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The Rival Ghosts
by
“And pretty girls,” added Dear Jones; but he did not look at her.
“And spooks,” remarked Uncle Larry, casually.
“Spooks?” queried the Duchess.
“Spooks. I maintain the word. Ghost, if you like that better, or spectres. We turn out the best quality of spook—-“
“You forget the lovely ghost stories about the Rhine and the Black Forest,” interrupted Miss Van Rensselaer, with feminine inconsistency.
“I remember the Rhine and the Black Forest and all the other haunts of elves and fairies and hobgoblins; but for good, honest spooks there is no place like home. And what differentiates our spook–spiritus Americanus–from the ordinary ghost of literature is that it responds to the American sense of humor. Take Irving’s stories, for example. The ‘Headless Horseman’–that’s a comic ghost story. And Rip Van Winkle–consider what humor, and what good humor, there is in the telling of his meeting with the goblin crew of Hendrik Hudson’s men! A still better example of this American way of dealing with legend and mystery is the marvellous tale of the rival ghosts.”
“The rival ghosts!” queried the Duchess and Baby Van Rensselaer together. “Who were they?”
“Didn’t I ever tell you about them?” answered Uncle Larry, a gleam of approaching joy flashing from his eye.
“Since he is bound to tell us sooner or later, we’d better be resigned and hear it now,” said Dear Jones.
“If you are not more eager, I won’t tell it at all.”
“Oh, do, Uncle Larry! you know I just dote on ghost stories,” pleaded Baby Van Rensselaer.
“Once upon a time,” began Uncle Larry–“in fact, a very few years ago–there lived in the thriving town of New York a young American called Duncan–Eliphalet Duncan. Like his name, he was half Yankee and half Scotch, and naturally he was a lawyer, and had come to New York to make his way. His father was a Scotchman who had come over and settled in Boston and married a Salem girl. When Eliphalet Duncan was about twenty he lost both of his parents. His father left him enough money to give him a start, and a strong feeling of pride in his Scotch birth; you see there was a title in the family in Scotland, and although Eliphalet’s father was the younger son of a younger son, yet he always remembered, and always bade his only son to remember, that this ancestry was noble. His mother left him her full share of Yankee grit and a little old house in Salem which had belonged to her family for more than two hundred years. She was a Hitchcock, and the Hitchcocks had been settled in Salem since the year 1. It was a great-great-grandfather of Mr. Eliphalet Hitchcock who was foremost in the time of the Salem witchcraft craze. And this little old house which she left to my friend Eliphalet Duncan was haunted.”
“By the ghost of one of the witches, of course?” interrupted Dear Jones.
“Now how could it be the ghost of a witch, since the witches were all burned at the stake? You never heard of anybody who was burned having a ghost, did you?” asked Uncle Larry.
“That’s an argument in favor of cremation, at any rate,” replied Dear Jones, evading the direct question.
“It is, if you don’t like ghosts. I do,” said Baby Van Rensselaer.
“And so do I,” added Uncle Larry. “I love a ghost as dearly as an Englishman loves a lord.”
“Go on with your story,” said the Duchess, majestically overruling all extraneous discussion.
“This little old house at Salem was haunted,” resumed Uncle Larry. “And by a very distinguished ghost–or at least by a ghost with very remarkable attributes.”
“What was he like?” asked Baby Van Rensselaer, with a premonitory shiver of anticipatory delight.
“It had a lot of peculiarities. In the first place, it never appeared to the master of the house. Mostly it confined its visitations to unwelcome guests. In the course of the last hundred years it had frightened away four successive mothers-in-law, while never intruding on the head of the household.”