The Mammoth Book of Modern Ghost Stories

The Prescription

Marjorie Bowen

Location: Verrall Hall, Sunford, Bucks.

Time: Christmas Eve, 1928.

Eyewitness Description: “We got, however, our surprise and our shock because Mrs Mahogany began suddenly to writhe into ugly contortions and called out in a loud voice, quite different from the one that she had hitherto used: ‘Murder!’ . . .”

Author: Marjorie Bowen (1886–1952) was no relation of Elizabeth Bowen: she had been born Gabrielle Margaret Long to a poor family on Hayling Island in Hampshire where she spent the early years of her career writing prolifically to support her extravagant mother and sister. She used a variety of pen names to conceal her huge output of over 150 novels, using the Bowen pseudonym on her supernatural stories, starting with Black Magic (1909), which was a best seller. She also used the name on The Haunted Vintage (1921); but chose Robert Paye for the eerie Julia Roseing Rave (1933); and Joseph Shearing for The Spectral Bride (1942), based on a real Victorian case. Despite this productivity, the best of her books brilliantly conjure up haunted landscapes along with a unique mixture of cruelty and pathos among her characters. The best of the Bowen short stories – or “twilight tales,” as she liked to call them – were collected in several volumes between 1917 and 1932, her own favourites appearing in The Bishop of Hell (1949). However, “The Prescription”, which was originally published in the Christmas issue of the London Magazine in 1928, did not find a place in any of these – an undeserved fate for a story about a professional medium by a writer recently described by Jack Sullivan unequivocally as “one of the great supernatural writers of the 20th century.”

John Cuming collected ghost stories; he always declared that this I was the best that he knew, although it was partially second-hand and contained a mystery that had no reasonable solution, while most really good ghost stories allow of a plausible explanation, even if it is one as feeble as a dream, excusing all; or a hallucination or a crude deception. Cuming told the story rather well. The first part of it at least had come under his own observation and been carefully noted by him in the flat green book which he kept for the record of all curious cases of this sort. He was a shrewd and a trained observer; he honestly restrained his love of drama from leading him into embellishing facts. Cuming told the story to us all on the most suitable possible occasion – Christmas Eve – and prefaced it with a little homily.

“You all know the good old saw – ‘The more it changes the more it is the same thing’ – and I should like you to notice that this extremely up-to-date ultra-modern ghost story is really almost exactly the same as the one that might have puzzled Babylonian or Assyrian sages. I can give you the first start of the tale in my own words, but the second part will have to be in the words of someone else. They were, however, most carefully and scrupulously taken down. As for the conclusion, I must leave you to draw that for yourselves – each according to your own mood, fancy and temperament; it may be that you will all think of the same solution, it may be that you will each think of a different one, and it may be that everyone will be left wondering.”

Having thus enjoyed himself by whetting our curiosity, Cuming settled himself down comfortably in his deep armchair and unfolded his tale:

