Ghost Stories of an AntiquaryJames, M. R. (Montague Rhodes)
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Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
James, M. R. (Montague Rhodes)
Ghost stories, English; Horror tales, English; Short stories, English
“On my second visit to the chapel,” he went on, “my purpose was to take
every note I could of figures, lettering, diamond-scratchings on the
glass, and even apparently accidental markings. The first point which I
tackled was that of the inscribed scrolls. I could not doubt that the
first of these, that of Job—‘There is a place for the gold where it is
hidden’—with its intentional alteration, must refer to the treasure; so
I applied myself with some confidence to the next, that of St
John—‘They have on their vestures a writing which no man knoweth.’ The
natural question will have occurred to you: Was there an inscription on
the robes of the figures? I could see none; each of the three had a
broad black border to his mantle, which made a conspicuous and rather
ugly feature in the window. I was nonplussed, I will own, and, but for
a curious bit of luck, I think I should have left the search where the
Canons of Steinfeld had left it before me. But it so happened that
there was a good deal of dust on the surface of the glass, and Lord
D——, happening to come in, noticed my blackened hands, and kindly
insisted on sending for a Turk’s head broom to clean down the window.
There must, I suppose, have been a rough piece in the broom; anyhow, as
it passed over the border of one of the mantles, I noticed that it left
a long scratch, and that some yellow stain instantly showed up. I asked
the man to stop his work for a moment, and ran up the ladder to examine
the place. The yellow stain was there, sure enough, and what had come
away was a thick black pigment, which had evidently been laid on with
the brush after the glass had been burnt, and could therefore be easily
scraped off without doing any harm. I scraped, accordingly, and you
will hardly believe—no, I do you an injustice; you will have guessed
already—that I found under this black pigment two or three
clearly-formed capital letters in yellow stain on a clear ground. Of
course, I could hardly contain my delight.
“I told Lord D—— that I had detected an inscription which I thought
might be very interesting, and begged to be allowed to uncover the
whole of it. He made no difficulty about it whatever, told me to do
exactly as I pleased, and then, having an engagement, was
obliged—rather to my relief, I must say—to leave me. I set to work at
once, and found the task a fairly easy one. The pigment, disintegrated,
of course, by time, came off almost at a touch, and I don’t think that
it took me a couple of hours, all told, to clean the whole of the black
borders in all three lights. Each of the figures had, as the
inscription said, ‘a writing on their vestures which nobody knew’.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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