rom the house, on the side of
the stables, and I had passed it on several of my journeyings to and fro
wondering at its forlorn and untarred appearance under a regime where
everything was so spick and span; but it had never once occurred to me
as possible that I should come to spend a night under its roof with a
comparative stranger, and undergo there an experience belonging to an
order of things I had always rather ridiculed and despised.

At the moment I can only partially recall the process by which
Shorthouse persuaded me to lend him my company. Like myself, he was a
guest in this autumn house-party, and where there were so many to
chatter and to chaff, I think his taciturnity of manner had appealed to
me by contrast, and that I wished to repay something of what I owed.
There was, no doubt, flattery in it as well, for he was more than twice
my age, a man of amazingly wide experience, an explorer of all the
world's corners where danger lurked, and--most subtle flattery of
all--by far the best shot in the whole party, our host included.

At first, however, I held out a bit.

"But surely this story you tell," I said, "has the parentage common to
all such tales--a superstitious heart and an imaginative brain--and has
grown now by frequent repetition into an authentic ghost story? Besides,
this head gardener of half a century ago," I added, seeing that he still
went on cleaning his gun in silence, "who was he, and what positive
information have you about him beyond the fact that he was found hanging
from the rafters, dead?"

"He was no mere head gardener, this man who passed as such," he replied
without looking up, "but a fellow of splendid education who used this
curious disguise for his own purposes. Part of this very barn, of which
he always kept the key, was found to have been fitted up as a complete
laboratory, with athanor, alembic, cucurbite, and other appliances, some
of which the master destroyed at once--perhaps for the best--and which I
have only been able to guess at--"

"Black Arts," I laughed.

"Who knows?" he rejoined quietly. "The man undoubtedly possessed
knowledge--dark knowledge--that was most unusual and dangerous, and I
can discover no means by which he came to it--no ordinary means, that
is. But I _have_ found many facts in the case which point to the
exercise of a most desperate and unscrupulous will; and the strange
disappearances in the neighbourhood, as well as the bones found buried
in t