It was about five years ago. I don’t wish to be exact with time, and of course I shall alter names – that’s one of the first rules of the game, isn’t it? Well, whenever it was, I was the guest of a – Mrs Janey we will call her – who was, to some extent, a friend of mine; an intelligent, lively, rather bustling sort of woman who had the knack of gathering interesting people about her. She had lately taken a new house in Buckinghamshire. It stood in the grounds of one of those large estates which are now so frequently being broken up. She was very pleased with the house, which was quite new and had only been finished about a year, and seemed, according to her own rather excited imagination, in every way desirable. I don’t want to emphasize anything about the house except that it was new and did stand on the verge, as it were, of this large old estate, which had belonged to one of those notable English families now extinct and completely forgotten. I am no antiquarian or connoisseur in architecture, and the rather blatant modernity of the house did not offend me. I was able to appreciate its comfort and to enjoy what Mrs Janey rather maddeningly called “the old-world garden”, which were really a section of the larger gardens of the vanished mansion which had once commanded this domain. Mrs Janey, I should tell you, knew nothing about the neighbourhood nor anyone who lived there, except that for the first it was very convenient for town and for the second she believed that they were all “nice” people, not likely to bother one. I was slightly disappointed with the crowd she had gathered together at Christmas. They were all people whom either I knew too well or whom I didn’t wish to know at all, and at first the party showed signs of being extremely flat. Mrs Janey seemed to perceive this too, and with rather nervous haste produced, on Christmas Eve, a trump card in the way of amusement – a professional medium, called Mrs Mahogany, because that could not possibly have been her name. Some of us “believed in”, as the saying goes, mediums, and some didn’t; but we were all willing to be diverted by the experiment. Mrs Janey continually lamented that a certain Dr Dilke would not be present. He was going to be one of the party, but had been detained in town and would not reach Verrall, which was the name of the house, until later, and the medium, it seemed, could not stay; for she, being a personage in great demand, must go on to a further engagement. I, of course, like everyone else possessed of an intelligent curiosity and a certain amount of leisure, had been to mediums before. I had been slightly impressed, slightly disgusted, and very much bewildered, and on the whole had decided to let the matter alone, considering that I really preferred the more direct old-fashioned method of getting in touch with what we used to call “the Unseen”. This sitting in the great new house seemed rather banal. I could understand in some haunted old manor that a clairvoyant, or a clairaudient, or a trance-medium might have found something interesting to say, but what was she going to get out of Mrs Janey’s bright, brilliant and comfortable dwelling?

Mrs Mahogany was a nondescript sort of woman – neither young nor old, neither clever nor stupid, neither dark nor fair, placid, and not in the least self-conscious. After an extremely good luncheon (it was a gloomy, stormy afternoon) we all sat down in a circle in the cheerful drawing-room; the curtains were pulled across the dreary prospect of grey sky and grey landscape, and we had merely the light of the fire. We sat quite close together in order to increase “the power”, as Mrs Mahogany said, and the medium sat in the middle, with no special precautions against trickery; but we all knew that trickery would have been really impossible, and we were quite prepared to be tremendously impressed and startled if any manifestations took place. I think we all felt rather foolish, as we did not know each other very well, sitting round there, staring at this very ordinary, rather common, stout little woman, who kept nervously pulling a little tippet of grey wool over her shoulders, closing her eyes and muttering, while she twisted her fingers together. When we had sat silent for about ten minutes Mrs Janey announced in a rather raw whisper that the medium had gone into a trance. “Beautifully,” she added. I thought that Mrs Mahogany did not look at all beautiful. Her communication began with a lot of rambling talk which had no point at all, and a good deal of generalisation under which I think we all became a little restive. There was too much of various spirits who had all sorts of ordinary names, just regular Toms, Dicks and Harrys of the spirit world, floating round behind us, their arms full of flowers and their mouths full of good will – all rather pointless. And though, occasionally, a Tom, a Dick, or a Harry was identified by some of us, it wasn’t very convincing and, what was worse, not very interesting. We got, however, our surprise and our shock, because Mrs Mahogany began suddenly to writhe into ugly contortions and called out in a loud voice, quite different from the one that she had hitherto used:

“Murder!”

This word gave us all a little thrill, and we leant forward eagerly to hear what further she had to say. With every sign of distress and horror Mrs Mahogany began to speak:

“He’s murdered her. Oh, how dreadful. Look at him! Can’t somebody stop him? It’s so near here too. He tried to save her. He was sorry, you know. Oh, how dreadful! Look at him – he’s borne it as long as he can, and now he’s murdered her! I see him mixing it in a glass. Oh, isn’t it awful that no one could have saved her – and he was so terribly remorseful afterwards. Oh, how dreadful! How horrible!”

She ended in a whimpering of fright and horror, and Mrs Janey, who seemed an adept at this sort of thing, leant forward and asked eagerly:

“Can’t you get the name – can’t you find out who it is? Why do you get that here?”

“I don’t know,” muttered the medium; “it’s somewhere near here – a house, an old dark house, and there are curtains of mauve velvet – do you call it mauve? – a kind of blue-red at the windows. There’s a garden outside with a fish-pond and you go through a low doorway and down stone steps.”

“It isn’t near here,” said Mrs Janey decidedly; “all the houses are new.”

