The Vision of Tom Chuff

At the edge of melancholy Catstean Moor, in the north of England, with
half-a-dozen ancient poplar-trees with rugged and hoary stems around,
one smashed across the middle by a flash of lightning thirty summers
before, and all by their great height dwarfing the abode near which
they stand, there squats a rude stone house, with a thick chimney, a
kitchen and bedroom on the ground-floor, and a loft, accessible by a
ladder, under the shingle roof, divided into two rooms.
Its owner was a man of ill repute. Tom Chuff was his name. A
shock-headed, broad-shouldered, powerful man, though somewhat short,
with lowering brows and a sullen eye. He was a poacher, and hardly
made an ostensible pretence of earning his bread by any honest
industry. He was a drunkard. He beat his wife, and led his children a
life of terror and lamentation, when he was at home. It was a blessing
to his frightened little family when he absented himself, as he
sometimes did, for a week or more together.
On the night I speak of he knocked at the door with his cudgel at
about eight o'clock. It was winter, and the night was very dark. Had
the summons been that of a bogie from the moor, the inmates of this
small house could hardly have heard it with greater terror.
His wife unbarred the door in fear and haste. Her hunchbacked sister
stood by the hearth, staring toward the threshold. The children
cowered behind.
Tom Chuff entered with his cudgel in his hand, without speaking, and
threw himself into a chair opposite the fire. He had been away two or
three days. He looked haggard, and his eyes were bloodshot. They knew
he had been drinking.
Tom raked and knocked the peat fire with his stick, and thrust his
feet close to it. He signed towards the little dresser, and nodded to
his wife, and she knew he wanted a cup, which in silence she gave him.
He pulled a bottle of gin from his coat-pocket, and nearly filling the
teacup, drank off the dram at a few gulps.
He usually refreshed himself with two or three drams of this kind
before beating the inmates of his house. His three little children,
cowering in a corner, eyed him from under a table, as Jack did the
ogre in the nursery tale. His wife, Nell, standing behind a chair,
which she was ready to snatch up to meet the blow of the cudgel, which
might be levelled at her at any moment, never took her eyes off him;
and hunchbacked Mary showed the whites of a large pair of eyes,
similarly employed, as she stood against the oaken press, her dark
face hardly distinguishable in the distance from the brown panel
behind it.
Tom Chuff was at his third dram, and had not yet spoken a word since
his entrance, and the suspense was growing dreadful, when, on a
sudden, he leaned back in his rude seat, the cudgel slipped from his
hand, a change and a death-like pallor came over his face.
For a while they all stared on; such was their fear of him, they dared
not speak or move, lest it should prove to have been but a doze, and
Tom should wake up and proceed forthwith to gratify his temper and
exercise his cudgel.
In a very little time, however, things began to look so odd, that they
ventured, his wife and Mary, to exchange glances full of doubt and
wonder. He hung so much over the side of the chair, that if it had not
been one of cyclopean clumsiness and weight, he would have borne it to
the floor. A leaden tint was darkening the pallor of his face. They
were becoming alarmed, and finally braving everything his wife timidly
said, "Tom!" and then more sharply repeated it, and finally cried the
appellative loudly, and again and again, with the terrified
accompaniment, "He's dying—he's dying!" her voice rising to a scream,
as she found that neither it nor her plucks and shakings of him by the
shoulder had the slightest effect in recalling him from his torpor.
And now from sheer terror of a new kind the children added their
shrilly piping to the talk and cries of their seniors; and if anything
could have called Tom up from his lethargy, it might have been the
piercing chorus that made the rude chamber of the poacher's habitation
ring again. But Tom continued unmoved, deaf, and stirless.
His wife sent Mary down to the village, hardly a quarter of a mile
away, to implore of the doctor, for whose family she did duty as
laundress, to come down and look at her husband, who seemed to be
dying.
The doctor, who was a good-natured fellow, arrived. With his hat still
on, he looked at Tom, examined him, and when he found that the emetic
he had brought with him, on conjecture from Mary's description, did
not act, and that his lancet brought no blood, and that he felt a
pulseless wrist, he shook his head, and inwardly thought:
"What the plague is the woman crying for? Could she have desired a
greater blessing for her children and herself than the very thing that
has happened?"
