A Caribbean Mystery (Miss Marple 15)

She spoke to a thin, bent old man with stooping shoulders and a delicate mystical face. Mr Winburn did not resemble his daughter; indeed no greater contrast could be imagined than that presented by her resolute practicalness and his dreamy abstraction.

‘Yes,’ he answered with a smile, ‘no one would dream the house was haunted.’

‘Papa, don’t talk nonsense! On our first day too.’

Mr Winburn smiled.

‘Very well, my dear, we will agree that there are no such things as ghosts.’

‘And please,’ continued Mrs Lancaster, ‘don’t say a word before Geoff. He’s so imaginative.’

Geoff was Mrs Lancaster’s little boy. The family consisted of Mr Winburn, his widowed daughter, and Geoffrey.

Rain had begun to beat against the window – pitter-patter, pitter-patter.

‘Listen,’ said Mr Winburn. ‘Is it not like little footsteps?’

‘It is more like rain,’ said Mrs Lancaster, with a smile. ‘But that, that is a footstep,’ cried her father, bending forward to listen. Mrs Lancaster laughed outright.

Mr Winburn was obliged to laugh too. They were having tea in the hall, and he had been sitting with his back to the staircase. He now turned his chair round to face it.

Little Geoffrey was coming down, rather slowly and sedately, with a child’s awe of a strange place. The stairs were of polished oak, uncarpeted. He came across and stood by his mother. Mr Winburn gave a slight start. As the child was crossing the floor, he distincty heard another pair of footsteps on the stairs, as of someone following Geoffrey. Dragging footsteps, curiously painful they were. Then he shrugged his shoulders incredulously. ‘The rain, no doubt,’ he thought.

‘I’m looking at the spongecakes,’ remarked Geoff with the admirably detached air of one who points out an interesting fact.

His mother hastened to comply with the hint. ‘Well, Sonny, how do you like your new home?’ she asked. ‘Lots,’ replied Geoffrey with his mouth generously filled. ‘Pounds and pounds and pounds.’ After this last assertion, which was evidently expressive of the deepest contentment, he relapsed into silence, only anxious to remove the spongecake from the sight of man in the least time possible.

Having bolted the last mouthful, he burst forth into speech. ‘Oh! Mummy, there’s attics here, Jane says; and can I go at once and eggzplore them? And there might be a secret door, Jane says there isn’t, but I think there must be, and, anyhow, I know there’ll be pipes, water pipes (with a face full of ecstasy) and can I play with them, and, oh! can I go and see the Boi-i-ler?’ He spun out the last word with such evident rapture that his grandfather felt ashamed to reflect that this peerless delight of childhood only conjured up to his imagination the picture of hot water that wasn’t hot, and heavy and numerous plumber’s bills.

‘We’ll see about the attics tomorrow, darling,’ said Mrs Lancaster. ‘Suppose you fetch your bricks and build a nice house, or an engine.’

‘Don’t want to build an ’ouse.’

‘House.’

‘House, or h’engine h’either.’

‘Build a boiler,’ suggested his grandfather.

Geoffrey brightened. ‘With pipes?’

‘Yes, lots of pipes.’

Geoffrey ran away happily to fetch his bricks.

The rain was still falling. Mr Winburn listened. Yes, it must have been the rain he had heard; but it did sound like footsteps.

He had a queer dream that night.

He dreamt that he was walking through a town, a great city it seemed to him. But it was a children’s city; there were no grown-up people there, nothing but children, crowds of them. In his dream they all rushed to the stranger crying: ‘Have you brought him?’ It seemed that he understood what they meant and shook his head sadly. When they saw this, the children turned away and began to cry, sobbing bitterly.

The city and the children faded away and he awoke to find himself in bed, but the sobbing was still in his ears. Though wide awake, he heard it distinctly; and he remembered that Geoffrey slept on the floor below, while this sound of a child’s sorrow descended from above. He sat up and struck a match. Instantly the sobbing ceased.

Mr Winburn did not tell his daughter of the dream or its sequel. That it was no trick of his imagination, he was convinced; indeed soon afterwards he heard it again in the day time. The wind was howling in the chimney but this was a separate sound – distinct, unmistakable; pitiful little heartbroken sobs.

