A Book of Ghosts: 11
Author: Various authors
Date: 1880-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Ghost Stories; Supernatural Fiction; Weird Fiction; Horror
Description: A collection of ten stories of the supernatural and the macabre by various authors, compiled by ECM.
Publisher: MobileRead.com
Rights: Public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA

A BOOK OF GHOSTS
— 11 —

THINGS THAT GO BUMP
IN THE NIGHT

MobileRead Edition
2021

A collection of ten stories of the supernatural and the macabre by various authors, compiled by ECM.

Contents were originally published 1881 ~ 1919. This book is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA.

CONTENTS:

- A Mysterious Portrait  –1881
by Mark Rutherford
(1831–1913)

- Markheim  –1885
by Robert Louis Stevenson
(1850–1894)

- The Serpent’s Head  –1886
by Lady Emilia Strong Dilke
(1840–1904)

- The Vampire Maid  –1890
by Hume Nisbet
(1849–1920)

- The Man with the Brown Beard  –1892
by Nathaniel T. Babcock
(1851–1928)

- The Woman And The Cat  –1896
by Marcel Prevost
(1862–1941)

- Wolverden Tower  –1896
by Grant Allen
(1848–1899)

- The Moonlit Road  –1907
by Ambrose Bierce
(1842–1914)

- The Waltz  –1913
by Morris W. Gowen
(?–?)

- The Sumach  –1919
by Ulrich Evan Daubeny
(1888–1922)

A MYSTERIOUS PORTRAIT

Mark Rutherford

1881

I remember some years ago that I went to spend a Christmas with an old friend who was a bachelor. He might, perhaps, have been verging on sixty at the time of my visit. On his study wall hung the portrait – merely the face of a singularly lovely woman. I did not like to ask any questions about it. There was no family likeness to him, and we always thought that early in life he had been disappointed. But one day, seeing that I could hardly keep my eyes off it, he said to me, “I have had that picture for many years, although you have never seen it before. If you like, I will tell you its history.” He then told me the following story.

•   •   •   •   •

In the year 1817, I was beginning life, and struggling to get a living. I had just started in business. I was alone, without much capital, and my whole energies were utterly absorbed in my adventure. In those days the master, instead of employing a commercial traveller, often used to travel himself, and one evening I had to start for the North to see some customers. I chose to go by night in order to save time, and as it was bitterly cold and I was weak in the chest, I determined to take a place inside the coach. We left St. Martin’s-le-Grand at about half-past eight, and I was the sole passenger. I could not sleep, but fell into a kind of doze, which was not sufficiently deep to prevent my rousing myself at every inn where we changed horses. Nobody intruded upon me, and I continued in the same drowsy, half-waking, half-slumbering condition till we came to the last stage before reaching Eaton Socon. I was then thoroughly awake, and continued awake until after the coach started. But presently I fell sound asleep for, perhaps, half-an-hour, and woke suddenly. To my great surprise I found a lady with me. How she came there I could not conjecture. I was positive that she did not get in when the coach last stopped. She sat at the opposite corner, so that I could see her well, and a more exquisite face I thought I had never beheld. It was not quite English – rather pale, earnest and abstracted, and with a certain intentness about the eyes which denoted a mind accustomed to dwell upon ideal objects. I was not particularly shy with women, and perhaps if she had been any ordinary, pretty girl I might have struck up a conversation with her. But I was dumb, for I hardly dared to intrude. It would have been necessary to begin by some commonplaces, and somehow my lips refused the utterance of commonplaces. Nor was this strange. If I had happened to find myself opposite the great Lord Byron in a coach I certainly should not have thrust myself upon him, and how should I dare to thrust myself upon a person who seemed as great and grand as she, although I did not know her name? So I remained perfectly still, only venturing by the light of the moon to watch her through my half-shut eyes. Just before we got to Eaton, although I was never more thoroughly or even excitedly awake in my life, I must have lost consciousness for a minute. I came to myself when the coach was pulling up at an inn. I looked round instantly, and my companion was gone. I jumped out on pretence of getting something to eat and drink, and hastily asked the guard where the lady who had just got out was put into the coach. He said they had never stopped since they had last changed horses, and that I must have been dreaming. He knew nothing about the lady, and he looked at me suspiciously, as if he thought I was drunk. I for my part was perfectly confident that I had not been deluded by an apparition of my own brain. I had never suffered from ghost-like visitations of any kind, and my thoughts, owing to my preoccupation with business, had not run upon women in any way whatever. More convincing still, I had noticed that the lady wore a light blue neckerchief; and when I went back into the coach I found that she had left it behind her. I took it up, and I have it to this day. You may imagine how my mind dwelt upon that night.

I got to Newcastle, did what I had to do, came back again, and made a point this time of sleeping at Eaton Socon in order to make inquiries. Everybody recollected the arrival of the down coach by which I travelled, and everybody was perfectly sure that no lady was in it. I produced the scarf, and asked whether anybody who lived near had been observed to wear it. Eaton is a little village, and all the people in it were as well known as if they belonged to one family, but nobody recognised it. It was certainly not English. I thought about the affair for months, partly because I was smitten with my visitor, and partly because I was half afraid my brain had been a little upset by worry. However, in time, the impression faded.

Meanwhile I began to get on in the world, and after some three or four years my intense application was rewarded by riches. In seven or eight years I had become wealthy, and I began to think about settling myself in life. I had made the acquaintance of influential people in London, and more particularly of a certain baronet whom I had met in France while taking a holiday. Although I was in business I came of good family, and our acquaintance grew into something more. He had two or three daughters, to each of whom he was able to give a good marriage portion, and I became engaged to one of them. I don’t know that there was much enthusiasm about our courtship. She was a very pleasant, good-looking girl, and although I can acquit myself of all mercenary motives in proposing to her, I cannot say that the highest motives were operative. I was as thousands of others are. I had got weary of loneliness; I wanted a home. I cast about me to see who amongst all the women I knew would best make me a wife. I selected this one, and perhaps the thought of her money may have been a trifle determinatory. I was not overmastered by a passion which I could not resist, nor was I coldly indifferent. If I had married her we should probably have lived a life of customary married comfort, and even of happiness; the same level, and perhaps slightly grey life which is lived by the ordinary English husband and wife. Things had gone so far that it was settled we were to be married in the spring of 1826, and I had begun to look out for a house, and make purchases in anticipation of housekeeping.

In 1825 I had to go to Bristol. I shall never forget to the day of my death one morning in that city. I had had my breakfast, and was going out to see the head of one of the largest firms in the city, with whom I had an appointment. I met him in the street, and I noted before he spoke that there was something the matter. I soon found out what it was. The panic of 1825 had begun; three great houses in London had failed, and brought him down. He was a ruined man, and so was I. I managed to stagger back to the hotel, and found letters there confirming all he had said. For some two or three days I was utterly prostrate, and could not summon sufficient strength to leave Bristol. One of the first things I did when I came to myself was to write to the baronet, telling him what had happened, that I was altogether penniless, and that in honour! felt bound to release his daughter from her engagement. I had a sympathising letter from him in return, saying that he was greatly afflicted at my misfortune, that his daughter was nearly broken-hearted, but that she had come to the conclusion that perhaps it would be best to accept my very kind offer. Much as she loved me, she felt that her health was far from strong, and although he had always meant to endow her generously on her marriage, her fortune alone would not enable her to procure those luxuries which, for her delicate constitution, alas! were necessaries. But the main reason with her was that she was sure that, with my independence, I should be unhappy if I felt that my wife’s property was my support. His letter was long, but although much wrapped up, this was the gist of it. I went back to London, sold every stick I had, and tried to get a situation as clerk in some house, doing the business in which I had been engaged. I failed, for the distress was great, and I was reduced nearly to my last sovereign when I determined to go down to Newcastle, and try the friend there whom I had not seen since 1817.

It was once more winter, and, although I was so poor, I was obliged to ride inside the coach again, for I was much troubled with my ancient enemy – the weakness in the chest. The incidents of my former visit I had nearly forgotten till we came near to Eaton Socon, and then they returned to me. But now it was a dull January day, with a bitter thaw, and my fellow passengers were a Lincolnshire squire, with his red-faced wife, who never spoke a syllable to me, and by reason of their isolation seemed to make the thaw all the more bitter, the fen levels all the more dismally flat, and the sky all the more leaden. At last we came to Newcastle. During the latter part of the journey I was alone, my Lincolnshire squire and his lady having left me on the road. It was about seven o’clock in the evening when we arrived; a miserable night, with the snow just melting under foot, and the town was wrapped in smoke and fog.

I was so depressed that I hardly cared what became of me, and when I stepped out of the coach wished that I had been content to lie down and die in London. I could not put up at the coaching hotel, as it was too expensive, but walked on to one which was cheaper. I almost lost my way, and had wandered down a narrow street, which at every step became more and more squalid, and at last ended opposite a factory gate. Hard by was a wretched marine store shop, in the window of which were old iron, old teapots, a few old Bibles, and other miscellaneous effects. I stepped in to ask for directions to the Cross Key. Coming out, whom should I see crossing the road, as if to meet me, but the very lady who rode with me in the coach to Eaton some nine years ago. There was no mistaking her. She seemed scarcely a day older. The face was as lovely and as inspired as ever. I was almost beside myself. I leaned against the railing of the shop, and the light from the window shone full on her. She came straight towards me on to the pavement; looked at me, and turned up the street. I followed her till we got to the end, determined not to lose sight of her; and we reached an open, broad thoroughfare. She stopped at a bookseller’s, and went in. I was not more than two minutes after her; but when I entered she was not there. A shopman was at the counter, and I asked him whether a lady, my sister, had not just left the shop. No lady, he said, had been there for half-an-hour. I went back to the marine store shop. The footsteps were still there which I saw her make as she crossed. I knelt down, tracing them with my fingers to make sure I was not deceived by my eyes, and was more than ever confounded. At last I got to my inn, and went to bed a prey to the strangest thoughts.

In the morning I was a little better. The stagnant blood had been stirred by the encounter of the night before, and though I was much agitated, and uncertain whether my brain was actually sound or not, I was sufficiently self-possessed and sensible to call upon my friend and explain my errand. He did what he could to help me, and I became his clerk in Newcastle. For a time I was completely broken, but gradually I began to recover my health and spirits a little. I had little or no responsibility, and nothing to absorb me after office hours. As a relief and an occupation, I tried to take up with a science, and chose geology; On Sundays I used to make long rambling excursions, and for a while I was pleased with my new toy. But by degrees it became less and less interesting. I suppose I had no real love for it. Furthermore, I had no opportunities for expression. My sorrow had secluded me. I demanded more from those around me than I had any right to expect. As a rule, we all of us demand from the world more than we are justified in demanding, especially if we suffer; and because the world is not so constituted that it can respond to us as eagerly and as sympathetically as we respond to ourselves, we become morose. So it was with me. People were sorry for me; but I knew that my trouble did not disturb them deeply, that when they left me, their faces, which were forcibly contracted while in my presence, instantly expanded into their ordinary self-satisfaction, and that if I were to die I should be forgotten a week after the funeral. I therefore recoiled from men, and frequently, with criminal carelessness and prodigality, rejected many an offer of kindness, not because I did not need it, but because I wanted too much of it.

My science, as I have said, was a failure. I cannot tell how it may be with some exceptionally heroic natures, but with me expression in some form or other, if the thing which should be expressed is to live, is an absolute necessity. I cannot read unless I have somebody to whom I can speak about my reading, and I lose almost all power of thinking if thought after thought remains with me. Expression is as indispensable to me as expiration of breath. Inspiration of the air is a necessity, but continued inspiration of air without expiration of the same is an impossibility. The geology was neglected, and at first I thought it was because it was geology, and I tried something else. For some months I fancied I had found a solace in chemistry. With my savings I purchased some apparatus, and began to be proficient. But the charm faded from this also; the apparatus was put aside, and the sight of it lying disused only made my dissatisfaction and melancholy the more profound. Amidst all my loneliness, I had never felt the least inclination to any baser pleasures, nor had I ever seen a woman for whom I felt even the most transient passion. My spectral friend – if spectre she was – dominated my existence, and seemed to prevent not only all licentiousness, but all pleasure, except of the most superficial kind, in other types of beauty. This need be no surprise to anybody. I have known cases in which the face of a singularly lovely woman, seen only for a few moments in the street, has haunted a man all through his life, and deeply affected it. In time I was advanced in my position as clerk, and would have married, but I had not the least inclination thereto. I did not believe in the actual reality of my vision, and had no hope of ever meeting in the flesh the apparition of the coach and the dingy street; I felt sure that there was some mistake, something wrong with me – the probabilities were all in favour of my being deceived; but still the dream possessed me, and every woman who for a moment appealed to me was tried by that standard and found wanting.

After some years had passed, during which I had scarcely been out of Newcastle, I took a holiday, and went up to London. It was about July. I was now a man on the wrong side of fifty, shy, reserved, with a reputation for constitutional melancholy, a shadowy creature, of whom nobody took much notice and who was noticed by nobody. While in London I went to see the pictures at the Academy. The place was thronged, and I was tired; I just looked about me, and was on the point of coming out wearied, when in a side room where there were crayon drawings, I caught sight of one of a face. I was amazed beyond measure. It was the face which had been my companion for so many years. There could be no mistake about it; even the neckerchief was tied as I remembered it so well, the very counterpart of the treasure I still preserved so sacredly at home. I was almost overcome with a faintness, with a creeping sensation all over the head, as if something were giving way, and with a shock of giddiness. I went and got a catalogue, found out the name of the artist, and saw that the picture had merely the name of “Stella” affixed to it. It might be a portrait, or it might not. After gazing myself almost blind at it, I went instantly to the artist’s house. He was at home. He seemed a poor man, and was evidently surprised at any inquiry after his picture so late in the season. I asked him who sat for it. “Nobody,” he said; “it was a mere fancy sketch. There might be a reminiscence in it of a girl I knew in France years ago; but she is long since dead, and I don’t think that anybody who knew her would recognise a likeness in it. In fact, I am sure they would not.” The price of the drawing was not much, although it was a good deal for me. I said instantly I would have it, and managed to get the money together by scraping up all my savings out of the savings bank. That is the very picture which you now see before you. I do not pretend to explain everything which I have told you. I have long since given up the attempt, and I suppose it must be said that I have suffered from some passing disorder of the brain, although that theory is not sound at all points, and there are circumstances inconsistent with it.

•   •   •   •   •

The next morning my friend went to his office, after an early breakfast. His hours were long, and I was obliged to leave Newcastle before his return. So I bade him goodbye before he left home. I never saw him again. Two years afterwards I was shocked to see an announcement in the Times of his death. Knowing his lonely way of life, I went down to Newcastle to gather what I could about his illness and last moments. He had caught cold, and died of congestion of the lungs. His landlady said that he had made a will, and that what little property had remained after paying his funeral expenses had been made over to a hospital. I was anxious to know where the picture was. She could not tell me. It had disappeared just before his death, and nobody knew what had become of it.

MARKHEIM

Robert Louis Stevenson

1885

“Yes,” said the dealer, “our windfalls are of various kinds. Some customers are ignorant, and then I touch a dividend on my superior knowledge. Some are dishonest,” and here he held up the candle, so that the light fell strongly on his visitor, “and in that case,” he continued, “I profit by my virtue.”

Markheim had but just entered from the daylight streets, and his eyes had not yet grown familiar with the mingled shine and darkness in the shop. At these pointed words, and before the near presence of the flame, he blinked painfully and looked aside.

The dealer chuckled. “You come to me on Christmas Day,” he resumed, “when you know that I am alone in my house, put up my shutters, and make a point of refusing business. Well, you will have to pay for that; you will have to pay for my loss of time, when I should be balancing my books; you will have to pay, besides, for a kind of manner that I remark in you today very strongly. I am the essence of discretion, and ask no awkward questions; but when a customer cannot look me in the eye, he has to pay for it.” The dealer once more chuckled; and then, changing to his usual business voice, though still with a note of irony, “You can give, as usual, a clear account of how you came into the possession of the object?” he continued. “Still your uncle’s cabinet? A remarkable collector, sir!”

And the little pale, round-shouldered dealer stood almost on tip-toe, looking over the top of his gold spectacles, and nodding his head with every mark of disbelief. Markheim returned his gaze with one of infinite pity, and a touch of horror.

“This time,” said he, “you are in error. I have not come to sell, but to buy. I have no curios to dispose of; my uncle’s cabinet is bare to the wainscot; even were it still intact, I have done well on the Stock Exchange, and should more likely add to it than otherwise, and my errand today is simplicity itself. I seek a Christmas present for a lady,” he continued, waxing more fluent as he struck into the speech he had prepared; “and certainly I owe you every excuse for thus disturbing you upon so small a matter. But the thing was neglected yesterday; I must produce my little compliment at dinner; and, as you very well know, a rich marriage is not a thing to be neglected.”

There followed a pause, during which the dealer seemed to weigh this statement incredulously. The ticking of many clocks among the curious lumber of the shop, and the faint rushing of the cabs in a near thoroughfare, filled up the interval of silence.

“Well, sir,” said the dealer, “be it so. You are an old customer after all; and if, as you say, you have the chance of a good marriage, far be it from me to be an obstacle. Here is a nice thing for a lady now,” he went on, “this hand glass – fifteenth century, warranted; comes from a good collection, too; but I reserve the name, in the interests of my customer, who was just like yourself, my dear sir, the nephew and sole heir of a remarkable collector.”

The dealer, while he thus ran on in his dry and biting voice, had stooped to take the object from its place; and, as he had done so, a shock had passed through Markheim, a start both of hand and foot, a sudden leap of many tumultuous passions to the face. It passed as swiftly as it came, and left no trace beyond a certain trembling of the hand that now received the glass.

“A glass,” he said hoarsely, and then paused, and repeated it more clearly. “A glass? For Christmas? Surely not?”

“And why not?” cried the dealer. “Why not a glass?”

Markheim was looking upon him with an indefinable expression. “You ask me why not?” he said. “Why, look here – look in it – look at yourself! Do you like to see it? No! Nor I – nor any man.”

The little man had jumped back when Markheim had so suddenly confronted him with the mirror; but now, perceiving there was nothing worse on hand, he chuckled. “Your future lady, sir, must be pretty hard favoured,” said he.

“I ask you,” said Markheim, “for a Christmas present, and you give me this – this damned reminder of years, and sins and follies – this hand-conscience! Did you mean it? Had you a thought in your mind? Tell me. It will be better for you if you do. Come, tell me about yourself. I hazard a guess now, that you are in secret a very charitable man?”

The dealer looked closely at his companion. It was very odd, Markheim did not appear to be laughing; there was something in his face like an eager sparkle of hope, but nothing of mirth.

“What are you driving at?” the dealer asked.

“Not charitable?” returned the other, gloomily. “Not charitable; not pious; not scrupulous; unloving, unbeloved; a hand to get money, a safe to keep it. Is that all? Dear God, man, is that all?”

“I will tell you what it is,” began the dealer, with some sharpness, and then broke off again into a chuckle. “But I see this is a love match of yours, and you have been drinking the lady’s health.”

“Ah!” cried Markheim, with a strange curiosity. “Ah, have you been in love? Tell me about that.”

“I,” cried the dealer. “I in love! I never had the time, nor have I the time today for all this nonsense. Will you take the glass?”

“Where is the hurry?” returned Markheim. “It is very pleasant to stand here talking; and life is so short and insecure that I would not hurry away from any pleasure – no, not even from so mild a one as this. We should rather cling, cling to what little we can get, like a man at a cliff’s edge. Every second is a cliff, if you think upon it – a cliff a mile high – high enough, if we fall, to dash us out of every feature of humanity. Hence it is best to talk pleasantly. Let us talk of each other: why should we wear this mask? Let us be confidential. Who knows, we might become friends?”

“I have just one word to say to you,” said the dealer. “Either make your purchase, or walk out of my shop!”

“True true,” said Markheim. “Enough, fooling. To business. Show me something else.”

The dealer stooped once more, this time to replace the glass upon the shelf, his thin blond hair falling over his eyes as he did so. Markheim moved a little nearer, with one hand in the pocket of his greatcoat; he drew himself up and filled his lungs; at the same time many different emotions were depicted together on his face – terror, horror, and resolve, fascination and a physical repulsion; and through a haggard lift of his upper lip, his teeth looked out.

“This, perhaps, may suit,” observed the dealer: and then, as he began to re-arise, Markheim bounded from behind upon his victim. The long, skewerlike dagger flashed and fell. The dealer struggled like a hen, striking his temple on the shelf, and then tumbled on the floor in a heap.

Time had some score of small voices in that shop, some stately and slow as was becoming to their great age; others garrulous and hurried. All these told out the seconds in an intricate, chorus of tickings. Then the passage of a lad’s feet, heavily running on the pavement, broke in upon these smaller voices and startled Markheim into the consciousness of his surroundings. He looked about him awfully. The candle stood on the counter, its flame solemnly wagging in a draught; and by that inconsiderable movement, the whole room was filled with noiseless bustle and kept heaving like a sea: the tall shadows nodding, the gross blots of darkness swelling and dwindling as with respiration, the faces of the portraits and the china gods changing and wavering like images in water. The inner door stood ajar, and peered into that leaguer of shadows with a long slit of daylight like a pointing finger.

From these fear-stricken rovings, Markheim’s eyes returned to the body of his victim, where it lay both humped and sprawling, incredibly small and strangely meaner than in life. In these poor, miserly clothes, in that ungainly attitude, the dealer lay like so much sawdust. Markheim had feared to see it, and, lo! it was nothing. And yet, as he gazed, this bundle of old clothes and pool of blood began to find eloquent voices. There it must lie; there was none to work the cunning hinges or direct the miracle of locomotion – there it must lie till it was found. Found! Ay, and then? Then would this dead flesh lift up a cry that would ring over England, and fill the world with the echoes of pursuit. Ay, dead or not, this was still the enemy. “Time was that when the brains were out,” he thought; and the first word struck into his mind. Time, now that the deed was accomplished – time, which had closed for the victim, had become instant and momentous for the slayer.

The thought was yet in his mind, when, first one and then another, with every variety of pace and voice – one deep as the bell from a cathedral turret, another ringing on its treble notes the prelude of a waltz – the clocks began to strike the hour of three in the afternoon.

The sudden outbreak of so many tongues in that dumb chamber staggered him. He began to bestir himself, going to and fro with the candle, beleaguered by moving shadows, and startled to the soul by chance reflections. In many rich mirrors, some of home design, some from Venice or Amsterdam, he saw his face repeated and repeated, as it were an army of spies; his own eyes met and detected him; and the sound of his own steps, lightly as they fell, vexed the surrounding quiet. And still, as he continued to fill his pockets, his mind accused him with a sickening iteration, of the thousand faults of his design. He should have chosen a more quiet hour; he should have prepared an alibi; he should not have used a knife; he should have been more cautious, and only bound and gagged the dealer, and not killed him; he should have been more bold, and killed the servant also; he should have done all things otherwise: poignant regrets, weary, incessant toiling of the mind to change what was unchangeable, to plan what was now useless, to be the architect of the irrevocable past. Meanwhile, and behind all this activity, brute terrors, like the scurrying of rats in a deserted attic, filled the more remote chambers of his brain with riot; the hand of the constable would fall heavy on his shoulder, and his nerves would jerk like a hooked fish; or he beheld, in galloping defile, the dock, the prison, the gallows, and the black coffin.

Terror of the people in the street sat down before his mind like a besieging army. It was impossible, he thought, but that some rumour of the struggle must have reached their ears and set on edge their curiosity; and now, in all the neighbouring houses, he divined them sitting motionless and with uplifted ear – solitary people, condemned to spend Christmas dwelling alone on memories of the past, and now startingly recalled from that tender exercise; happy family parties struck into silence round the table, the mother still with raised finger: every degree and age and humour, but all, by their own hearths, prying and hearkening and weaving the rope that was to hang him. Sometimes it seemed to him he could not move too softly; the clink of the tall Bohemian goblets rang out loudly like a bell; and alarmed by the bigness of the ticking, he was tempted to stop the clocks. And then, again, with a swift transition of his terrors, the very silence of the place appeared a source of peril, and a thing to strike and freeze the passer-by; and he would step more boldly, and bustle aloud among the contents of the shop, and imitate, with elaborate bravado, the movements of a busy man at ease in his own house.

But he was now so pulled about by different alarms that, while one portion of his mind was still alert and cunning, another trembled on the brink of lunacy. One hallucination in particular took a strong hold on his credulity. The neighbour hearkening with white face beside his window, the passer-by arrested by a horrible surmise on the pavement – these could at worst suspect, they could not know; through the brick walls and shuttered windows only sounds could penetrate. But here, within the house, was he alone? He knew he was; he had watched the servant set forth sweet-hearting, in her poor best, “out for the day” written in every ribbon and smile. Yes, he was alone, of course; and yet, in the bulk of empty house above him, he could surely hear a stir of delicate footing – he was surely conscious, inexplicably conscious of some presence. Ay, surely; to every room and corner of the house his imagination followed it; and now it was a faceless thing, and yet had eyes to see with; and again it was a shadow of himself; and yet again behold the image of the dead dealer, reinspired with cunning and hatred.