“The house is near here,” persisted the medium. “I am walking through it now; I can see the room, I can see that poor woman, and a glass of milk—”

“I wish you’d get the name,” insisted Mrs Janey, and she cast a look, as I thought not without suspicion, round the circle. “You can’t be getting this from my house, you know, Mrs Mahogany,” she added decidedly, “it must be given out by someone here – something they’ve read or seen, you know,” she said, to reassure us that our characters were not in dispute.

But the medium replied drowsily, “No, it’s somewhere near here. I see a light dress covered with small roses. If he could have got help he would have gone for it, but there was no one; so all his remorse was useless . . .”

No further urging would induce the medium to say more; soon afterwards she came out of the trance, and all of us, I think, felt that she had made rather a stupid blunder by introducing this vague piece of melodrama, and if it was, as we suspected, a cheap attempt to give a ghostly and mysterious atmosphere to Christmas Eve, it was a failure.

When Mrs Mahogany, blinking round her, said brightly, “Well, here I am again! I wonder if I said anything that interested you?” we all replied rather coldly, “Of course it has been most interesting, but there hasn’t been anything definite.” And I think that even Mrs Janey felt that the sitting had been rather a disappointment, and she suggested that if the weather was really too horrible to venture out of doors we should sit round the fire and tell old-fashioned ghost stories. “The kind,” she said brightly, “that are about bones and chairs and shrouds. I really think that is the most thrilling kind of all.” Then, with some embarrassment, and when Mrs Mahogany had left the room, she suggested that not one of us should say anything about what the medium had said in her trance.

“It really was rather absurd,” said our hostess, “and it would make me look a little foolish if it got about; you know some people think these mediums are absolute fakes, and anyhow the whole thing, I am afraid, was quite stupid. She must have got her contacts mixed. There is no old house about here and never has been since the original Verrall was pulled down, and that’s a good fifty years ago, I believe, from what the estate agent told me; and as for a murder, I never heard the shadow of any such story.”

We all agreed not to mention what the medium had said, and did this with the more heartiness as we were not any of us impressed. The feeling was rather that Mrs Mahogany had been obliged to say something, and had said that . . .

“Well” [said Cuming comfortably], “that is the first part of my story, and I dare say you’ll think it’s dull enough. Now we come to the second part”:

Latish that evening Dr Dilke arrived. He was not in any way a remarkable man, just an ordinary successful physician, and I refuse to say that he was suffering from overwork or nervous strain; you know, that is so often put into this kind of story as a sort of excuse for what happens afterwards. On the contrary, Dr Dilke seemed to be in the most robust of health and the most cheerful frame of mind, and quite prepared to make the most of his brief holiday. The car that fetched him from the station was taking Mrs Mahogany away, and the doctor and the medium met for just a moment in the hall. Mrs Janey did not trouble to introduce them, but without waiting for this Mrs Mahogany turned to the doctor and, looking at him fixedly, said: “You’re very psychic, aren’t you?” And upon that Mrs Janey was forced to say hastily: “This is Mrs Mahogany, Dr Dilke, the famous medium.”

The physician was indifferently impressed: “I really don’t know,” he answered, smiling. “I have never gone in for that sort of thing. I shouldn’t think I am what you call ‘psychic’ really, I have had a hard scientific training, and that rather knocks the bottom out of fantasies.”

“Well, you are, you know,” said Mrs Mahogany. “I felt it at once; I shouldn’t be at all surprised if you had some strange experiences one of these days.”

Mrs Mahogany left the house and was duly driven away to the station. I want to make the point very clear that she and Dr Dilke did not meet again and that they held no communication except those few words in the hall spoken in the presence of Mrs Janey. Of course Dr Dilke got twitted a good deal about what the medium had said; it made quite a topic of conversation during dinner and after dinner, and we all had queer little ghost stories or incidents of what we considered “psychic” experiences to trot out and discuss. Dr Dilke remained civil, amused, but entirely unconvinced. He had what he called a material, or physical, or medical explanation for almost everything that we said, and, apart from all these explanations, he added, with some justice, that human credulity was such that there was always someone who would accept and embellish anything, however wild, unlikely or grotesque it was.