Tom, in fact, seemed quite gone. At his lips no breath was
perceptible. The doctor could discover no pulse. His hands and feet
were cold, and the chill was stealing up into his body.
The doctor, after a stay of twenty minutes, had buttoned up his
great-coat again and pulled down his hat, and told Mrs. Chuff that
there was no use in his remaining any longer, when, all of a sudden, a
little rill of blood began to trickle from the lancet-cut in Tom
Chuffs temple.
"That's very odd," said the doctor. "Let us wait a little."
I must describe now the sensations which Tom Chuff had experienced.
With his elbows on his knees, and his chin upon his hands, he was
staring into the embers, with his gin beside him, when suddenly a
swimming came in his head, he lost sight of the fire, and a sound like
one stroke of a loud church bell smote his brain.
Then he heard a confused humming, and the leaden weight of his head
held him backward as he sank in his chair, and consciousness quite
forsook him.
When he came to himself he felt chilled, and was leaning against a
huge leafless tree. The night was moonless, and when he looked up he
thought he had never seen stars so large and bright, or sky so black.
The stars, too, seemed to blink down with longer intervals of
darkness, and fiercer and more dazzling emergence, and something, he
vaguely thought, of the character of silent menace and fury.
He had a confused recollection of having come there, or rather of
having been carried along, as if on men's shoulders, with a sort of
rushing motion. But it was utterly indistinct; the imperfect
recollection simply of a sensation. He had seen or heard nothing on
his way.
He looked round. There was not a sign of a living creature near. And
he began with a sense of awe to recognise the place.
The tree against which he had been leaning was one of the noble old
beeches that surround at irregular intervals the churchyard of
Shackleton, which spreads its green and wavy lap on the edge of the
Moor of Catstean, at the opposite side of which stands the rude
cottage in which he had just lost consciousness. It was six miles or
more across the moor to his habitation, and the black expanse lay
before him, disappearing dismally in the darkness. So that, looking
straight before him, sky and land blended together in an
undistinguishable and awful blank.
There was a silence quite unnatural over the place. The distant murmur
of the brook, which he knew so well, was dead; not a whisper in the
leaves about him; the air, earth, everything about and above was
indescribably still; and he experienced that quaking of the heart that
seems to portend the approach of something awful. He would have set
out upon his return across the moor, had he not an undefined
presentiment that he was waylaid by something he dared not pass.
The old grey church and tower of Shackleton stood like a shadow in the
rear. His eye had grown accustomed to the obscurity, and he could just
trace its outline. There were no comforting associations in his mind
connected with it; nothing but menace and misgiving. His early
training in his lawless calling was connected with this very spot.
Here his father used to meet two other poachers, and bring his son,
then but a boy, with him.
Under the church porch, towards morning, they used to divide the game
they had taken, and take account of the sales they had made on the
previous day, and make partition of the money, and drink their gin. It
was here he had taken his early lessons in drinking, cursing, and
lawlessness. His father's grave was hardly eight steps from the spot
where he stood. In his present state of awful dejection, no scene on
earth could have so helped to heighten his fear.
There was one object close by which added to his gloom. About a yard
away, in rear of the tree, behind himself, and extending to his left,
was an open grave, the mould and rubbish piled on the other side. At
the head of this grave stood the beech-tree; its columnar stem rose
like a huge monumental pillar. He knew every line and crease on its
smooth surface. The initial letters of his own name, cut in its bark
long ago, had spread out and wrinkled like the grotesque capitals of a
fanciful engraver, and now with a sinister significance overlooked the
open grave, as if answering his mental question, "Who for is t' grave
cut?"
He felt still a little stunned, and there was a faint tremor in his
joints that disinclined him to exert himself; and, further, he had a
vague apprehension that take what direction he might, there was danger
around him worse than that of staying where he was.