At times, with a strong effort, he would glance at the open door which still seemed to repel his eyes. The house was tall, the skylight small and dirty, the day blind with fog; and the light that filtered down to the ground story was exceedingly faint, and showed dimly on the threshold of the shop. And yet, in that strip of doubtful brightness, did there not hang wavering a shadow?

Suddenly, from the street outside, a very jovial gentleman began to beat with a staff on the shop-door, accompanying his blows with shouts and railleries in which the dealer was continually called upon by name. Markheim, smitten into ice, glanced at the dead man. But no! he lay quite still; he was fled away far beyond earshot of these blows and shoutings; he was sunk beneath seas of silence; and his name, which would once have caught his notice above the howling of a storm, had become an empty sound. And presently the jovial gentleman desisted from his knocking, and departed.

Here was a broad hint to hurry what remained to be done, to get forth from this accusing neighbourhood, to plunge into a bath of London multitudes, and to reach, on the other side of day, that haven of safety and apparent innocence – his bed. One visitor had come: at any moment another might follow and be more obstinate. To have done the deed, and yet not to reap the profit, would be too abhorrent a failure. The money, that was now Markheim’s concern; and as a means to that, the keys.

He glanced over his shoulder at the open door, where the shadow was still lingering and shivering; and with no conscious repugnance of the mind, yet with a tremor of the belly, he drew near the body of his victim. The human character had quite departed. Like a suit half-stuffed with bran, the limbs lay scattered, the trunk doubled, on the floor; and yet the thing repelled him. Although so dingy and inconsiderable to the eye, he feared it might have more significance to the touch. He took the body by the shoulders, and turned it on its back. It was strangely light and supple, and the limbs, as if they had been broken, fell into the oddest postures. The face was robbed of all expression; but it was as pale as wax, and shockingly smeared with blood about one temple. That was, for Markheim, the one displeasing circumstance. It carried him back, upon the instant, to a certain fair-day in a fishers’ village: a gray day, a piping wind, a crowd upon the street, the blare of brasses, the booming of drums, the nasal voice of a ballad singer; and a boy going to and fro, buried over head in the crowd and divided between interest and fear, until, coming out upon the chief place of concourse, he beheld a booth and a great screen with pictures, dismally designed, garishly coloured: Brown-rigg with her apprentice; the Mannings with their murdered guest; Weare in the death-grip of Thurtell; and a score besides of famous crimes. The thing was as clear as an illusion; he was once again that little boy; he was looking once again, and with the same sense of physical revolt, at these vile pictures; he was still stunned by the thumping of the drums. A bar of that day’s music returned upon his memory; and at that, for the first time, a qualm came over him, a breath of nausea, a sudden weakness of the joints, which he must instantly resist and conquer.

He judged it more prudent to confront than to flee from these considerations; looking the more hardily in the dead face, bending his mind to realise the nature and greatness of his crime. So little a while ago that face had moved with every change of sentiment, that pale mouth had spoken, that body had been all on fire with governable energies; and now, and by his act, that piece of life had been arrested, as the horologist, with interjected finger, arrests the beating of the clock. So he reasoned in vain; he could rise to no more remorseful consciousness; the same heart which had shuddered before the painted effigies of crime, looked on its reality unmoved. At best, he felt a gleam of pity for one who had been endowed in vain with all those faculties that can make the world a garden of enchantment, one who had never lived and who was now dead. But of penitence, no, not a tremor.

With that, shaking himself clear of these considerations, he found the keys and advanced towards the open door of the shop. Outside, it had begun to rain smartly; and the sound of the shower upon the roof had banished silence. Like some dripping cavern, the chambers of the house were haunted by an incessant echoing, which filled the ear and mingled with the ticking of the clocks. And, as Markheim approached the door, he seemed to hear, in answer to his own cautious tread, the steps of another foot withdrawing up the stair. The shadow still palpitated loosely on the threshold. He threw a ton’s weight of resolve upon his muscles, and drew back the door.

The faint, foggy daylight glimmered dimly on the bare floor and stairs; on the bright suit of armour posted, halbert in hand, upon the landing; and on the dark wood-carvings, and framed pictures that hung against the yellow panels of the wainscot. So loud was the beating of the rain through all the house that, in Markheim’s ears, it began to be distinguished into many different sounds. Footsteps and sighs, the tread of regiments marching in the distance, the chink of money in the counting, and the creaking of doors held stealthily ajar, appeared to mingle with the patter of the drops upon the cupola and the gushing of the water in the pipes. The sense that he was not alone grew upon him to the verge of madness. On every side he was haunted and begirt by presences. He heard them moving in the upper chambers; from the shop, he heard the dead man getting to his legs; and as he began with a great effort to mount the stairs, feet fled quietly before him and followed stealthily behind. If he were but deaf, he thought, how tranquilly he would possess his soul! And then again, and hearkening with ever fresh attention, he blessed himself for that unresting sense which held the outposts and stood a trusty sentinel upon his life. His head turned continually on his neck; his eyes, which seemed starting from their orbits, scouted on every side, and on every side were half-rewarded as with the tail of something nameless vanishing. The four-and-twenty steps to the first floor were four-and-twenty agonies.

On that first storey, the doors stood ajar, three of them like three ambushes, shaking his nerves like the throats of cannon. He could never again, he felt, be sufficiently immured and fortified from men’s observing eyes, he longed to be home, girt in by walls, buried among bedclothes, and invisible to all but God. And at that thought he wondered a little, recollecting tales of other murderers and the fear they were said to entertain of heavenly avengers. It was not so, at least, with him. He feared the laws of nature, lest, in their callous and immutable procedure, they should preserve some damning evidence of his crime. He feared tenfold more, with a slavish, superstitions terror, some scission in the continuity of man’s experience, some wilful illegality of nature. He played a game of skill, depending on the rules, calculating consequence from cause; and what if nature, as the defeated tyrant overthrew the chessboard, should break the mould of their succession? The like had befallen Napoleon (so writers said) when the winter changed the time of its appearance. The like might befall Markheim: the solid walls might become transparent and reveal his doings like those of bees in a glass hive; the stout planks might yield under his foot like quicksands and detain him in their clutch; ay, and there were soberer accidents that might destroy him: if, for instance, the house should fall and imprison him beside the body of his victim; or the house next door should fly on fire, and the firemen invade him from all sides. These things he feared; and, in a sense, these things might be called the hands of God reached forth against sin. But about God himself he was at ease; his act was doubtless exceptional, but so were his excuses, which God knew; it was there, and not among men, that he felt sure of justice.

When he had got safe into the drawing-room, and shut the door behind him, he was aware of a respite from alarms. The room was quite dismantled, uncarpeted besides, and strewn with packing cases and incongruous furniture; several great pier-glasses, in which he beheld himself at various angles, like an actor on a stage; many pictures, framed and unframed, standing, with their faces to the wall; a fine Sheraton sideboard, a cabinet of marquetry, and a great old bed, with tapestry hangings. The windows opened to the floor; but by great good fortune the lower part of the shutters had been closed, and this concealed him from the neighbours. Here, then, Markheim drew in a packing case before the cabinet, and began to search among the keys. It was a long business, for there were many; and it was irksome, besides; for, after all, there might be nothing in the cabinet, and time was on the wing. But the closeness of the occupation sobered him. With the tail of his eye he saw the door – even glanced at it from time to time directly, like a besieged commander pleased to verify the good estate of his defences. But in truth he was at peace. The rain falling in the street sounded natural and pleasant. Presently, on the other side, the notes of a piano were wakened to the music of a hymn, and the voices of many children took up the air and words. How stately, how comfortable was the melody! How fresh the youthful voices! Markheim gave ear to it smilingly, as he sorted out the keys; and his mind was thronged with answerable ideas and images; church-going children and the pealing of the high organ; children afield, bathers by the brookside, ramblers on the brambly common, kite-flyers in the windy and cloud-navigated sky; and then, at another cadence of the hymn, back again to church, and the somnolence of summer Sundays, and the high genteel voice of the parson (which he smiled a little to recall) and the painted Jacobean tombs, and the dim lettering of the Ten Commandments in the chancel.

And as he sat thus, at once busy and absent, he was startled to his feet. A flash of ice, a flash of fire, a bursting gush of blood, went over him, and then he stood transfixed and thrilling. A step mounted the stair slowly and steadily, and presently a hand was laid upon the knob, and the lock clicked, and the door opened.

Fear held Markheim in a vice. What to expect he knew not, whether the dead man walking, or the official ministers of human justice, or some chance witness blindly stumbling in to consign him to the gallows. But when a face was thrust into the aperture, glanced round the room, looked at him, nodded and smiled as if in friendly recognition, and then withdrew again, and the door closed behind it, his fear broke loose from his control in a hoarse cry. At the sound of this the visitant returned.

“Did you call me?” he asked, pleasantly, and with that he entered the room and closed the door behind him.

Markheim stood and gazed at him with all his eyes. Perhaps there was a film upon his sight, but the outlines of the new comer seemed to change and waver like those of the idols in the wavering candlelight of the shop; and at times he thought he knew him; and at times he thought he bore a likeness to himself; and always, like a lump of living terror, there lay in his bosom the conviction that this thing was not of the earth and not of God.

And yet the creature had a strange air of the commonplace, as he stood looking on Markheim with a smile; and when he added: “You are looking for the money, I believe?” it was in the tones of everyday politeness.

Markheim made no answer.

“I should warn you,” resumed the other, “that the maid has left her sweetheart earlier than usual and will soon be here. If Mr. Markheim be found in this house, I need not describe to him the consequences.”

“You know me?” cried the murderer.

The visitor smiled. “You have long been a favourite of mine,” he said; “and I have long observed and often sought to help you.”

“What are you?” cried Markheim: “the devil?”

“What I may be,” returned the other, “cannot affect the service I propose to render you.”

“It can,” cried Markheim; “it does! Be helped by you? No, never; not by you! You do not know me yet; thank God, you do not know me!”

“I know you,” replied the visitant, with a sort of kind severity or rather firmness. “I know you to the soul.”

“Know me!” cried Markheim. “Who can do so? My life is but a travesty and slander on myself. I have lived to belie my nature. All men do; all men are better than this disguise that grows about and stifles them. You see each dragged away by life, like one whom bravos have seized and muffled in a cloak. If they had their own control – if you could see their faces, they would be altogether different, they would shine out for heroes and saints! I am worse than most; myself is more overlaid; my excuse is known to me and God. But, had I the time, I could disclose myself.”

“To me?” inquired the visitant.

“To you before all,” returned the murderer. “I supposed you were intelligent. I thought – since you exist – you would prove a reader of the heart. And yet you would propose to judge me by my acts! Think of it; my acts! I was born and I have lived in a land of giants; giants have dragged me by the wrists since I was born out of my mother – the giants of circumstance. And you would judge me by my acts! But can you not look within? Can you not understand that evil is hateful to me? Can you not see within me the clear writing of conscience, never blurred by any wilful sophistry, although too often disregarded? Can you not read me for a thing that surely must be common as humanity – the unwilling sinner?”

“All this is very feelingly expressed,” was the reply, “but it regards me not. These points of consistency are beyond my province, and I care not in the least by what compulsion you may have been dragged away, so as you are but carried in the right direction. But time flies; the servant delays, looking in the faces of the crowd and at the pictures on the hoardings, but still she keeps moving nearer; and remember, it is as if the gallows itself was striding towards you through the Christmas streets! Shall I help you; I, who know all? Shall I tell you where to find the money?”

“For what price?” asked Markheim.

“I offer you the service for a Christmas gift,” returned the other.

Markheim could not refrain from smiling with a kind of bitter triumph. “No,” said he, “I will take nothing at your hands; if I were dying of thirst, and it was your hand that put the pitcher to my lips, I should find the courage to refuse. It may be credulous, but I will do nothing to commit myself to evil.”

“I have no objection to a deathbed repentance,” observed the visitant.

“Because you disbelieve their efficacy!” Markheim cried.

“I do not say so,” returned the other; “but I look on these things from a different side, and when the life is done my interest falls. The man has lived to serve me, to spread black looks under colour of religion, or to sow tares in the wheat-field, as you do, in a course of weak compliance with desire. Now that he draws so near to his deliverance, he can add but one act of service – to repent, to die smiling, and thus to build up in confidence and hope the more timorous of my surviving followers. I am not so hard a master. Try me. Accept my help. Please yourself in life as you have done hitherto; please yourself more amply, spread your elbows at the board; and when the night begins to fall and the curtains to be drawn, I tell you, for your greater comfort, that you will find it even easy to compound your quarrel with your conscience, and to make a truckling peace with God. I came but now from such a deathbed, and the room was full of sincere mourners, listening to the man’s last words: and when I looked into that face, which had been set as a flint against mercy, I found it smiling with hope.”

“And do you, then, suppose me such a creature?” asked Markheim. “Do you think I have no more generous aspirations than to sin, and sin, and sin, and, at the last, sneak into heaven? My heart rises at the thought. Is this, then, your experience of mankind? or is it because you find me with red hands that you presume such baseness? and is this crime of murder indeed so impious as to dry up the very springs of good?”

“Murder is to me no special category,” replied the other. “All sins are murder, even as all life is war. I behold your race, like starving mariners on a raft, plucking crusts out of the hands of famine and feeding on each other’s lives. I follow sins beyond the moment of their acting; I find in all that the last consequence is death; and to my eyes, the pretty maid who thwarts her mother with such taking graces on a question of a ball, drips no less visibly with human gore than such a murderer as yourself. Do I say that I follow sins? I follow virtues also; they differ not by the thickness of a nail, they are both scythes for the reaping angel of Death. Evil, for which I live, consists not in action but in character. The bad man is dear to me; not the bad act, whose fruits, if we could follow them far enough down the hurtling cataract of the ages, might yet be found more blessed than those of the rarest virtues. And it is not because you have killed a dealer, but because you are Markheim, that I offer to forward your escape.”

“I will lay my heart open to you,” answered Markheim. “This crime on which you find me is my last. On my way to it I have learned many lessons; itself is a lesson, a momentous lesson. Hitherto I have been driven with revolt to what I would not; I was a bond-slave to poverty, driven and scourged. There are robust virtues that can stand in these temptations; mine was not so: I had a thirst of pleasure. But today, and out of this deed, I pluck both warning and riches – both the power and a fresh resolve to be myself. I become in all things a free actor in the world; I begin to see myself all changed, these hands the agents of good, this heart at peace. Something comes over me out of the past; something of what I have dreamed on Sabbath evenings to the sound of the church organ, of what I forecast when I shed tears over noble books, or talked, an innocent child, with my mother. There lies my life; I have wandered a few years, but now I see once more my city of destination.”

“You are to use this money on the Stock Exchange, I think?” remarked the visitor; “and there, if I mistake not, you have already lost some thousands?”

“Ah,” said Markheim, “but this time I have a sure thing.”

“This time, again, you will lose,” replied the visitor quietly.

“Ah, but I keep back the half!” cried Markheim.

“That also you will lose,” said the other.

The sweat started upon Markheim’s brow. “Well, then, what matter?” he exclaimed. “Say it be lost, say I am plunged again in poverty, shall one part of me, and that the worse, continue until the end to override the better? Evil and good run strong in me, haling me both ways. I do not love the one thing, I love all. I can conceive great deeds, renunciations, martyrdoms; and though I be fallen to such a crime as murder, pity is no stranger to my thoughts. I pity the poor; who knows their trials better than myself? I pity and help them; I prize love, I love honest laughter; there is no good thing nor true thing on earth but I love it from my heart. And are my vices only to direct my life, and my virtues to lie without effect, like some passive lumber of the mind? Not so; good, also, is a spring of acts.”

But the visitant raised his finger. “For six-and-thirty years that you have been in this world,” said be, “through many changes of fortune and varieties of humour, I have watched you steadily fall. Fifteen years ago you would have started at a theft. Three years back you would have blenched at the name of murder. Is there any crime, is there any cruelty or meanness, from which you still recoil? – five years from now I shall detect you in the fact! Downward, downward, lies your way; nor can anything but death avail to stop you.”

“It is true,” Markheim said huskily, “I have in some degree complied with evil. But it is so with all: the very saints, in the mere exercise of living, grow less dainty, and take on the tone of their surroundings.”

“I will propound to you one simple question,” said the other; “and as you answer, I shall read to you your moral horoscope. You have grown in many things more lax; possibly you do right to be so – and at any account, it is the same with all men. But granting that, are you in any one particular, however trifling, more difficult to please with your own conduct, or do you go in all things with a looser rein?”

“In any one?” repeated Markheim, with an anguish of consideration. “No,” he added, with despair, “in none! I have gone down in all.”

“Then,” said the visitor, “content yourself with what you are, for you will never change; and the words of your part on this stage are irrevocably written down.”

Markheim stood for a long while silent, and indeed it was the visitor who first broke the silence. “That being so,” he said, “shall I show you the money?”

“And grace?” cried Markheim.

“Have you not tried it?” returned the other. “Two or three years ago, did I not see you on the platform of revival meetings, and was not your voice the loudest in the hymn?”

“It is true,” said Markheim; “and I see clearly what remains for me by way of duty. I thank you for these lessons from my soul; my eyes are opened, and I behold myself at last for what I am.”

At this moment, the sharp note of the door-bell rang through the house; and the visitant, as though this were some concerted signal for which he had been waiting, changed at once in his demeanour.

“The maid!” he cried. “She has returned, as I forewarned you, and there is now before you one more difficult passage. Her master, you must say, is ill; you must let her in, with an assured but rather serious countenance – no smiles, no overacting, and I promise you success! Once the girl within, and the door closed, the same dexterity that has already rid you of the dealer will relieve you of this last danger in your path. Thenceforward you have the whole evening – the whole night, if needful – to ransack the treasures of the house and to make good your safety. This is help that comes to you with the mask of danger. Up!” he cried; “up, friend; your life hangs trembling in the scales: up, and act!”

Markheim steadily regarded his counsellor. “If I be condemned to evil acts,” he said, “there is still one door of freedom open – I can cease from action. If my life be an ill thing, I can lay it down. Though I be, as you say truly, at the beck of every small temptation, I can yet, by one decisive gesture, place myself beyond the reach of all. My love of good is damned to barrenness; it may, and let it be! But I have still my hatred of evil; and from that, to your galling disappointment, you shall see that I can draw both energy and courage.”

The features of the visitor began to undergo a wonderful and lovely change: they brightened and softened with a tender triumph, and, even as they brightened, faded and dislimned. But Markheim did not pause to watch or understand the transformation. He opened the door and went downstairs very slowly, thinking to himself. His past went soberly before him; he beheld it as it was, ugly and strenuous like a dream, random as chance-medley – a scene of defeat. Life, as he thus reviewed it, tempted him no longer; but on the further side he perceived a quiet haven for his bark. He paused in the passage, and looked into the shop, where the candle still burned by the dead body. It was strangely silent. Thoughts of the dealer swarmed into his mind, as he stood gazing. And then the bell once more broke out into impatient clamour.

He confronted the maid upon the threshold with something like a smile.

“You had better go for the police,” said he: “I have killed your master.”

THE SERPENT’S HEAD

Lady Emilia Strong Dilke

1886

In a castle by the Northern Sea two women, a girl and her mother, dwelt alone; nor, had they wished for friends and neighbours, were there any to find in that desolate country. All the space which was not covered by water was spread with sand, for the hills near the coast, mined by the stealthy advances of the sea, were forever falling over and strewing the shore with ruin. The only feature of this mournful landscape was a black reef of rocks to the north, the position of which was marked, even at the highest tides, by a crag called “The Serpent’s Head.”

The castle itself, which was on an eminence completely isolated from the surrounding country, showed but the scanty remains of its ancient glories; the great tower yet stood on the north proudly intact within the inner series of fortifications, but facing it on the south and east were nought but ruins, whilst on the west a disused building called “The Chamber on the Wall” presented a gloomy and deserted aspect. Such life as yet lingered within a fortress meant to contain a thousand men was apparently confined to the tower, and centered on the existence of two women.

In a vast and vaulted chamber, the sides of which were riddled with strange closets, and mantled with books, the mother constantly sat; but her gaze was more often on the deserted courts below than on the pages before her, and oftenest of all her eyes would seek the black reef on the north, and spy out the antics of her daughter, diving and swimming about the Serpent’s Head.

The girl, in her childish days, had been content, finding infinite amusement, as the fisher children did, in the wonders of the sands; in the hollows of the great drifts she had built for herself many a fairy chamber; but as she grew older these sports were all outworn, and of all her delights one only remained to her, for she was a fearless swimmer, and to dive into the deep waters off the Serpent’s Head was ever a pleasure to her.

There, too, she would sit for hours gazing seawards. No tiniest speck of sail that crossed the waters could escape her watchful eyes, and as she watched she dreamed that someday one of these distant sails should bear down towards her, and one should come, in whose hand she would lay her own, and they two would flee to the far East. But as the changeless years went by and brought him not, the girl grew sullen, and a sense of wrong possessed her, for the older she grew, the clearer became her consciousness of a world beyond her, and the greater her longing to seek it.

So the sea, with its journeying ships, appeared to her as the path of deliverance, and the way of escape, and the castle in which she dwelt was a prison to her; and sometimes sudden fits of gusty passion would overtake her, for weariness grew to hate, and hate to wrath, and rising to her feet she would clench and shake her impotent hands at the grey walls above her, frowning motionless at the ever-moving sea. Then her mother, if by chance she saw these demoniacal gestures, would smile a bitter smile, and when they met her eyes would have a challenge in them, so that the girl’s passion, which the moment before had risen high with questioning, fell before her gaze, nor did it ever seem possible to her to speak her thoughts, and there was never any confidence between them.

Thus it was that the girl went always alone, and one morning in the late autumn, having risen from a bed fevered with evil dreams, she betook herself, as was her wont, to the Serpent’s Head. It was low water, and stepping lightly from point to point, she soon reached the utmost projecting crag, and sat herself down upon it. Now as she sat, she looked into the waters below, and her eyes fastened on two long ribands of seaweed which floated out of a cave beneath, or were sucked back as the tide ebbed or flowed. As she looked on them, these ribands of weed seemed to her like two long arms stretching and reaching out to her. Then, suddenly she remembered her dream, for in her dream it had seemed to her that her own heart lay in her hands, and as she held it before her, lo! two arms had stretched themselves out of the darkness, and her heart lay no longer in her own hands, but in those of her mother, and she heard her mother’s voice saying, “It is mine!” and a great anguish had come upon her, as she felt her mother’s fingers in her heart-strings, and she awoke.

Now when the girl remembered her dream, the fever of the night ran yet in her veins, and she continued to watch the witchlike movements of the weeds upon the water, until it was as though she felt the clasp of their slimy tendrils drawing her downwards, and yielding to a sudden impulse, she sprang to her feet, cast her garments from her, and hastily girding on a little blue gown which she had brought with her, she threw herself into the sea. Once she had touched the water, her dream faded, and she forgot her meaning to enter the cave below, and struck out from the land. Nor was it long before all the blackness in her heart vanished, and she began to laugh, joying and sporting in the boundless waters. But soon there arose a sea fog such as afflict those coasts, and in a moment, the shore and the sea were as one, for on all sides the impenetrable mist had fallen.

At this the girl made, as she thought, for the point whence she had come, and she did not discover that she had utterly lost her bearings till the sound of the signal, fired from the castle walls, rolled past her through the waves of shivering mist. She was now weary, but the sound was no sure guide, for, having reached the shore, she found herself still so far out of her course that her feet were in the quicksands which lay to the south of the Serpent’s Head. Now anger and fear laid hold upon her, for the tide was coming in fast, and she knew that no man might land at that point with his life; so, turning to the north, she struck out again for the rocks, and the old fever mounted to her brain, and she fancied that the hand of her mother lay heavy on her life, and her thought was, “I will not die, but live. I will be stronger than thou!” And even when, in her extremity, the end seemed very close to her, the fog began to lift, and before her she saw the black shape of the Serpent’s Head. Then, with a desperate effort, she drew near it, and the fog lifted altogether, and she saw that no other part of the reef was visible; but though she laid her hands upon it, the numbness of her body was such that she could get no footing, nor by any means could she raise herself on to the rock.

There was one, however, who now watched her, one who had ridden from afar, and caught by the fog and the rising tide had tarried near the rocks. When this one saw the girl clinging to the Serpent’s Head, he rode his horse a little way up the shore, till he could put him in the curve of the breakers, and thus, like one who had often done the same, he strove to reach her; but by this means he could not, so next, letting go his horse, he made himself ready, and fetching a wide circle, he reached her and brought her safely to land.

When he touched the shore, he laid her on the sands and knelt beside her, and she, half conscious only, opening her eyes and seeing him thus close, made one of her dreams and of her escape from death, and putting her arms about him said, “I have saved my heart, and it is yours;” and she thrust her mouth to his and she kissed him. After this, she lay still as in a swoon, and he was amazed; but the girl was very beautiful, and great pity and tenderness possessed him as he saw her thus. Then he looked about for help, and so looking he espied a narrow path embedded in the grass-grown sand, and leading to the postern gate of the castle. Taking her then in his arms, he bore her slowly thither, for the way was steep, and pausing now and again, he felt that the pressure of her arms about him tightened until she held him so close that when he had brought her into the presence of her mother scarcely might her stiffened fingers be unclasped from about his neck.

