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

of the room as noiselessly as a flower blown across the threshold. Michael Bascom looked after her curiously. He had seen very little of youthful womanhood in his dry-as-dust career, and he wondered at this girl as at a creature of a species hitherto unknown to him. How fairly and delicately she was fashioned; what a translucent skin; what soft and pleasing accents issued from those rose-tinted lips. A pretty thing, assuredly, this kitchen wench! A pity that in all this busy world there could be no better work found for her than the scouring of pots and pans.
    Absorbed in considerations about dry bones, Mr Bascom thought no more of the pale-faced handmaiden. He saw her no more about his rooms. Whatever work she did there was done early in the morning, before the scholar’s breakfast.
    She had been a week in the house, when he met her one day in the hall. He was struck by the change in her appearance.
    The girlish lips had lost their rose-bud hue; the pale blue eyes had a frightened look, and there were dark rings round them, as in one whose nights had been sleepless, or troubled by evil dreams.
    Michael Bascom was so startled by an undefinable look in the girl’s face that, reserved as he was by habit and nature, he expanded so far as to ask her what ailed her.
    “There is something amiss, I am sure,” he said. “What is it?”
    “Nothing, sir,” she faltered, looking still more scared at his question. “Indeed, it is nothing; or nothing worth troubling you about.”
    “Nonsense. Do you suppose, because I live among books, I have no sympathy with my fellow-creatures? Tell me what is wrong with you, child. You have been grieving about the father you have lately lost, I suppose.”
    “No, sir; it is not that. I shall never leave off being sorry for that. It is a grief which will last me all my life.”
    “What, there is something else then?” asked Michael impatiently. “I see; you are not happy here. Hard work does not suit you. I thought as much.”
    “Oh, sir, please don’t think that,” cried the girl, very earnestly. “Indeed, I am glad to work – glad to be in service; it is only—”
    She faltered and broke down, the tears rolling slowly from her sorrowful eyes, despite her effort to keep them back.
    “Only what?” cried Michael, growing angry. “The girl is full of secrets and mysteries. What do you mean, wench?”
    “I – I know it is very foolish, sir; but I am afraid of the room where I sleep.”
    “Afraid! Why?”
    “Shall I tell you the truth, sir? Will you promise not to be angry?”
    “I will not be angry if you will only speak plainly; but you provoke me by these hesitations and suppressions.”
    “And please, sir, do not tell Mrs Skegg that I have told you. She would scold me; or perhaps even send me away.”
    “Mrs Skegg shall not scold you. Go on, child.”
    “You may not know the room where I sleep, sir; it is a large room at one end of the house, looking towards the sea. I can see the dark line of water from the window, and I wonder sometimes to think that it is the same ocean I used to see when I was a child at Yarmouth. It is very lonely, sir, at the top of the house. Mr and Mrs Skegg sleep in a little room near the kitchen, you know, sir, and I am quite alone on the top floor.”
    “Skegg told me you had been educated in advance of your position in life, Maria. I should have thought the first effect of a good education would have been to make you superior to any foolish fancies about empty rooms.”
    “Oh, pray, sir, do not think it is any fault in my education. Father took such pains with me; he spared no expense in giving me as good an education as a tradesman’s daughter need wish for. And he was a religious man, sir. He did not believe—” here she paused, with a suppressed shudder “—in the spirits of the dead appearing to the living, since the days of miracles, when the ghost of Samuel appeared to Saul. He never put any foolish ideas into my head, sir. I