Best Short Stories Omnibus - Volume 3

Chapter Eight

Chapter Eight

––––––––

Mrs. Tippens, assisted by her husband and Mr. Maldon and his friend Mr. Whipple, and one of the second-floor lodgers, who was out of work, scoured the neighbourhood for Miss Tippens, and scoured it in vain. That young person seemed to have vanished as utterly as old Mrs. Jones. They sought her high, they sought her low; the whole street in confusion; as popular opinion had as yet defined no limit to the powers possessed by Doctor Jones' wife, little doubt existed that Anne Jane had been carried off bodily by the grey-haired lady as an expiation of the sins of the Tippens' family in continuing the tenancy of a house on which it was “well-known a curse rested.”

Who had cursed it, on whom it rested, were matters considered quite irrelevant to the general issue. So far sickness had passed over and misfortune shunned the latest dwellers in the haunted dwelling. But now it was felt the day of reckoning had been only deferred in order to inflict a heavier punishment. Old Mrs. Jones was about to vindicate herself at last. And if you don't get out of the place quick,” said Mrs. Jubb, who, during the whole of that memorable morning, conducted herself after the manner of some ancient prophetess, “you'll find far worse to follow. I always told you I couldn't sleep in the house if the hall was paved with golden guineas.”

“d**k, d**k,” cried Mrs. Tippens, “didn't I beg and pray of you long ago to move—that very first night the children saw old Mrs. Jones?”

But d**k, not being in a fit state of mind either to argue with his wife or endure her reproaches, mounted to the seat of his neat hansom and drove aimlessly about the streets, asking useless questions of persons totally unable to afford the slightest information as to his cousin's whereabouts.

About three o'clock, however, Anne Jane, in person, appeared at her cousin's door, accompanied by a policeman. Early that morning she had been found trying to open the garden gate of a house in the Stratford Road; as, when remonstrated with concerning the impropriety of her conduct, she still continued knocking and pushing the gate, the policeman seized her left arm and told her she couldn't be allowed to make such a noise; then, for the first time, she turned her face towards him, and he saw, as he expressed himself, “there was something stranger about the matter than he thought.”

Immediately it dawned upon his understanding that though the woman's eyes were wide open, she did not see him, and that she was not drunk, as he had supposed, but fast asleep.

Therefore he woke her up, and inquired what she was doing there at four o'clock in the morning.

The girl's terror when suddenly recalled to consciousness—she found herself only partially dressed, in a road perfectly unknown to her, held firmly in the grasp of a stalwart policeman was so great as utterly to deprive her of speech. She tried to collect her senses, she strove to ask him how she came there, but no word passed her parched and trembling lips, in a very agony of shame and distress, she allowed herself to be led to the station-house; but there, when addressed by the inspector, she broke into a passion of weeping, which culminated in a fit of violent hysterics, that in turn was succeeded by a sort of wandering the doctor regarded as a precursor of some severe illness. “The girl is quite overwrought,” he said; “I wonder who this old Mrs. Jones is she talks so much about.”

“Oh, save me from her—oh, Luce!—oh, d**k! don't let her come near me again.” At that moment Anne Jane again cried in terror.

“No, she shan't come near you, we won't let her,” observed the doctor soothingly; and after a time he managed to give this strange patient a quieting draught.

“Anyone,” as Mrs. Tippens observed, when subsequently commenting upon the conduct of the police, “could see Anne Jane was a thoroughly respectable girl, who had been carefully brought up,” and accordingly she did not feel so grateful as she ought to have done to the inspector for sending her cousin home in a cab.

“She'll be better with her friends than in a hospital,” said the doctor; and accordingly, when she recovered sufficiently to mention Mr. Tippens' address, she was despatched thither under the care of a staid and respectable member of the force.

But nothing could induce her to enter d**k's house, till Mrs. Tippens had solemnly promised at once to go out and find a lodging for her elsewhere.

“If I sleep here again she'll never rest till she has killed me,” declared the girl; which utterance seemed so mysterious to the policeman, that, pressing for an explanation, he was told the whole story of “old Mrs. Jones.”

“And the young woman solemnly declares,” went on the man who repeated the narrative to the inspector, “that Doctor Jones' wife came to her bedside, and bade her get up and dress, and opened the door of the room, and the front door, and made her walk till she was fit to drop through places and streets she had never seen before, till they came to the garden gate of St. Julian's; she passed through that and kept beckoning her to follow—'and I know I tried hard, and then you must have awakened me.'”

“It's a rather unlikely tale altogether,” observed the inspector, but still he kept the matter in his mind, and thought it worth while to make a few inquiries and set a detective to work; and had a watch kept on Doctor Schloss, the great German chemist, who lived in a very secluded manner at St. Julian's—the result of all being that one day a policeman appeared at the house, and asking if he could see the doctor, arrested him on the charge of “Wilful Murder.”