Now when at last she opened her eyes, she lay in her own room, and her mother stood near, and she heard her mother say, “Would God that she had perished in the sea!” and she saw her mother’s face that it was very stern as she said this. But the heart of the girl was glad; she felt neither fear nor anger, and hate seemed harmless, so great a love within an hour past had leapt up within her. And, though no word had passed, she knew that he who had fetched her from the sea was her lover, and that even as it was with her so it was with him.

Next day, and each day after, they met again by the Serpent’s Head; but her mother watched her, and looking towards the rocks at sunset she saw them together. Then neither that night nor the next did she take any rest, and on the morning of the second day, when the girl would have gone forth, her mother met her and said, “I have somewhat to say unto you.” And the girl, suspecting her purpose, stood still before her, and folding her arms across her breast she answered, “He is my lover, and shall be my husband.” And the mother at this cried, “Are you hot so soon? But I have that to tell you which shall put out your fires. There is a curse on you, even the curse of your accursed father and his race. O God!” she continued, “shall not one life suffice, and shall his seed drag yet another and another down into the abyss? Shall a son born of your body live to rivet these devil’s chains on another life as fair as mine?”

And a great shiver passed over her, and she closed her eyes a space before she spoke again, and then it was in a different tone, a tone of pitiful pleading, that she said, “Child! for the sake of your love, put him from you; die sooner than bring this death to his soul;” and in so saying she averted her eyes, for she knew that if she looked upon the girl and saw in her her father’s features, the dregs of hate, grown cold, would be as gall within her, and turn her words to bitter. So laying her hands on the hangings of the wall her lips moved silently as in prayer, and she went on, as one in a trance, “I gave my soul to him who was your father, and here for years, I served him, but by no service could his spirit be appeased, and the hour came that I knew him to be mad, and he knew it also, but the world knew it not, and a great fear came upon him that I who knew it should betray him. Day and night, he watched me, nor could I by any means elude his cunning, till at the last he had me at his will.”

Here her voice dropped and her lips were white, as thrusting aside the folds she pointed to the stains on the floor beneath. “There,” she said, “is my blood;” and letting go the curtains she loosened her gown and showed a deep and ugly scar upon her breast, and even as she did so, a dagger, dislodged by her sudden action from among the weapons on the wall above, slipped from its holdings and fell between them with a terrible rattling sound. So she stooped, and picking it up looked steadfastly upon it. “It is the same,” she said. “Ah, God! that night, and the long days that went before, and the long years that have followed after! Is there any mercy or any justice in Heaven?”

But the girl put no faith in her, and the thoughts which had been in her mind that day when the fog had fallen on the waters returned to her, so that she gave no heed to threats or pleadings, and the anguish of the other’s soul moved her to scorn only and laughter, for the story of her house was as a fable to her, and when her mother called on her to stay the curse, and stretched out her hands in her praying, she called to mind the witchlike moving weeds below the Serpent’s Head, and she remembered her dream, and how she had felt the fingers of her mother on her heart. Then too, she remembered how she had been delivered in her need, and turning to go she answered, “I will not die, but live. I will be stronger than thou.”

But the mother said, “Not so; yet if you will do this deed, you shall first ask your father’s blessing;” and as she said this she laughed, and the girl felt that her laughter was more to be dreaded than any threats.

So now, they two went forth, and crossing the court, came to the broken flight of steps which led up to the Chamber on the Wall. When they had mounted these, they stood before an ancient door heavily bound with iron. Then the mother knocked, and was answered, and entered, and the girl, though she was stricken with fear, followed her in silence. But when she had come into the presence of her father, a great compassion filled her heart, and her eyes were drawn to the subtle appeal of his. “Has she told you,” he said, “that I am mad? I am not mad, my little child, it is she;” and here his voice took on an accent of infinite pathos; “it is she, who was once all the world to me, who has abandoned me and left me desolate. Ah! for God’s sake take me home! Come back to me, my wife! Give me love! Yet, how should any love such as I am?”

And as he pleaded thus, turning from one to the other, the girl, seeing his chains, thought shame of her mother, and with reproach on her tongue, she made to go forward as though she would have embraced him. But her words died on her lips, for looking on her mother’s face she saw that it was as the face of one inspired, and even as she was about to advance towards him, her mother put her on one side, and saying, “Lord God! Take my life if by this means it is Thy will that this plague be stayed,” she put herself within his reach, and kneeling down close to him folded her arms on her breast. Then, before the girl was aware of his purpose, he had her mother in his grip, and before any aid could come near she was dead.

All that night long, the girl watched alone by the body of her mother in the tower, and a great struggle went on in her mind as she began to see the meaning of her mother’s act, and at daybreak, the spell upon her was so strong, that as she saw the grey light of dawn she rose, and falling on her knees beside the bed she folded her arms on her breast, and it seemed as if she, too, were about to dedicate her life that so the curse of her house might be stayed. But the chamber windows fronted the east, and even as she lifted, her face to heaven the first rays of the morning sun flushed the sky, and caught the crests of the waves, and the path of light on the waters went by the Serpent’s Head and changed its black to gold. At this sight, the girl started to her feet, and throwing wide the windows, “I will not die!” she said. “Is there no other way?” Even as she asked this question, she answered it with another. “Why should my seed live?” and as she spoke thus, turning to leave the room she saw her own face in the glass, and it was as the face of her father. Then her gaze became fixed, and presently she whispered to herself and smiled. And turning her back upon the corpse she went swiftly to seek her lover on the rocks.

Not long after this the father died, and the girl married her lover, and the castle, which had so long seemed like a vast and empty shell, overflowed with life. And all things prospered with her, only of all the children born to her not one lived. And many said it was best so, seeing that their inheritance, all fair to outward seeming, had so dark a spot within; but the husband was ill content, for most of all he desired a son that should bear his name, and his wife was angered at this, for she thought, “Why should not I be sufficient for him? What need has he of child or heir when I am near?” And her passion for him was spiced with jealousy, and when once more she became with child and saw the hope in his eyes, she set herself to cheat it. Nor by any means could she be persuaded to value rest, or to live in such wise as was deemed fitting; and now at dusk the hoofs of her horses would be heard in mad gallop along the causeway, or at early dawn she would be seen battling with the crested waters off the Serpent’s Head.

Between her and her husband there were high words, and he reproached her, and swore there was purpose in her folly; then she caught him and held him, crying, “Why should this devil’s brat come between us! You are all the world to me. Am I less to you?” and she would have kissed him, but there was that in her passion which filled him with loathing, and thrusting her from him he said, “Are you mad?” After he had said this he repented himself, but she answered him nothing, only her face blanched. And from this day forward, she was very gentle, nor did she cross his will in any way, nor even once did she return to the Serpent’s Head; only sitting in the tower chamber there, where her mother had so often sat before her, she watched the waves beating on the rocks. And her husband, wishing to feel her mind, said “The day will come when you will be there again;” and she smiled as she answered, “Ay! the day will come.”

Yet, though she was so gentle, he felt that there was wrong between them, and when the child was born, his great joy was poisoned by fear lest it should displease her, and he watched to see if there should be any change in her manner or in her look; but he could find none, till one day he, having taken the child in his arms, looked up suddenly, and thought he saw a gleam of malice in her eyes, yet this faded into smiles so swiftly, that after, when he recalled her look, he misdoubted that which he had seen.

Shortly after this, she and her child were missed from the castle, and it was late evening; so fearing he knew not what, the husband looked from the windows to the rocks, and there he descried her, seated on the Serpent’s Head, with her little one on her knee. The tide was coming in fast, and dumb with anguish and terror, he made haste to reach the shore; but the way seemed long to him, and even when he drew near to her he scarce dared to approach her, for his fears shaped themselves as he ran, and became one agony of terror for his child’s life, and he thought, “If I come upon her unawares, she may cast him into the sea.” But she, though her back was turned to him, was aware of his coming, and she rose to her feet and faced him, still holding her child in her arms, whilst he, wading, and often slipping and stumbling, made his way slowly to her.

And as he drew close, he saw that she wore the little blue gown in which she was wont to bathe, and her golden hair was loose about her neck as when he had seen her first, and her feet were bare, and a smile was on her face as she kissed the child in her arms as if it were very dear. Then calling and moaning out to him she cried, “My mother’s hand is heavy on me; oh! my love, save me! Her hand is heavy on the child, and her arms are stretching from the waves to seize us. Ah! my love, save us!” And now he had almost laid his hands upon her, when she, thrusting the little one from her, shrieked, “Take your devil’s brat, I will have none of it!” And he saw that his child was dead.

At this, he made as though he would have seized her, but before he could lay hands on her she had him by the throat, nor could any strength of his avail to unloose her fingers; as he struggled with her thus, he felt the crag rock beneath his feet, and between his teeth he cursed the day that had brought him thither to mix his blood with that of her demon blood.

But neither to curse nor to pray could then avail him. The tide came on, nor was there any help from land or sea. And the great waves leapt high above them, and her lingers tightened on him, and her lips clung to his mouth, so that gasping for breath he stamped in his fury with his foot. Then was the great crag loosened utterly from its hold; for a moment, it hung above the abyss below; next, with a steady roll and a sound as of thunder, it plunged into the seething waters. In the gathering night, a cloud of spray arose to heaven; then the waves rolled on to the shore, and neither in ebb nor flow can any man find where the Serpent’s Head has made the grave of its ghastly burden. But the plague of that house was stayed in the land.

THE VAMPIRE MAID

Hume Nisbet

1890

It was the exact kind of abode that I had been looking after for weeks, for I was in that condition of mind when absolute renunciation of society was a necessity. I had become diffident of myself, and wearied of my kind. A strange unrest was in my blood; a barren dearth in my brains. Familiar objects and faces had grown distasteful to me. I wanted to be alone.

This is the mood which comes upon every sensitive and artistic mind when the possessor has been overworked or living too long in one groove. It is Nature’s hint for him to seek pastures new; the sign that a retreat has become needful.

If he does not yield, he breaks down and becomes whimsical and hypochondriacal, as well as hypercritical. It is always a bad sign when a man becomes over-critical and censorious about his own or other people’s work, for it means that he is losing the vital portions of work, freshness and enthusiasm.

Before I arrived at the dismal stage of criticism I hastily packed up my knapsack, and taking the train to Westmorland I began my tramp in search of solitude, bracing air and romantic surroundings.

Many places I came upon during that early summer wandering that appeared to have almost the required conditions, yet some petty drawback prevented me from deciding. Sometimes it was the scenery that I did not take kindly to. At other places I took sudden antipathies to the landlady or landlord, and felt I would abhor them before a week was spent under their charge. Other places which might have suited me I could not have, as they did not want a lodger. Fate was driving me to this Cottage on the Moor, and no one can resist destiny.

One day I found myself on a wide and pathless moor near the sea. I had slept the night before at a small hamlet, but that was already eight miles in my rear, and since I had turned my back upon it I had not seen any signs of humanity; I was alone with a fair sky above me, a balmy ozone-filled wind blowing over the stony and heather-clad mounds, and nothing to disturb my meditations.

How far the moor stretched I had no knowledge; I only knew that by keeping in a straight line I would come to the ocean cliffs, then perhaps after a time arrive at some fishing village.

I had provisions in my knapsack, and being young did not fear a night under the stars. I was inhaling the delicious summer air and once more getting back the vigour and happiness I had lost; my city-dried brains were again becoming juicy.

Thus hour after hour slid past me, with the paces, until I had covered about fifteen miles since morning, when I saw before me in the distance a solitary stone-built cottage with roughly slated roof. “I’ll camp there if possible,” I said to myself as I quickened my steps towards it.

To one in search of a quiet, free life, nothing could have possibly been more suitable than this cottage. It stood on the edge of lofty cliffs, with its front door facing the moor and the back-yard wall overlooking the ocean. The sound of the dancing waves struck upon my ears like a lullaby as I drew near; how they would thunder when the autumn gales came on and the seabirds fled shrieking to the shelter of the sedges.

A small garden spread in front, surrounded by a dry-stone wall just high enough for one to lean lazily upon when inclined. This garden was a flame of colour, scarlet predominating, with those other soft shades that cultivated poppies take on in their blooming, for this was all that the garden grew.

As I approached, taking notice of this singular assortment of poppies, and the orderly cleanness of the windows, the front door opened and a woman appeared who impressed me at once favourably as she leisurely came along the pathway to the gate, and drew it back as if to welcome me.

She was of middle age, and when young must have been remarkably good-looking. She was tall and still shapely, with smooth clear skin, regular features and a calm expression that at once gave me a sensation of rest.

To my inquiries she said that she could give me both a sitting and bedroom, and invited me inside to see them. As I looked at her smooth black hair, and cool brown eyes, I felt that I would not be too particular about the accommodation. With such a landlady, I was sure to find what I was after here.

The rooms surpassed my expectation, dainty white curtains and bedding with the perfume of lavender about them, a sitting-room homely yet cosy without being crowded. With a sigh of infinite relief I flung down my knapsack and clinched the bargain.

She was a widow with one daughter, whom I did not see the first day, as she was unwell and confined to her own room, but on the next day she was somewhat better, and then we met.

The fare was simple, yet it suited me exactly for the time, delicious milk and butter with home-made scones, fresh eggs and bacon; after a hearty tea I went early to bed in a condition of perfect content with my quarters.

Yet happy and tired Out as I was I had by no means a comfortable night. This I put down to the strange bed. I slept certainly, but my sleep was filled with dreams so that I woke late and unrefreshed; a good walk on the moor, however, restored me, and I returned with a fine appetite for breakfast.

Certain conditions of mind, with aggravating circumstances, are required before even a young man can fall in love at first sight, as Shakespeare has shown in his Romeo and Juliet. In the city, where many fair faces passed me every hour, I had remained like a stoic, yet no sooner did I enter the cottage after that morning walk than I succumbed instantly before the weird charms of my landlady’s daughter, Ariadne Brunnell.

She was somewhat better this morning and able to meet me at breakfast, for we had our meals together while I was their lodger. Ariadne was not beautiful in the strictly classical sense, her complexion being too lividly white and her expression too set to be quite pleasant at first sight; yet, as her mother had informed me, she had been ill for some time, which accounted for that defect. Her features were not regular, her hair and eyes seemed too black with that strangely white skin, and her lips too red for any except the decadent harmonies of an Aubrey Beardsley.

Yet my fantastic dreams of the preceding night, with my morning walk, had prepared me to be enthralled by this modern poster-like invalid.

The loneliness of the moor, with the singing of the ocean, had gripped my heart with a wistful longing. The incongruity of those flaunting and evanescent poppy flowers, dashing their giddy tints in the face of that sober heath, touched me with a shiver as I approached the cottage, and lastly that weird embodiment of startling contrasts completed my subjugation.

She rose from her chair as her mother introduced her, and smiled while she held out her hand. I clasped that soft snowflake, and as I did so a faint thrill tingled over me and rested on my heart, stopping for the moment its beating.

This contact seemed also to have affected her as it did me; a clear flush, like a white flame, lighted up her face, so that it glowed as if an alabaster lamp had been lit; her black eyes became softer and more humid as our glances crossed, and her scarlet lips grew moist. She was a living woman now, while before she had seemed half a corpse.

She permitted her white slender hand to remain in mine longer than most people do at an introduction, and then she slowly withdrew it, still regarding me with steadfast eyes for a second or two afterwards.

Fathomless velvety eyes these were, yet before they were shifted from mine they appeared to have absorbed all my willpower and made me her abject slave. They looked like deep dark pools of clear water, yet they filled me with fire and deprived me of strength. I sank into my chair almost as languidly as I had risen from my bed that morning.

Yet I made a good breakfast, and although she hardly tasted anything, this strange girl rose much refreshed and with a slight glow of colour on her cheeks, which improved her so greatly that she appeared younger and almost beautiful.

I had come here seeking solitude, but since I had seen Ariadne it seemed as if I had come for her only. She was not very lively; indeed, thinking back, I cannot recall any spontaneous remark of hers; she answered my questions by monosyllables and left me to lead in words; yet she was insinuating and appeared to lead my thoughts in her direction and speak to me with her eyes. I cannot describe her minutely, I only know that from the first glance and touch she gave me I was bewitched and could think of nothing else.

It was a rapid, distracting, and devouring infatuation that possessed me; all day long I followed her about like a dog, every night I dreamed of that white glowing face, those steadfast black eyes, those moist scarlet lips, and each morning I rose more languid than I had been the day before. Sometimes I dreamt that she was kissing me with those red lips, while I shivered at the contact of her silky black tresses as they covered my throat; sometimes that we were floating in the air, her arms about me and her long hair enveloping us both like an inky cloud, while I lay supine and helpless.

She went with me after breakfast on that first day to the moor, and before we came back I had spoken my love and received her assent. I held her in my arms and had taken her kisses in answer to mine, nor did I think it strange that all this had happened so quickly. She was mine, or rather I was hers, without a pause. I told her it was fate that had sent me to her, for 1 had no doubts about my love, and she replied that I had restored her to life.

Acting upon Ariadne’s advice, and also from a natural shyness, I did not inform her mother how quickly matters had progressed between us, yet although we both acted as circumspectly as possible, I had no doubt Mrs Brunnell could see how engrossed we were in each other. Lovers are not unlike ostriches in their modes of concealment. I was not afraid of asking Mrs Brunnell for her daughter, for she already showed her partiality towards me, and had bestowed upon me some confidences regarding her own position in life, and I therefore knew that, so far as social position was concerned, there could be no real objection to our marriage. They lived in this lonely spot for the sake of their health, and kept no servant because they could not get any to take service so far away from other humanity. My coming had been opportune and welcome to both mother and daughter.

For the sake of decorum, however, I resolved to delay my confession for a week or two and trust to some favourable opportunity of doing it discreetly.

Meantime Ariadne and I passed our time in a thoroughly idle and lotus-eating style. Each night I retired to bed meditating starting work next day, each morning I rose languid from those disturbing dreams with no thought for anything outside my love. She grew stronger every day, while I appeared to be taking her place as the invalid, yet I was more frantically in love than ever, and only happy when with her. She was my lode-star, my only joy – my life.

We did not go great distances, for I liked best to lie on the dry heath and watch her glowing face and intense eyes while I listened to the surging of the distant waves. It was love made me lazy, I thought, for unless a man has all he longs for beside him, he is apt to copy the domestic cat and bask in the sunshine.

I had been enchanted quickly. My disenchantment came as rapidly, although it was long before the poison left my blood.

One night, about a couple of weeks after my coming to the cottage, I had returned after a delicious moonlight walk with Ariadne. The night was warm and the moon at the full, therefore I left my bedroom window open to let in what little air there was.

I was more than usually fagged out, so that I had only strength enough to remove my boots and coat before I flung myself wearily on the coverlet and fell almost instantly asleep without tasting the nightcap draught that was constantly placed on the table, and which I had always drained thirstily.

I had a ghastly dream this night. I thought I saw a monster bat, with the face and tresses of Ariadne, fly into the open window and fasten its white teeth and scarlet lips on my arm. I tried to beat the horror away, but could not, for I seemed chained down and thralled also with drowsy delight as the beast sucked my blood with a gruesome rapture.

I looked out dreamily and saw a line of dead bodies of young men lying on the floor, each with a red mark on their arms, on the same part where the vampire was then sucking me, and I remembered having seen and wondered at such a mark on my own arm for the past fortnight. In a flash I understood the reason for my strange weakness, and at the same moment a sudden prick of pain roused me from my dreamy pleasure.

The vampire in her eagerness had bitten a little too deeply that night, unaware that I had not tasted the drugged draught. As I woke I saw her fully revealed by the midnight moon, with her black tresses flowing loosely, and with her red lips glued to my arm. With a shriek of horror I dashed her backwards, getting one last glimpse of her savage eyes, glowing white face and blood-stained red lips; then I rushed out to the night, moved on by my fear and hatred, nor did I pause in my mad flight until I had left miles between me and that accursed Cottage on the Moor.

THE MAN
WITH THE BROWN BEARD

Nathaniel T. Babcock

1892

If my pen continues to remain a pen and my ink changes not into blood or wine until the purpose is accomplished, I shall, I think, succeed in giving to the public a tale as wondrous strange as any to which the world has, for many years, listened. There is nothing in the appearance of this gracefully pointed bit of steel and its cedar wood handle, as I hold it between my eyes and the lamplight, to suggest a possibility of its suddenly becoming a serpent’s tall or a devil’s divining rod, nor do I perceive in the contents of my crystal inkstand anything beyond a superior quality of black writing fluid; and yet for caution’s sake, and lest I all unexpectedly become again the victim of a supernatural practical joke, I beg the privilege of prefacing my story with the above improbable, as you will say, provisions.

There are going to be in the unfolding of this narrative, as everybody will discover, several very embarrassing factors, chief of which is this, that although I suppose I am relating certain extraordinary events which have happened to me, I have no positive means of knowing that such is the case. The two of us, by whom I mean Harry Jessup (who certainly once was and still seems to be) and poor John Sutherland (who clearly now is not), are so closely, so intimately, connected – soul intertwined, if I may use the expression – that I (or is it he?) who speak can be certain of all things more easily than of my (or is it his?) identity.

Clearly, however, we shall not get on at all at this rate. Though honestly endeavoring to enlighten, I perceive I am but mystifying my readers. Let me quiet my nerves with one draught of this wholesome wine (here’s to you, poor John Sutherland!) and proceed as calmly as I can with my story.

One year ago tonight I was lying in the Tombs prison, New York City, under sentence of death for murder. I was guiltless. This fact, unfortunately, was known only to myself. In justice to my memory (or should I say in justice to the memory of John Sutherland?) I must briefly relate the circumstances which led to that error of justice which condemned an innocent man to the gallows.

I was born (that is, supposing I am the person who, though contrary to all external appearances, I still believe myself to be) in the city of London, England. If I had parents I never knew them; nether was I acquainted with brothers, sisters, or relatives even of a remote degree. I purloined what little knowledge I had of the world from the tips of gentlemen at the backs of whose chairs I stood during the breakfast and dining hours at some of the most reputable eating houses in London. I got a bit of book learning at an evening school, and other odds and ends of accomplishments I picked up at merry places by gaslight. It was while employed at one of those “Homes of Harmony” that I obtained that knowledge of the pianoforte which, in spite of its superficiality, is today so great a source of wonder to those persons with whom I am now surrounded. I read more than fellows of my sort, and, as a consequence, soon became educated beyond my station and emigrated to America. Upon my arrival in New York I found work at fair wages in an eating house somewhere east of Broadway. I was put to share the room of an Italian waiter, a surly, ill-favored person, who, within two months after I bad taken quarters with him, cut his throat while I lay by his side, a circumstance which brought him no greater harm than it brought to me, since on the following morning I was thrown into jail, and six weeks later removed to the Tombs under sentence of death.

A year ago tonight, at just about this hour, to avoid the gaze of the curious newspaper writers who clustered thick about the stove at the end of the narrow corridor upon which my cell opened, and who (the jailer having permitted me the freedom of the passage) pitilessly noted down my every despairing movement, I stepped back behind my grated door and threw myself face downward upon my narrow bed. I remember that the cot was covered with a coarse gray blanket, across which, near either end, was woven a narrow strip of red. The jailer rattled the grating of my door and spoke kindly, advising me to remove my coat and boots and get a bit of sleep. I lifted my head as he spoke. The blood red streak in the blanket was immediately under my chin; I had thrown myself down, throat across it. I sat bolt uptight on the bed. My hand went involuntarily to my throat. The jailer’s kindly face seemed to my terror stricken vision the face of a devil. I knew that within a few hours I was to be murdered, and he was to be my murderer. I felt that I ought to hate him; that if I were half a man I would seize his beard and batter his head upon the rusty iron of the cage. Yet, when I spoke, my voice was low, courteous, even modestly submissive, as I thanked him for his attention. Great God! think of it – I thanked the man who stood there at my cell door keeping watch over a stalled ox for the coming of the butcher.

He turned to go. The rage which in my soul had found birth and death without power of expression was followed by a frantic grief, an overwhelming self pity. I longed to throw myself upon my knees before the retreating figure and beg for mercy, but again my limbs refused to act, and as the jailer faced the grating for a last look at his victim, I think he must have seen a smile – who knows, perhaps a grin? – upon my face, for he brightened, and said, “That’s right, Jessup; I’m glad to see you keeping up a good heart.”

Tell me the face is the soul’s mirror! The soul is as powerless to control the body as the body is powerless to control the soul. Rage, grief, despair, incite to action, and the body mocks them all. True, I am an unlearned and an unlettered man, but of the soul’s relation to the body who on earth should know more than I have been taught?

It is possible that the suicide, just prior to the carrying out of his purpose, is made acquainted with that sickening, muscle relaxing, nerve tightening despair which comes to the man who is to be executed tomorrow, but I do not think so. In the case of suicide there must be (and this, before long, I shall fully discover) an absence of that pitiful helplessness which tears the heartstrings of the man who is to be put to death by his fellows. Oh, the grief of it! The haunting horror of any human form! With pistol in hand, even when its cold round muzzle is pressed against his throbbing temple; even to that fractional part of a second in which the cruel deed is done, the suicide is soothed by a consciousness of an optional escape. There is no time fixed. He is the master of his punishment. The inexorable is lacking in the refinement of his torture.

