A Book of Ghosts: 24
Author: Various authors
Date: 1870-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Ghost Stories; Supernatural Fiction; Weird Fiction; Horror
Description: A collection of ten stories of the uncanny and the macabre by various anonymous 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
– 24 –

THINGS THAT GO BUMP
IN THE NIGHT

MobileRead Edition
2021

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

Contents were originally published 1871 ~ 1910. This book is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less.

CONTENTS:

- In the Confessional
– 1871
by Amelia B. Edwards
(1831–1892)

- At Chrighton Abbey
– 1871
by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
(1835–1915)

- Vera
– 1874
by Villiers de L’Isle-Adam
(1838–1889)
translation by Hamish Miles
(1894–1937)

- Number Two, Melrose Square
– 1879
by Theo Gift
(Dora Havers)
(1847–1923)

- A Lost Day
– 1891
by Edgar Fawcett
(1847–1904)

- The Seventh Man
– 1900
by A.T. Quiller-Couch
(1863–1944)

- The Man Who Went Too Far
– 1904
by E.F. Benson
(1867–1940)

- The House of the Nightmare
– 1906
by Edward Lucas White
(1866–1934)

- The Eyes
– 1910
by Edith Wharton
(1862–1937)

- The Grove of Ashtaroth
– 1910
by John Buchan
(1875–1940)

IN THE CONFESSIONAL

Amelia B. Edwards

1871

The things of which I write befell — let me see, some fifteen or eighteen years ago. I was not young then; I am not old now. Perhaps I was about thirty-two; but I do not know my age very exactly, and I cannot be certain to a year or two one way or the other.

My manner of life at that time was desultory and unsettled. I had a sorrow — no matter of what kind — and I took to rambling about Europe; not certainly in the hope of forgetting it, for I had no wish to forget, but because of the restlessness that made one place after another triste and intolerable to me.

It was change of place, however, and not excitement, that I sought. I kept almost entirely aloof from great cities, Spas, and beaten tracks, and preferred for the most part to explore districts where travellers and foreigners rarely penetrated.

Such a district at that time was the Upper Rhine. I was traversing it that particular summer for the first time, and on foot; and I had set myself to trace the course of the river from its source in the great Rhine glacier to its fall at Schaffhausen. Having done this, however, I was unwilling to part company with the noble river; so I decided to follow it yet a few miles further — perhaps as far as Mayence, but at all events as far as Basle.

And now began, if not the finest, certainly not the least charming part of my journey. Here, it is true, were neither Alps nor glaciers, nor ruined castles perched on inaccessible crags; but my way lay through a smiling country, studded with picturesque hamlets, and beside a bright river, hurrying along over swirling rapids, and under the dark arches of antique covered bridges, and between hillsides garlanded with vines.

It was towards the middle of a long day’s walk among such scenes as these that I came to Rheinfelden, a small place on the left bank of the river, about fourteen miles above Basle.

As I came down the white road in the blinding sunshine, with the vines on either hand, I saw the town lying low on the opposite bank of the Rhine. It was an old walled town, enclosed on the land side, and open to the river, the houses going sheer down to the water’s edge, with flights of slimy steps worn smooth by the wash of the current, and overhanging eaves, and little built-out rooms with penthouse roofs, supported from below by jutting piles black with age and tapestried with water-weeds. The stunted towers of a couple of churches stood up from amid the brown and tawny roofs within the walls.

Beyond the town, height above height, stretched a distance of wooded hills. The old covered bridge, divided by a bit of rocky island in the middle of the stream, led from bank to bank — from Germany to Switzerland. The town was in Switzerland; I, looking towards it from the road, stood on Baden territory; the river ran sparkling and foaming between.

I crossed, and found the place all alive in anticipation of a Kermess, or fair, that was to be held there the next day but one. The townsfolk were all out in the streets or standing about their doors; and there were carpenters hard at work knocking up rows of wooden stands and stalls the whole length of the principal thoroughfare. Shop-signs in open-work of wrought iron hung over the doors. A runlet of sparkling water babbled down a stone channel in the middle of the street. At almost every other house (to judge by the rows of tarnished watches hanging in the dingy parlour windows), there lived a watchmaker; and presently I came to a fountain — a regular Swiss fountain, spouting water from four ornamental pipes, and surmounted by the usual armed knight in old grey stone.

As I rambled on thus (looking for an inn, but seeing none), I suddenly found that I had reached the end of the street, and with it the limit of the town on this side. Before me rose a lofty, picturesque old gate-tower, with a tiled roof and a little window over the archway; and there was a peep of green grass and golden sunshine beyond. The town walls (sixty or seventy feet in height, and curiously roofed with a sort of projecting shed on the inner side) curved away to right and left, unchanged since the Middle Ages. A rude waggon, laden with clover and drawn by mild-eyed, cream-coloured oxen, stood close by in the shade.

I passed out through the gloom of the archway into the sunny space beyond. The moat outside the walls was bridged over and filled in — a green ravine of grasses and wild-flowers. A stork had built its nest on the roof of the gate-tower. The cicadas shrilled in the grass. The shadows lay sleeping under the trees, and a family of cocks and hens went plodding inquisitively to and fro among the cabbages in the adjacent field. Just beyond the moat, with only this field between, stood a little solitary church — a church with a wooden porch, and a quaint, bright-red steeple, and a churchyard like a rose-garden, full of colour and perfume, and scattered over with iron crosses wreathed with immortelles.

