When Last I Died

"I'll walk as far as the station with you, shall I?" said Mrs. Bradley. Miss Foxley demurred, Mrs. Bradley insisted. Miss Foxley caught the train with ten minutes to spare, and, to Mrs. Bradley's great satisfaction, completely obscured her features with a thick veil, and the lines of her figure with a long, loose mackintosh cape, before they set out from the house.

"I am just sufficiently like poor old Bella to look at, that I don't feel I want to give people a shock," she remarked, apparently feeling that an explanation was called for, although Mrs. Bradley had asked for none.

"Very proper," said Mrs. Bradley. As soon as the train pulled out of the station she telephoned for the police, and then returned to the house. This time there was nobody in occupation. She passed from room to room, and then went to the courtyard. There she removed the wooden cover of the well and peered into the depths.

There were footholds in the brickwork, as had already been noted by one of her amateur searchers after truth. She glanced round—at the scullery door, which opened almost on to the well; at the kitchen window, which overlooked it; at the pantry window, which, with all their zeal, the seekers had not troubled to seal nor she to point out to them.

"Selah," said Mrs. Bradley, removing all traces of the poltergeists' ingress and egress by this means. She returned to the well and soliloquised it:

"In five minutes we were at the well, and for some little time we sat on the edge of the well-head to make sure that no one was stirring or spying on us ... and so we began to descend cautiously, feeling every step before we set foot on it, and scanning the walls in search of any marked stone ..."^*

^*"The Treasure of Abbot Thomas." From Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. By M. R. James.

Mrs. Bradley began to climb carefully into the well.

The police were as painstaking as usual. Led by Mrs. Bradley, who availed herself of her position as temporary tenant of the house to act as guide and showman, they also climbed warily into the well, felt their way along a narrow tunnel which opened out of its side about a dozen feet above the water-line, and, after groping forward a couple of yards, emerged, as she had already done, into the cellars of the house.

The cellars were ancient, and were interesting, not only from the point of view of their age. Frogs hopped on the floors, for dampness was everywhere, chiefly because of the proximity of the well. The chief interest, however, lay not in the frogs but in the great thick groins of stone upon which the roof of the cellars was supported.

"Good heavens!" said the inspector, straightening himself as he came out of the passage exit. "Looks like something built to hold up a bridge."

"It was built to hold up the floor, including the stone pillars of a Norman church," said Mrs. Bradley, resting one of her thin yellow hands affectionately on the stonework. "This is a Norman crypt, and, I should say, one of the most interesting in England."

"No wonder there's been funny goings-on," said the sergeant, who was inclined to be superstitious and was marked for promotion because of it, his superiors being under the impression that it betokened imagination, about which they had been hearing in staff talks.

Mrs. Bradley nodded, and suggested to them that in order to obtain the results she thought probable, they would need to dig. As they had brought nothing down with them—indeed, they could not have transported spades down the well—the inspector looked at her as respectfully as circumstances, and the crude illumination of his countenance by the beams of electric torches, would permit, but did not reply. Mrs. Bradley did not relieve his mind by picking up a very beautiful frog, caressing it gently with her forefinger, and cackling loudly, and with a horrid echo from the vault.

"This way," she said. The overhead arches of the vaulting descended to earth in the form of thick, heavy, crudely-carved, round-capitalled pillars. Mrs. Bradley suddenly disappeared behind one of these, and the inspector, thinking to follow, discovered that she was gone. Unpardonably, since the place must at one time have been consecrated, he swore nervously, and turned round to speak to the sergeant.

"Disappearing trick," he said, introducing a regrettable adjective.

"Snatched away ... and no wonder, with a physog like that," said the sergeant. Suddenly Mrs. Bradley's voice spoke right in his ear.

"Tell the inspector to mind the step," she said. The flight of stone steps was immediately visible to the sergeant. He blushed—fortunately in the darkness—and followed the inspector up to a little square trap-door.