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Rainbow Valley
something stirring and rustling round at the other side of
the garden, in those cherry bushes. It was white. I tell you
I didn’t stop for a second look. I flew over the dyke quicker
than quick. I was sure it was Henry Warren’s ghost.”
“Who was Henry Warren?” asked Di.
“And why should he have a ghost?” asked Nan.
“Laws, did you never hear the story? And you brought up
in the Glen. Well, wait a minute till I get my breath all back
and I’ll tell you.”
Walter shivered delightsomely. He loved ghost stories.
eir mystery, their dramatic climaxes, their eeriness gave
him a fearful, exquisite pleasure. Longfellow instantly grew
tame and commonplace. He threw the book aside and
stretched himself out, propped upon his elbows to listen
whole-heartedly, fixing his great luminous eyes on Mary’s
face. Mary wished he wouldn’t look at her so. She felt she
could make a far better job of the ghost story if Walter were
not looking at her. She could put on several frills and invent
a few artistic details to enhance the horror. As it was, she
had to stick to the bare truth—or what had been told her
for truth.
“Well,” she began, “you know old Tom Bailey and his wife
used to live in that house up there thirty years ago. He was
an awful old rip, they say, and his wife wasn’t much better.
ey’d no children of their own, but a sister of old Tom’s
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died and left a little boy—this Henry Warren—and they
took him. He was about twelve when he came to them, and
kind of undersized and delicate. ey say Tom and his wife
used him awful from the start—whipped him and starved
him. Folks said they wanted him to die so’s they could get
the little bit of money his mother had left for him. Henry
didn’t die right off, but he begun having fits—epileps, they
called ’em—and he grew up kind of simple, till he was about
eighteen. His uncle used to thrash him in that garden up
there, ’cause it was back of the house where no one could
see him. But folks could hear and they say it was awful
sometimes hearing poor Henry plead with his uncle not to
kill him. But nobody dared interfere ’cause old Tom was
such a reprobate he’d have been sure to get square with ’em
some way. He burned the barns of a man at Harbour Head
who offended him. At last Henry died and his uncle and aunt
give out he died in one of his fits and that was all anybody
ever knowed, but everybody said Tom had just up and killed
him for keeps at last. And it wasn’t long till it got round that
Henry walked. at old garden was ha’nted. He was heard
there at nights, moaning and crying. Old Tom and his wife
got out—went out West and never come back. e place got
Such a bad name nobody’d buy or rent it. at’s why it’s all
gone to ruin. at was thirty years ago, but Henry Warren’s
ghost ha’nts it yet.”
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“Do you believe that?” asked Nan scornfully. “I don’t.”
“Well, good people have seen him—and heard him,”
retorted Mary. “ey say he appears and grovels on the
ground and holds you by the legs and gibbers and moans
like he did when he was alive. I thought of that as soon as I
seen that white thing in the bushes and thought if it caught
me like that and moaned I’d drop down dead on the spot.
So I cut and run. It mightn’t have been his ghost, but I wasn’t
going to take any chances with a ha’nt.”
“It was likely old Mrs. Stimson’s white calf,” laughed Di.
“It pastures in that garden—I’ve seen it.”
“Maybe so. But I’m not going home through the Bailey
garden any more. Here’s Jerry with a big string of trout and
it’s my turn to cook them. Jem and Jerry both say I’m the
best cook in the Glen. And Cornelia told me I could bring
up this batch of cookies. I all but dropped them when I saw
Henry’s ghost.”
Jerry hooted when he heard the ghost story—which Mary
repeated as she fried the fish, touching it up a trifle or so,
since Walter had gone to help Faith set the table. It made
no impression on Jerry, but Faith and Una and Carl had
been secretly much frightened, though they would never
have given in to it. It was all right as long as the others were
with them in the valley; but when the feast was over and the
shadows fell they quaked with remembrance. Jerry went up
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Rainbow Valley
to Ingleside with the Blythes to see Jem about something,
and Mary Vance went around that way home. So Faith
and Una and Carl had to go back to the manse alone. ey
walked very close together and gave the old Bailey garden
a wide berth. ey did not believe that it was haunted, of
course, but they would not go near it for all that.
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CHaPTeR XXX
THe GHoST on THe DyKe
SOMEHOW, Faith and Carl and Una could not shake
off the hold which the story of Henry Warren’s ghost had
taken upon their imaginations. ey had never believed in
ghosts. Ghost tales they had heard a-plenty—Mary Vance
had told some far more blood-curdling than this; but those
tales were all of places and people and spooks far away and
unknown. After the first half-awful, half-pleasant thrill of
awe and terror they thought of them no more. But this story
came home to them. e old Bailey garden was almost at
their very door—almost in their beloved Rainbow Valley.
ey had passed and repassed it constantly; they had hunted
for flowers in it; they had made short cuts through it when
they wished to go straight from the village to the valley. But
never again! After the night when Mary Vance told them its
gruesome tale they would not have gone through or near it
on pain of death. Death! What was death compared to the
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unearthly possibility of falling into the clutches of Henry
Warren’s grovelling ghost?