“I should rather like to hear what you would say if such an experience happened to you,” Mrs Janey challenged him; “whether you use the ancient terms of ‘ghost’, ‘witches’, ‘black magic’, and so on, or whether you speak in modern terms like ‘medium’, ‘clairvoyance’, ‘psychic contacts’, and all the rest of it; well, it seems one is in a bit of a tangle, anyhow, and if any queer thing ever happens to you—”

Dr Dilke broke in pleasantly: “Well, if it ever does I will let you all know about it, and I dare say I shall have an explanation to add at the end of the tale.”

When we all met again the next morning we rather hoped that Dr Dilke would have something to tell us – some odd experience that might have befallen him in the night, new as the house was and banal as was his bedroom. He told us, of course, that he had passed a perfectly good night.

We most of us went to the morning service in the small church that had once been the chapel belonging to the demolished mansion, and which had some rather curious monuments inside and in the churchyard. As I went in I noticed a mortuary chapel with niches for the coffins to be stood upright, now whitewashed and used as a sacristy. The monuments and mural tablets were mostly to the memory of members of the family of Verrall – the Verralls of Verrall Hall, who appeared to have been people of little interest or distinction. Dr Dilke sat beside me, and I, having nothing better to do through the more familiar and monotonous portions of the service, found myself idly looking at the mural tablet beyond him. This was a large slab of black marble deeply cut with a very worn Latin inscription which I found, unconsciously, I was spelling out. The stone, it seemed, commemorated a woman who had been, of course, the possessor of all the virtues; her name was Philadelphia Carwithen, and I rather pleasantly sampled the flavour of that ancient name – Philadelphia. Then I noticed a smaller inscription at the bottom of the slab, which indicated that the lady’s husband also rested in the vault; he had died suddenly about six months after her – of grief at her loss, no doubt, I thought, scenting out a pretty romance.

As we walked home across the frost-bitten fields and icy lanes Dr Dilke, who walked beside me, as he had sat beside me in church, began to complain of cold; he said he believed that he had caught a chill. I was rather amused to hear this old-womanish expression on the lips of a successful physician, and I told him that I had been taught in my more enlightened days that there was no such thing as “catching a chill”. To my surprise he did not laugh at this, but said:

“Oh, yes, there is, and I believe I’ve got it – I keep on shivering; I think it was that slab of black stone I was sitting next. It was as cold as ice, for I touched it, and it seemed to me exuding moisture – some of that old stone does, you know; it’s always, as it were, sweating; and I felt exactly as if I were sitting next a slab of ice from which a cold wind was blowing; it was really as if it penetrated my flesh.”

He looked pale, and I thought how disagreeable it would be for us all, and particularly for Mrs Janey, if the good man was to be taken ill in the midst of her already not too successful Christmas party. Dr Dilke seemed, too, in that ill-humour which so often presages an illness; he was quite peevish about the church and the service, and the fact that he had been asked to go there.

“These places are nothing but charnel-houses after all,” he said fretfully; “one sits there among all those rotting bones, with that damp marble at one’s side. . . .”

“It is supposed to give you ‘atmosphere’,” I said. “The atmosphere of an old-fashioned Christmas . . . Did you notice who your black stone was erected ‘to the memory of?’” I asked, and the doctor replied that he had not.

“It was to a woman – a young woman, I took it, and her husband: ‘Philadelphia Carwithen’, I noticed that, and of course there was a long eulogy of her virtues, and then underneath it just said that he had died a few months afterwards. As far as I could see it was the only example of that name in the church – all the rest were Verralls. I suppose they were strangers here.”

“What was the date?” asked the doctor, and I replied that really I had not been able to make it out, for where the Roman figures came the stone had been very worn.

The day ambled along somehow, with games, diversions, and plenty of good food and drink, and towards the evening we began to feel a little more satisfied with each other and our hostess. Only Dr Dilke remained a little peevish and apart, and this was remarkable in one who was obviously of a robust temperament and an even temper. He still continued to talk of a “chill”, and I did notice that he shuddered once or twice, and continually sat near the large fire which Mrs Janey had rather laboriously arranged in imitation of what she would call “the good old times.”

