When Last I Died

"I'm not going to play," said his father, basely. "I've got this letter from Gran and I'd better answer it."

He fled, pursued by the joint maledictions of his wife and son, who, thereafter, forgot him, and settled down to Tiddleywinks until it was Derek's bedtime.

"Would you like to go and stay with Gran at the seaside for a bit?" asked Caroline, when she went in to say good-night. Her son's reply was brief but warm, and so by the middle of the following week all arrangements had been made.

The house which Mrs. Bradley had rented was about a hundred yards from the sea, and was, from the child's point of view, admirably situated. Mrs. Bradley had fitted up her dressing-room for him, and there he had a camp bed and a chest of drawers. On the top of this antiquated but useful piece of furniture he placed the model of a Viking ship made for him by a cousin. This was so much his most cherished possession that it could not be left at home.

The house was that of which Mrs. Bradley had heard from the Warden. Unattractive from the outside, and furnished in accordance with the taste of an earlier period, it was comfortable and convenient enough, and grandmother and grandson enjoyed one another's company and the pleasures of the sea and the shore. Permission had not, so far, been granted for any of the Warden's boys to join them.

George, Mrs. Bradley's chauffeur, one of the servants she had brought with her, had become mentor to the little boy, and introduced him to the wonders of the internal combustion engine and to the vocabulary of the mechanically-minded. The weather, on the whole, was fine, and although Mrs. Bradley deplored the ostrich-outlook of the authorities in refraining from granting their blessing to her holiday scheme for the Home Boys (as they were euphemistically entitled), she enjoyed the sea air, the old-fashioned house, and, until the last week of the child's visit, the innocuous gossip of the village.

During this last week, however, she was surprised and annoyed when the little boy said suddenly, one evening when he was having his supper, and only an hour before his bedtime,

"Gran, what lady was murdered in this house?"

"Murdered?" said Mrs. Bradley. She had no time to prepare an answer. "Oh, I expect they mean poor old Aunt What's-it. I've forgotten her name."

"Does her ghost walk?"

"Why should it?"

"Somebody told me it did."

"Had this person seen it?"

"No. What would it look like, Gran?"

"Exactly like the person, I suppose."

"I don't want to see it, Gran."

"No such luck. I've tried hard to see them, many and many a time. It isn't a scrap of good. I've come to the conclusion there are no such things. People are such liars, unfortunately."

"Do you think Miss Peeple was telling me lies, Gran? She said Miss Bella killed Aunt Flora, and Aunt Flora's spirit can't rest."

"Well, she's a funny old thing, and not very sensible, you know——"

"George says she's batty and sees double. Is it the same thing, Gran?"

"Exactly the same thing," said Mrs. Bradley, paying her usual mental tribute to her chauffeur.

"Yes ... but I think I'm glad I'm sleeping in the next room, Gran. Do you think I could move my bed in beside yours?"

"I think it would be great fun," said Mrs. Bradley. In the morning she said to the postmistress, in the course of a conversation engineered to lead up to the question:

"What is this tale that the house I have rented is haunted?"

"It's only Peggy Peeple's nonsense," said the postmistress. "Although you can't wonder at her, poor thing. There's plenty about here to swear the old lady was murdered. They do say it was her niece, Miss Bella Foxley, the one that inherited the money."

"Wasn't someone tried for it?—the niece, or some other relative?" said Mrs. Bradley, innocent of all real knowledge of the subject, but determined to get to the bottom of it.

"Oh, no, not for that. It was never brought in as murder, that wasn't. Oh, no! It's only people's wickedness to talk the way they do, but, of course, she did come in for the money, Miss Bella did, and then she was tried for murdering her cousin, and that set people off again. But the poor thing committed suicide in the end—drowned herself, so I heard—and some thought it was remorse that made her do it. But all that talk about her aunt, there was nothing so far as we knew, though they do say no smoke without fire."

Other customers came in then, and the conversation was abandoned. Neither did Mrs. Bradley find any occasion to resume it during her grandson's visit, for every time after that that she visited the shop, Derek happened to be with her.

At last the time came for him to return home, but he suggested that he should stay another week, so, despite his parents' protests that they missed him, and wanted him back, stay he did until the following Thursday.

During his visit Mrs. Bradley had heard, at intervals, of a holiday task he had been set. He went to school, but Caroline preferred that it should be a day school until he was nine.