Free Dracula's Guest And Other Weird Tales by Bram Stoker Page B

to rent a part of the old house. Mr Carnford, the local lawyer and agent, was a genial old gentleman, and frankly confessed his delight at anyone being willing to live in the house.
    ‘To tell you the truth, ’ said he, ‘I should be only too happy, on behalf of the owners, to let anyone have the house rent free for a term of years if only to accustom the people here to see it inhabited. It has been so long empty that some kind of absurd prejudice has grown up about it, and this can be best put down by its occupation – if only, ’ he added with a sly glance at Malcolmson, ‘by a scholar like yourself, who wants its quiet for a time.’
    Malcolmson thought it needless to ask the agent about the ‘absurd prejudice’; he knew he would get more information, if he should require it, on that subject from other quarters. He paid his three months’ rent, got a receipt, and the name of an old woman who would probably undertake to ‘do’ for him, and came away with the keys in his pocket. He then went to the landlady of the inn, who was a cheerful and most kindly person, and asked her advice as to such stores and provisions as he would be likely to require. She threw up her hands in amazement when he told her where he was going to settle himself.
    ‘Not in the Judge’s House!’ she said, and grew pale as she spoke. He explained the locality of the house, saying that he did not know its name. When he had finished she answered:
    ‘Aye, sure enough – sure enough the very place! It is theJudge’s House sure enough.’ He asked her to tell him about the place, why so called, and what there was against it. She told him that it was so called locally because it had been many years before – how long she could not say, as she was herself from another part of the country, but she thought it must have been a hundred years or more – the abode of a judge who was held in great terror on account of his harsh sentences and his hostility to prisoners at Assizes. 2 As to what there was against the house itself she could not tell. She had often asked, but no one could inform her; but there was a general feeling that there was
something
, and for her own part she would not take all the money in Drinkwater’s Bank and stay in the house an hour by herself. Then she apologised to Malcolmson for her disturbing talk.
    ‘It is too bad of me, sir, and you – and a young gentleman, too – if you will pardon me saying it, going to live there all alone. If you were my boy – and you’ll excuse me for saying it – you wouldn’t sleep there a night, not if I had to go there myself and pull the big alarm bell that’s on the roof!’ The good creature was so manifestly in earnest, and was so kindly in her intentions, that Malcomson, although amused, was touched. He told her kindly how much he appreciated her interest in him, and added:
    ‘But, my dear Mrs Witham, indeed you need not be concerned about me! A man who is reading for the Mathematical Tripos 3 has too much to think of to be disturbed by any of these mysterious ‘somethings, ’ and his work is of too exact and prosaic a kind to allow of his having any corner in his mind for mysteries of any kind. Harmonical Progression, Permutations and Combinations, and Elliptic Functions 4 have sufficient mysteries for me!’ Mrs Witham kindly undertook to see after his commissions, and he went himself to look for the old woman who had been recommended to him. When he returned to the Judge’s House with her, after an interval of a couple of hours, he found Mrs Witham herself waiting with several men and boys carrying parcels, and an upholsterer’s man with a bed in a cart, for she said, though tables and chairs might be all very well, a bed that hadn’t been aired for mayhap fifty years was not proper for young bones to lie on. She was evidently curiousto see the inside of the house; and though manifestly so afraid of the ‘somethings’ that at the slightest sound she clutched on to