That evening, the evening of Christmas Day, there was no talk whatever of ghosts or psychic matters; our discussions were entirely topical and of mundane affairs, in which Dr Dilke, who seemed to have recovered his spirits, took his part with ability and agreeableness. When it was time to break up I asked him, half in jest, about his mysterious chill, and he looked at me with some surprise and appeared to have forgotten that he had ever said he had got such a thing; the impression, whatever it was, which he had received in the church had evidently been effaced from his mind. I wish to make that quite clear.

The next morning Dr Dilke appeared very late at the breakfast table, and when he did so his looks were matter for hints and comment; he was pale, distracted, troubled, untidy in his dress, absent in his manner, and I, at least, instantly recalled what he had said yesterday, and feared he was sickening for some illness.

On Mrs Janey putting to him some direct question as to his looks and manner, so strange and so troubled, he replied rather sharply: “Well, I don’t know what you can expect from a fellow who’s been up all night. I thought I came down here for a rest.”

We all looked at him as he dropped into his place and began to drink his coffee with eager gusto; I noticed that he continually shivered. There was something about this astounding statement and his curious appearance which held us all discreetly silent. We waited for further developments before committing ourselves; even Mrs Janey, whom I had never thought of as tactful, contrived to say casually:

“Up all night, doctor. Couldn’t you sleep then? I’m so sorry if your bed wasn’t comfortable.”

“The bed was all right,” he answered, “that made me the more sorry to leave it. Haven’t you got a local doctor who can take the local cases?” he added.

“Why, of course we have; there’s Dr Armstrong and Dr Fraser – I made sure about that before I came here.”

“Well, then,” demanded Dr Dilke angrily, “why on earth couldn’t one of them have gone last night?”

Mrs Janey looked at me helplessly, and I, obeying her glance, took up the matter.

“What do you mean, doctor? Do you mean that you were called out of your bed last night to attend a case?” I asked deliberately.

“Of course I was – I only got back with the dawn.”

Here Mrs Janey could not forbear breaking in.

“But, whoever could it have been? I know nobody about here yet, at least, only one or two people by name, and they would not be aware that you were here. And how did you get out of the house? It’s locked every night.”

Then the doctor gave his story in rather, I must confess, a confused fashion, and yet with an earnest conviction that he was speaking the simple truth. It was broken up a good deal by ejaculations and comments from the rest of us, but I give it you here shorn of all that and exactly as I put it down in my note-book afterwards:

“I was awoken by a tap at the door. I was instantly wide awake and I said: ‘Come in.’ I thought immediately that probably someone in the house was ill – a doctor, you know, is always ready for these emergencies. The door opened at once and a man entered holding a small ordinary storm-lantern. I noticed nothing peculiar about the man. He had a dark great-coat on, and appeared extremely anxious. ‘I am sorry to disturb you,’ he said at once, ‘but there is a young woman dangerously ill. I want you to come and see her.’ I, somehow, did not think of arguing or of suggesting that there were other medical men in the neighbourhood, or of asking how it was he knew of my presence at Verrall. I dressed myself quickly and accompanied him out of the house. He opened the front door without any trouble, and it did not occur to me to ask him how it was he had obtained either admission or egress. There was a small carriage outside the door, such a one as you may still see in isolated country places, but such a one as I was certainly surprised to see here. I could not very well make out either the horse or the driver for, though the moon was high in the heavens, it was frequently obscured by clouds. I got into the carriage and noticed, as I have often noticed before in these ancient vehicles, a most repulsive smell of decay and damp. My companion got in beside me. He did not speak a word during the whole of the journey, which was, I have the impression, extremely long, and yet I could not say how long. I had also the sense that he was in the greatest trouble, anguish, and almost despair; I do not know why I did not question him. I should tell you that he had drawn down the blinds of the carriage and we travelled in darkness, yet I was perfectly aware of his presence and seemed to see him in his heavy dark great-coat turned up round his chin, his black hair low on his forehead, and his anxious, furtive dark eyes.