When the jailer had disappeared from view I sank back upon the cot. I turned myself upon my back and looked at the plain white ceiling. I tried to people this vague surface with heaven’s lamps – to imagine it was God’s firmament. There were the countless stars twinkling as merrily as though no sorrow anywhere existed. Spread out around me was the mighty ocean, foaming and rolling near by, then stretching off like a great, black, quiet plain. I was once more upon the steamer, the accursed steamer that brought me to New York to be killed. The motion, how delightful! swing so, swing so. My hands went to the side of the cot for the protection of my balance. Oh, this motion! now up, now down! The stars, how bright! The waves! see, see how high. Mercy! what pleasure. Great tears flow down my cheeks. Crash! we’ve struck! We’re sinking! My fingers go to my eyes; rub, rub, and there is again the white ceiling. No stars? I spring to my feet. No ocean? A prison cell; death by strangulation in the morning.

I staggered to the cell door; I pressed my cheek against the grating and was able to see a portion of the group of watchers at the end of the corridor. Their heads were together; somebody was relating a story. A fat man had his profile to me. From time to time his hands went down upon his knees with a slap, and his sides shook. He was being amused by reminiscences of the trusty jailer. Amused? These men being amused, and I—

I could no longer endure the sight of my fellow men. Again I threw myself upon the bed. The red stripe on the blanket had lost its terror. I saw nothing, thought of nothing, but men; crowds of men in black, coming after me! Coming with a rope to strangle me. I, a man like themselves, with head and legs and arms like theirs. They would take me by the hands and we should touch one another; they would look in my face and I should look in theirs, and nowhere, nowhere, would I find anybody to help me, to save me! Shut up in a cage awaiting the approach of my own species, sons of women, like myself; relentlessly coming, to put me to death! Coming perhaps from happy firesides, and waiting only until I should be dead to return to their wives and little ones; not a man among them but would lend an arm to the meanest cripple on the street, yet coming, coming to butcher me. Could the good Lord, who made us all in a world of sin and suffering, approve it? I got down upon my knees; I tried to pray, but just as comfort seemed approaching, a sodden awful sensation, as of the presence of the executioner standing at my back, rope in hand, brought me trembling to my feet. Again I fell exhausted on my bed. And now a mighty terror of my own body seized upon me. My head was raised so that I saw the entire length of my figure. It seemed to me to be the body of a strangled corpse. I moved my foot to dispel the illusion, but with the cessation of its motion the frightful hallucination returned. I madly assisted the delusion. I crossed my hands on my breast; they seemed to become waxen, cold, and bloodless. I closed my eyes and pressed my elbows tightly against my sides to avoid contact with the linen of a coffin. A sickening nausea arose within me; my heart seemed turning over in its place, and then – consciousness ceased; merciful sleep had come to my relief.

•   •   •   •   •

I awoke with a start. When I make this statement I feel I am doing scant justice to an extraordinary phenomenon. How do I know that I ever awoke? May I not still be lying in a dream upon that prison bed? May not the gallows and rope be yet in store for me? Well, if such is the case, surely my supposing that it is not the case can do no harm. You, my mythical readers, will not worry over it if you are mythical, and if you are real, why, then I, too, must be real, and the phenomenon a reality. I think that I awoke suddenly, and with the thought of the dire business of the morning very present in my mind. It was broad daylight – the light of that day I had shivered to think of – the light which was to be a signal for all those men in black with crape on their arms to take their victim to the sacrifice. A film seemed stretched across the balls of my eyes, upon which were mirrored a multitude of colors that now, as my staring pupils dilated, took form in a hundred beautiful things. First of all, I seemed to see just in front of me the face of a pretty child smiling from out a halo of yellow hair; a sideways glance, and heavy curtains of some bright red material parted to permit my dazzled eyes to behold a window flaming with reflections of the morning sunlight. Overhead my sky was a plane of brown and gold. My hand failing at my side rested upon a texture as soft as swans-down; my body undulated upon a bed softer than any it had ever before known.

It is now a year since the day of that awakening. I have been for the last ten minutes endeavoring to recall my first impressions, my earliest thought, as this scene, the beauty of which I have but hinted at, dawned upon my senses. I may have supposed myself in heaven, but, if so, the idea could have been no more than momentary, for it was impossible for one lying as I was lying, in a position commanding a view on all sides, not speedily to discover that he was the occupant of a very comfortable bed in a decidedly luxurious bedchamber. My little girl of the golden hair hung in a massive frame on the tinted wall directly opposite the foot of my bed; the window through which came in the early sunlight, was in a bow of the east wall; my brown and gold sky was excellent fresco, equal to anything I had ever seen in those establishments in which my livelihood had been gained on the other side of the water.

How long I had been staring at these marvelous surroundings I cannot say, when suddenly there came a soft rap at the door, which was on the right of the apartment, and a very cheery voice, the voice of a young girl, exclaimed, “Jacko! Jacko, are you going to sleep all day’?”

I listened in amazement, and naturally made no reply.

“Jacko, I tell you,” continued the pretty voice, “it’s after eight o’clock, and we are all waiting for you.”

Clearly the child was addressing some person whom she supposed to be in the room, of which I was the only occupant. The rapping on the door of an obviously impatient little fist continued, it was necessary to respond. I said “Hello!”

“All right,” replied the little voice. “I’m glad you are awake at last; now do hurry.”

Hurry? Hurry where? I had an engagement at seven o’clock. The child assured me, and a French clock on the mantel confirmed her statement, that it was past eight. Where was I? What did it all mean? I softly protruded one foot from the yielding bed-clothing and planted it upon the thick carpet on the floor. How warm and grateful was the sense! My other leg followed, and I stood erect. In what was I dressed! White linen, with beautiful scarlet loops in place of common buttonholes – the night robe of a prince! I smoothed the fabric with my hand, and was surprised to discover a roundness and plumpness in my limbs, of which I had never before been conscious. I put my hand to my bewildered head. A beard? A beard upon my face which had ever been beardless!

In the corner was a handsome dresser, surmounted by a high mirror. With wild, uncertain steps I crossed the room. The polished glass of the mirror showed the face of an utter stranger. Forgetful of the fact that, had he stood behind me, my own figure must have obscured his image, I wheeled about and confronted – no one. The room was occupied by myself alone. Again I faced the glass. There stood the stranger, with face as white as that of a corpse, and eyes that seemed starting from his head. I put my hand to my eyes; the specter in the glass imitated the motion. I screamed and fell to the floor, the image in the glass disappearing simultaneously with my fall. I had never fainted in my life, and I did not become unconscious. Lifting myself upon my elbow I looked around me.

The base of a wardrobe immediately opposite my point of vision was set with plate glass. In that mirror I again saw the stranger, lying, as I was lying, with his cheek upon the palm of his hand. I got upon my knees and clasped my hands. The figure in the glass followed each motion. I jumped to my feet. The head and shoulders of the image disappeared, but from the waist downward remained. I then perceived that the mirror in the base of the wardrobe was less than three feet high. It was, then, my own reflection that I saw! No, not my own reflection, for I was a man six feet in height, slimly built, with light hair and blue eyes, and a beardless face The object in the glass was scarcely five feet nine, inclined to stoutness, with short, curly brown hair, and a heavy dark beard. I turned to the mirror above the dresser, my knees quaking under me from consternation. The ashen face of the brown-bearded stranger again confronted me. I lifted my finger to my lips in a dazed, meaningless way, and the man in the glass did the same. Just then there came a loud knock at the door, and a hearty voice said,

“Open the door for a moment, Jack; I’ve something to say to you.”

Was the voice addressing me? I stood like a stone alternately growing hot and cold.

“I say, old man, open the door,” continued the voice from without.

Half unconsciously I approached the door and pushed back the bolt that held it. A handsome young fellow, rosy radiant as from a brisk walk and bearing a striking resemblance to the image in the glass, rushed in as the bolt was drawn, and clapping his hands upon my shoulders, exclaimed, “Jack, old man, it’s all fixed; we’re going with you. The governor gave in at the last when mother, Nell, and I all got after him in a bunch. But what’s the matter with you, Jack?” (holding me at arm’s length and peering anxiously into my face.) “You look as if you’d seen a ghost. Here, Nell! mother! Jack is fainting.”

I have before mentioned that I never faint; neither did I then, though I doubt not Walter had good cause to imagine that I would. I felt the blood leaving my body; I became limp in the strong young fellow’s arms as he tenderly assisted me to the sofa. Attracted by his call there entered a moment later a matronly looking woman of fifty or thereabouts, followed by a girl of fifteen, whom I at once, recognized as the original of the portrait, grown a few summers older. Both threw themselves on their knees at my feet. Mother (I gave the title by which I today address that estimable lady) placed her arm lovingly around my shoulder, and drew my head toward her own, while Nell grasped one of my hands and began to kiss it gently.

“My poor boy,” began the lady, “you have overtaxed yourself, just as I feared you would, and the anticipation of this morning’s event, in the weakened condition of your nerves, has made you ill. I shall be glad when the ceremony is over and you are comfortably off.”

Great heavens! What was the lady speaking of? “The anticipation of this morning’s event”? “weakened my nerves”? “comfortably off”? What does it mean? Had I really been executed in the prison yard, and was I in some place of purgatory, waiting to go through the agony under different surroundings? Was this the beginning of a sinner’s eternity? Were these people fiends in the guise of angels? Was I to go on forever, being executed in different shapes?

“Come, Jack dear,” continued the good lady; “Walter will help you with your clothes, and after a good breakfast and a cup of hot coffee you’ll be yourself again.”

“And,” chimed in the pretty little maiden, “we won’t tell Julie what a devoted husband she is to have. A man – oh, Jacko, for shame! – who becomes ill on his wedding day merely at the thought of being married!”

During all this time my lips had refused to utter a sound, and I could now only exclaim. “Heaven have mercy on me!” a remark which caused Walter and his mother to hold a hurried conversation at the back of the sofa, and then to leave the room, saying cheerily that they would not be gone a moment.

Left alone with me, the young girl clapped her hands over my knees, and looking in my face, said, “Now, Jacko, my darling, tell me what is the matter? You won’t keep anything from your own Nell? I admire Julie and I respect her, but if this marriage is going to make you unhappy, I’ll break it off if I have to go to the girl myself and tell her that you do not love her. Oh, Jacko, my best, my dearest brother, tell me what is the matter?”

“Please leave me,” was all that I could articulate.

“Dear Jacko,” cried the affectionate girl, “I cannot leave you. You never spoke to me so before. My brother, my dear, dear brother!”

“Where is your brother?” I cried.

There was probably a look in my eyes that terrified the girl, for she arose to her feet, and with team streaming from her eyes left the room.

I was alone, and again approached the glass. The brown-bearded man looked haggard and unnatural. “For the love of Him who made us,” I cried, speaking to the stranger in the mirror, “tell me who you are and who am I?”

“Why, Jack, my boy, what is the matter?”

I felt a strong hand upon my shoulder, and, turning, confronted a pleasant mannered, middle age gentleman whom I rightly inferred to be a physician. Just behind stood Walter and his mother. I do not know whether it was the strong individuality of the doctor that impressed me with a sense of the reality of my surroundings, which up to this moment had seemed illusory and vague, but I suddenly felt a warmth of blood returning to my limbs and a sense of rest and security in my condition; a determination to drift whithersoever fate might lead me. A smile must have shown itself in my face, for the doctor turned to the anxious lady and said, “It is nothing, my dear madam; mere nervous excitement which will soon pass away.” He then prepared a potion, which I cheerfully swallowed. Walter inquired whether he should not assist me to dress, and I assented. The drollery of my existence now began to take precedence of all other emotions. The brown-bearded man in the glass was no longer an object of terror in my eyes; he became amusing. I saw, I could not fail to see, that his motions and actions were entirely in my control. Little by little, I came to a graceful acceptance of my new identity. A man who has been hanged, said I to myself, cannot be chooser in any subsequent allotment of events. If this is hell, I must admit it is an unexpectedly agreeable hell, and if it is heaven, I should certainly ask for nothing better.

This mild acceptance of my extraordinary fate, at that time, was probably due in a large measure to the drug which the doctor had administered – a powerful narcotic, no doubt – that quieted my nerves and caused my troubled brain to become languid. Piloted by Walter, who happily insisted upon keeping hold of my arm, I passed through a spacious and handsome hall and down a broad pair of stairs to a very luxurious breakfast room, where, for the first time, I met the head of the family, a mild eyed man past middle age, who, during the strange scenes of the morning, had been absent from the house, and who now greeted me very tenderly. Throughout the breakfast which followed, I remained completely silent. There was a large pier glass opposite me in which, with quiet amusement, I beheld the brown-bearded man put morsels of food into his rather handsome mouth, I myself enjoying the sensation of swallowing the same. I did not fail to notice that my silence and evident preoccupation was a source of keen distress to the others at the table, but I was powerless to improve matters.

As the soothing effects of the doctor’s potion wore away, my thoughts became more troublesome and bewildering, until finally, unable to remain any longer quiet, I arose from the table and fled to an adjoining room. There seemed to have been an intention on the part of some member of the family to follow me, but the head of the house exclaimed, “No, let Jack alone; he’ll come out all right presently.”

Upon a table in the room in which I had taken refuge lay a newspaper. I picked it up. The date – that dreadful date to which for weeks I had looked forward with sickening consternation – showed me that it was the latest issue. The paper was called the Denver Tribune, and was printed in Denver, Colorado. As I scanned the sheet, a faint recollection as of something heard in childhood came upon me. I recalled a conversation caught in a fragmentary way years before, while standing at dinner behind two English noblemen. They were talking of this “Denver, Colorado.” What were they saying? Oh, yes, they were speaking of Denver as the chief city of a cattle raising province in the United States.

I was then still in the United States! In Denver! But how in Denver? How anywhere except in a murderer’s cell in the Tombs prison, New York?

While pondering with aching head upon these questions, my eyes encountered the following paragraph:

Harry Jessup, the brutal murderer of Eduardo Italiani, is to be hanged in the Tombs prison, New York City, at seven o’clock this morning.

Again and again I read this paragraph. My eyes devoured the three brief lines of print till every word and letter seemed eating its way into my soul. “Harry Jessup, the brutal murderer of Eduardo Italiani, is to be hanged!” Is to be hanged? A clock on the mantel struck nine. “Is to be hanged at the Tombs Prison, New York City, at seven o’clock this morning” Is to be hanged? I, Harry Jessup, am to be – my God! what does it mean? This is the day, this is the morning, and the sun, which rose at five o’clock, is four hours old! My eyes dropped again upon the paper which had fallen on my lap, and I read the following notice:

The marriage of Mr. John Sutherland (better known to his countless friends in Denver as “Jack” Sutherland) to Miss Julie Chamberlain, will take place at the residence of the bride this morning. It is to be a very quiet affair, only the immediate friends of the two families having received cards.

For a moment my brain seemed to be bursting. The sickening nausea which I felt in the prison had returned, and then, quietly, like a great awakening of some hitherto dormant intellectual faculties, there stole into my soul the consciousness of a miracle performed. I had not suffered at the hangman’s bands. I lived. I had never ceased to live. Every action of my life was accessible to memory. I was still Harry Jessup. Were I dead, had I passed into another world, my store of knowledge would of necessity be increased or diminished; but it remained the same. I mentally ran over my past life, and at every station found proof of a personal and intimate knowledge of but one man, and that man was Harry Jessup. I arose and approached the glass. There stood the brown-bearded stranger.

I looked in the face, and knew that he had stolen my soul. The mirror showed me the body of John Sutherland, with the soul of Harry Jessup. But the soul of the man whose body I wore, what of it?

The sound of voices, subdued but earnest, came to my ears from the adjoining room. The name of “Jack,”  “dear Jack,” was constantly upon the lips of the distressed parents of the loving brother and sister. It needed no marvelous perspicacity for me, stranger as I was to them all, to discover that this “brother Jack,” into whose suit of flesh I had unwittingly stepped, was a very dearly beloved member of the household. I learned from such fragments of their talk as reached my ears, that the loved ones were sorely troubled at my (at John Sutherland’s) behavior, and were at a loss what to do. The newspaper paragraph, taken in connection with the young lady’s remark in the chamber, made it obvious to me that this was to have been the wedding day of the brown-bearded man, and I readily understood the dilemma into which was (or rather my) unaccountable conduct had thrown the entire family. Remember, I am now writing of events a year old, and if I seem singularly composed, it is only because time has graciously permitted me to grow accustomed to the contemplation of these wonders.

As I listened to the tender whisperings of mother and sister, so full of solicitude and anxiety, an overwhelming sense of my own enforced duplicity took possession of me. Who and what was I that I should have entered ghost-like into this happy family circle, bringing sorrow and suffering to all its members and unwarrantedly usurping the place of the eldest son; turning him from his bride, driving him – (the thought flashes like fire upon my brain) – where is John Sutherland? This is his small, fat white hand I hold before me; this is his heart which I feel beating, but his soul – himself – the man – the being, who called himself Sutherland? Where is he? Was it an exchange of bodies? Between the hours of twelve o’clock last night and seven o’clock that morning I threw off the flesh and form which was my own, and assumed another mortal dwelling place. The occupant of this body – the body which I see staring at me from yonder mirror – abandoned it for mine. It must have been so. And my body – – the external man Jessup – the corporeal shelter which this fond son and loving brother had been forced to enter – what of its fate? Dragged into a prison courtyard and stretched by the neck at the end of a rope, two hours ago.

I do not remember all that occurred in the fever and subsequent delirium which fell upon me. I am told that I lingered between life and death for several months, tenderly watched by the parents and the sister of the unhappy man who died in my place. When I was able to move about, my ignorance of all surroundings, which, as may be imagined, was complete, was attributed by the family physician to a shock of the brain center which, he explained, had destroyed my memory. I must, he said to Mr. and Mrs. Sutherland, be treated as a child and retaught all that I had ever learned. He suggested a trip to Europe, and we are now, after many months, about to sail for England. My failure to recognize the affianced bride of John Sutherland, has, I am told, thrown that young lady into a decline. No member of the Sutherland family has ever crossed the Atlantic, and my intimate knowledge of London will, if I ever reach London, be a new source of wonder to my companions. As for myself, I have passed beyond the reach of wonderment or surprises. I am what I am, while I am, because I am. That is all I know, but I see withal nothing more strange than that any two souls should exchange abiding places than that any individual soul should leave its abiding place tenantless and a prey to worms, as is every day the case in all parts of the world. What guarantee, if I may use so trite an expression, have you, or you, my friend, that the soul, which yields itself nightly to dreamless sleep, will find the same environment upon awakening?

We arrived in New York yesterday from Denver, and as soon as I could decently excuse myself from my “relatives,” I went straightway to the Tombs prison on Center Street. Having obtained a card of admission, I entered the inner prison, and made my way to the corridor known as “Murderers’ Row.” Cell No. 5, my cell, was empty. The jailer, at sight of whom I came near to faint, informed me that Cell No. 5 had not been occupied since one Jessup, the murderer of an Italian, left it for the gallows a year ago.

“And tell me,” I inquired with a calmness which amazed me, “how this – this Jessup met this fate?”

“Terrible, terrible, sir,” replied the jailer, evidently having, as he spoke, a vivid picture of the scene in his mind. “I never want to see the like of it again. You see, sir, he was a very nervous customer, most extraordinary so, and I expected we’d have trouble with him. But ’long toward midnight he fell into a sleep just like the sleep of a child, and at half past six he was slumbering as pretty as anything you ever saw. We hated to wake the poor fellow, but it had to be done, so I steps inside the grating and takes hold of his arm. He was awake and bright in a minute. ‘All right, Walter,’ he says, cheery-like, ‘I’m with you.’ Then he looks around in a dazed sort of way, and says he, ‘Why, hello! What the devil’s all this?’ and looking at me, he says, ‘Who are you?’ I told him as kindly as I could, that it was time to be going. He was on his feet then, and staring around. ‘Well,’ says he, ‘this may be a very pretty joke the boys have played on me, old man, but I don’t like it. I suppose this is the county jail, and I’m in West Denver, hey? The boys must have got me pretty full at Charpiot’s, and yet I could almost swear that I went home straight.’

“I saw at once that he was crazy, and I thought it would be a mercy to get through the business as soon as possible; so I called in the deputies, and we read him the death warrant. At times he’d laugh, and then he’d look sort of dazed and wild-like. After the reading, I told him we’d have to be moving, and that I would be obliged to pinion his arms. ‘All right, old man,’ he said; ‘everything goes; but I’ll get even with those fellows when their time comes, you mark my words. I suppose now,’ he said with a laugh, ‘you’re going to haul me up?’ Tell you, sir,” continued the jailer, “it made the cold shivers run down my back to hear him so joking-like, just as if it was all a bit of fun. When we had his arms tied we started for the yard. There was a priest with him, at whom he laughed, saying, ‘Well, the boys seem to want to make it as real as possible.’ After we got into the court behind the prison, where the gallows stood, and he saw the squad of police and the reporters and deputy sheriffs, he began to tremble, and then suddenly, in a voice that I can hear to this day, he screamed, ‘What does it mean? Help! Murder! Murder!’ As quick as possible we got him under the drop and pulled the black cap over his face; and then I think he fainted, for he cried ‘Julie! Father!’ and fell down in a heap. The work was well done, and he didn’t suffer much; but I can tell you, sir, I don’t want to have to hang any more crazy men.”

Well, as I said before, we are off for Europe in the morning, but I do not think I shall ever reach the other side. I have an idea that somewhere about midway of the Atlantic I shall drown this brown-bearded man whom everybody calls “John Sutherland.”

“I saw at once that he was crazy, and I thought it would be a mercy to get through the business as soon as possible; so I called in the deputies, and we read him the death warrant. At times he’d laugh, and then he’d look sort of dazed and wild-like. After the reading, I told him we’d have to be moving, and that I would be obliged to pinion his arms. ‘All right, old man,’ he said; ‘everything goes; but I’ll get even with those fellows when their time comes, you mark my words. I suppose now,’ he said with a laugh, ‘you’re going to haul me up?’ Tell you, sir,” continued the jailer, “it made the cold shivers run down my back to hear him so joking-like, just as if it was all a bit of fun. When we had his arms tied we started for the yard. There was a priest with him, at whom he laughed, saying, ‘Well, the boys seem to want to make it as real as possible.’ After we got into the court behind the prison, where the gallows stood, and he saw the squad of police and the reporters and deputy sheriffs, he began to tremble, and then suddenly, in a voice that I can hear to this day, he screamed, ‘What does it mean? Help! Murder! Murder!’ As quick as possible we got him under the drop and pulled the black cap over his face; and then I think he fainted, for he cried ‘Julie! Father!’ and fell down in a heap. The work was well done, and he didn’t suffer much; but I can tell you, sir, I don’t want to have to hang any more crazy men.”

Well, as I said before, we are off for Europe in the morning, but I do not think I shall ever reach the other side. I have an idea that somewhere about midway of the Atlantic I shall drown this brown-bearded man whom everybody calls “John Sutherland.”

THE WOMAN AND THE CAT

Marcel Prevost

1896

“Yes,” said our old friend Tribourdeaux, a man of culture and a philosopher, which is a combination rarely found among army surgeons; “yes, the supernatural is everywhere; it surrounds us and hems us in and permeates us. If science pursues it, it takes flight and cannot be grasped. Our intellect resembles those ancestors of ours who cleared a few acres of forest; whenever they approached the limits of their clearing they heard low growls and saw gleaming eyes everywhere circling them about. I myself have had the sensation of having approached the limits of the unknown several times in my life, and on one occasion in particular.”

A young lady present interrupted him:

“Doctor, you are evidently dying to tell us a story. Come now, begin!”

The doctor bowed.

“No, I am not in the least anxious, I assure you. I tell this story as seldom as possible, for it disturbs those who hear it, and it disturbs me also. However, if you wish it, here it is:

•   •   •   •   •

In 1863 I was a young physician stationed at Orléans. In that patrician city, full of aristocratic old residences, it is difficult to find bachelor apartments; and, as I like both plenty of air and plenty of room, I took up my lodging on the first floor of a large building situated just outside the city, near Saint-Euverte. It had been originally constructed to serve as the warehouse and also as the dwelling of a manufacturer of rugs. In course of time the manufacturer had failed, and this big barrack that he had built, falling out of repair through lack of tenants, had been sold for a song with all its furnishings. The purchaser hoped to make a future profit out of his purchase, for the city was growing in that direction; and, as a matter of fact, I believe that at the present time the house is included within the city limits. When I took up my quarters there, however, the mansion stood alone on the verge of the open country, at the end of a straggling street on which a few stray houses produced at dusk the impression of a jaw from which most of the teeth have fallen out.

I leased one-half of the first floor, an apartment of four rooms. For my bedroom and my study I took the two that fronted on the street; in the third room I set up some shelves for my wardrobe, and the other room I left empty. This made a very comfortable lodging for me, and I had, for a sort of promenade, a broad balcony that ran along the entire front of the building, or rather one-half of the balcony, since it was divided into two parts (please note this carefully) by a fan of ironwork, over which, however, one could easily climb.

I had been living there for about two months when, one night in July on returning to my rooms, I saw with a good deal of surprise a light shining through the windows of the other apartment on the same floor, which I had supposed to be uninhabited. The effect of this light was extraordinary. It lit up with a pale, yet perfectly distinct, reflection, parts of the balcony, the street below, and a bit of the neighboring fields.

I thought to myself, “Aha! I have a neighbor.”