One warm July evening the three of them were sitting
under the Tree Lovers, feeling a little lonely. Nobody else had
come near the valley that evening. Jem Blythe was away in
Charlottetown, writing on his entrance examinations. Jerry
and Walter Blythe were off for a sail on the harbour with
old Captain Crawford. Nan and Di and Rilla and Shirley
had gone down the harbour road to visit Kenneth and Persis
Ford, who had come with their parents for a flying visit to
the little old House of Dreams. Nan had asked Faith to go
with them, but Faith had declined. She would never have
admitted it, but she felt a little secret jealousy of Persis Ford,
concerning whose wonderful beauty and city glamour she
had heard a great deal. No, she wasn’t going to go down
there and play second fiddle to anybody. She and Una took
their story books to Rainbow Valley and read, while Carl
investigated bugs along the banks of the brook, and all
three were happy until they suddenly realized that it was
twilight and that the old Bailey garden was uncomfortably
near by. Carl came and sat down close to the girls. ey all
wished they had gone home a little sooner, but nobody said
anything.
Great, velvety, purple clouds heaped up in the west and
spread over the valley. ere was no wind and everything
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was suddenly, strangely, dreadfully still. e marsh was full
of thousands of fireflies. Surely some fairy parliament was
being convened that night. Altogether, Rainbow Valley was
not a canny place just then.
Faith looked fearfully up the valley to the old Bailey garden.
en, if anybody’s blood ever did freeze, Faith Meredith’s
certainly froze at that moment. e eyes of Carl and Una
followed her entranced gaze and chills began gallopading
up and down their spines also. For there, under the big
tamarack tree on the tumble-down, grass-grown dyke of the
Bailey garden, was a something white—shapelessly white in
the gathering gloom. e three Merediths sat and gazed as
if turned to stone.
“It’s—it’s the—calf,” whispered Una at last.
“It’s—too—big—for the calf,” whispered Faith. Her
mouth and lips were so dry she could hardly articulate the
words.
Suddenly Carl gasped,
“It’s coming here.”
e girls gave one last agonized glance. Yes, it was creeping
down over the dyke, as no calf ever did or could creep. Reason
fled before sudden, over-mastering panic. For the moment
every one of the trio was firmly convinced that what they
saw was Henry Warren’s ghost. Carl sprang to his feet and
bolted blindly. With a simultaneous shriek the girls followed
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him. Like mad creatures they tore up the hill, across the road
and into the manse. ey had left Aunt Martha sewing in
the kitchen. She was not there. ey rushed to the study. It
was dark and tenantless. As with one impulse, they swung
around and made for Ingleside—but not across Rainbow
Valley. Down the hill and through the Glen street they
flew on the wings of their wild terror, Carl in the lead, Una
bringing up the rear. Nobody tried to stop them, though
everybody who saw them wondered what fresh devilment
those manse youngsters were up to now. But at the gate of
Ingleside they ran into Rosemary West, who had just been in
for a moment to return some borrowed books.
She saw their ghastly faces and staring eyes. She realized
that their poor little souls were wrung with some awful and
real fear, whatever its cause. She caught Carl with one arm
and Faith with the other. Una stumbled against her and held
on desperately.
“Children, dear, what has happened?” she said. “What has
frightened you?”
“Henry Warren’s ghost,” answered Carl, through his
chattering teeth.
“Henry—Warren’s—ghost!” said amazed Rosemary, who
had never heard the story.
“Yes,” sobbed Faith hysterically. “It’s there—on the Bailey
dyke—we saw it—and it started to—chase us.”
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Rainbow Valley
Rosemary herded the three distracted creatures to the
Ingleside veranda. Gilbert and Anne were both away, having
also gone to the House of Dreams, but Susan appeared in
the doorway, gaunt and practical and unghostlike.
“What is all this rumpus about?” she inquired.
Again the children gasped out their awful tale, while
Rosemary held them close to her and soothed them with
wordless comfort.
“Likely it was an owl,” said Susan, unstirred.
An owl! e Meredith children never had any opinion of
Susan’s intelligence after that!
“It was bigger than a million owls,” said Carl, sobbing—
oh, how ashamed Carl was of that sobbing in after days—
“and it—it grovelled just as Mary said—and it was crawling
down over the dyke to get at us. Do owls crawl?”
Rosemary looked at Susan.
“ey must have seen something to frighten them so,”
she said.
“I will go and see,” said Susan coolly. “Now, children,
calm yourselves. Whatever you have seen, it was not a ghost.
As for poor Henry Warren, I feel sure he would be only too
glad to rest quietly in his peaceful grave once he got there.
No fear of him venturing back, and that you may tie to. If
you can make them see reason, Miss West, I will find out the
truth of the matter.”
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Rainbow Valley
Susan departed for Rainbow Valley, valiantly grasping a
pitchfork which she found leaning against the back fence
where the doctor had been working in his little hay-field. A
pitchfork might not be of much use against “ha’nts,” but it
was a comforting sort of weapon. ere was nothing to be
seen in Rainbow Valley when Susan reached it. No white
visitants appeared to be lurking in the shadowy, tangled old
Bailey garden. Susan marched boldly through it and beyond
it, and rapped with her pitchfork on the door of the little
cottage on the other side, where Mrs. Stimson lived with her
two daughters.
Back at Ingleside Rosemary had succeeded in calming
the children. ey still sobbed a little from shock, but they
were beginning to feel a lurking and salutary suspicion that
they had made dreadful geese of themselves. is suspicion
became a certainty when Susan finally returned.
“I have found out what your ghost was,” she said, with
a grim smile, sitting down on a rocker and fanning herself.
“Old Mrs. Stimson has had a pair of factory cotton sheets
bleaching in the Bailey garden for a week. She spread them
on the dyke under the tamarack tree because the grass was
clean and short there. is evening she went out to take
them in. She had her knitting in her hands so she flung the
sheets over her shoulders by way of carrying them. And then
she must drop one of her needles and find it she could not
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