THE VAN ON THE ROAD.

Otago Witness, Issue 3239, 12 April 1916, Page 78

THE VAN ON THE ROAD.

By Bernard Caves

(Copyright.)

Concar.on had taken the train to Farnborough, on the South-western main line, and thence walked to view the " House to Let." The house, according to the agents, had appeared the very thing to suit him. It was small, isolated, the rent was low, 'and there was a garden. Its reported solitude was what had most appealed to Ifum. He had just completed a labour involving perpetual research and application, and his brain exhaustion coveted an utter pastoral vacancy —for months, for years, for a lifetime if need be. As yet freedom and idleness filled him with only a dim rapture. His direction soon took him off the highways into remote quietudes. Trees and fields were all about him; and then came a little village. It was a grave, sunless day, with only the tiniest breeze that blew in ghostly spasms, and danced in little eddies of dust before his feet, and in a moment was gone. Suddenly, at a half-mile beyond the village in a Hat country, he came upon a horseless furniture van standing in the middle of the road.

It struck him as odd, and no more. As he passed, lie observed that the back doors were open, and that an oak chest of an antique pattern was slightly protruding through them. But no sign of men or cattle was visible anywhere. He went on, assuming that, according to his directions, he must be very near his destination. Somehow his thoughts reverted to a story recently told him. It was of a deserted house, into which nobody could penetrate. So surely as one tried, some force, invisible, unaccountable, ejected him. Then once a scandalised and indignant mob had essayed to storm the place. They threw stones, they were prepared to fire it, when suddenly there had appeared at a window a presence so hideous that the boldest screamed and fled. And thenceforth the house was accursed and abanjoned. C'oncanon was wondering what had recalled the weird thing to his mind, when he came upon a little lane leading off the road, and at the end was the house to let. He would have known it at once from the particulars given him, without the advertising board to confirm. Alert on the instant, he turned down the lane, and, approaching, saw at once the explanation of the van. The tenants were in actual process of leaving. He was surprised, as he had certainlv understood from the agent that the house was empty; yet here were evidences enough of active removal. Straw scattered the short drive; articles of furniture, placed ready for porterage, stood about the steps. ' Yet still not. a living soul appeared to attest the fact. Lonely of the loneliest, the house undoubtedly appeared; yet, in its position, its embowered quiet, its rusted antiquity, restfully potential of promire. Concanon went on and entered the hall, assuring himself, he knew not why, that here anyhow was no repelling malignity. Rather some emotion, vaguely sympathetic, seemed to lure hip on from room to room. They were all littered with unremoved furniture. Obviously the British workman, claiming his prescriptive right to thirst, had adjourned to the neighbouring village for beer, leaving his task unfinished. Now, it seemed to Concanon all of a sudden, that the thing he had considered and repudiated was actually happening to him—he was being softly, invisibly" propelled towards the door. The conviction was so strong that, to test it, he leaned slightly backwards, enough to throw him normally off his balance. The next moment he was out in the garden and walking rapidly away from the house, his heart 4humping and his brain in a fume. He went up the lane, and, coming out into the road, saw the deserted van still in its place. The oak chest appeared, if anything, a thought more protruded. An hour later he walked into the agent's office at Farnborough. "You never told me," he said, "that the house was occupied." The agent stared at him. "It isn't occupied, sir." "Was, then, until recentlv. I found the removal going on." "It hasn't been let, I assure you, for over a year." It was .Concanon's turn to stare. "Will you come back there with me?" he said. "We'll get a trap and drive over."

There was something wrong here, it appeared. Could it be possible that 'the tenant rabid had taken advantage of the remoteness of the place to put in a year's occupation rent free? Yes, the "agent ■would come with him.

They drove over. Nearing the lane Concanon observed that the furniture-van was no longer in evidence. It had been removed during the interval. That was a plausible hypothesis, but no hypothesis could account for the utter desertion and emptiness of the house when they reached it. The men on their return must have worked with a superhuman activity. There was no trace anywhere of straw, of furniture, of human occupation. It was all dust and echoing .loneliness. The agent, taking his client for the second time over the premises, was a little curt in his manner. Probably he thought Concanon drunk or possessed. He looked at him covertly from time to time, but hardly alluded to the mare's nest which had brought him afield to the utter r*aste Of his afternoon.

Lack in his office, he could scarcely uomjnand the professional blandishment meet for the netting of a customer. He spoke with a minute show of impatience, barely jfcroubling to suggest alternatives:

" Well, sir," he said, " are you satisfied with the place or not?" " Who were the lest tenants?" said Concanon, answering the question with a question. The agent shrugged his shoulders. " A family, name of Darrel," he said shortly. "An ordinary family—l mean, there was nothing unusual about them?" asked the customer, he himself hardly knew why. " They paid their rent," said the agent. " That was all I needed to know about them." "Of whom did they consist?" " Father, mother, and a daughter of the mother, who'd been married before. The mother died during their tenancy. Well, sir, about the house?" Concanon rose and stood with his back to the empty fireplace. "1 wish you'd tell me," he said, "what sort of people they were." His nervous insistence impressed the agent, despite his commonplace self. "Really, sir," he said, "i knew nothing definite against them!" " Definite?" " The man hadn't, perhaps, a first-class reputation. He was, in fact, rather a domestic tyrant, and unpopular with his neighbours." "There was no suggestion of •" "Foul play? Good heavens, no 1 . vVhat are you hinting at? The poor woman died of some internal complaint.' Though certainly——" " Well, what?" " Why, it simply occurred to me that the money was hers. But you mustn't accept that for any suggestive admission. Everything was perfectly straight and above-board." "And they left a year ago, you say?' "Rather more." "Do you know where they went?" " No, i don't. I know only that the furniture was stored."