“But this is absurd,” said the great chemist, speaking in very broken English. “Who is it that you make believe I have murdered?”

“Your wife, Zillah Jones,” was the answer. Whereupon the doctor shrugged his shoulders and inquired who Zillah Jones might be.

Asked if he would come quietly with the policeman, he laughed, and said, “Oh, yes.” Warned that any statement he made would be used as evidence, he laughed again, and observed he had no statement of any kind to make.

On the way he conducted himself, as was remarked, in a very quiet and gentlemanlike manner; and, arrived at his destination, he requested to be allowed to sit down, as he did not feel very well.

“It is a serious charge to bring against an innocent person,” he said, still speaking in imperfect English. That was the last sentence he uttered. When he was requested to get up, he did not stir. He was dead—dead as the woman whose remains were found, embalmed in a locked box, in his laboratory at St. Julian's.

No one, however, in the neighbourhood where Doctor Jones once lived believed, or could be persuaded to believe Doctor Schloss and Doctor Jones were one and the same person, or that the embalmed body was that of old Mrs. Jones. Nothing will ever shake the local mind in its conviction that Doctor Jones is still enjoying existence in “foreign parts,” or that his wife was buried in the cellar of that old-fashioned house where evil befell all who tried to live.

In proof of which conviction it is still told in bated breath how Anne Jane was never able to go back to service, but was forced eventually to return to her native village, where to this day she earns a modest living with her needle; and how, on the very night of that day when Mr. Tippens removed his family and goods, cabs and horses excepted, to a dwelling he had taken in the next street, where the lodgers accompanied Mrs. Tippens, a passer-by, looking up at the old house, saw something like the figure of a woman, carrying a torch, flit from window to window, and story to story, and ere he had time to think what it meant, beheld flames bursting from every part of the old building.

Before the engines came the fire had got such a mastery it was with difficulty Mr. Tippens' horses were saved, to say nothing of the adjoining houses.

It was indeed a conflagration to be remembered, if for no other reason than that standing on the parapet in the fiercest of the fire a woman, with streaming grey hair, was seen wringing her hands in such an apparent agony of distress that an escape was put up, and one of the brigade nearly lost his life in trying to save her.

At this juncture someone cried out with a loud voice: “It was a witch the doctor married, and fire alone can destroy her!”

Then for a moment there fell a dead silence upon the assembled crowd, while the dreadful figure was seen running from point to point in a mad effort to escape.

Suddenly the roof crashed in, millions of sparks flew upwards from the burning rafters, there was a roar as if the doors of some mighty furnace had been suddenly opened, a blaze of light shot straight towards the heavens, and when the spectators looked again there was no figure to be seen anywhere, only the bare walls, and red flames rushing through the sashless windows of the house once haunted by “Old Mrs. Jones.”

Flora Annie Steel

Flora Annie Steel (2 April 1847 – 12 April 1929) was an English writer, who lived in British India for 22 years. She was noted especially for books set or otherwise connected with the sub-continent.

She was born Flora Annie Webster in Sudbury, Middlesex, the sixth child of George Webster. In 1867, she married Henry William Steel, a member of the Indian Civil Service, and lived there until 1889, chiefly in the Punjab, with which most of her books are connected. She grew deeply interested in native Indian life and began to urge educational reforms on the government of India. Mrs Steel became an Inspectress of Government and Aided Schools in the Punjab and also worked with John Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard Kipling's father, to foster Indian arts and crafts. When her husband's health was weak, Flora Annie Steel took over some of his responsibilities.

Flora Annie Steel was interested in relating to all classes of Indian society. The birth of her daughter gave her a chance to interact with local women and learn their language. She encouraged the production of local handicrafts and collected folk-tales, a collection of which she published in 1894.

Her interest in schools and the education of women gave her a special insight into native life and character. A year before leaving India, she coauthored and published The Complete Indian Housekeeper, giving detailed directions to European women on all aspects of household management in India.

In 1889 the family moved back to Scotland, and she continued her writing there. Some of her best work, according to the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica, is contained in two collections of short stories, From the Five Rivers and Tales of the Punjab.

Her novel On the Face of the Waters (1896) describes incidents in the Indian Mutiny. She also wrote a popular history of India. John F. Riddick describes Steel's The Hosts of the Lord as one of the "three significant works" produced by Anglo-Indian writers on Indian missionaries, along with The Old Missionary (1895) by William Wilson Hunter and Idolatry (1909) by Alice Perrin. Among her other literary associates in India was Bithia Mary Croker.

She died at her daughter's house in Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire on 12 April 1929.