On a sudden the stars began to blink more fiercely, a faint wild light
overspread for a minute the bleak landscape, and he saw approaching
from the moor a figure at a kind of swinging trot, with now and then a
zig-zag hop or two, such as men accustomed to cross such places make,
to avoid the patches of slob or quag that meet them here and there.
This figure resembled his father's, and like him, whistled through his
finger by way of signal as he approached; but the whistle sounded not
now shrilly and sharp, as in old times, but immensely far away, and
seemed to sing strangely through Tom's head. From habit or from fear,
in answer to the signal, Tom whistled as he used to do five-and-twenty
years ago and more, although he was already chilled with an unearthly
fear.
Like his father, too, the figure held up the bag that was in his left
hand as he drew near, when it was his custom to call out to him what
was in it. It did not reassure the watcher, you may be certain, when a
shout unnaturally faint reached him, as the phantom dangled the bag
in the air, and he heard with a faint distinctness the words, "Tom
Chuff's soul!"
Scarcely fifty yards away from the low churchyard fence at which Tom
was standing, there was a wider chasm in the peat, which there threw
up a growth of reeds and bulrushes, among which, as the old poacher
used to do on a sudden alarm, the approaching figure suddenly cast
itself down.
From the same patch of tall reeds and rushes emerged instantaneously
what he at first mistook for the same figure creeping on all-fours,
but what he soon perceived to be an enormous black dog with a rough
coat like a bear's, which at first sniffed about, and then started
towards him in what seemed to be a sportive amble, bouncing this way
and that, but as it drew near it displayed a pair of fearful eyes that
glowed like live coals, and emitted from the monstrous expanse of its
jaws a terrifying growl.
This beast seemed on the point of seizing him, and Tom recoiled in
panic and fell into the open grave behind him. The edge which he
caught as he tumbled gave way, and down he went, expecting almost at
the same instant to reach the bottom. But never was such a fall!
Bottomless seemed the abyss! Down, down, down, with immeasurable and
still increasing speed, through utter darkness, with hair streaming
straight upward, breathless, he shot with a rush of air against him,
the force of which whirled up his very arms, second after second,
minute after minute, through the chasm downward he flew, the icy
perspiration of horror covering his body, and suddenly, as he expected
to be dashed into annihilation, his descent was in an instant arrested
with a tremendous shock, which, however, did not deprive him of
consciousness even for a moment.
He looked about him. The place resembled a smoke-stained cavern or
catacomb, the roof of which, except for a ribbed arch here and there
faintly visible, was lost in darkness. From several rude passages,
like the galleries of a gigantic mine, which opened from this centre
chamber, was very dimly emitted a dull glow as of charcoal, which was
the only light by which he could imperfectly discern the objects
immediately about him.
What seemed like a projecting piece of the rock, at the corner of one
of these murky entrances, moved on a sudden, and proved to be a human
figure, that beckoned to him. He approached, and saw his father. He
could barely recognise him, he was so monstrously altered.
"I've been looking for you, Tom. Welcome home, lad; come along to your
place."
Tom's heart sank as he heard these words, which were spoken in a
hollow and, he thought, derisive voice that made him tremble. But he
could not help accompanying the wicked spirit, who led him into a
place, in passing which he heard, as it were from within the rock,
deadful cries and appeals for mercy.
"What is this?" said he.
"Never mind."
"Who are they?"
"New-comers, like yourself, lad," answered his father apathetically.
"They give over that work in time, finding it is no use."
"What shall I do?" said Tom, in an agony.
"It's all one."
"But what shall I do?" reiterated Tom, quivering in every joint and
nerve.
"Grin and bear it, I suppose."
"For God's sake, if ever you cared for me, as I am your own child, let
me out of this!"
"There's no way out."
"If there's a way in there's a way out, and for Heaven's sake let me
out of this."
But the dreadful figure made no further answer, and glided backwards
by his shoulder to the rear; and others appeared in view, each with a
faint red halo round it, staring on him with frightful eyes, images,
all in hideous variety, of eternal fury or derision. He was growing
mad, it seemed, under the stare of so many eyes, increasing in number
and drawing closer every moment, and at the same time myriads and
myriads of voices were calling him by his name, some far away, some
near, some from one point, some from another, some from behind, close
to his ears. These cries were increased in rapidity and multitude, and
mingled with laughter, with flitting blasphemies, with broken insults
and mockeries, succeeded and obliterated by others, before he could
half catch their meaning.