" Where?" " That I can't recall. Now, sir, I must really trouble you for an answer." " Leave that open," said Concanon. "The place suits me and it doesn't. If I decide to take, I'll, let you know." He left the office in an odd mood. He seemed to himself to have been impelled to these questions. He returned to town in a state of queer mental perturbation, which did nothing but increase during the next day or two. Clearly, unless he could devise some means to quiet .it, his search for repose had exchanged him merely Scylla for Charybdis. One night he saw in a dream once more the deserted furniture van. It stood on the empty road, as it had stood to his waking vision; only there was a difference —the oak chest was so protruded that it seemed to shoot towards him. He woke, trembling and in a violent sweat; and by the morning he had made up his mind. He must do his utmost to trace the thing. Now, at the time of his first experience, he had noted plainly enough, with no ulterior purpose, yet somehow compelled to the observation,, the inscription on the van. It was that of a well-known Pantechnicon at Southampton; his one obvious resource was to visit the place. Necessarily his mission must be a blind one; nor could he conceive what was to be its upshot. But go he must, if -only as a first step towards resolving a very haunting psychical problem. He took an early opportunity to run down. As he approached the place he saw that a quantity of furniture and household effects was in process of being removed from it at the moment. A couple of tilted vans, heavily laden, issued from the yard as he approached, and prominent on the tail-board of the second lay the oak chest. He believed he recognised it with certainty, and his heart gave an odd twist. Then, turning, he followed the van through the streets. It led him to the rear quarters of some auction rooms, where it stopped to unload. He waited to see the chest carried in, then walked round to the front offices, and inquired as to forthcoming furniture sales. The one they were about to catalogue, he learned, was to take place in a week.

He would "wait for it, he told himself. He was happily an idle man, and weather and water were attractive. Calling at the auction rooms in due course, he procured a catalogue, and, having ascertained from it that the goods were to be sold by the direction of a Mr Darrel, their owner, he passed in to view the lots. The chest, on examination, proved to be a sound antique piece; but it was completely and naturally empty. On the day of the sale he attended, and, having bought the thing at a fair price, had it carried home to his lodgings. At night he examined his purchase. It was to reveal to him for once and for all the actuality of the ghostly influence which had mastered him, or his own unfounded superstition. It was with a thrill, quite momentarily sickening in its intensity, that he found his minute investigation rewarded at last by the discovery of a secret panel which, sliding apart, betrayed the fact of a document hidden behind it. Concanon disinterred his prize with shaking fingers and spread it open. It was a will, duly attested and signed by one Kathleen Darrel (nee Brewer) making her only surviving daughter, Lucy Allingham, her sole residuary legatee, after the payment of a certain bequest to John Darrel, the testator's husband.

The next day Concanon returned to town, where he made it his first business 1o visit the probate oflico at Somerset House. The will in his possession, he discovered, post-dated another proved by John Darrel, in which the whole of Kathleen DarreFs property and effects were left unconditionally to her husband.

Concanon promptly transferred the further conduct of the matter to the hands of his lawyers, who, discarding all evidences of supernatural agency, proceeded to work, like plain business men, to find the girl, Lucy Allingham. A series of advertisements was successful at length in producing her, and then the

story, such as it was, came out. Darrel had been a brute, both to his wife (whose fortune lie had married) and to his stepdaughter. The complete control he had effected over the former had resulted in the will by which he alone profited: but remorse of conscience, it spemed, had driven the mother, when stricken to her death, to reinedv the injustice done her child bv executing a "later will—that hidden away in the oak chest. It was duly witnessed by a couple of ignorant and illiterate laundry hands, who had been sworn to secrecy, and the girl supposed that some frantic inarticulate efforts made by her mother, when actually dying, to explain something to her, had related to the secret deposit. The two had lived in mortal terror of Dane!; the mother had postponed her revelation, with fatal results, to the very last. The moment she. was dead and buried, the miscreant had driven the girl from home, with an intimation that she was to expect nothing more from him. She, delicately reared and educated, had been eking out a miserably existence as a skirt-hand when the solicitors' advertisement at length reached her.

The law did the rest, and effectively ; and a- scoundrel was duly checkmated. But there was a postscript, proper to the singularity of the occasion. The emotion;',! experience, operatino; on a somewhat debilitated constitution ; the impulse to a certain intimacy, supernaturally encouraged ; the communion in a secret very sweet and pitiful in its essence—how could these "result but in a craving for closer relations, The girl was desirable; the man. in his then condition, wholly susceptible. When at length Concanon moved into a country cottage —not that one in question, but another and a fairer, far away—he took a wife with him for love's sake.