girls, indeed! We shall have rare work to get one.”
    “Because the neighbourhood is sparsely populated?” interrogated Mr Bascom, still reading.
    “No, sir. Because this house is known to be haunted.”
    Michael Bascom laid down his book, and turned a look of grave reproach upon his servant.
    “Skegg,” he said in a severe voice, “I thought you had lived long enough with me to be superior to any folly of that kind.”
    “I don’t say that I believe in ghosts,” answered Daniel with a semi-apologetic air, “but the country people do. There’s not a mortal among ’em that will venture across our threshold after nightfall.”
    “Merely because Anthony Bascom, who led a wild life in London, and lost his money and land, came home here brokenhearted, and is supposed to have destroyed himself in this house – the only remnant of property that was left him out of a fine estate.”
    “Supposed to have destroyed himself!” cried Skegg. “Why the fact is as well known as the death of Queen Elizabeth, or the Great Fire of London. Why, wasn’t he buried at the crossroads between here and Holcroft?”
    “An idle tradition, for which you could produce no substantial proof,” retorted Mr Bascom.
    “I don’t know about proof; but the country people believe it as firmly as they believe their Gospel.”
    “If their faith in the Gospel was a little stronger they need not trouble themselves about Anthony Bascom.”
    “Well,” grumbled Daniel, as he began to clear the table, “a girl of some kind we must get, but she’ll have to be a foreigner, or a girl that’s hard driven for a place.”
    When Daniel Skegg said a foreigner, he did not mean the native of some distant clime, but a girl who had not been born and bred at Holcroft. Daniel had been raised and reared in that insignificant hamlet, and, small and dull as it was, he considered the world beyond its only margin.
    Michael Bascom was too deep in the atomic theory to give a second thought to the necessities of an old servant. Mrs Skegg was an individual with whom he rarely came in contact. She lived for the most part in a gloomy region at the north end of the house, where she ruled over the solitude of a kitchen that looked like a cathedral, and numerous offices of the scullery, larder, and pantry class, where she carried on a perpetual warfare with spiders and beetles, and wore her old life out in the labour of sweeping and scrubbing. She was a woman of severe aspect, dogmatic piety, and a bitter tongue. She was a good plain cook, and ministered diligently to her master’s wants. He was not an epicure, but liked his life to be smooth and easy, and the equilibrium of his mental power would have been disturbed by a bad dinner.
    He heard no more about the proposed addition to his household for a space of ten days, when Daniel Skegg again startled him amidst his studious repose by the abrupt