“I think I may have gone to sleep in the carriage, I was tired and cold. I was aware, however, when it stopped, and of my companion opening the door and helping me out. We went through a garden, down some steps and past a fish-pond; I could see by the moonlight the silver and gold shapes of fishes slipping in and out of the black water. We entered the house by a side-door – I remember that very distinctly – and went up what seemed to be some secret or seldom-used stairs, and into a bedroom. I was by now quite alert, as one is when one gets into the presence of the patient, and I said to myself, ‘What a fool I’ve been, I’ve brought nothing with me’; and I tried to remember, but could not quite do so, whether or not I had brought anything with me – my cases and so on – to Verrall.

“The room was very badly lit, but a certain illumination, I could not say whether it came from any artificial light within the room or merely from the moonlight through the open window, draped with mauve velvet curtains, fell on the bed, and there I saw my patient. She was a young woman who, I surmised, would have been, when in health, of considerable though coarse charm. She was now in great suffering, twisted and contorted with agony, and in her struggles of anguish had pulled and torn the bedclothes into a heap. I noticed that she wore a dress of some light material spotted with small roses, and it occurred to me at once that she had been taken ill during the daytime and must have lain thus in great pain for many hours, and I turned with some reproach to the man who had fetched me and demanded why help had not been sought sooner. For answer he wrung his hands – a gesture that I do not remember having noticed in any human being before; one hears a great deal of hands being wrung but one does not so often see it. This man, I remember distinctly, wrung his hands, and muttered, ‘Do what you can for her – do what you can!’ I feared that this would be very little. I endeavoured to make an examination of the patient, but owing to her half-delirious struggles this was very difficult; she was, however, I thought, likely to die, and of what malady I could not determine.

“There was a table nearby on which lay some papers – one I took to be a will – and a glass in which there had been milk. I do not remember seeing anything else in the room – the light was so bad. I endeavoured to question the man, whom I took to be the husband, but without any success. He merely repeated his monotonous appeal for me to save her. Then I was aware of a sound outside the room – of a woman laughing, perpetually and shrilly laughing. “Pray stop that,’ I cried to the man; ‘who have you got in the house – a lunatic?’ But he took no notice of my appeal, merely repeating his own hushed lamentations. The sick woman appeared to hear that demoniacal laughter outside, and, raising herself on one elbow, said, ‘You have destroyed me and you may well laugh!’

“I sat down at the table on which were the papers and the half-full glass of milk, and wrote a prescription on a sheet torn out of my note-book. The man snatched it eagerly. ‘I don’t know when and where you can get that made up,’ I said, ‘but it’s the only hope.’ At this he seemed wishful for me to depart, as wishful as he had been for me to come. ‘That’s all I want,’ he said. He took me by the arm and led me out of the house by the same back stairs. As I descended I still heard those two dreadful sounds – the thin laughter of the woman I had not seen, and the groans, becoming every moment fainter, of the young woman whom I had seen. The carriage was waiting for me and I was driven back by the same way I had come. When I reached the house and my room I saw the dawn just breaking. I rested till I heard the breakfast gong. I suppose some time had gone by since I returned to the house, but I wasn’t quite aware of it; all through the night I had rather lost the sense of time.”

