Short Fiction · A View from a Hill (3/3)

“Yes, I was,” said the Squire. “I wonder you haven’t told me all this before. However, I was going to say I remember old Lawrence telling me he’d attended Baxter. He was a queer card, he said. Lawrence was up in the bedroom one day, and picked up a little mask covered with black velvet, and put it on in fun and went to look at himself in the glass. He hadn’t time for a proper look, for old Baxter shouted out to him from the bed: ‘Put it down, you fool! Do you want to look through a dead man’s eyes?’ and it startled him so that he did put it down, and then he asked Baxter what he meant. And Baxter insisted on him handing it over, and said the man he bought it from was dead, or some such nonsense. But Lawrence felt it as he handed it over, and he declared he was sure it was made out of the front of a skull. He bought a distilling apparatus at Baxter’s sale, he told me, but he could never use it: it seemed to taint everything, however much he cleaned it. But go on, Patten.”

“Yes, Master Henry, I’m nearly done now, and time, too, for I don’t know what they’ll think about me in the servants’ ’all. Well, this business of the scalding was some few years before Mr. Baxter was took, and he got about again, and went on just as he’d used. And one of the last jobs he done was finishing up them actual glasses what you took out last night. You see he’d made the body of them some long time, and got the pieces of glass for them, but there was somethink wanted to finish ’em, whatever it was, I don’t know, but I picked up the frame one day, and I says: ‘Mr. Baxter, why don’t you make a job of this?’ And he says, ‘Ah, when I’ve done that, you’ll hear news, you will: there’s going to be no such pair of glasses as mine when they’re filled and sealed,’ and there he stopped, and I says: ‘Why, Mr. Baxter, you talk as if they was wine bottles: filled and sealed⁠—why, where’s the necessity for that?’ ‘Did I say filled and sealed?’ he says. ‘O, well, I was suiting my conversation to my company.’ Well, then come round this time of year, and one fine evening, I was passing his shop on my way home, and he was standing on the step, very pleased with hisself, and he says: ‘All right and tight now: my best bit of work’s finished, and I’ll be out with ’em tomorrow.’ ‘What, finished them glasses?’ I says, ‘might I have a look at them?’ ‘No, no,’ he says, ‘I’ve put ’em to bed for tonight, and when I do show ’em you, you’ll have to pay for peepin’, so I tell you.’ And that, gentlemen, were the last words I heard that man say.

“That were the 17th of June, and just a week after, there was a funny thing happened, and it was doo to that as we brought in ‘unsound mind’ at the inquest, for barring that, no one as knew Baxter in business could anyways have laid that against him. But George Williams, as lived in the next house, and do now, he was woke up that same night with a stumbling and tumbling about in Mr. Baxter’s premises, and he got out o’ bed, and went to the front window on the street to see if there was any rough customers about. And it being a very light night, he could make sure as there was not. Then he stood and listened, and he hear Mr. Baxter coming down his front stair one step after another very slow, and he got the idear as it was like someone bein’ pushed or pulled down and holdin’ on to everythin’ he could. Next thing he hear the street door come open, and out come Mr. Baxter into the street in his day-clothes, ’at and all, with his arms straight down by his sides, and talking to hisself, and shakin’ his head from one side to the other, and walking in that peculiar way that he appeared to be going as it were against his own will. George Williams put up the window, and hear him say: ‘O mercy, gentlemen!’ and then he shut up sudden as if, he said, someone clapped his hand over his mouth, and Mr. Baxter threw his head back, and his hat fell off. And Williams see his face looking something pitiful, so as he couldn’t keep from calling out to him: ‘Why, Mr. Baxter, ain’t you well?’ and he was goin’ to offer to fetch Dr. Lawrence to him, only he heard the answer: ‘ ’Tis best you mind your own business. Put in your head.’ But whether it were Mr. Baxter said it so hoarse-like and faint, he never could be sure. Still there weren’t no one but him in the street, and yet Williams was that upset by the way he spoke that he shrank back from the window and went and sat on the bed. And he heard Mr. Baxter’s step go on and up the road, and after a minute or more he couldn’t help but look out once more and he see him going along the same curious way as before. And one thing he recollected was that Mr. Baxter never stopped to pick up his ’at when it fell off, and yet there it was on his head. Well, Master Henry, that was the last anybody see of Mr. Baxter, leastways for a week or more. There was a lot of people said he was called off on business, or made off because he’d got into some scrape, but he was well known for miles round, and none of the railway-people nor the public-house people hadn’t seen him; and then ponds was looked into and nothink found; and at last one evening Fakes the keeper come down from over the hill to the village, and he says he seen the Gallows Hill planting black with birds, and that were a funny thing, because he never see no sign of a creature there in his time. So they looked at each other a bit, and first one says: ‘I’m game to go up,’ and another says: ‘So am I, if you are,’ and half a dozen of ’em set out in the evening time, and took Dr. Lawrence with them, and you know, Master Henry, there he was between them three stones with his neck broke.”

Useless to imagine the talk which this story set going. It is not remembered. But before Patten left them, he said to Fanshawe: “Excuse me, sir, but did I understand as you took out them glasses with you today? I thought you did; and might I ask, did you make use of them at all?”

“Yes. Only to look at something in a church.”

“Oh, indeed, you took ’em into the church, did you, sir?”

“Yes, I did; it was Lambsfield church. By the way, I left them strapped on to my bicycle, I’m afraid, in the stable-yard.”

“No matter for that, sir. I can bring them in the first thing tomorrow, and perhaps you’ll be so good as to look at ’em then.”

Accordingly, before breakfast, after a tranquil and well-earned sleep, Fanshawe took the glasses into the garden and directed them to a distant hill. He lowered them instantly, and looked at top and bottom, worked the screws, tried them again and yet again, shrugged his shoulders and replaced them on the hall-table.

“Patten,” he said, “they’re absolutely useless. I can’t see a thing: it’s as if someone had stuck a black wafer over the lens.”

“Spoilt my glasses, have you?” said the Squire. “Thank you: the only ones I’ve got.”

“You try them yourself,” said Fanshawe, “I’ve done nothing to them.”

So after breakfast the Squire took them out to the terrace and stood on the steps. After a few ineffectual attempts, “Lord, how heavy they are!” he said impatiently, and in the same instant dropped them on to the stones, and the lens splintered and the barrel cracked: a little pool of liquid formed on the stone slab. It was inky black, and the odour that rose from it is not to be described.

“Filled and sealed, eh?” said the Squire. “If I could bring myself to touch it, I dare say we should find the seal. So that’s what came of his boiling and distilling, is it? Old Ghoul!”

“What in the world do you mean?”

“Don’t you see, my good man? Remember what he said to the doctor about looking through dead men’s eyes? Well, this was another way of it. But they didn’t like having their bones boiled, I take it, and the end of it was they carried him off whither he would not. Well, I’ll get a spade, and we’ll bury this thing decently.”

As they smoothed the turf over it, the Squire, handing the spade to Patten, who had been a reverential spectator, remarked to Fanshawe: “It’s almost a pity you took that thing into the church: you might have seen more than you did. Baxter only had them for a week, I make out, but I don’t see that he did much in the time.”

“I’m not sure,” said Fanshawe, “there is that picture of Fulnaker Priory Church.”