All this time, in proportion to the rapidity and urgency of these
dreadful sights and sounds, the epilepsy of terror was creeping up to
his brain, and with a long and dreadful scream he lost consciousness.
When he recovered his senses, he found himself in a small stone
chamber, vaulted above, and with a ponderous door. A single point of
light in the wall, with a strange brilliancy illuminated this cell.
Seated opposite to him was a venerable man with a snowy beard of
immense length; an image of awful purity and severity. He was dressed
in a coarse robe, with three large keys suspensed from his girdle. He
might have filled one's idea of an ancient porter of a city gate; such
spiritual cities, I should say, as John Bunyan loved to describe.
This old man's eyes were brilliant and awful, and fixed on him as they
were, Tom Chuff felt himself helplessly in his power. At length he
spoke:
"The command is given to let you forth for one trial more. But if you
are found again drinking with the drunken, and beating your
fellow-servants, you shall return through the door by which you came,
and go out no more."
With these words the old man took him by the wrist and led him through
the first door, and then unlocking one that stood in the cavern
outside, he struck Tom Chuff sharply on the shoulder, and the door
shut behind him with a sound that boomed peal after peal of thunder
near and far away, and all round and above, till it rolled off
gradually into silence. It was totally dark, but there was a fanning
of fresh cool air that overpowered him. He felt that he was in the
upper world again.
In a few minutes he began to hear voices which he knew, and first a
faint point of light appeared before his eyes, and gradually he saw
the flame of the candle, and, after that, the familiar faces of his
wife and children, and he heard them faintly when they spoke to him,
although he was as yet unable to answer.
He also saw the doctor, like an isolated figure in the dark, and heard
him say:
"There, now, you have him back. He'll do, I think."
His first words, when he could speak and saw clearly all about him,
and felt the blood on his neck and shirt, were:
"Wife, forgie me. I'm a changed man. Send for't sir."
Which last phrase means, "Send for the clergyman."
When the vicar came and entered the little bedroom where the scared
poacher, whose soul had died within him, was lying, still sick and
weak, in his bed, and with a spirit that was prostrate with terror,
Tom Chuff feebly beckoned the rest from the room, and, the door being
closed, the good parson heard the strange confession, and with equal
amazement the man's earnest and agitated vows of amendment, and his
helpless appeals to him for support and counsel.
These, of course, were kindly met; and the visits of the rector, for
some time, were frequent.
One day, when he took Tom Chuff's hand on bidding him good-bye, the
sick man held it still, and said:
"Ye'r vicar o' Shackleton, sir, and if I sud dee, ye'll promise me a'e
thing, as I a promised ye a many. I a said I'll never gie wife, nor
barn, nor folk o' no sort, skelp nor sizzup more, and ye'll know o' me
no more among the sipers. Nor never will Tom draw trigger, nor set a
snare again, but in an honest way, and after that ye'll no make it a
bootless bene for me, but bein', as I say, vicar o' Shackleton, and
able to do as ye list, ye'll no let them bury me within twenty good
yerd-wands measure o' the a'd beech trees that's round the churchyard
of Shackleton."
"I see; you would have your grave, when your time really comes, a good
way from the place where lay the grave you dreamed of."
"That's jest it. I'd lie at the bottom o' a marl-pit liefer! And I'd
be laid in anither churchyard just to be shut o' my fear o' that, but
that a' my kinsfolk is buried beyond in Shackleton, and ye'll gie me
yer promise, and no break yer word."
"I do promise, certainly. I'm not likely to outlive you; but, if I
should, and still be vicar of Shackleton, you shall be buried
somewhere as near the middle of the churchyard as we can find space."
"That'll do."
And so content they parted.