The idea indeed was not altogether agreeable, for I had been rather proud of my exclusive proprietorship. On reaching my bedroom I passed noiselessly out upon the balcony, but already the light had been extinguished. So I went back into my room, and sat down to read for an hour or two. From time to time I seemed to hear about me, as though within the walls, light footsteps; but after finishing my book I went to bed, and speedily fell asleep.

About midnight I suddenly awoke with a curious feeling that something was standing beside me. I raised myself in bed, lit a candle, and this is what I saw. In the middle of the room stood an immense cat gazing upon me with phosphorescent eyes, and with its back slightly arched. It was a magnificent Angora, with long fur and a fluffy tail, and of a remarkable color – exactly like that of the yellow silk that one sees in cocoons – so that, as the light gleamed upon its coat, the animal seemed to be made of gold.

It slowly moved toward me on its velvety paws, softly rubbing its sinuous body against my legs. I leaned over to stroke it, and it permitted my caress, purring, and finally leaping upon my knees. I noticed then that it was a female cat, quite young, and that she seemed disposed to permit me to pet her as long as ever I would. Finally, however, I put her down upon the floor, and tried to induce her to leave the room; but she leaped away from me and hid herself somewhere among the furniture, though as soon as I had blown out my candle, she jumped upon my bed. Being sleepy, however, I didn’t molest her, but dropped off into a doze, and the next morning when I awoke in broad daylight I could find no sign of the animal at all.

Truly, the human brain is a very delicate instrument, and one that is easily thrown out of gear. Before I proceed, just sum up for yourselves the facts that I have mentioned: a light seen and presently extinguished in an apartment supposed to be uninhabited; and a cat of a remarkable color, which appeared and disappeared in a way that was slightly mysterious. Now there isn’t anything very strange about that, is there? Very well. Imagine, now, that these unimportant facts are repeated day after day and under the same conditions throughout a whole week, and then, believe me, they become of importance enough to impress the mind of a man who is living all alone, and to produce in him a slight disquietude such as I spoke of in commencing my story, and such as is always caused when one approaches the sphere of the unknown. The human mind is so formed that it always unconsciously applies the principle of the causa sufficiens. For every series of facts that are identical, it demands a cause, a law; and a vague dismay seizes upon it when it is unable to guess this cause and to trace out this law.

I am no coward, but I have often studied the manifestation of fear in others, from its most puerile form in children up to its most tragic phase in madmen. I know that it is fed and nourished by uncertainties, although when one actually sets himself to investigate the cause, this fear is often transformed into simple curiosity.

I made up my mind, therefore, to ferret out the truth. I questioned my caretaker, and found that he knew nothing about my neighbors. Every morning an old woman came to look after the neighboring apartment; my caretaker had tried to question her, but either she was completely deaf or else she was unwilling to give him any information, for she had refused to answer a single word. Nevertheless, I was able to explain satisfactorily the first thing that I had noted – that is to say, the sudden extinction of the light at the moment when I entered the house. I had observed that the windows next to mine were covered only by long lace curtains; and as the two balconies were connected, my neighbor, whether man or woman, had no doubt a wish to prevent any indiscreet inquisitiveness on my part, and therefore had always put out the light on hearing me come in. To verify this supposition, I tried a very simple experiment, which succeeded perfectly. I had a cold supper brought in one day about noon by my servant, and that evening I did not go out. When darkness came on, I took my station near the window. Presently I saw the balcony shining with the light that streamed through the windows of the neighboring apartment. At once I slipped quietly out upon my balcony, and stepped softly over the ironwork that separated the two parts. Although I knew that I was exposing myself to a positive danger, either of falling and breaking my neck, or of finding myself face to face with a man, I experienced no perturbation. Reaching the lighted window without having made the slightest noise, I found it partly open; its curtains, which for me were quite transparent since I was on the dark side of the window, made me wholly invisible to anyone who should look toward the window from the interior of the room.

I saw a vast chamber furnished quite elegantly, though it was obviously out of repair, and lighted by a lamp suspended from the ceiling. At the end of the room was a low sofa upon which was reclining a woman who seemed to me to be both young and pretty. Her loosened hair fell over her shoulders in a rain of gold. She was looking at herself in a hand mirror, patting herself, passing her arms over her lips, and twisting about her supple body with a curiously feline grace. Every movement that she made caused her long hair to ripple in glistening undulations.

As I gazed upon her I confess that I felt a little troubled, especially when all of a sudden the young girl’s eyes were fixed upon me – strange eyes, eyes of a phosphorescent green that gleamed like the flame of a lamp. I was sure that I was invisible, being on the dark side of a curtained window. That was simple enough, yet nevertheless I felt that I was seen. The girl, in fact, uttered a cry, and then turned and buried her face in the sofa-pillows.

I raised the window, rushed into the room toward the sofa, and leaned over the face that she was hiding. As I did so, being really very remorseful, I began to excuse and to accuse myself, calling myself all sorts of names, and begging pardon for my indiscretion. I said that I deserved to be driven from her presence, but begged not to be sent away without at least a word of pardon. For a long time I pleaded thus without success, but at last she slowly turned, and I saw that her fair young face was stirred with just the faintest suggestion of a smile. When she caught a glimpse of me she murmured something of which I did not then quite get the meaning.

“It is you,” she cried out; “it is you!”

As she said this, and as I looked at her, not knowing yet exactly what to answer, I was harassed by the thought: Where on earth have I already seen this face, this look, this very gesture? Little by little, however, I found my tongue, and after saying a few more words in apology for my unpardonable curiosity, and getting brief but not offended answers, I took leave of her, and, retiring through the window by which I had come, went back to my own room. Arriving there, I sat a long time by the window in the darkness, charmed by the face that I had seen, and yet singularly disquieted. This woman so beautiful, so amiable, living so near to me, who said to me, “It is you,” exactly as though she had already known me, who spoke so little, who answered all my questions with evasion, excited in me a feeling of fear. She had, indeed, told me her name – Linda – and that was all. I tried in vain to drive away the remembrance of her greenish eyes, which in the darkness seemed still to gleam upon me, and of those glints which, like electric sparks, shone in her long hair whenever she stroked it with her hand. Finally, however, I retired for the night; but scarcely was my head upon the pillow when I felt some moving body descend upon my feet. The cat had appeared again. I tried to chase her away, but she kept returning again and again, until I ended by resigning myself to her presence; and, just as before, I went to sleep with this strange companion near me. Yet my rest was this time a troubled one, and broken by strange and fitful dreams.

Have you ever experienced the sort of mental obsession which gradually causes the brain to be mastered by some single absurd idea – an idea almost insane, and one which your reason and your will alike repel, but which nevertheless gradually blends itself with your thought, fastens itself upon your mind, and grows and grows? I suffered cruelly in this way on the days that followed my strange adventure. Nothing new occurred, but in the evening, going out upon the balcony, I found Linda standing upon her side of the iron fan. We chatted together for a while in the half darkness, and, as before, I returned to my room to find that in a few moments the golden cat appeared, leaped upon my bed, made a nest for herself there, and remained until the morning. I knew now to whom the cat belonged, for Linda had answered that very same evening, on my speaking of it, “Oh, yes, my cat; doesn’t she look exactly as though she were made of gold?” As I said, nothing new had occurred, yet nevertheless a vague sort of terror began little by little to master me and to develop itself in my mind, at first merely as a bit of foolish fancy, and then as a haunting belief that dominated my entire thought, so that I perpetually seemed to see a thing which it was in reality quite impossible to see.

—   —   —

“Why, it’s easy enough to guess,” interrupted the young lady who had spoken at the beginning of his story. “Linda and the cat were the same thing.”

Tribourdeaux smiled.

—   —   —

I should not have been quite so positive as that, he said, even then; but I cannot deny that this ridiculous fancy haunted me for many hours when I was endeavoring to snatch a little sleep amid the insomnia that a too active brain produced. Yes, there were moments when these two beings with greenish eyes, sinuous movements, golden hair, and mysterious ways, seemed to me to be blended into one, and to be merely the double manifestation of a single entity. As I said, I saw Linda again and again, but in spite of all my efforts to come upon her unexpectedly, I never was able to see them both at the same time. I tried to reason with myself, to convince myself that there was nothing really inexplicable in all of this, and I ridiculed myself for being afraid both of a woman and of a harmless cat. In truth, at the end of all my reasoning, I found that I was not so much afraid of the animal alone or of the woman alone, but rather of a sort of quality which existed in my fancy and inspired me with a fear of something that was incorporeal – fear of a manifestation of my own spirit, fear of a vague thought, which is, indeed, the very worst of fears.

I began to be mentally disturbed. After long evenings spent in confidential and very unconventional chats with Linda, in which little by little my feelings took on the color of love, I passed long days of secret torment, such as incipient maniacs must experience. Gradually a resolve began to grow up in my mind, a desire that became more and more importunate in demanding a solution of this unceasing and tormenting doubt; and the more I cared for Linda, the more it seemed absolutely necessary to push this resolve to its fulfilment. I decided to kill the cat.

One evening before meeting Linda on the balcony, I took out of my medical cabinet a jar of glycerin and a small bottle of hydrocyanic acid, together with one of those little pencils of glass which chemists use in mixing certain corrosive substances. That evening for the first time Linda allowed me to caress her. I held her in my arms and passed my hand over her long hair, which snapped and cracked under my touch in a succession of tiny sparks. As soon as I regained my room the golden cat, as usual, appeared before me. I called her to me; she rubbed herself against me with arched back and extended tail, purring the while with the greatest amiability. I took the glass pencil in my hand, moistened the point in the glycerin, and held it out to the animal, which licked it with her long red tongue. I did this three or four times, but the next time I dipped the pencil in the acid. The cat unhesitatingly touched it with her tongue. In an instant she became rigid, and a moment after, a frightful tetanic convulsion caused her to leap thrice into the air, and then to fall upon the floor with a dreadful cry – a cry that was truly human. She was dead!

With the perspiration starting from my forehead and with trembling hands I threw myself upon the floor beside the body that was not yet cold. The starting eyes had a look that froze me with horror. The blackened tongue was thrust out between the teeth; the limbs exhibited the most remarkable contortions. I mustered all my courage with a violent effort of will, took the animal by the paws, and left the house. Hurrying down the silent street, I proceeded to the quays along the banks of the Loire, and, on reaching them, threw my burden into the river. Until daylight I roamed around the city, just where I know not; and not until the sky began to grow pale and then to be flushed with light did I at last have the courage to return home. As I laid my hand upon the door, I shivered. I had a dread of finding there still living, as in the celebrated tale of Poe, the animal that I had so lately put to death. But no, my room was empty. I fell half-fainting upon my bed, and for the first time I slept, with a perfect sense of being all alone, a sleep like that of a beast or of an assassin, until evening came.

•   •   •   •   •

Someone here interrupted, breaking in upon the profound silence in which we had been listening.

“I can guess the end. Linda disappeared at the same time as the cat.”

“You see perfectly well,” replied Tribourdeaux, “that there exists between the facts of this story a curious coincidence, since you are able to guess so exactly their relation. Yes, Linda disappeared. They found in her apartment her dresses, her linen, all even to the night-robe that she was to have worn that night, but there was nothing that could give the slightest clue to her identity. The owner of the house had let the apartment to ‘Mademoiselle Linda, concert-singer,’ He knew nothing more. I was summoned before the police magistrate. I had been seen on the night of her disappearance roaming about with a distracted air in the vicinity of the river. Luckily the judge knew me; luckily also, he was a man of no ordinary intelligence. I related to him privately the entire story, just as I have been telling it to you. He dismissed the inquiry; yet I may say that very few have ever had so narrow, an escape as mine from a criminal trial.”

For several moments the silence of the company was unbroken. Finally a gentleman, wishing to relieve the tension, cried out:

“Come now, doctor, confess that this is really all fiction; that you merely want to prevent these ladies from getting any sleep tonight.”

Tribourdeaux bowed stiffly, his face unsmiling and a little pale.

“You may take it as you will,” he said.

WOLVERDEN TOWER

Grant Allen

1896

Maisie Llewelyn had never been asked to Wolverden before; therefore, she was not a little elated at Mrs. West’s invitation. For Wolverden Hall, one of the loveliest Elizabethan manor-houses in the Weald of Kent, had been bought and fitted up in appropriate style (the phrase is the upholsterer’s) by Colonel West, the famous millionaire from South Australia. The Colonel had lavished upon it untold wealth, fleeced from the backs of ten thousand sheep and an equal number of his fellow-countrymen; and Wolverden was now, if not the most beautiful, at least the most opulent country-house within easy reach of London.

Mrs. West was waiting at the station to meet Maisie. The house was full of Christmas guests already, it is true; but Mrs. West was a model of stately, old-fashioned courtesy: she would not have omitted meeting one among the number on any less excuse than a royal command to appear at Windsor. She kissed Maisie on both cheeks – she had always been fond of Maisie – and, leaving two haughty young aristocrats (in powdered hair and blue-and-gold livery) to hunt up her luggage by the light of nature, sailed forth with her through the door to the obsequious carriage.

The drive up the avenue to Wolverden Hall Maisie found quite delicious. Even in their leafless winter condition the great limes looked so noble; and the ivy-covered hall at the end, with its mullioned windows, its Inigo Jones porch, and its creeper-clad gables, was as picturesque a building as the ideals one sees in Mr. Abbey’s sketches. If only Arthur Hume had been one of the party now, Maisie’s joy would have been complete. But what was the use of thinking so much about Arthur Hume, when she didn’t even know whether Arthur Hume cared for her?

A tall, slim girl, Maisie Llewelyn, with rich black hair, and ethereal features, as became a descendant of Llewelyn ap Iorwerth – the sort of girl we none of us would have called anything more than “interesting” till Rossetti and Burne-Jones found eyes for us to see that the type is beautiful with a deeper beauty than that of your obvious pink-and-white prettiness. Her eyes, in particular, had a lustrous depth that was almost superhuman, and her fingers and nails were strangely transparent in their waxen softness.

“You won’t mind my having put you in a ground-floor room in the new wing, my dear, will you?” Mrs West inquired, as she led Maisie personally to the quarters chosen for her. “You see, we’re so unusually full, because of these tableaux!”

Maisie gazed round the ground-floor room in the new wing with eyes of mute wonder. If this was the kind of lodging for which Mrs. West thought it necessary to apologise, Maisie wondered of what sort were those better rooms which she gave to the guests she delighted to honour. It was a large and exquisitely decorated chamber, with the softest and deepest Oriental carpet Maisie’s feet had ever felt, and the daintiest curtains her eyes had ever lighted upon. True, it opened by French windows on to what was nominally the ground in front; but as the Italian terrace, with its formal balustrade and its great stone balls, was raised several feet above the level of the sloping garden below, the room was really on the first floor for all practical purposes. Indeed, Maisie rather liked the unwonted sense of space and freedom which was given by this easy access to the world without; and, as the windows were secured by great shutters and fasteners, she had no counterbalancing fear lest a nightly burglar should attempt to carry off her little pearl necklet or her amethyst brooch, instead of directing his whole attention to Mrs. West’s famous diamond tiara.

She moved naturally to the window. She was fond of nature. The view it disclosed over the Weald at her feet was wide and varied. Misty range lay behind misty range, in a faint December haze, receding and receding, till away to the south, half hidden by vapour, the Sussex downs loomed vague in the distance. The village church, as happens so often in the case of old lordly manors, stood within the grounds of the Hall, and close by the house. It had been built, her hostess said, in the days of the Edwards, but had portions of an older Saxon edifice still enclosed in the chancel. The one eyesore in the view was its new white tower, recently restored (or rather, rebuilt), which contrasted most painfully with the mellow grey stone and mouldering corbels of the nave and transept.

“What a pity it’s been so spoiled!” Maisie exclaimed, looking across at the tower. Coming straight as she did from a Merioneth rectory, she took an ancestral interest in all that concerned churches.

“Oh, my dear!” Mrs. West cried, “please don’t say that, I beg of you, to the Colonel. If you were to murmur ‘spoiled’ to him you’d wreck his digestion. He’s spent ever so much money over securing the foundations and reproducing the sculpture on the old tower we took down, and it breaks his dear heart when anybody disapproves of it. For some people, you know, are so absurdly opposed to reasonable restoration.”

“Oh, but this isn’t even restoration, you know,” Maisie said, with the frankness of twenty, and the specialist interest of an antiquary’s daughter. “This is pure reconstruction.”

“Perhaps so,” Mrs. West answered. “But if you think so, my dear, don’t breathe it at Wolverden.”

A fire, of ostentatiously wealthy dimensions, and of the best glowing coal burned bright on the hearth, but the day was mild, and hardly more than autumnal. Maisie found the room quite unpleasantly hot. She opened the windows and stepped out on the terrace. Mrs. West followed her. They paced up and down the broad gravelled platform for a while – Maisie had not yet taken off her travelling-cloak and hat – and then strolled half unconsciously towards the gate of the church. The churchyard, to hide the tombstones of which the parapet had been erected, was full of quaint old monuments, with broken-nosed cherubs, some of them dating from a comparatively early period. The porch, with its sculptured niches deprived of their saints by puritan hands, was still rich and beautiful in its carved detail. On the seat inside an old woman was sitting. She did not rise as the lady of the manor approached, but went on mumbling and muttering inarticulately to herself in a sulky undertone. Still, Maisie was aware, none the less, that the moment she came near a strange light gleamed suddenly in the old woman’s eyes, and that her glance was fixed upon her. A faint thrill of recognition seemed to pass like a flash through her palsied body. Maisie knew not why, but she was dimly afraid of the old woman’s gaze upon her.

“It’s a lovely old church!” Maisie said, looking up at the trefoil finials on the porch – “all, except the tower.”

“We had to reconstruct it,” Mrs. West answered apologetically – Mrs. West’s general attitude in life was apologetic, as though she felt she had no right to so much more money than her fellow-creatures. “It would have fallen if we hadn’t done something to buttress it up. It was really in a most dangerous and critical condition.”

“Lies! lies! lies!” the old woman burst out suddenly, though in a strange, low tone, as if speaking to herself. “It would not have fallen – they knew it would not. It could not have fallen. It would never have fallen if they had not destroyed it. And even then – I was there when they pulled it down – each stone clung to each, with arms and legs and hands and claws, till they burst them asunder by main force with their new-fangled stuff – I don’t know what they call it – dynamite, or something. It was all of it done for one man’s vainglory!”

“Come away, dear,” Mrs. West whispered. But Maisie loitered.

“Wolverden Tower was fasted thrice,” the old woman continued, in a sing-song quaver. “It was fasted thrice with souls of maids against every assault of man or devil. It was fasted at the foundation against earthquake and ruin. It was fasted at the top against thunder and lightning. It was fasted in the middle against storm and battle. And there it would have stood for a thousand years if a wicked man had not raised a vainglorious hand against it. For that’s what the rhyme says—

“Fasted thrice with souls of men,

Stands the tower of Wolverden;

Fasted thrice with maidens’ blood,

A thousand years of fire and flood

Shall see it stand as erst it stood.”

She paused a moment, then, raising one skinny hand towards the brand-new stone, she went on in the same voice, but with malignant fervour—

“A thousand years the tower shall stand

Till ill assailed by evil hand;

By evil hand in evil hour,

Fasted thrice with warlock’s power,

Shall fall the stanes of Wulfhere’s tower.”

She tottered off as she ended, and took her seat on the edge of a depressed vault in the churchyard close by, still eyeing Maisie Llewelyn with a weird and curious glance, almost like the look which a famishing man casts upon the food in a shop-window.

“Who is she?” Maisie asked, shrinking away in undefined terror.

“Oh, old Bessie,” Mrs. West answered, looking more apologetic (for the parish) than ever. “She’s always hanging about here. She has nothing else to do, and she’s an outdoor pauper. You see, that’s the worst of having the church in one’s grounds, which is otherwise picturesque and romantic and baronial; the road to it’s public; you must admit all the world; and old Bessie will come here. The servants are afraid of her. They say she’s a witch. She has the evil eye, and she drives girls to suicide. But they cross her hand with silver all the same, and she tells them their fortunes – gives them each a butler. She’s full of dreadful stories about Wolverden Church – stories to make your blood run cold, my dear, compact with old superstitions and murders, and so forth. And they’re true, too, that’s the worst of them. She’s quite a character. Mr. Blaydes, the antiquary, is really attached to her; he says she’s now the sole living repository of the traditional folklore and history of the parish. But I don’t care for it myself. It ‘gars one greet,’ as we say in Scotland. Too much burying alive in it, don’t you know, my dear, to quite suit my fancy.”

They turned back as she spoke towards the carved wooden lych-gate, one of the oldest and most exquisite of its class in England. When they reached the vault by whose doors old Bessie was seated, Maisie turned once more to gaze at the pointed lancet windows of the Early English choir, and the still more ancient dog-tooth ornament of the ruined Norman Lady Chapel.

“How solidly it’s built!” she exclaimed, looking up at the arches which alone survived the fury of the Puritan. “It really looks as if it would last forever.”

Old Bessie had bent her head, and seemed to be whispering something at the door of the vault. But at the sound she raised her eyes, and, turning her wizened face towards the lady of the manor, mumbled through her few remaining fang-like teeth an old local saying, “Bradbury for length, Wolverden for strength, and Church Hatton for beauty!

“Three brothers builded churches three;

And fasted thrice each church shall be:

Fasted thrice with maidens’ blood,

To make them safe from fire and flood;

Fasted thrice with souls of men,

Hatton, Bradbury, Wolverden!”

“Come away,” Maisie said, shuddering. “I’m afraid of that woman. Why was she whispering at the doors of the vault down there? I don’t like the look of her.”

“My dear,” Mrs. West answered, in no less terrified a tone, “I will confess I don’t like the look of her myself. I wish she’d leave the place. I’ve tried to make her. The Colonel offered her fifty pounds down and a nice cottage in Surrey if only she’d go – she frightens me so much; but she wouldn’t hear of it. She said she must stop by the bodies of her dead – that’s her style, don’t you see: a sort of modern ghoul, a degenerate vampire – and from the bodies of her dead in Wolverden Church no living soul should ever move her.”

II

For dinner Maisie wore her white satin Empire dress, high-waisted, low-necked, and cut in the bodice with a certain baby-like simplicity of style which exactly suited her strange and uncanny type of beauty. She was very much admired. She felt it, and it pleased her. The young man who took her in, a subaltern of engineers, had no eyes for anyone else; while old Admiral Wade, who sat opposite her with a plain and skinny dowager, made her positively uncomfortable by the persistent way in which he stared at her simple pearl necklet.

After dinner, the tableaux. They had been designed and managed by a famous Royal Academician, and were mostly got up by the members of the house-party. But two or three actresses from London had been specially invited to help in a few of the more mythological scenes; for, indeed, Mrs. West had prepared the entire entertainment with that topsy-turvy conscientiousness and scrupulous sense of responsibility to society which pervaded her view of millionaire morality. Having once decided to offer the county a set of tableaux, she felt that millionaire morality absolutely demanded of her the sacrifice of three weeks’ time and several hundred pounds money in order to discharge her obligations to the county with becoming magnificence.

The first tableau, Maisie learned from the gorgeous programme, was “Jephthah’s Daughter.” The subject was represented at the pathetic moment when the doomed virgin goes forth from her father’s house with her attendant maidens to bewail her virginity for two months upon the mountains, before the fulfilment of the awful vow which bound her father to offer her up for a burnt offering. Maisie thought it too solemn and tragic a scene for a festive occasion. But the famous R.A. had a taste for such themes, and his grouping was certainly most effectively dramatic.

“A perfect symphony in white and grey,” said Mr. Wills, the art critic.

“How awfully affecting!” said most of the young girls.

“Reminds me a little too much, my dear, of old Bessie’s stories,” Mrs. West whispered low, leaning from her seat across two rows to Maisie.

A piano stood a little on one side of the platform, just in front of the curtain. The intervals between the pieces were filled up with songs, which, however, had been evidently arranged in keeping with the solemn and half-mystical tone of the tableaux. It is the habit of amateurs to take a long time in getting their scenes in order, so the interposition of the music was a happy thought as far as its prime intention went. But Maisie wondered they could not have chosen some livelier song for Christmas Eve than “Oh, Mary, go and call the cattle home, and call the cattle home, and call the cattle home, across the sands of Dee.” Her own name was Mary when she signed it officially, and the sad lilt of the last line, “But never home came she,” rang unpleasantly in her ear through the rest of the evening.

The second tableau was the “Sacrifice of Iphigenia.” It was admirably rendered. The cold and dignified father, standing, apparently unmoved, by the pyre; the cruel faces of the attendant priests; the shrinking form of the immolated princess; the mere blank curiosity and inquiring interest of the helmeted heroes looking on, to whom this slaughter of a virgin victim was but an ordinary incident of the Achae’an religion – all these had been arranged by the Academical director with consummate skill and pictorial cleverness. But the group that attracted Maisie most among the components of the scene was that of the attendant maidens, more conspicuous here in their flowing white chitons than even they had been when posed as companions of the beautiful and ill-fated Hebrew victim. Two in particular excited her close attention – two very graceful and spiritual-looking girls, in long white robes of no particular age or country, who stood at the very end near the right edge of the picture. “How lovely they are, the two last on the right!” Maisie whispered to her neighbour – an Oxford undergraduate with a budding moustache. “I do so admire them!”