When Dr Dilke had finished his narrative, which I give here badly – but, I hope, to the point – we all glanced at each other rather uncomfortably, for who was to tell a man like Dr Dilke that he had been suffering from a severe hallucination? It was, of course, quite impossible that he could have left the house and gone through the peculiar scenes he had described, and it seemed extraordinary that he could for a moment have believed that he had done so. What was even more remarkable was that so many points of his story agreed with what the medium, Mrs Mahogany, had said in her trance. We recognized the frock with the roses, the mauve velvet curtains, the glass of milk, the man who had fetched Dr Dilke sounded like the murderer, and the unfortunate woman writhing on the bed sounded like the victim; but how had the doctor got hold of these particulars? We all knew that he had not spoken to Mrs Mahogany and each suspected the other of having told him what the medium had said, and that this having wrought on his mind he had the dream, vision, or hallucination he had just described to us. I must add that this was found afterwards to be wholly false; we were all reliable people and there was not a shadow of doubt we had all kept our counsel about Mrs Mahogany. In fact, none of us had been alone with Dr Dilke the previous day for more than a moment or so save myself, who had walked with him home from the church, when we had certainly spoken of nothing except the black stone in the church and the chill which he had said emanated from it . . . Well, to put the matter as briefly as possible, and to leave out a great deal of amazement and wonder, explanation and so on, we will come to the point when Dr Dilke was finally persuaded that he had not left Verrall all the night. When his story was taken to pieces and put before him, as it were, in the raw, he himself recognized many absurdities; how could the man have come straight to his bedroom? How could he have left the house? – the doors were locked every night, there was no doubt about that. Where did the carriage come from and where was the house to which he had been taken? And who could possibly have known of his presence in the neighbourhood? Had not, too, the scene in the house to which he was taken all the resemblance of a nightmare? Who was it laughing in the other room? What was the mysterious illness that was destroying the young woman? Who was the black-browed man who had fetched him? And, in these days of telephone and motor-cars, people didn’t go out in old-fashioned one-horse carriages to fetch doctors from miles away in the case of dangerous illness.

Dr Dilke was finally silenced, uneasy, but not convinced. I could see that he disliked intensely the idea that he had been the victim of an hallucination, and that he equally intensely regretted the impulse which had made him relate his extraordinary adventure of the night. I could only conclude that he must have done so while still, to an extent, under the influence of his delusion, which had been so strong that never for a moment had he questioned the reality of it. Though he was forced at last to allow us to put the whole thing down as a most remarkable dream, I could see that he did not intend to let the matter rest there, and later in the day (out of good manners we had eventually ceased discussing the story) he asked me if I would accompany him on some investigation in the neighbourhood.

“I think I should know the house,” he said, “even though I saw it in the dark. I was impressed by the fish-pond and the low doorway through which I had to stoop in order to pass without knocking my head.”

I did not tell him that Mrs Mahogany had also mentioned a fish-pond and a low door.

We made the excuse of some old brasses we wished to discover in a nearby church to take my car and go out that afternoon on an investigation of the neighbourhood in the hope of discovering Dr Dilke’s dream house.

We covered a good deal of distance and spend a good deal of time without any success at all, and the short day was already darkening when we came upon a row of almshouses in which, for no reason at all that I could discern, Dr Dilke showed an interest and insisted on stopping before them. He pointed out an inscription cut in the centre gable, which said that these had been built by a certain Richard Carwithen in memory of Philadelphia, his wife.

“The people whose tablet you sat next to in the church,” I remarked.

“Yes,” murmured Dr. Dilke, “when I felt the chill,” and he added, “when I first felt the chill. You see the date is 1830. That would be about right.”

We stopped in the little village, which was a good many miles from Verrall, and after some tedious delays because everything was shut up for the holidays we did discover an old man who was willing to tell us something about the almshouses, though there was nothing much to be said about them. They had been founded by a certain Mr Richard Carwithen with his wife’s fortune. He had been a poor man, a kind of adventurer, our informant thought, who had married a wealthy woman; they had not been at all happy. There had been quarrels and disputes, and a separation (at least, so the gossip went, as his father had told it to him). Finally, the Carwithens had taken a house here in this village of Sunford – a large house it was, and it still stood. The Carwithens weren’t buried in this village though, but at Verrall, she had been a Verrall by birth – perhaps that’s why they came to this neighbourhood – it was the name of a great family in those days you know . . . There was another woman in the old story, as it went, and she got hold of Mr Carwithen and was for making him put his wife aside; and so, perhaps, he would have done, but the poor lady died suddenly, and there was some talk about it, having the other woman in the house at the time, and it being so convenient for both of them . . . But he didn’t marry the other woman, because he died six months after his wife . . . By his will he left all his wife’s money to found these almshouses.

Dr Dilke asked if he could see the house where the Carwithens had lived.

“It belongs to a London gentleman,” the old man said, “who never comes here. It’s going to be pulled down and the land sold in building lots; why, it’s been locked up these ten years or more. I don’t suppose it’s been inhabited since – no, not for a hundred years.”