The effect of the vision upon Tom Chuff was powerful, and promised to
be lasting. With a sore effort he exchanged his life of desultory
adventure and comparative idleness for one of regular industry. He
gave up drinking; he was as kind as an originally surly nature would
allow to his wife and family; he went to church; in fine weather they
crossed the moor to Shackleton Church; the vicar said he came there to
look at the scenery of his vision, and to fortify his good resolutions
by the reminder.
Impressions upon the imagination, however, are but transitory, and a
bad man acting under fear is not a free agent; his real character does
not appear. But as the images of the imagination fade, and the action
of fear abates, the essential qualities of the man reassert
themselves.
So, after a time, Tom Chuff began to grow weary of his new life; he
grew lazy, and people began to say that he was catching hares, and
pursuing his old contraband way of life, under the rose.
He came home one hard night, with signs of the bottle in his thick
speech and violent temper. Next day he was sorry, or frightened, at
all events repentant, and for a week or more something of the old
horror returned, and he was once more on his good behaviour. But in a
little time came a relapse, and another repentance, and then a relapse
again, and gradually the return of old habits and the flooding in of
all his old way of life, with more violence and gloom, in proportion
as the man was alarmed and exasperated by the remembrance of his
despised, but terrible, warning.
With the old life returned the misery of the cottage. The smiles,
which had begun to appear with the unwonted sunshine, were seen no
more. Instead, returned to his poor wife's face the old pale and
heartbroken look. The cottage lost its neat and cheerful air, and the
melancholy of neglect was visible. Sometimes at night were overheard,
by a chance passer-by, cries and sobs from that ill-omened dwelling.
Tom Chuff was now often drunk, and not very often at home, except when
he came in to sweep away his poor wife's earnings.
Tom had long lost sight of the honest old parson. There was shame
mixed with his degradation. He had grace enough left when he saw the
thin figure of "t' sir" walking along the road to turn out of his way
and avoid meeting him. The clergyman shook his head, and sometimes
groaned, when his name was mentioned. His horror and regret were more
for the poor wife than for the relapsed sinner, for her case was
pitiable indeed.
Her brother, Jack Everton, coming over from Hexley, having heard
stories of all this, determined to beat Tom, for his ill-treatment of
his sister, within an inch of his life. Luckily, perhaps, for all
concerned, Tom happened to be away upon one of his long excursions,
and poor Nell besought her brother, in extremity of terror, not to
interpose between them. So he took his leave and went home muttering
and sulky.
Now it happened a few months later that Nelly Chuff fell sick. She had
been ailing, as heartbroken people do, for a good while. But now the
end had come.
There was a coroner's inquest when she died, for the doctor had
doubts as to whether a blow had not, at least, hastened her death.
Nothing certain, however, came of the inquiry. Tom Chuff had left his
home more than two days before his wife's death. He was absent upon
his lawless business still when the coroner had held his quest.
Jack Everton came over from Hexley to attend the dismal obsequies of
his sister. He was more incensed than ever with the wicked husband,
who, one way or other, had hastened Nelly's death. The inquest had
closed early in the day. The husband had not appeared.
An occasional companion—perhaps I ought to say accomplice—of Chuff's
happened to turn up. He had left him on the borders of Westmoreland,
and said he would probably be home next day. But Everton affected not
to believe it. Perhaps it was to Tom Chuff, he suggested, a secret
satisfaction to crown the history of his bad married life with the
scandal of his absence from the funeral of his neglected and abused
wife.
Everton had taken on himself the direction of the melancholy
preparations. He had ordered a grave to be opened for his sister
beside her mother's, in Shackleton churchyard, at the other side of
the moor. For the purpose, as I have said, of marking the callous
neglect of her husband, he determined that the funeral should take
place that night. His brother Dick had accompanied him, and they and
his sister, with Mary and the children, and a couple of the
neighbours, formed the humble cortège.
Jack Everton said he would wait behind, on the chance of Tom Chuff
coming in time, that he might tell him what had happened, and make him
cross the moor with him to meet the funeral. His real object, I think,
was to inflict upon the villain the drubbing he had so long wished to
give him. Anyhow, he was resolved, by crossing the moor, to reach the
churchyard in time to anticipate the arrival of the funeral, and to
have a few words with the vicar, clerk, and sexton, all old friends of
his, for the parish of Shackleton was the place of his birth and early
recollections.