“Do you?” he answered, fondling the moustache with one dubious finger. “Well, now, do you know, I don’t think I do. They’re rather coarse-looking. And besides, I don’t quite like the way they’ve got their hair done up in bunches; too fashionable, isn’t it? – too much of the present day? I don’t care to see a girl in a Greek costume, with her coiffure so evidently turned out by Truefitt’s!”

“Oh, I don’t mean those two,” Maisie answered, a little shocked he should think she had picked out such meretricious faces; “I mean the two beyond them again – the two with their hair so simply and sweetly done – the ethereal-looking dark girls.”

The undergraduate opened his mouth, and stared at her in blank amazement for a moment. “Well, I don’t see—” he began, and broke off suddenly. Something in Maisie’s eye seemed to give him pause. He fondled his moustache, hesitated and was silent.

“How nice to have read the Greek and know what it all means!” Maisie went on, after a minute. “It’s a human sacrifice, of course; but, please, what is the story?”

The undergraduate hummed and hawed. “Well, it’s in Euripides, you know,” he said, trying to look impressive, “and – er – and I haven’t taken up Euripides for my next examination. But I think it’s like this. Iphigenia was a daughter of Agamemnon’s, don’t you know, and he had offended Artemis or somebody – some other Goddess; and he vowed to offer up to her the most beautiful thing that should be born that year, by way of reparation – just like Jephthah. Well, Iphigenia was considered the most beautiful product of the particular twelvemonth – don’t look at me like that, please! you – you make me nervous – and so, when the young woman grew up – well, I don’t quite recollect the ins and outs of the details, but it’s a human sacrifice business, don’t you see; and they’re just going to kill her, though I believe a hind was finally substituted for the girl, like the ram for Isaac; but I must confess I’ve a very vague recollection of it.” He rose from his seat uneasily. “I’m afraid,” he went on, shuffling about for an excuse to move, “these chairs are too close. I seem to be incommoding you.”

He moved away with a furtive air. At the end of the tableau one or two of the characters who were not needed in succeeding pieces came down from the stage and joined the body of spectators, as they often do, in their character-dresses – a good opportunity, in point of fact, for retaining through the evening the advantages conferred by theatrical costume, rouge, and pearl-powder. Among them the two girls Maisie had admired so much glided quietly toward her and took the two vacant seats on either side, one of which had just been quitted by the awkward undergraduate. They were not only beautiful in face and figure, on a closer view, but Maisie found them from the first extremely sympathetic. They burst into talk with her, frankly and at once, with charming ease and grace of manner. They were ladies in the grain, in instinct and breeding. The taller of the two, whom the other addressed as Yolande, seemed particularly pleasing. The very name charmed Maisie. She was friends with them at once. They both possessed a certain nameless attraction that constitutes in itself the best possible introduction. Maisie hesitated to ask them whence they came, but it was clear from their talk they knew Wolverden intimately.

After a minute the piano struck up once more. A famous Scotch vocalist, in a diamond necklet and a dress to match, took her place on the stage, just in front of the footlights. As chance would have it, she began singing the song Maisie most of all hated. It was Scott’s ballad of “Proud Maisie,” set to music by Carlo Ludovici—

Proud Maisie is in the wood,

Walking so early;

Sweet Robin sits on the bush,

Singing so rarely.

‘Tell me, thou bonny bird,

When shall I marry me?’

‘When six braw gentlemen

Kirkward shall carry ye.’

‘Who makes the bridal bed,

Birdie, say truly?’

‘The grey-headed sexton

That delves the grave duly.

‘The glow-worm o’er grave and stone

Shall light thee steady;

The owl from the steeple sing,

“Welcome, Proud lady.”’

Maisie listened to the song with grave discomfort. She had never liked it, and tonight it appalled her. She did not know that just at that moment Mrs. West was whispering in a perfect fever of apology to a lady by her side, “Oh dear! oh dear! what a dreadful thing of me ever to have permitted that song to be sung here tonight! It was horribly thoughtless! Why, now I remember, Miss Llewelyn’s name, you know, is Maisie! – and there she is listening to it with a face like a sheet! I shall never forgive myself!”

The tall, dark girl by Maisie’s side, whom the other called Yolande, leaned across to her sympathetically. “You don’t like that song?” she said, with just a tinge of reproach in her voice as she said it.

“I hate it!” Maisie answered, trying hard to compose herself.

“Why so?” the tall, dark girl asked, in a tone of calm and singular sweetness. “It is sad, perhaps; but it’s lovely – and natural!”

“My own name is Maisie,” her new friend replied, with an ill-repressed shudder. “And somehow that song pursues me through life I seem always to hear the horrid ring of the words, ‘When six braw gentlemen kirkward shall carry ye.’ I wish to Heaven my people had never called me Maisie!”

“And yet why?” the tall, dark girl asked again, with a sad, mysterious air. “Why this clinging to life – this terror of death – this inexplicable attachment to a world of misery? And with such eyes as yours, too! Your eyes are like mine” – which was a compliment, certainly, for the dark girl’s own pair were strangely deep and lustrous. “People with eyes such as those, that can look into futurity, ought not surely to shrink from a mere gate like death! For death is but a gate – the gate of life in its fullest beauty. It is written over the door, ‘Mors janua vitae.’”

“What door?” Maisie asked – for she remembered having read those selfsame words, and tried in vain to translate them, that very day, though the meaning was now clear to her.

The answer electrified her: “The gate of the vault in Wolverden churchyard.”

She said it very low, but with pregnant expression.

“Oh, how dreadful!” Maisie exclaimed, drawing back. The tall, dark girl half frightened her.

“Not at all,” the girl answered. “This life is so short, so vain, so transitory! And beyond it is peace – eternal peace – the calm of rest – the joy of the spirit.”

“You come to anchor at last,” her companion added.

“But if – one has somebody one would not wish to leave behind?” Maisie suggested timidly.

“He will follow before long,” the dark girl replied with quiet decision, interpreting rightly the sex of the indefinite substantive. “Time passes so quickly. And if time passes quickly in time, how much more, then, in eternity!”

“Hush, Yolande,” the other dark girl put in, with a warning glance; “there’s a new tableau coming. Let me see, is this ‘The Death of Ophelia’? No, that’s number four; this is number three, ‘The Martyrdom of St. Agnes.’”

III

“My dear,” Mrs. West said, positively oozing apology, when she met Maisie in the supper-room, “I’m afraid you’ve been left in a corner by yourself almost all the evening!”

“Oh dear, no,” Maisie answered with a quiet smile. “I had that Oxford undergraduate at my elbow at first; and afterwards those two nice girls, with the flowing white dresses and the beautiful eyes, came and sat beside me. What’s their name, I wonder?”

“Which girls?” Mrs. West asked, with a little surprise in her tone, for her impression was rather that Maisie had been sitting between two empty chairs for the greater part of the evening, muttering at times to herself in the most uncanny way, but not talking to anybody.

Maisie glanced round the room in search of her new friends, and for some time could not see them. At last, she observed them in a remote alcove, drinking red wine by themselves out of Venetian-glass beakers. “Those two,” she said, pointing towards them. “They’re such charming girls! Can you tell me who they are? I’ve quite taken a fancy to them.”

Mrs. West gazed at them for a second – or rather, at the recess towards which Maisie pointed – and then turned to Maisie with much the same oddly embarrassed look and manner as the undergraduate’s. “Oh, those!” she said slowly, peering through and through her, Maisie thought. “Those – must be some of the professionals from London. At any rate – -I’m not sure which you mean – over there by the curtain, in the Moorish nook, you say – well, I can’t tell you their names! So they must be professionals.”

She went off with a singularly frightened manner. Maisie noticed it and wondered at it. But it made no great or lasting impression.

When the party broke up, about midnight or a little later, Maisie went along the corridor to her own bedroom. At the end, by the door, the two other girls happened to be standing, apparently gossiping.

“Oh, you’ve not gone home yet?” Maisie said, as she passed, to Yolande.

“No, we’re stopping here,” the dark girl with the speaking eyes answered.

Maisie paused for a second. Then an impulse burst over her. “Will you come and see my room?” she asked, a little timidly.

“Shall we go, Hedda?” Yolande said, with an inquiring glance at her companion.

Her friend nodded assent. Maisie opened the door, and ushered them into her bedroom.

The ostentatiously opulent fire was still burning brightly, the electric light flooded the room with its brilliancy, the curtains were drawn, and the shutters fastened. For a while the three girls sat together by the hearth and gossiped quietly. Maisie liked her new friends – their voices were so gentle, soft, and sympathetic, while for face and figure they might have sat as models to Burne-Jones or Botticelli. Their dresses, too, took her delicate Welsh fancy; they were so dainty, yet so simple. The soft silk fell in natural folds and dimples. The only ornaments they wore were two curious brooches of very antique workmanship – as Maisie supposed – somewhat Celtic in design, and enamelled in blood-red on a gold background. Each carried a flower laid loosely in her bosom. Yolande’s was an orchid with long, floating streamers, in colour and shape recalling some Southern lizard; dark purple spots dappled its lip and petals. Hedda’s was a flower of a sort Maisie had never before seen – the stem spotted like a viper’s skin, green flecked with russet-brown, and uncanny to look upon; on either side, great twisted spirals of red-and-blue blossoms, each curled after the fashion of a scorpion’s tail, very strange and lurid. Something weird and witch-like about flowers and dresses rather attracted Maisie; they affected her with the half-repellent fascination of a snake for a bird; she felt such blossoms were fit for incantations and sorceries. But a lily-of-the-valley in Yolande’s dark hair gave a sense of purity which assorted better with the girl’s exquisitely calm and nun-like beauty.

After a while Hedda rose. “This air is close,” she said. “It ought to be warm outside tonight, if one may judge by the sunset. May I open the window?”

“Oh, certainly, if you like,” Maisie answered, a vague foreboding now struggling within her against innate politeness.

Hedda drew back the curtains and unfastened the shutters. It was a moonlit evening. The breeze hardly stirred the bare boughs of the silver birches. A sprinkling of soft snow on the terrace and the hills just whitened the ground The moon lighted it up, falling full upon the Hall; the church and tower below stood silhouetted in dark against a cloudless expanse of starry sky in the background. Hedda opened the window. Cool, fresh air blew in, very soft and genial, in spite of the snow and the lateness of the season. “What a glorious night!” she said, looking up at Orion overhead. “Shall we stroll out for a while in it?”

If the suggestion had not thus been thrust upon her from outside, it would never have occurred to Maisie to walk abroad in a strange place, in evening dress, on a winter’s night, with snow whitening the ground; but Hedda’s voice sounded so sweetly persuasive, and the idea itself seemed so natural now she had once proposed it, that Maisie followed her two new friends on to the moonlit terrace without a moment’s hesitation.

They paced once or twice up and down the gravelled walks. Strange to say, though a sprinkling of dry snow powdered the ground under foot, the air itself was soft and balmy. Stranger still, Maisie noticed, almost without noticing it, that though they walked three abreast, only one pair of footprints – her own – lay impressed on the snow in a long trail when they turned at either end and re-paced the platform. Yolande and Hedda must step lightly indeed; or perhaps her own feet might be warmer or thinner shod, so as to melt the light layer of snow more readily.

The girls slipped their arms through hers. A little thrill coursed through her. Then, after three or four turns up and down the terrace, Yolande led the way quietly down the broad flight of steps in the direction of the church on the lower level. In that bright, broad moonlight Maisie went with them undeterred; the Hall was still alive with the glare of electric lights in bedroom windows; and the presence of the other girls, both wholly free from any signs of fear, took off all sense of terror or loneliness. They strolled on into the churchyard. Maisie’s eyes were now fixed on the new white tower, which merged in the silhouette against the starry sky into much the same grey and indefinite hue as the older parts of the building. Before she quite knew where she was, she found herself at the head of the worn stone steps which led into the vault by whose doors she had seen old Bessie sitting. In the pallid moonlight, with the aid of the greenish reflection from the snow, she could just read the words inscribed over the portal, the words that Yolande had repeated in the drawing-room, “Mors janua vitae.”

Yolande moved down one step. Maisie drew back for the first time with a faint access of alarm. “You’re – you’re not going down there!” she exclaimed, catching her breath for a second.

“Yes, I am,” her new friend answered in a calmly quiet voice. “Why not? We live here.”

“You live here?” Maisie echoed, freeing her arms by a sudden movement and standing away from her mysterious friends with a tremulous shudder.

“Yes, we live here,” Hedda broke in, without the slightest emotion. She said it in a voice of perfect calm, as one might say it of any house in a street in London.

Maisie was far less terrified than she might have imagined beforehand would be the case under such unexpected conditions. The two girls were so simple, so natural, so strangely like herself, that she could not say she was really afraid of them. She shrank, it is true, from the nature of the door at which they stood, but she received the unearthly announcement that they lived there with scarcely more than a slight tremor of surprise and astonishment.

“You will come in with us?” Hedda said in a gently enticing tone. “We went into your bedroom.”

Maisie hardly liked to say no. They seemed so anxious to show her their home. With trembling feet she moved down the first step, and then the second. Yolande kept ever one pace in front of her. As Maisie reached the third step, the two girls, as if moved by one design, took her wrists in their hands, not unkindly, but coaxingly. They reached the actual doors of the vault itself – two heavy bronze valves, meeting in the centre. Each bore a ring for a handle, pierced through a Gorgon’s head embossed upon the surface. Yolande pushed them with her hand. They yielded instantly to her light touch, and opened inward. Yolande, still in front, passed from the glow of the moon to the gloom of the vault, which a ray of moonlight just descended obliquely. As she passed, for a second, a weird sight met Maisie’s eyes. Her face and hands and dress became momentarily self-luminous but through them, as they glowed, she could descry within every bone and joint of her living skeleton, dimly shadowed in dark through the luminous haze that marked her body.

Maisie drew back once more, terrified. Yet her terror was not quite what one could describe as fear: it was rather a vague sense of the profoundly mystical. “I can’t! I can’t!” she cried, with an appealing glance. “Hedda! Yolande! I cannot go with you.”

Hedda held her hand tight, and almost seemed to force her. But Yolande, in front, like a mother with her child, turned round with a grave smile. “No, no,” she said reprovingly. “Let her come if she will, Hedda, of her own accord, not otherwise. The tower demands a willing victim.”

Her hand on Maisie’s wrist was strong but persuasive. It drew her without exercising the faintest compulsion. “Will you come with us, dear?” she said, in that winning silvery tone which had captivated Maisie’s fancy from the very first moment they spoke together. Maisie gazed into her eyes. They were deep and tender. A strange resolution seemed to nerve her for the effort. “Yes, yes – I – will – come – with you,” she answered slowly.

Hedda on one side, Yolande on the other, now went before her, holding her wrists in their grasp, but rather enticing than drawing her. As each reached the gloom, the same luminous appearance which Maisie had noticed before spread over their bodies, and the same weird skeleton shape showed faintly through their limbs in darker shadow. Maisie crossed the threshold with a convulsive gasp. As she crossed it she looked down at her own dress and body. They were semi-transparent, like the others’, though not quite so self-luminous; the framework of her limbs appeared within in less certain outline, yet quite dark and distinguishable.

The doors swung to of themselves behind her. Those three stood alone in the vault of Wolverden

Alone, for a minute or two; and then, as her eyes grew accustomed to the grey dusk of the interior, Maisie began to perceive that the vault opened out into a large and beautiful hall or crypt, dimly lighted at first, but becoming each moment more vaguely clear and more dreamily definite. Gradually she could make out great rock-hewn pillars, Romanesque in their outline or dimly Oriental, like the sculptured columns in the caves of Ellora, supporting a roof of vague and uncertain dimensions, more or less strangely dome-shaped. The effect on the whole was like that of the second impression produced by some dim cathedral, such as Chartres or Milan, after the eyes have grown accustomed to the mellow light from the stained-glass windows, and have recovered from the blinding glare of the outer sunlight. But the architecture, if one may call it so, was more mosque-like and magical. She turned to her companions. Yolande and Hedda stood still by her side; their bodies were now self-luminous to a greater degree than even at the threshold; but the terrible transparency had disappeared altogether; they were once more but beautiful though strangely transfigured and more than mortal women

Then Maisie understood in her own soul, dimly, the meaning of those mystic words written over the portal – “Mors janua vitae” – Death is the gate of life; and also the interpretation of that awful vision of death dwelling within them as they crossed the threshold; for through that gate they had passed to this underground palace.

Her two guides still held her hands, one on either side. But they seemed rather to lead her on now, seductively and resistlessly, than to draw or compel her. As she moved in through the hall, with its endless vistas of shadowy pillars, seen now behind, now in dim perspective, she was gradually aware that many other people crowded its aisles and corridors. Slowly they took shape as forms more or less clad, mysterious, varied, and of many ages. Some of them wore flowing robes, half mediaeval in shape, like the two friends who had brought her there. They looked like the saints on a stained-glass window. Others were girt merely with a light and floating Coan sash; while some stood dimly nude in the darker recesses of the temple or palace. All leaned eagerly forward with one mind as she approached, and regarded her with deep and sympathetic interest. A few of them murmured words – mere cabalistic sounds which at first she could not understand; but as she moved further into the hall, and saw at each step more clearly into the gloom, they began to have a meaning for her. Before long, she was aware that she understood the mute tumult of voices at once by some internal instinct. The Shades addressed her; she answered them. She knew by intuition what tongue they spoke; it was the Language of the Dead; and, by passing that portal with her two companions, she had herself become enabled both to speak and understand it.

A soft and flowing tongue, this speech of the Nether World – all vowels it seemed, without distinguishable consonants; yet dimly recalling every other tongue, and compounded, as it were, of what was common to all of them. It flowed from those shadowy lips as clouds issue inchoate from a mountain valley; it was formless, uncertain, vague, but yet beautiful. She hardly knew, indeed, as it fell upon her senses, if it were sound or perfume.

Through this tenuous world Maisie moved as in a dream, her two companions still cheering and guiding her. When they reached an inner shrine or chantry of the temple she was dimly conscious of more terrible forms pervading the background than any of those that had yet appeared to her. This was a more austere and antique apartment than the rest; a shadowy cloister, prehistoric in its severity; it recalled to her mind something indefinitely intermediate between the huge unwrought trilithons of Stonehenge and the massive granite pillars of Philae and Luxor. At the further end of the sanctuary a sort of Sphinx looked down on her, smiling mysteriously. At its base, on a rude megalithic throne, in solitary state, a High Priest was seated. He bore in his hand a wand or sceptre. All round, a strange court of half-unseen acolytes and shadowy hierophants stood attentive They were girt, as she fancied, in what looked like leopards’ skins, or in the fells of some earlier prehistoric lion. These wore sabre-shaped teeth suspended by a string round their dusky necks; others had ornaments of uncut amber, or hatchets of jade threaded as collars on a cord of sinew. A few, more barbaric than savage in type, flaunted torques of gold as armlets and necklets.

The High Priest rose slowly and held out his two hands, just level with his head, the palms turned outward. “You have brought a willing victim as Guardian of the Tower?” he asked, in that mystic tongue, of Yolande and Hedda.

“We have brought a willing victim,” the two girls answered.

The High Priest gazed at her. His glance was piercing Maisie trembled less with fear than with a sense of strangeness, such as a neophyte might feel on being first presented at some courtly pageant. “You come of your own accord?” the Priest inquired of her in solemn accents

“I come of my own accord,” Maisie answered, with an inner consciousness that she was bearing her part in some immemorial ritual. Ancestral memories seemed to stir within her.

“It is well,” the Priest murmured. Then he turned to her guides. “She is of royal lineage?” he inquired, taking his wand in his hand again.

“She is a Llewelyn,” Yolande answered, “of royal lineage, and of the race that, after your own, earliest bore sway in this land of Britain. She has in her veins the blood of Arthur, of Ambrosius, and of Vortigern”

“It is well,” the Priest said again. “I know these princes.” Then he turned to Maisie. “This is the ritual of those who build,” he said, in a very deep voice. “It has been the ritual of those who build from the days of the builders of Lokmariaker and Avebury. Every building man makes shall have its human soul, the soul of a virgin to guard and protect it. Three souls it requires as a living talisman against chance and change. One soul is the soul of the human victim slain beneath the foundation-stone; she is the guardian spirit against earthquake and ruin. One soul is the soul of the human victim slain when the building is half built up; she is the guardian spirit against battle and tempest. One soul is the soul of the human victim who flings herself of her own free will off tower or gable when the building is complete; she is the guardian spirit against thunder and lightning. Unless a building be duly fasted with these three, how can it hope to stand against the hostile powers of fire and flood and storm and earthquake?”

An assessor at his side, unnoticed till then, took up the parable. He had a stern Roman face, and bore a shadowy suit of Roman armour. “In times of old,” he said, with iron austerity, “all men knew well these rules of building. They built in solid stone to endure forever: the works they erected have lasted to this day, in this land and others. So built we the amphitheatres of Rome and Verona; so built we the walls of Lincoln, York, and London. In the blood of a king’s son laid we the foundation-stone: in the blood of a king’s son laid we the coping-stone: in the blood of a maiden of royal line fasted we the bastions against fire and lightning. But in these latter days, since faith grows dim, men build with burnt brick and rubble of plaster; no foundation spirit or guardian soul do they give to their bridges, their walls, or their towers: so bridges break, and walls fall in, and towers crumble, and the art and mystery of building aright have perished from among you.”

He ceased. The High Priest held out his wand and spoke again. “We are the Assembly of Dead Builders and Dead Victims,” he said, “for this mark of Wolverden; all of whom have built or been built upon in this holy site of immemorial sanctity. We are the stones of a living fabric. Before this place was a Christian church, it was a temple of Woden. And before it was a temple of Woden, it was a shrine of Hercules. And before it was a shrine of Hercules, it was a grove of Nodens. And before it was a grove of Nodens, it was a Stone Circle of the Host of Heaven. And before it was a Stone Circle of the Host of Heaven, it was the grave and tumulus and underground palace of Me, who am the earliest builder of all in this place; and my name in my ancient tongue is Wolf, and I laid and hallowed it. And after me, Wolf, and my namesake Wulfhere, was this barrow called Ad Lupum and Wolverden. And all these that are here with me have built and been built upon in this holy site for all generations. And you are the last who come to join us.”

Maisie felt a cold thrill course down her spine as he spoke these words; but courage did not fail her. She was dimly aware that those who offer themselves as victims for service must offer themselves willingly; for the gods demand a voluntary victim; no beast can be slain unless it nod assent; and none can be made a guardian spirit who takes not the post upon him of his own free will. She turned meekly to Hedda. “Who are you?” she asked, trembling.

“I am Hedda,” the girl answered, in the same soft sweet voice and winning tone as before; “Hedda, the daughter of Gorm, the chief of the Northmen who settled in East Anglia. And I was a worshipper of Thor and Odin. And when my father, Gorm, fought against Alfred, King of Wessex, was I taken prisoner. And Wulfhere, the Kenting, was then building the first church and tower of Wolverden. And they baptized me, and shrived me, and I consented of my own free will to be built under the foundation-stone. And there my body lies built up to this day; and I am the guardian spirit against earthquake and ruin.”

“And who are you?” Maisie asked, turning again to Yolande.

“I am Yolande Fitz-Aylwin,” the tall dark girl answered; “a royal maiden too, sprung from the blood of Henry Plantagenet. And when Roland Fitz-Stephen was building anew the choir and chancel of Wulfhere’s minster, I chose to be immured in the fabric of the wall, for love of the Church and all holy saints; and there my body lies built up to this day; and I am the guardian against battle and tempest.”

Maisie held her friend’s hand tight. Her voice hardly trembled. “And I?” she asked once more. “What fate for me? Tell me!”

“Your task is easier far,” Yolande answered gently. “For you shall be the guardian of the new tower against thunder and lightning. Now, those who guard against earthquake and battle are buried alive under the foundation-stone or in the wall of the building; there they die a slow death of starvation and choking. But those who guard against thunder and lightning cast themselves alive of their own free will from the battlements of the tower, and die in the air before they reach the ground; so their fate is the easiest and the lightest of all who would serve mankind; and thenceforth they live with us here in our palace.”

Maisie clung to her hand still tighter. “Must I do it?” she asked, pleading.

“It is not must,” Yolande replied in the same caressing tone, yet with a calmness as of one in whom earthly desires and earthly passions are quenched forever. “It is as you choose yourself. None but a willing victim may be a guardian spirit. This glorious privilege comes but to the purest and best amongst us. Yet what better end can you ask for your soul than to dwell here in our midst as our comrade forever, where all is peace, and to preserve the tower whose guardian you are from evil assaults of lightning and thunderbolt?”

Maisie flung her arms round her friend’s neck. “But – I am afraid,” she murmured. Why she should even wish to consent she knew not, yet the strange serene peace in these strange girls’ eyes made her mysteriously in love with them and with the fate they offered her. They seemed to move like the stars in their orbits. “How shall I leap from the top?” she cried. “How shall I have courage to mount the stairs alone, and fling myself off from the lonely battlement?”

Yolande unwound her arms with a gentle forbearance. She coaxed her as one coaxes an unwilling child. “You will not be alone,” she said, with a tender pressure. “We will all go with you. We will help you and encourage you. We will sing our sweet songs of life-in-death to you. Why should you draw back? All we have faced it in ten thousand ages, and we tell you with one voice, you need not fear it. ’Tis life you should fear – life, with its dangers, its toils, its heartbreakings. Here we dwell forever in unbroken peace. Come, come, and join us!”