“Well, I’m looking for a house round about here. I don’t mind spending a little money on repairs if that house is in the market.”

The old man didn’t know whether it was in the market or not, but kept repeating that the property was to be sold and broken up for building lots.

I won’t bother you with all our delays and arguments, but merely tell you that we did finally discover the lodge-keeper of the estate, who gave us the key. It was not such a very large estate, nothing to be compared to Verrall, but had been, in its time, of some pretension. Builders’ boards had already been raised along the high road frontage. There were some fine old trees, black and bare, in a little park. As we turned in through the rusty gates and motored towards the house it was nearly dark, but we had our electric torches and the powerful head-lamps of the car. Dr Dilke made no comment on what we had found, but he reconstructed the story of the Carwithens whose names were on that black stone in Verrall church.

“They were quarrelling over money, he was trying to get her to sign a will in his favour; she had some little sickness perhaps – brought on probably by rage – he had got the other woman in the house, remember. I expect he was no good. There was some sort of poison about – perhaps for a face wash, perhaps as a drug. He put it in the milk and gave it to her.”

Here I interrupted: “How do you know it was in the milk?”

The doctor did not reply to this. I had now swung the car round to the front of the ancient mansion – a poor, pretentious place, sinister in the half-darkness.

“And then, when he had done it,” continued Dr Dilke, mounting the steps of the house, “he repented most horribly; he wanted to fly for a doctor to get some antidote for the poison with the idea in his head that if he could have got help he could have saved her himself. The other woman kept on laughing. He couldn’t forgive that – that she could laugh at a moment like that! He couldn’t get help. He couldn’t find a doctor. His wife died. No one suspected foul play – they seldom did in those days as long as the people were respectable, you must remember the state in which medical knowledge was in 1830. He couldn’t marry the other woman, and he couldn’t touch the money; he left it all to found the almshouses; then he died himself, six months afterwards, leaving instructions that his name should be added on that black stone. I dare say he died by his own hand. Probably he loved her through it all, you know – it was only the money, that cursed money, a fortune just within his grasp, but which he couldn’t take!”

“A pretty romance,” I suggested as we entered the house; “I am sure there is a three-volume novel in it of what Mrs Janey would call ‘the good old-fashioned’ sort.”

To this Dr Dilke answered: “Suppose the miserable man can’t rest? Supposing he is still searching for a doctor?”

We passed from one room to another of the dismal, dusty, dismantled house. Dr Dilke opened a damaged shutter which concealed one of the windows at the back, and pointed out in the waning light a decayed garden with stone steps and a fish-pond – dry now, of course, but certainly once a fish-pond; and a low gateway, to pass through which a man of his height would have to stoop. We could just discern this in the twilight. He made no comment. We went upstairs.

Here Cuming paused dramatically to give us the full flavour of the final part of his story. He reminded us, rather unnecessarily, for somehow he had convinced us, that this was all perfectly true:

I am not romancing; I won’t answer for what Dr Dilke said or did, or his adventure of the night before, or the story of the Carwithens as he constructed it, but this is actually what happened . . . We went upstairs by the wide main stairs. Dr Dilke searched about for and found a door which opened on to the back stairs, and then he said: “This must be the room.” It was entirely devoid of any furniture, and stained with damp, the walls stripped of panelling and cheaply covered with decayed paper, peeling, and in parts fallen.

“What’s this?” said Dr Dilke.

He picked up a scrap of paper that showed vivid on the dusty floor and handed it to me. It was a prescription. He took out his note-book and showed me the page where this fitted in.

“This page I tore out last night when I wrote that prescription in this room. The bed was just there, and there was the table on which were the papers and the glass of milk.”

“But you couldn’t have been here last night,” I protested feebly, “the locked doors – the whole thing! . . .”

Dr Dilke said nothing. After a while neither did I. “Let’s get out of the place,” I said. Then another thought struck me. “What is your prescription?” I asked.

He said: “A very uncommon kind of prescription, a very desperate sort of prescription, one that I’ve never written before, nor I hope shall again – an antidote for severe arsenical poisoning.”

“I leave you,” smiled Cuming, “to your various attitudes of incredulity or explanation.”