The Uninhabited House (1875) dramatizes its supernatural manifestations in a sober and matter-of-fact manner. Charlotte Riddell (1832-1906) is clearly not in the business of shoving the reader's nose in hysteria. Sightings cause renters of London's River Hall house to break their leases; servants, those canaries in the coal mine of many a ghost story, quickly become unobtainable at any price.
But Riddell is not writing a spook novel; she is detailing a turning point in the expectations of Mr. Henry Patterson, clerk in the law office of Craven & Son. Like a similar protagonist in Riddell's fine story "The Open Door" (1882), Patterson is a hero of humble circumstances, but bright and game.
His boss William Craven gives him his big chance, assenting to Patterson's request to find out why River Hall is consistently unleasable. The current owners refuse to live there, even though young Miss Helena Elmsdale and her formidable (to be diplomatic) aunt Miss Blake are within an ace of destitution.
Patterson is ultimately successful. Both supernatural and mundane mysteries bedevilling River Hall house are solved, as is the question of Patterson's future.
Riddell's skill in creating atmosphere is nicely modulated, as is her droll humor when dealing with questions of class and manners.
Consider this early moment, complete with jump scare, when Patterson is taking a late night walk:
There it was, just as I had seen it last, with high brick walls dividing it from the road; with its belt of forest-trees separating it from the next residence, with its long frontage to the river, with its closed gates and shuttered postern-door.
The entrance to it was not from the main highway, but from a lane which led right down to the Thames; and I went to the very bottom of that lane and swung myself by means of a post right over the river, so that I might get a view of the windows of the room with which so ghostly a character was associated. The blinds were all down and the whole place looked innocent enough.
The strong, sweet, subtle smell of mignonette came wafted to my senses, the odours of jessamine, roses, and myrtle floated to me on the evening breeze. I could just catch a glimpse of the flower-gardens, radiant with colour, full of leaf and bloom.
"No haunted look there," I thought. "The house is right enough, but some one must have determined to keep it empty." And then I swung myself back into the lane again, and the shadow of the high brick wall projected itself across my mind as it did across my body.
"Is this place to let again, do you know?" said a voice in my ear, as I stood looking at the private door which gave a separate entrance to that evil-reputed library.
The question was a natural one, and the voice not unpleasant, yet I started, having noticed no one near me.
"I beg your pardon," said the owner of the voice. "Nervous, I fear!"
"No, not at all, only my thoughts were wandering. I beg your pardon—I do not know whether the place is to let or not."
"A good house?" This might have been interrogative, or uttered as an assertion, but I took it as the former, and answered accordingly.
"Yes, a good house—a very good house, indeed," I said.
"It is often vacant, though," he said, with a light laugh.
"Through no fault of the house," I added.
"Oh! it is the fault of the tenants, is it?" he remarked, laughing once more. "The owners, I should think, must be rather tired of their property by this time."
"I do not know that," I replied. "They live in hope of finding a good and sensible tenant willing to take it."
"And equally willing to keep it, eh?" he remarked. "Well, I, perhaps, am not much of a judge in the matter, but I should say they will have to wait a long time first."
"You know something about the house?" I said, interrogatively.
"Yes," he answered, "most people about here do, I fancy—but least said soonest mended"; and as by this time we had reached the top of the lane, he bade me a civil good-evening, and struck off in a westerly direction.
Though the light of the setting sun shone full in my face, and I had to shade my eyes in order to enable me to see at all, moved by some feeling impossible to analyse, I stood watching that retreating figure. Afterwards I could have sworn to the man among ten thousand.
A man of about fifty, well and plainly dressed, who did not appear to be in ill-health, yet whose complexion had a blanched look, like forced sea-kale; a man of under, rather than over middle height, not of slight make, but lean as if the flesh had been all worn off his bones; a man with sad, anxious, outlooking, abstracted eyes, with a nose slightly hooked, without a trace of whisker, with hair thin and straight and flaked with white, active and lithe in his movements, a swift walker, though he had a slight halt. While looking at him thrown up in relief against the glowing western sky, I noticed, what had previously escaped my attention, that he was a little deformed. His right shoulder was rather higher than the other. A man with a story in his memory, I imagined; a man who had been jilted by the girl he loved, or who had lost her by death, or whose wife had proved faithless; whose life, at all events, had been marred by a great trouble. So, in my folly, I decided; for I was young then, and romantic, and had experienced some sorrow myself connected with pecuniary matters.
The Uninhabited House is available here, and as part of the British Library Tales of the Weird series here.
Jay
2 October 2021
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