She held out her arms with an enticing gesture. Maisie sprang into them, sobbing. “Yes, I will come,” she cried in an access of hysterical fervour. “These are the arms of Death – I embrace them. These are the lips of Death – I kiss them. Yolande, Yolande, I will do as you ask me!”

The tall dark girl in the luminous white robe stooped down and kissed her twice on the forehead in return. Then she looked at the High Priest. “We are ready,” she murmured in a low, grave voice. “The Victim consents. The Virgin will die. Lead on to the tower. We are ready! We are ready!”

IV

From the recesses of the temple – if temple it were – from the inmost shrines of the shrouded cavern, unearthly music began to sound of itself; with wild modulation, on strange reeds and tabors. It swept through the aisles like a rushing wind on an Aeolian harp; at times it wailed with a voice like a woman’s; at times it rose loud in an organ-note of triumph; at times it sank low into a pensive and melancholy flute-like symphony. It waxed and waned; it swelled and died away again; but no man saw how or whence it proceeded. Wizard echoes issued from the crannies and vents in the invisible walls; they sighed from the ghostly interspaces of the pillars; they keened and moaned from the vast overhanging dome of the palace. Gradually the song shaped itself by weird stages into a processional measure. At its sound the High Priest rose slowly from his immemorial seat on the mighty cromlech which formed his throne. The Shades in leopards’ skins ranged themselves in bodiless rows on either hand; the ghostly wearers of the sabre-toothed lions’ fangs followed like ministrants in the footsteps of their hierarch.

Hedda and Yolande took their places in the procession. Maisie stood between the two, with hair floating on the air; she looked like a novice who goes up to take the veil, accompanied and cheered by two elder sisters.

The ghostly pageant began to move. Unseen music followed it with fitful gusts of melody. They passed down the main corridor, between shadowy Doric or Ionic pillars which grew dimmer and ever dimmer again in the distance as they approached, with slow steps, the earthward portal.

At the gate, the High Priest pushed against the valves with his hand. They opened outward.

He passed into the moonlight. The attendants thronged after him. As each wild figure crossed the threshold the same strange sight as before met Maisie’s eyes. For a second of time each ghostly body became self-luminous, as with some curious phosphorescence; and through each, at the moment of passing the portal, the dim outline of a skeleton loomed briefly visible. Next instant it had clothed itself as with earthly members.

Maisie reached the outer air. As she did so, she gasped. For a second, its chilliness and freshness almost choked her. She was conscious now that the atmosphere of the vault, though pleasant in its way, and warm and dry, had been loaded with fumes as of burning incense, and with somnolent vapours of poppy and mandragora. Its drowsy ether had cast her into a lethargy. But after the first minute in the outer world, the keen night air revived her. Snow lay still on the ground a little deeper than when she first came out, and the moon rode lower; otherwise, all was as before, save that only one or two lights still burned here and there in the great house on the terrace. Among them she could recognise her own room, on the ground floor in the new wing, by its open window.

The procession made its way across the churchyard towards the tower. As it wound among the graves an owl hooted. All at once Maisie remembered the lines that had so chilled her a few short hours before in the drawing-room—

“The glow-worm o’er grave and stone

Shall light thee steady;

The owl from the steeple sing,

‘Welcome, proud lady!’”

But, marvellous to relate, they no longer alarmed her. She felt rather that a friend was welcoming her home; she clung to Yolande’s hand with a gentle pressure.

As they passed in front of the porch, with its ancient yew-tree, a stealthy figure glided out like a ghost from the darkling shadow. It was a woman, bent and bowed, with quivering limbs that shook half palsied. Maisie recognised old Bessie. “I knew she would come!” the old hag muttered between her toothless jaws. “I knew Wolverden Tower would yet be duly fasted!”

She put herself, as of right, at the head of the procession. They moved on to the tower, rather gliding than walking. Old Bessie drew a rusty key from her pocket, and fitted it with a twist into the brand-new lock. “What turned the old will turn the new,” she murmured, looking round and grinning. Maisie shrank from her as she shrank from not one of the Dead; but she followed on still into the ringers’ room at the base of the tower.

Thence a staircase in the corner led up to the summit. The High Priest mounted the stair, chanting a mystic refrain, whose runic sounds were no longer intelligible to Maisie. As she reached the outer air, the Tongue of the Dead seemed to have become a mere blank of mingled odours and murmurs to her. It was like a summer breeze, sighing through warm and resinous pinewoods. But Yolande and Hedda spoke to her yet, to cheer her, in the language of the living. She recognised that as #revenants they were still in touch with the upper air and the world of the embodied.

They tempted her up the stair with encouraging fingers. Maisie followed them like a child, in implicit confidence. The steps wound round and round, spirally, and the staircase was dim; but a supernatural light seemed to fill the tower, diffused from the bodies or souls of its occupants. At the head of all, the High Priest still chanted as he went his unearthly litany; magic sounds of chimes seemed to swim in unison with his tune as they mounted. Were those floating notes material or spiritual? They passed the belfry; no tongue of metal wagged; but the rims of the great bells resounded and reverberated to the ghostly symphony with sympathetic music. Still they passed on and on, upward and upward. They reached the ladder that alone gave access to the final story. Dust and cobwebs already clung to it. Once more Maisie drew back. It was dark overhead and the luminous haze began to fail them. Her friends held her hands with the same kindly persuasive touch as ever. “I cannot!” she cried, shrinking away from the tall, steep ladder. “Oh, Yolande, I cannot!”

“Yes, dear,” Yolande whispered in a soothing voice. “You can. It is but ten steps, and I will hold your hand tight. Be brave and mount them!”

The sweet voice encouraged her. It was like heavenly music. She knew not why she should submit, or, rather, consent; but none the less she consented. Some spell seemed cast over her. With tremulous feet, scarcely realising what she did, she mounted the ladder and went up four steps of it.

Then she turned and looked down again. Old Bessie’s wrinkled face met her frightened eyes. It was smiling horribly. She shrank back once more, terrified. “I can’t do it,” she cried, “if that woman comes up! I’m not afraid of you, dear” – she pressed Yolande’s hand – “but she, she is too terrible!”

Hedda looked back and raised a warning finger. “Let the woman stop below,” she said; “she savours too much of the evil world. We must do nothing to frighten the willing victim.”

The High Priest by this time, with his ghostly fingers, had opened the trapdoor that gave access to the summit. A ray of moonlight slanted through the aperture. The breeze blew down with it. Once more Maisie felt the stimulating and reviving effect of the open air. Vivified by its freshness, she struggled up to the top, passed out through the trap, and found herself standing on the open platform at the summit of the tower.

The moon had not yet quite set. The light on the snow shone pale green and mysterious. For miles and miles around she could just make out, by its aid, the dim contour of the downs, with their thin white mantle, in the solemn silence. Range behind range rose faintly shimmering. The chant had now ceased; the High Priest and his acolytes were mingling strange herbs in a mazar-bowl or chalice. Stray perfumes of myrrh and of cardamoms were wafted towards her. The men in leopards’ skins burnt smouldering sticks of spikenard. Then Yolande led the postulant forward again, and placed her close up to the new white parapet. Stone heads of virgins smiled on her from the angles. “She must front the east,” Hedda said in a tone of authority: and Yolande turned her face towards the rising sun accordingly. Then she opened her lips and spoke in a very solemn voice. “From this new-built tower you fling yourself,” she said, or rather intoned, “that you may serve mankind, and all the powers that be, as its guardian spirit against thunder and lightning. Judged a virgin, pure and unsullied in deed and word and thought, of royal race and ancient lineage – a Cymry of the Cymry – you are found worthy to be intrusted with this charge and this honour. Take care that never shall dart or thunderbolt assault this tower, as She that is below you takes care to preserve it from earthquake and ruin, and She that is midway takes care to preserve it from battle and tempest. This is your charge. See well that you keep it.”

She took her by both hands. “Mary Llewelyn,” she said, “you willing victim, step on to the battlement.”

Maisie knew not why, but with very little shrinking she stepped as she was told, by the aid of a wooden footstool, on to the eastward-looking parapet. There, in her loose white robe, with her arms spread abroad, and her hair flying free, she poised herself for a second, as if about to shake out some unseen wings and throw herself on the air like a swift or a swallow.

“Mary Llewelyn,” Yolande said once more, in a still deeper tone, with ineffable earnestness, “cast yourself down, a willing sacrifice, for the service of man, and the security of this tower against thunderbolt and lightning.”

Maisie stretched her arms wider, and leaned forward in act to leap, from the edge of the parapet, on to the snow-clad churchyard.

V

One second more and the sacrifice would have been complete. But before she could launch herself from the tower, she felt suddenly a hand laid upon her shoulder from behind to restrain her. Even in her existing state of nervous exaltation she was aware at once that it was the hand of a living and solid mortal, not that of a soul or guardian spirit. It lay heavier upon her than Hedda’s or Yolande’s. It seemed to clog and burden her. With a violent effort she strove to shake herself free, and carry out her now fixed intention of self-immolation, for the safety of the tower. But the hand was too strong for her. She could not shake it off. It gripped and held her.

She yielded, and, reeling, fell back with a gasp on to the platform of the tower. At the selfsame moment a strange terror and commotion seemed to seize all at once on the assembled spirits. A weird cry rang voiceless through the shadowy company. Maisie heard it as in a dream, very dim and distant. It was thin as a bat’s note; almost inaudible to the ear, yet perceived by the brain or at least by the spirit. It was a cry of alarm, of fright, of warning. With one accord, all the host of phantoms rushed hurriedly forward to the battlements and pinnacles. The ghostly High Priest went first, with his wand held downward; the men in leopards’ skins and other assistants followed in confusion. Theirs was a reckless rout. They flung themselves from the top, like fugitives from a cliff, and floated fast through the air on invisible pinions. Hedda and Yolande, ambassadresses and intermediaries with the upper air, were the last to fly from the living presence. They clasped her hand silently, and looked deep into her eyes. There was something in that calm yet regretful look that seemed to say, “Farewell! We have tried in vain to save you, sister, from the terrors of living.”

The horde of spirits floated away on the air, as in a witches’ Sabbath, to the vault whence it issued. The doors swung on their rusty hinges, and closed behind them. Maisie stood alone with the hand that grasped her on the tower.

The shock of the grasp, and the sudden departure of the ghostly band in such wild dismay, threw Maisie for a while into a state of semi-unconsciousness. Her head reeled round; her brain swam faintly. She clutched for support at the parapet of the tower. But the hand that held her sustained her still. She felt herself gently drawn down with quiet mastery, and laid on the stone floor close by the trapdoor that led to the ladder.

The next thing of which she could feel sure was the voice of the Oxford undergraduate. He was distinctly frightened and not a little tremulous. “I think,” he said very softly, laying her head on his lap, “you had better rest a while, Miss Llewelyn, before you try to get down again. I hope I didn’t catch you and disturb you too hastily. But one step more, and you would have been over the edge. I really couldn’t help it.”

“Let me go,” Maisie moaned, trying to raise herself again, but feeling too faint and ill to make the necessary effort to recover the power of motion. “I want to go with them! I want to join them!”

“Some of the others will be up before long,” the undergraduate said, supporting her head in his hands; “and they’ll help me to get you down again. Mr. Yates is in the belfry. Meanwhile, if I were you, I’d lie quite still, and take a drop or two of this brandy.”

He held it to her lips. Maisie drank a mouthful, hardly knowing what she did. Then she lay quiet where he placed her for some minutes. How they lifted her down and conveyed her to her bed she scarcely knew. She was dazed and terrified. She could only remember afterward that three or four gentlemen in roughly huddled clothes had carried or handed her down the ladder between them. The spiral stair and all the rest were a blank to her.

VI

When she next awoke she was lying in her bed in the same room at the Hall, with Mrs. West by her side, leaning over her tenderly.

Maisie looked up through her closed eyes and just saw the motherly face and grey hair bending above her. Then voices came to her from the mist, vaguely: “Yesterday was so hot for the time of year, you see!”  “Very unusual weather, of course, for Christmas.”  “But a thunderstorm! So strange! I put it down to that. The electrical disturbance must have affected the poor child’s head.” Then it dawned upon her that the conversation she heard was passing between Mrs. West and a doctor.

She raised herself suddenly and wildly on her arms. The bed faced the windows. She looked out and beheld – the tower of Wolverden church, rent from top to bottom with a mighty rent, while half its height lay tossed in fragments on the ground in the churchyard.

“What is it?” she cried wildly, with a flush as of shame.

“Hush, hush!” the doctor said. “Don’t trouble! Don’t look at it!”

“Was it – after I came down?” Maisie moaned in vague terror.

The doctor nodded. “An hour after you were brought down,” he said, “a thunderstorm broke over it. The lightning struck and shattered the tower. They had not yet put up the lightning-conductor. It was to have been done on Boxing Day.”

A weird remorse possessed Maisie’s soul. “My fault!” she cried, starting up. “My fault, my fault! I have neglected my duty!”

“Don’t talk,” the doctor answered, looking hard at her. “It is always dangerous to be too suddenly aroused from these curious overwrought sleeps and trances.”

“And old Bessie?” Maisie exclaimed, trembling with an eerie presentiment.

The doctor glanced at Mrs. West. “How did she know?” he whispered. Then he turned to Maisie. “You may as well be told the truth as suspect it,” he said slowly. “Old Bessie must have been watching there. She was crushed and half buried beneath the falling tower.”

“One more question, Mrs. West,” Maisie murmured, growing faint with an access of supernatural fear. “Those two nice girls who sat on the chairs at each side of me through the tableaux – are they hurt? Were they in it?”

Mrs. West soothed her hand. “My dear child,” she said gravely, with quiet emphasis, “there were no other girls. This is mere hallucination. You sat alone by yourself through the whole of the evening.”

THE MOONLIT ROAD

Ambrose Bierce

1881

1: Statement of Joel Hetman, Jr.

I am the most unfortunate of men. Rich, respected, fairly well educated and of sound health – with many other advantages usually valued by those having them and coveted by those who have them not – I sometimes think that I should be less unhappy if they had been denied me, for then the contrast between my outer and my inner life would not be continually demanding a painful attention. In the stress of privation and the need of effort I might sometimes forget the sombre secret ever baffling the conjecture that it compels.

I am the only child of Joel and Julia Hetman. The one was a well-to-do country gentleman, the other a beautiful and accomplished woman to whom he was passionately attached with what I now know to have been a jealous and exacting devotion. The family home was a few miles from Nashville, Tennessee, a large, irregularly built dwelling of no particular order of architecture, a little way off the road, in a park of trees and shrubbery.

At the time of which I write I was nineteen years old, a student at Yale. One day I received a telegram from my father of such urgency that in compliance with its unexplained demand I left at once for home. At the railway station in Nashville a distant relative awaited me to apprise me of the reason for my recall: my mother had been barbarously murdered – why and by whom none could conjecture, but the circumstances were these.

My father had gone to Nashville, intending to return the next afternoon. Something prevented his accomplishing the business in hand, so he returned on the same night, arriving just before the dawn. In his testimony before the coroner he explained that having no latchkey and not caring to disturb the sleeping servants, he had, with no clearly defined intention, gone round to the rear of the house. As he turned an angle of the building, he heard a sound as of a door gently closed, and saw in the darkness, indistinctly, the figure of a man, which instantly disappeared among the trees of the lawn. A hasty pursuit and brief search of the grounds in the belief that the trespasser was someone secretly visiting a servant proving fruitless, he entered at the unlocked door and mounted the stairs to my mother’s chamber. Its door was open, and stepping into black darkness he fell headlong over some heavy object on the floor. I may spare myself the details; it was my poor mother, dead of strangulation by human hands!

Nothing had been taken from the house, the servants had heard no sound, and excepting those terrible finger-marks upon the dead woman’s throat – dear God! that I might forget them! – no trace of the assassin was ever found.

I gave up my studies and remained with my father, who, naturally, was greatly changed. Always of a sedate, taciturn disposition, he now fell into so deep a dejection that nothing could hold his attention, yet anything – a footfall, the sudden closing of a door – aroused in him a fitful interest; one might have called it an apprehension. At any small surprise of the senses he would start visibly and sometimes turn pale, then relapse into a melancholy apathy deeper than before. I suppose he was what is called a ‘nervous wreck.’ As to me, I was younger then than now – there is much in that. Youth is Gilead, in which is balm for every wound. Ah, that I might again dwell in that enchanted land! Unacquainted with grief, I knew not how to appraise my bereavement; I could not rightly estimate the strength of the stroke.

One night, a few months after the dreadful event, my father and I walked home from the city. The full moon was about three hours above the eastern horizon; the entire countryside had the solemn stillness of a summer night; our footfalls and the ceaseless song of the katydids were the only sound, aloof. Black shadows of bordering trees lay athwart the road, which, in the short reaches between, gleamed a ghostly white. As we approached the gate to our dwelling, whose front was in shadow, and in which no light shone, my father suddenly stopped and clutched my arm, saying, hardly above his breath:

“God! God! What is that?”

“I hear nothing,” I replied.

“But see – see!” he said, pointing along the road, directly ahead.

I said: “Nothing is there. Come, father, let us go in – you are ill.”

He had released my arm and was standing rigid and motionless in the centre of the illuminated roadway, staring like one bereft of sense. His face in the moonlight showed a pallor and fixity inexpressibly distressing. I pulled gently at his sleeve, but he had forgotten my existence. Presently he began to retire backward, step by step, never for an instant removing his eyes from what he saw, or thought he saw. I turned half round to follow, but stood irresolute. I do not recall any feeling of fear, unless a sudden chill was its physical manifestation. It seemed as if an icy wind had touched my face and enfolded my body from head to foot; I could feel the stir of it in my hair.

At that moment my attention was drawn to a light that suddenly streamed from an upper window of the house: one of the servants, awakened by what mysterious premonition of evil who can say, and in obedience to an impulse that she was never able to name, had lit a lamp. When I turned to look for my father he was gone, and in all the years that have passed no whisper of his fate has come across the borderland of conjecture from the realm of the unknown.

2: Statement of Caspar Grattan

Today I am said to live, tomorrow, here in this room, will lie a senseless shape of clay that all too long was I. If anyone lift the cloth from the face of that unpleasant thing it will be in gratification of a mere morbid curiosity. Some, doubtless, will go further and inquire, “Who was he?”’ In this writing I supply the only answer that I am able to make – Caspar Grattan. Surely, that should be enough. The name has served my small need for more than twenty years of a life of unknown length. True, I gave it to myself, but lacking another I had the right. In this world one must have a name; it prevents confusion, even when it does not establish identity. Some, though, are known by numbers, which also seem inadequate distinctions.

One day, for illustration, I was passing along a street of a city, far from here, when I met two men in uniform, one of whom, half pausing and looking curiously into my face, said to his companion, “That man looks like 767.” Something in the number seemed familiar and horrible. Moved by an uncontrollable impulse, I sprang into a side street and ran until I fell exhausted in a country lane.

I have never forgotten that number, and always it comes to memory attended by gibbering obscenity, peals of joyless laughter, the clang of iron doors. So I say a name, even if self-bestowed, is better than a number. In the register of the potter’s field I shall soon have both. What wealth!

Of him who shall find this paper I must beg a little consideration. It is not the history of my life; the knowledge to write that is denied me. This is only a record of broken and apparently unrelated memories, some of them as distinct and sequent as brilliant beads upon a thread, others remote and strange, having the character of crimson dreams with interspaces blank and black – witch-fires glowing still and red in a great desolation.

Standing upon the shore of eternity, I turn for a last look landward over the course by which I came. There are twenty years of footprints fairly distinct, the impressions of bleeding feet. They lead through poverty and pain, devious and unsure, as of one staggering beneath a burden—

Remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow.

Ah, the poet’s prophecy of Me – how admirable, how dreadfully admirable!

Backward beyond the beginning of this via dolorosa – this epic of suffering with episodes of sin – I see nothing clearly; it comes out of a cloud. I know that it spans only twenty years, yet I am an old man.

One does not remember one’s birth – one has to be told. But with me it was different; life came to me full-handed and dowered me with all my faculties and powers. Of a previous existence I know no more than others, for all have stammering intimations that may be memories and may be dreams. I know only that my first consciousness was of maturity in body and mind – a consciousness accepted without surprise or conjecture. I merely found myself walking in a forest, half-clad, footsore, unutterably weary and hungry. Seeing a farmhouse, I approached and asked for food, which was given me by one who inquired my name. I did not know, yet knew that all had names. Greatly embarrassed, I retreated, and night coming on, lay down in the forest and slept.

The next day I entered a large town which I shall not name. Nor shall I recount further incidents of the life that is now to end – a life of wandering, always and everywhere haunted by an overmastering sense of crime in punishment of wrong and of terror in punishment of crime. Let me see if I can reduce it to narrative.

I seem once to have lived near a great city, a prosperous planter, married to a woman whom I loved and distrusted. We had, it sometimes seems, one child, a youth of brilliant parts and promise. He is at all times a vague figure, never clearly drawn, frequently altogether out of the picture.

One luckless evening it occurred to me to test my wife’s fidelity in a vulgar, commonplace way familiar to everyone who has acquaintance with the literature of fact and fiction. I went to the city, telling my wife that I should be absent until the following afternoon. But I returned before daybreak and went to the rear of the house, purposing to enter by a door with which I had secretly so tampered that it would seem to lock, yet not actually fasten. As I approached it, I heard it gently open and close, and saw a man steal away into the darkness. With murder in my heart, I sprang after him, but he had vanished without even the bad luck of identification. Sometimes now I cannot even persuade myself that it was a human being.

Crazed with jealousy and rage, blind and bestial with all the elemental passions of insulted manhood, I entered the house and sprang up the stairs to the door of my wife’s chamber. It was closed, but having tampered with its lock also, I easily entered, and despite the black darkness soon stood by the side of her bed. My groping hands told me that although disarranged it was unoccupied.

“She is below,” I thought, “and terrified by my entrance has evaded me in the darkness of the hall.” With the purpose of seeking her I turned to leave the room, but took a wrong direction – the right one! My foot struck her, cowering in a corner of the room. Instantly my hands were at her throat, stifling a shriek, my knees were upon her struggling body; and there in the darkness, without a word of accusation or reproach, I strangled her till she died! There ends the dream. I have related it in the past tense, but the present would be the fitter form, for again and again the sombre tragedy re-enacts itself in my consciousness – over and over I lay the plan, I suffer the confirmation, I redress the wrong. Then all is blank; and afterward the rains beat against the grimy windowpanes, or the snows fall upon my scant attire, the wheels rattle in the squalid streets where my life lies in poverty and mean employment. If there is ever sunshine I do not recall it; if there are birds they do not sing.

There is another dream, another vision of the night. I stand among the shadows in a moonlit road. I am aware of another presence, but whose I cannot rightly determine. In the shadow of a great dwelling I catch the gleam of white garments; then the figure of a woman confronts me in the road – my murdered wife! There is death in the face; there are marks upon the throat. The eyes are fixed on mine with an infinite gravity which is not reproach, nor hate, nor menace, nor anything less terrible than recognition. Before this awful apparition I retreat in terror – a terror that is upon me as I write. I can no longer rightly shape the words. See! They—

Now I am calm, but truly there is no more to tell: the incident ends where it began – in darkness and in doubt.

Yes, I am again in control of myself: “the captain of my soul.”’ But that is not respite; it is another stage and phase of expiation. My penance, constant in degree, is mutable in kind: one of its variants is tranquility. After all, it is only a life-sentence. “To Hell for life” – that is a foolish penalty: the culprit chooses the duration of his punishment. Today my term expires.

To each and all, the peace that was not mine.

3: Statement of the Late Julia Hetman, through the Medium Bayrolles

I had retired early and fallen almost immediately into a peaceful sleep, from which I awoke with that indefinable sense of peril which is, I think, a common experience in that other, earlier life. Of its unmeaning character, too, I was entirely persuaded, yet that did not banish it. My husband, Joel Hetman, was away from home; the servants slept in another part of the house. But these were familiar conditions; they had never before distressed me. Nevertheless, the strange terror grew so insupportable that conquering my reluctance to move I sat up and lit the lamp at my bedside. Contrary to my expectation this gave me no relief; the light seemed rather an added danger, for I reflected that it would shine out under the door, disclosing my presence to whatever evil thing might lurk outside. You that are still in the flesh, subject to horrors of the imagination, think what a monstrous fear that must be which seeks in darkness security from malevolent existences of the night. That is to spring to close quarters with an unseen enemy – the strategy of despair!

Extinguishing the lamp I pulled the bed-clothing about my head and lay trembling and silent, unable to shriek, forgetful to pray. In this pitiable state I must have lain for what you call hours – with us there are no hours, there is no time.

At last it came – a soft, irregular sound of footfalls on the stairs! They were slow, hesitant, uncertain, as of something that did not see its way; to my disordered reason all the more terrifying for that, as the approach of some blind and mindless malevolence to which is no appeal. I even thought that I must have left the hall lamp burning and the groping of this creature proved it a monster of the night. This was foolish and inconsistent with my previous dread of the light, but what would you have? Fear has no brains; it is an idiot. The dismal witness that it bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers are unrelated. We know this well, we who have passed into the Realm of Terror, who skulk in eternal dusk among the scenes of our former lives, invisible even to ourselves, and one another, yet hiding forlorn in lonely places; yearning for speech with our loved ones, yet dumb, and as fearful of them as they of us. Sometimes the disability is removed, the law suspended: by the deathless power of love or hate we break the spell – we are seen by those whom we would warn, console, or punish. What form we seem to them to bear we know not; we know only that we terrify even those whom we most wish to comfort, and from whom we most crave tenderness and sympathy.