He found out too, that he was not the only one to hear them. He overheard the housemaid saying to the parlour maid that she ‘didn’t think as that there nurse was kind to Master Geoffrey, she’d ’eard ’im crying ’is little ’eart out only that morning.’ Geoffrey had come down to breakfast and lunch beaming with health and happiness; and Mr Winburn knew that it was not Geoff who had been crying, but that other child whose dragging footsteps had startled him more than once.

Mrs Lancaster alone never heard anything. Her ears were not perhaps attuned to catch sounds from another world.

Yet one day she also received a shock. ‘Mummy,’ said Geoff plaintively. ‘I wish you’d let me play with that little boy.’

Mrs Lancaster looked up from her writing-table with a smile. ‘What little boy, dear?’

‘I don’t know his name. He was in a attic, sitting on the floor crying, but he ran away when he saw me. I suppose he was shy (with slight contempt), not like a big boy, and then, when I was in the nursery building, I saw him standing in the door watching me build, and he looked so awful lonely and as though he wanted to play wiv me. I said: “Come and build a h’engine,” but he didn’t say nothing, just looked as – as though he saw a lot of chocolates, and his Mummy had told him not to touch them.’ Geoff sighed, sad personal reminiscences evidently recurring to him. ‘But when I asked Jane who he was and told her I wanted to play wiv him, she said there wasn’t no little boy in the ’ouse and not to tell naughty stories. I don’t love Jane at all.’

Mrs Lancaster got up. ‘Jane was right. There was no little boy.’

‘But I saw him. Oh! Mummy, do let me play wiv him, he did look so awful lonely and unhappy. I do want to do something to “make him better”.’

Mrs Lancaster was about to speak again, but her father shook his head.

‘Geoff,’ he said very gently, ‘that poor little boy is lonely, and perhaps you may do something to comfort him; but you must find out how by yourself – like a puzzle – do you see?’

‘Is it because I am getting big I must do it all my lone?’

‘Yes, because you are getting big.’

As the boy left the room, Mrs Lancaster turned to her father impatiently.

‘Papa, this is absurd. To encourage the boy to believe the servants’ idle tales!’

‘No servant has told the child anything,’ said the old man gently. ‘He’s seen – what I hear, what I could see perhaps if I were his age.’

‘But it’s such nonsense! Why don’t I see it or hear it?’

Mr Winburn smiled, a curiously tired smile, but did not reply. ‘Why?’ repeated his daughter. ‘And why did you tell him he could help the – the – thing. It’s – it’s all so impossible.’

The old man looked at her with his thoughtful glance. ‘Why not?’ he said. ‘Do you remember these words:

“What Lamp has Destiny to guide

Her little Children stumbling in the Dark?

‘A Blind Understanding,’ Heaven replied.”

‘Geoffrey has that – a blind understanding. All children possess it. It is only as we grow older that we lose it, that we cast it away from us. Sometimes, when we are quite old, a faint gleam comes back to us, but the Lamp burns brightest in childhood. That is why I think Geoffrey may help.’

‘I don’t understand,’ murmured Mrs Lancaster feebly. ‘No more do I. That – that child is in trouble and wants – to be set free. But how? I do not know, but – it’s awful to think of it – sobbing its heart out – a child.’

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; A month after this conversation Geoffrey fell very ill. The east wind had been severe, and he was not a strong child. The doctor shook his head and said that it was a grave case. To Mr Winburn he divulged more and confessed that the case was quite hopeless. ‘The child would never have lived to grow up, under any circumstances,’ he added.

‘There has been serious lung trouble for a long time.’

It was when nursing Geoff that Mrs Lancaster became aware of that – other child. At first the sobs were an indistinguishable part of the wind, but gradually they became more distinct, more unmistakable. Finally she heard them in moments of dead calm: a child’s sobs – dull, hopeless, heartbroken.

Geoff grew steadily worse and in his delirium he spoke of the ‘little boy’ again and again. ‘I do want to help him get away, I do!’ he cried.

Succeeding the delirium there came a state of lethargy. Geoffrey lay very still, hardly breathing, sunk in oblivion. There was nothing to do but wait and watch. Then there came a still night, clear and calm, without one breath of wind.

Suddenly the child stirred. His eyes opened. He looked past his mother toward the open door. He tried to speak and she bent down to catch the half breathed words.

‘All right, I’m comin’,’ he whispered; then he sank back.

The mother felt suddenly terrified, she crossed the room to her father. Somewhere near them the other child was laughing. Joyful, contented, triumphant and silvery laughter echoed through the room.

‘I’m frightened; I’m frightened,’ she moaned.