But Tom Chuff did not appear at his house that night. In surly mood,
and without a shilling in his pocket, he was making his way homeward.
His bottle of gin, his last investment, half emptied, with its neck
protruding, as usual on such returns, was in his coat-pocket.
His way home lay across the moor of Catstean, and the point at which
he best knew the passage was from the churchyard of Shackleton. He
vaulted the low wall that forms its boundary, and strode across the
graves, and over many a flat, half-buried tombstone, toward the side
of the churchyard next Catstean Moor.
The old church of Shackleton and its tower rose, close at his right,
like a black shadow against the sky. It was a moonless night, but
clear. By this time he had reached the low boundary wall, at the other
side, that overlooks the wide expanse of Catstean Moor. He stood by
one of the huge old beech-trees, and leaned his back to its smooth
trunk. Had he ever seen the sky look so black, and the stars shine
out and blink so vividly? There was a deathlike silence over the
scene, like the hush that precedes thunder in sultry weather. The
expanse before him was lost in utter blackness. A strange quaking
unnerved his heart. It was the sky and scenery of his vision! The same
horror and misgiving. The same invincible fear of venturing from the
spot where he stood. He would have prayed if he dared. His sinking
heart demanded a restorative of some sort, and he grasped the bottle
in his coat-pocket. Turning to his left, as he did so, he saw the
piled-up mould of an open grave that gaped with its head close to the
base of the great tree against which he was leaning.
He stood aghast. His dream was returning and slowly enveloping him.
Everything he saw was weaving itself into the texture of his vision.
The chill of horror stole over him.
A faint whistle came shrill and clear over the moor, and he saw a
figure approaching at a swinging trot, with a zig-zag course, hopping
now here and now there, as men do over a surface where one has need to
choose their steps. Through the jungle of reeds and bulrushes in the
foreground this figure advanced; and with the same unaccountable
impulse that had coerced him in his dream, he answered the whistle of
the advancing figure.
On that signal it directed its course straight toward him. It mounted
the low wall, and, standing there, looked into the graveyard.
"Who med answer?" challenged the new-comer from his post of
observation.
"Me," answered Tom.
"Who are you?" repeated the man upon the wall.
"Tom Chuff; and who's this grave cut for?" He answered in a savage
tone, to cover the secret shudder of his panic.
"I'll tell you that, ye villain!" answered the stranger, descending
from the wall, "I a' looked for you far and near, and waited long, and
now you're found at last."
Not knowing what to make of the figure that advanced upon him, Tom
Chuff recoiled, stumbled, and fell backward into the open grave. He
caught at the sides as he fell, but without retarding his fall.
An hour later, when lights came with the coffin, the corpse of Tom
Chuff was found at the bottom of the grave. He had fallen direct upon
his head, and his neck was broken. His death must have been
simultaneous with his fall. Thus far his dream was accomplished.
It was his brother-in-law who had crossed the moor and approached the
churchyard of Shackleton, exactly in the line which the image of his
father had seemed to take in his strange vision. Fortunately for Jack
Everton, the sexton and clerk of Shackleton church were, unseen by
him, crossing the churchyard toward the grave of Nelly Chuff, just as
Tom the poacher stumbled and fell. Suspicion of direct violence would
otherwise have inevitably attached to the exasperated brother. As it
was, the catastrophe was followed by no legal consequences.
The good vicar kept his word, and the grave of Tom Chuff is still
pointed out by the old inhabitants of Shackleton pretty nearly in the
centre of the churchyard. This conscientious compliance with the
entreaty of the panic-stricken man as to the place of his sepulture
gave a horrible and mocking emphasis to the strange combination by
which fate had defeated his precaution, and fixed the place of his
death.
The story was for many a year, and we believe still is, told round
many a cottage hearth, and though it appeals to what many would term
superstition, it yet sounded, in the ears of a rude and simple
audience, a thrilling, and let us hope, not altogether fruitless
homily.
Category:Horror
Category:Library Archive/PD