Forgive, I pray you, this inconsequent digression by what was once a woman. You who consult us in this imperfect way – you do not understand. You ask foolish questions about things unknown and things forbidden. Much that we know and could impart in our speech is meaningless in yours. We must communicate with you through a stammering intelligence in that small fraction of our language that you yourselves can speak. You think that we are of another world. No, we have knowledge of no world but yours, though for us it holds no sunlight, no warmth, no music, no laughter, no song of birds, nor any companionship. O God! What a thing it is to be a ghost, cowering and shivering in an altered world, a prey to apprehension and despair!

No, I did not die of fright: the Thing turned and went away. I heard it go down the stairs, hurriedly, I thought, as if itself in sudden fear. Then I rose to call for help. Hardly had my shaking hand found the doorknob when – merciful heaven! – I heard it returning. Its footfalls as it remounted the stairs were rapid, heavy and loud; they shook the house. I fled to an angle of the wall and crouched upon the floor. I tried to pray. I tried to call the name of my dear husband. Then I heard the door thrown open. There was an interval of unconsciousness, and when I revived I felt a strangling clutch upon my throat – felt my arms feebly beating against something that bore me backward – felt my tongue thrusting itself from between my teeth! And then I passed into this life.

No, I have no knowledge of what it was. The sum of what we knew at death is the measure of what we know afterward of all that went before. Of this existence we know many things, but no new light falls upon any page of that; in memory is written all of it that we can read. Here are no heights of truth overlooking the confused landscape of that dubitable domain. We still dwell in the Valley of the Shadow, lurk in its desolate places, peering from brambles and thickets at its mad, malign inhabitants. How should we have new knowledge of that fading past?

What I am about to relate happened on a night. We know when it is night, for then you retire to your houses and we can venture from our places of concealment to move unafraid about our old homes, to look in at the windows, even to enter and gaze upon your faces as you sleep. I had lingered long near the dwelling where I had been so cruelly changed to what I am, as we do while any that we love or hate remain. Vainly I had sought some method of manifestation, some way to make my continued existence and my great love and poignant pity understood by my husband and son. Always if they slept they would wake, or if in my desperation I dared approach them when they were awake, would turn toward me the terrible eyes of the living, frightening me by the glances that I sought from the purpose that I held.

On this night I had searched for them without success, fearing to find them; they were nowhere in the house, nor about the moonlit dawn. For, although the sun is lost to us forever, the moon, full-orbed or slender, remains to us. Sometimes it shines by night, sometimes by day, but always it rises and sets, as in that other life.

I left the lawn and moved in the white light and silence along the road, aimless and sorrowing. Suddenly I heard the voice of my poor husband in exclamations of astonishment, with that of my son in reassurance and dissuasion; and there by the shadow of a group of trees they stood – near, so near! Their faces were toward me, the eyes of the elder man fixed upon mine. He saw me – at last, at last, he saw me! In the consciousness of that, my terror fled as a cruel dream. The death-spell was broken: Love had conquered Law! Mad with exultation I shouted – I must have shouted, “He sees, he sees: he will understand!” Then, controlling myself, I moved forward, smiling and consciously beautiful, to offer myself to his arms, to comfort him with endearments, and, with my son’s hand in mine, to speak words that should restore the broken bonds between the living and the dead.

Alas! Alas! His face went white with fear, his eyes were as those of a hunted animal. He backed away from me, as I advanced, and at last turned and fled into the wood – whither, it is not given to me to know.

To my poor boy, left doubly desolate, I have never been able to impart a sense of my presence. Soon he, too, must pass to this Life Invisible and be lost to me forever.

THE WALTZ

Morris W. Gowen

1913

Toward the end of May, high up in an attic room of a tumble-down house in Paris, a young man stood at the open window. He held a violin and a bow. The last colors of a glorious sunset were fading away into night over the skyline of chimneys and black roofs.

The room was littered by what was left of the musician’s worldly goods – very few, for that day a sale had taken place of his poor effects to satisfy the landlord’s demand for rent. All that remained were a few sheets of manuscript-music, a bed, a chair, and some cooking utensils.

It was the end of hope, ambition, of all – complete failure having met the composer’s efforts.

His face showed plainly his suffering for the past month or so. Thin, so as to be only skin and bone, it was of a terrible paleness.

Only his eyes had fire in them. They were awful to see.

His left hand grasped the neck of the violin tightly, and his eyes wandered about the bare room.

Then, as the sky darkened, the first breath of summer crept in at the window. A warm south breeze so soft as to be barely felt, but bringing with it the first tidings of brighter days to those who had felt the long winter’s cold. It was the forewarner of gladness and sunshine.

Unheedingly, the young man lifted the violin to his chin, and his right hand crossed the bow over the strings. He hesitated a minute; then cast a look at the sky, and with a bold sweep of the bow began to play.

It was a waltz, throbbing with passion, full and harmonious. The sad notes of the bass strings in a minor key followed each other to the time, crying sadly like the lament of a lost soul far away.

Ever changing in melody, the waltz carried in it the first four thrilling notes. They crossed, repeated; retreated, and returned.

The first breath of summer caught these notes, carried them out of the attic window over the smoky roofs of Paris, held them, played with them, sent them to the wondering ears of other poor people who lived in attics and in lodgings near by. Women stopped sewing. Children ceased playing. Men dropped their forks and, leaving their evening’s meal, crept on tiptoe to the open windows and listened.

Suddenly the music grew louder, more intense, and the time quickened to madness. Then four long-drawn notes, the same as at the beginning, rang out, and – silence fell.

As the last note was sounded the composer fell dead from the intense effort and the past months of starvation.

The little summer breeze carried with it his grand composition and his soul.

•   •   •   •   •

A man sat in an office before a richly carved desk. He was a plain-looking business man, fat, in a white waistcoat. Before him on the desk lay much money.

His fat hands, sparkling with valuable rings, gathered up the crisp notes and slipped them into rubber bands, assembling them into packets of ten-thousands. He then got up and carried these packets to a large safe set into the wall of the office, placed them in a drawer, and locked the safe, sighing when he had done, like a person does after lifting a heavy weight.

He then switched on the light and threw open the big office window, looking out onto a busy square filled by hurrying people and vehicles.

He stood at the window some minutes, following with his cunning small eyes the figure of a smart little woman whose figure interested him. As he tried to keep her in sight while she crossed the square the summer breeze crept into the office, touching his cheek with its warm caress.

It held music in its impalpable vapor – that heartrending waltz with its deep chords and simple harmony leading up to the fantastic finale, infernal in its throbbing recklessness and the four simple notes of its sudden ending.

The banker drew his handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow, his hand trembling. A chill passed over him.

He hastily closed the window and then sank into a chair. He felt unnerved and weak. His eyes wandered about the office in a troubled way. He grasped the arms of the chair tightly as his gaze became fixed in the direction of the locked safe.

As he did so, the music again caught his ear, holding him breathless in his eagerness not to miss a single note.

The music had full possession of him. It held him in its cruelly irresistible power while, standing before the safe, he saw a poorly clad figure holding a violin to its chin, its pale face looking upward, its right arm swinging the bow.

The figure was no ghost in the banker’s eyes. To him it lived. He could see the bow swing back and forth, and his left foot beat time almost imperceptibly.

He saw the aristocratic profile of the player, as clearly cut as a cameo. The neck and profile brought a vague, far-off memory to the banker.

He was young again. Very young, at his father’s country-place. In his mind he saw the old trees, the lawns, and moonlight nights of June. He saw Lucille, the farmer’s daughter, as she crept in her pretty, bare, white feet over the moonlit grass to meet him under the shadow of the oaks.

He remembered his father’s anger, the hurried departure, the long sea voyage to foreign lands. The return, and the news of Lucille’s trouble and death.

As the music got hold of his heart, these visions became so clear that while the violin sighed, he lived again all that summer of love and passion.

He rose to his feet, trembling; for in that white neck and pure profile he recognized his own flesh and blood.

The waltz was drawing near the end.

As the last four notes filled the office with their magic harmony, the banker held his arms out toward the figure and cried, his voice full of longing:

“Speak! Speak! My son!”

But it was too late.

As the last note left the ghostly violin, the figure of the player vanished.

THE SUMACH

Ulric Daubeny

1919

“How red that Sumach is!”

Irene Barton murmured something commonplace, for to her the tree brought painful recollections. Her visitor, unconscious of this fact, proceeded to elaborate.

“Do you know, Irene, that tree gives me the creeps! I can’t explain, except that it is not a nice tree, not a good tree. For instance, why should its leaves be red in August, when they are not supposed to turn until October?”

“What queer ideas you have, May! The tree is right enough, although its significance to me is sad. Poor Spot, you know; we buried him beneath it two days ago. Come and see his grave.”

The two women left the terrace, where this conversation had been taking place, and leisurely strolled across the lawn, at the end of which, in almost startling isolation, grew the Sumach. At least, Mrs Watcombe, who evinced so great an interest in the tree, questioned whether it actually was a Sumach, for the foliage was unusual, and the branches gnarled and twisted beyond recognition. Just now, the leaves were stained with splashes of dull crimson, but rather than droop, they had a bloated appearance, as if the luxuriance of the growth were not altogether healthy.

For several moments they stood regarding the pathetic little grave, and the silence was only broken when Mrs Watcombe darted beneath the tree, and came back with something in her hand.

“Irene, look at this dead thrush. Poor little thing! Such splendid plumage, yet it hardly weighs a sugar plum!”

Mrs Barton regarded it with wrinkled brows.

“I cannot understand what happens to the birds, May – unless someone lays poison. We continually find them dead about the garden, and usually beneath, or very near this tree.”

It is doubtful whether Mrs Watcombe listened. Her attention seemed to wander that morning, and she was studying the twisted branches of the Sumach with a thoughtful scrutiny.

“Curious that the leaves should turn at this time of year,” she murmured. “It brings to mind poor Geraldine’s illness. This tree had an extraordinary fascination for her, you know. It was quite scarlet then, yet that was only June, and it had barely finished shooting.”

“My dear May! You have red leaves on the brain this morning!” Irene retorted, uncertain whether to be irritated or amused. “I can’t think why you are so concerned about the colour. It is only the result of two days’ excessive heat, for scarcely a leaf was touched, when I buried poor old Spot.”

The conversation seemed absurdly trivial, yet, Mrs Watcombe gone, Irene could not keep her mind from dwelling on her cousin’s fatal illness. The news had reached them with the shock of the absolutely unexpected. Poor Geraldine, who had always been so strong, to have fallen victim to acute anaemia! It was almost unbelievable, that heart failure should have put an an end to her sweet young life, after a few days’ ailing. Of course, the sad event had wrought a wonderful change for Irene and her husband, giving them, in place of a cramped suburban villa, this beautiful country home, Cleeve Grange. Everything for her was filled with the delight of novelty, for she had ruled as mistress over the charmed abode for only one short week. Hilary, her husband, was yet a stranger to the more intimate of its attractions, being detained in London by the winding-up of business affairs.

Several days elapsed, for the most part given solely to the keen pleasure of arranging and re-arranging the new home. As time went by, the crimson splashes on the Sumach faded, the leaves becoming green again, though drooping as if from want of moisture. Irene noticed this when she paid her daily visits to the pathetic little dog grave, trying to induce flowers to take root upon it, but do what she might, they invariably faded. Nothing, not even grass, would grow beneath the Sumach. Only death seemed to thrive there, she mused in a fleeting moment of depression, as she searched around for more dead birds. But none had fallen since the thrush, picked up by Mrs Watcombe.

One evening, the heat inside the house becoming insupportable, Irene wandered into the garden, her steps mechanically leading her to the little grave beneath the Sumach. In the uncertain moonlight, the twisted trunk and branches of the old tree were suggestive of a rustic seat, and feeling tired, she lifted herself into the natural bower, and lolled back, joyously inhaling the cool night air. Presently she dropped asleep, and in a curiously vivid manner, dreamt of Hilary; that he had completed his business in London, and was coming home. They met at evening, near the garden gate, and Hilary spread wide his arms, and eagerly folded them about her. Swiftly the dream began to change, assuming the characteristic of a nightmare. The sky grew strangely dark, the arms fiercely masterful, while the face which bent to kiss her neck was not that of her young husband: it was leering, wicked, gnarled like the trunk of some weather-beaten tree. Chilled with horror, Irene fought long and desperately against the vision, to be at last awakened by her own frightened whimpering. Yet returning consciousness did not immediately dissipate the nightmare. In imagination she was still held rigid by brutal arms, and it was only after a blind, half-waking struggle that she freed herself, and went speeding across the lawn, towards the lighted doorway.

Next morning Mrs Watcombe called, and subjected her to a puzzled scrutiny.

“How pale you look Irene. Do you feel ill?”

“Ill! No, only a little languid. I find this hot weather very trying.”

Mrs Watcombe studied her with care, for the pallor of Irene’s face was very marked. In contrast, a vivid spot of red showed on the slender neck, an inch or so below the ear. Intuitively a hand went up, as Irene turned to her friend in explanation.

“It feels so sore. I think I must have grazed the skin, last night, while sitting in the Sumach.”

“Sitting in the Sumach!” echoed Mrs Watcombe in surprise. “How curious you should do that. Poor Geraldine used to do the same, just before she was taken ill, and yet at the last she was seized with a perfect horror of the tree. Goodness, but it is quite red again, this morning!”

Irene swung round in the direction of the tree, filled with a vague repugnance. Sure enough, the leaves no longer drooped, nor were they green. They had become flecked once more with crimson, and the growth had quite regained its former vigour.

“Eugh!” she breathed, hurriedly turning towards the house. “It reminds me of a horrid nightmare. I have rather a head this morning; let’s go in, and talk of something else!”

As the day advanced, the heat grew more oppressive, and night brought with it a curious stillness, the stillness which so often presages a heavy thunderstorm. No bird had offered up its evening hymn, no breeze came sufficient to stir a single leaf: everything was pervaded by the silence of expectancy.

The interval between dinner and bedtime is always a dreary one for those accustomed to companionship, and left all alone, Irene’s restlessness momentarily increased. First the ceiling, then the very atmosphere seemed to weigh heavy upon her head. Although windows and doors were all flung wide, the airlessness of the house grew less and less endurable, until from sheer desperation she made her escape into the garden, where a sudden illumination of the horizon gave warning of the approaching storm. Feeling somewhat at a loss, she roamed aimlessly awhile, pausing sometimes to catch the echoes of distant thunder, until at last she found herself standing over Spot’s desolate little grave. The sight struck her with a sense of utter loneliness, and the tears sprang to her eyes, in poignant longing for the companionship of her faithful pet.

Moved by she knew not what, Irene swung herself into the comfortable branches of the old Sumach, and soothed by the reposeful attitude, her head soon began to nod in slumber. Afterwards it was a doubtful memory whether she actually did sleep, or whether the whole experience was not a kind of waking nightmare. Something of the previous evening’s dream returned to her, but this time with added horror; for it commenced with no pleasurable vision of her husband. Instead, relentless, stick-like arms immediately closed in upon her, their vice-like grip so tight that she could scarcely breathe. Down darted the awful head, rugged and lined by every sin, darting at the fair, white neck as a wild beast on its prey. The foul lips began to eat into her skin.… She struggled desperately, madly, for to her swooning senses the very branches of the tree became endowed with active life, coiling unmercifully around her, tenaciously clinging to her limbs, and tearing at her dress. Pain at last spurred her to an heroic effort, the pain of something – perhaps a twig – digging deep into her unprotected neck. With a choking cry she freed herself, and nerved by a sudden burst of thunder, ran tottering towards the shelter of the house.

Having gained the cosy lounge-hall, Irene sank into an armchair, gasping hysterically for breath. Gusts of refreshing wind came through the open windows, but although the atmosphere rapidly grew less stagnant, an hour passed before she could make sufficient effort to crawl upstairs to bed. In her room, a further shock awaited her. The bloodless, drawn face reflected in the mirror was scarcely recognizable. The eyes lacked lustre, the lips were white, the skin hung flabby on the shrunken flesh, giving it a look of premature old age. A tiny trickle of dry blood, the solitary smudge of colour, stained the chalky pallor of her neck. Taking up a hand-glass, she examined this with momentary concern. It was the old wound reopened, an angry-looking sore, almost like the bite of some small, or very sharp-toothed animal. It smarted painfully.…

Mrs Watcombe, bursting into the breakfast room next morning, with suggestions of an expedition to the neighbouring town, was shocked at Irene’s looks, and insisted on going at once to fetch the doctor. Mrs Watcombe fussed continually throughout the interview, and insisted on an examination of the scar upon Irene’s neck. Patient and doctor had regarded this as a negligible detail, but finally the latter subjected it to a slightly puzzled scrutiny, advising that it should be kept bandaged. He suggested that Irene was suffering from anaemia, and would do well to keep as quiet as possible, building up her strength with food, open windows and a general selection of pills and tonics. But despite these comforting arrangements, no one was entirely satisfied. The doctor lacked something in assurance, Irene was certain that she could not really be anaemic, while Mrs Watcombe was obsessed by inward misgivings, perfectly indefinable, yet none the less disturbing. She left the house as a woman bent under a load of care. Passing up the lane, her glance lighted on the old Sumach, more crimson now, more flourishing in its growth than she had seen it since the time of Geraldine’s fatal illness.

“I loathe that horrid old tree!” she murmured, then added, struck by a nameless premonition, “Her husband ought to know. I shall wire to him at once.”

Irene, womanlike, put to use her enforced idleness, by instituting a rearrangement of the box-room, the only part of her new home which yet remained unexplored. Among the odds and ends of the rubbish to be thrown away, there was a little notebook, apparently unused. In idle curiosity, Irene picked it up, and was surprised to learn, from an inscription, that her cousin Geraldine had intended to use it as a diary. A date appeared – only a few days prior to the poor girl’s death – but no entries had been made, though the first two pages of the book had certainly been removed. As Irene put it down, there fluttered to the ground a torn scrap of writing. She stooped, and continued stooping, breathlessly staring at the words that had been written by her cousin’s hand – Sumach fascinates m—

In some unaccountable manner this applied to her. It was obvious what tree was meant, the old Sumach at the end of the lawn; and it fascinated her, Irene, though not until that moment had she openly recognized the fact. Searching hurriedly through the notebook, she discovered, near the end, a heap of torn paper, evidently the first two pages of a diary. She turned the pieces in eager haste. Most of them bore no more than one short word, or portions of a longer one, but a few bigger fragments proved more enlightening, and filled with nervous apprehension, she carried the book to her escritoire, and spent the remainder of the afternoon in trying to piece together the torn-up pages.

Meanwhile, Mrs Watcombe was worrying and fretting over Irene’s unexpected illness. Her pallor, her listlessness, even the curious mark upon her neck, gave cause for positive alarm, so exactly did they correspond with symptoms exhibited by her cousin Geraldine, during the few days prior to her death. She wished that the village doctor, who had attended the earlier case, would return soon from his holiday, as his locum tenens seemed sadly wanting in that authoritative decision which is so consoling to patients, relatives, and friends. Feeling, as an old friend, responsible for the welfare of Irene, she wired to Hilary, telling him of the sudden illness, and advising him to return without delay.

The urgency of the telegram alarmed him, so much so that he left London by the next train, arriving at Cleeve Grange shortly after dark.

“Where is your mistress?” was his first enquiry, as the maid met him in the hall.

“Upstairs, Sir. She complained of feeling tired, and said she would go to bed.”

He hurried to her room, only to find it empty. He called, he rang for the servants; in a moment the whole house was astir, yet nowhere was Irene to be found. Deeming it possible that she might have gone to see Mrs Watcombe, Hilary was about to follow, when that lady herself was ushered in.

“I saw the lights of your cab—” she commenced, cutting short the sentence, as she met his questioning glance.

“Where is Irene?”

“Irene? My dear Hilary, is she not here?”

“No. We can’t find her anywhere. I thought she might have been with you.”

For the space of half a second, Mrs Watcombe’s face presented a picture of astonishment; then the expression changed to one of dismayed concern.

“She is in that tree! I’m certain of it! Hilary, we must fetch her in at once!”

Completely at a loss to understand, he followed the excited woman into the garden, stumbling blindly in her wake across the lawn. The darkness was intense, and a terrific wind beat them back as if with living hands. Irene’s white dress at length became discernible, dimly thrown up against the pitchy background, and obscured in places by the twists and coils of the old Sumach. Between them they grasped the sleeping body, but the branches swung wildly in the gale, and to Hilary’s confused imagination it was as if they had literally to tear it from the tree’s embrace. At last they regained the shelter of the house, and laid their inanimate burden upon the sofa. She was quite unconscious, pale as death, and her face painfully contorted, as if with fear. The old wound on the neck, now bereft of bandages, had been reopened, and was wet with blood.

Hilary rushed off to fetch the doctor, while Mrs Watcombe and the servants carried Irene to her room. Several hours passed before she recovered consciousness, and during that time Hilary was gently but firmly excluded from the sickroom. Bewildered and disconsolate, he wandered restlessly about the house, until his attention was arrested by the unusual array of torn-up bits of paper on Irene’s desk. He saw that she had been sorting out the pieces, and sticking them together as the sentences became complete. The work was barely half finished, yet what there was to read, struck him as exceedingly strange:

The seat in the old Sumach fascinates me. I find myself going back to it unconsciously, nay, even against my will. Oh, but the nightmare visions it always brings me! In them I seem to plumb the very depths of terror. Their memory preys upon my mind, and every day my strength grows less.

Dr H. speaks of anaemia.…

That was as far as Irene had proceeded. Hardly knowing why he did so, Hilary resolved to complete the task, but the chill of early morning was in the air before it was finished. Cramped and stiff, he was pushing back his chair when a footstep sounded in the doorway, and Mrs Watcombe entered.

“Irene is better,” she volunteered immediately. “She is sleeping naturally, and Doctor Thomson says there is no longer any immediate danger. The poor child is terribly weak and bloodless.”

“May – tell me – what is the meaning of all this? Why has Irene suddenly become so ill? I can’t understand it!”

Mrs Watcombe’s face was preternaturally grave.

“Even the doctor admits that he is puzzled,” she answered very quietly. “The symptoms all point to a sudden and excessive loss of blood, though in cases of acute anaemia—”

“God! But – not like Geraldine? I can’t believe it!”

“Neither can I. Oh, Hilary, you may think me mad, but I can’t help feeling that there is some unknown, some awful influence at work. Irene was perfectly well three days ago, and it was the same with Geraldine before she was taken ill. The cases are so exactly similar

Irene was trying to tell me something about a diary, but the poor girl was too exhausted to make herself properly understood.”

“Diary? Geraldine’s diary, do you think? She must mean that. I have just finished piecing it together, but frankly, I can’t make head or tail of it!”

Mrs Watcombe rapidly scanned the writing, then studied it again with greater care. Finally she read the second part aloud.

“Listen, Hilary! This seems to me important.”

Dr H. speaks of anaemia. Pray heaven, he may be correct, for my thoughts sometimes move in a direction which foreshadows nothing short of lunacy – or so people would tell me, if I could bring myself to confide these things. I must fight alone, clinging to the knowledge that it is usual for anaemic persons to be obsessed by unhealthy fancies. If only I had not read those horribly suggestive words in Barrett …

“Barrett? What can she mean, May?”

“Wait a moment. Barrett? Barrett’s Traditions of the County, perhaps. I have noticed a copy in the library. Let us go there; it may give the clue!”

The book was quickly found, and a marker indicated the passage to which Geraldine apparently referred.

At Cleeve, I was reminded of another of those traditions, so rapidly disappearing before the spread of education. It concerned the old belief in vampires, spirits of the evil dead, who by night, could assume a human form, and scour the countryside in search of victims. Suspected vampires, if caught, were buried with the mouth stuffed full of garlic, and a stake plunged through the heart, whereby they were rendered harmless, or, at least, confined to that one particular locality.

Some thirty years ago, an old man pointed out a tree which was said to have grown from such a stake. So far as I can recollect, it was an unusual variety of Sumach, and had been enclosed during a recent extension to the garden of the old Grange …

“Come outside,” said Mrs Watcombe, breaking a long and solemn silence. “I want you to see that tree.”

The sky was suffused with the blush of early dawn, and the shrubs, the flowers, even the dew upon the grass caught and reflected something of the pink effulgence. The Sumach alone stood out, dark and menacing. During the night its leaves had become a hideous, mottled purple; its growth was oily, bloated, unnaturally vigorous, like that of some rank and poisonous weed.

Mrs Watcombe, looking from afar, spoke in frightened, husky tones.

“See, Hilary! It was exactly like that when – when Geraldine died!”

•   •   •   •   •

When evening fell, the end of the lawn was strangely bare. In place of the old tree, there lay an enormous heap of smouldering embers – enormous, because the Sumach had been too sodden with dark and sticky sap, to burn without the assistance of large quantities of other timber.

Many weeks elapsed before Irene was sufficiently recovered to walk as far as Spot’s little grave. She was surprised to find it almost hidden in a bed of garlic.

Hilary explained that it was the only plant they could induce to grow there.