The churchyard gate and the church door stood open. I went in. All was clean, and simple, and very poor. The walls were whitewashed; the floor was laid with red bricks; the roof raftered. A tiny confessional like a sentry-box stood in one corner; the font was covered with a lid like a wooden steeple; and over the altar, upon which stood a pair of battered brass candlesticks and two vases of artificial flowers, hung a daub of the Holy Family, in oils.

All here was so cool, so quiet, that I sat down for a few moments and rested. Presently an old peasant woman trudged up the church-path with a basket of vegetables on her head. Having set this down in the porch, she came in, knelt before the altar, said her simple prayers, and went her way.

Was it not time for me also to go my way? I looked at my watch. It was past four o’clock, and I had not yet found a lodging for the night.

I got up, somewhat unwillingly; but, attracted by a tablet near the altar, crossed over to look at it before leaving the church. It was a very small slab, and bore a very brief German inscription to this effect:

TO THE SACRED MEMORY
OF
THE REVEREND PÈRE CHESSEZ,

For twenty years
the beloved Pastor of this Parish.

Died April 16th, 1825. Aged 44.

HE LIVED A SAINT; HE DIED A MARTYR.

I read it over twice, wondering idly what story was wrapped up in the concluding line. Then, prompted by a childish curiosity, I went up to examine the confessional.

It was, as I have said, about the size of a sentry-box, and was painted to imitate old dark oak. On the one side was a narrow door with a black handle, on the other a little opening like a ticket-taker’s window, closed on the inside by a faded green curtain.

I know not what foolish fancy possessed me, but, almost without considering what I was doing, I turned the handle and opened the door. Opened it — peeped in — found the priest sitting in his place — started back as if I had been shot — and stammered an unintelligible apology.

“I — I beg a thousand pardons,” I exclaimed. “I had no idea — seeing the church empty—”

He was sitting with averted face, and clasped hands lying idly in his lap — a tall, gaunt man, dressed in a black soutane. When I paused — and not till then — he slowly, very slowly, turned his head, and looked me in the face.

The light inside the confessional was so dim that I could not see his features very plainly. I only observed that his eyes were large, and bright, and wild-looking, like the eyes of some fierce animal, and that his face, with the reflection of the green curtain upon it, looked lividly pale.

For a moment we remained thus, gazing at each other, as if fascinated. Then finding that he made no reply, but only stared at me with those strange eyes, I stepped hastily back, shut the door without another word, and hurried out of the church.

I was very much disturbed by this little incident; more disturbed, in truth, than seemed reasonable, for my nerves for the moment were shaken. Never, I told myself, never while I lived could I forget that fixed attitude and stony face, or the glare of those terrible eyes. What was the man’s history? Of what secret despair, of what lifelong remorse, of what wild unsatisfied longings was he the victim? I felt I could not rest till I had learned something of his past life.

Full of these thoughts, I went on quickly into the town, half running across the field, and never looking back. Once past the gateway and inside the walls, I breathed more freely. The wain was still standing in the shade, but the oxen were gone now, and two men were busy forking out the clover into a little yard close by. Having inquired of one of these regarding an inn, and being directed to The Krone, “over against the Frauen-Kirche”, I made my way to the upper part of the town, and there, at one corner of a forlorn, weed-grown market-place, I found my hostelry.

The landlord, a sedate, bald man in spectacles, who, as I presently discovered, was not only an innkeeper but a clock-maker, came out from an inner room to receive me. His wife, a plump, pleasant body, took my orders for dinner. His pretty daughter showed me to my room. It was a large, low, whitewashed room, with two lattice windows overlooking the market-place, two little beds, covered with puffy red eiderdowns at the further end, and an army of clocks and ornamental timepieces arranged along every shelf, table, and chest of drawers in the room. Being left here to my meditations, I sat down and counted these companions of my solitude.

Taking little and big together, Dutch clocks, cuckoo clocks, châlet clocks, skeleton clocks, and pendules in ormolu, bronze, marble, ebony, and alabaster cases, there were exactly thirty-two. Twenty-eight were going merrily. As no two among them were of the same opinion as regarded the time, and as several struck the quarters as well as the hours, the consequence was that one or other gave tongue about every five minutes. Now, for a light and nervous sleeper such as I was at that time, here was a lively prospect for the night!

Going downstairs presently with the hope of getting my landlady to assign me a quieter room, I passed two eight-day clocks on the landing, and a third at the foot of the stairs. The public room was equally well-stocked. It literally bristled with clocks, one of which played a spasmodic version of “Gentle Zitella” with variations every quarter-of-an-hour. Here I found a little table prepared by the open window, and a dish of trout and a flask of country wine awaiting me. The pretty daughter waited upon me; her mother bustled to and fro with the dishes; the landlord stood by, and beamed upon me through his spectacles.

“The trout were caught this morning, about two miles from here,” he said, complacently.

“They are excellent,” I replied, filling him out a glass of wine, and helping myself to another. “Your health, Herr Wirth.”

“Thanks, mein Herr — yours.”

Just at this moment two clocks struck at opposite ends of the room — one twelve, and the other seven. I ventured to suggest that mine host was tolerably well reminded of the flight of time; whereupon he explained that his work lay chiefly in the repairing and regulating line, and that at that present moment he had no less than one hundred and eighteen clocks of various sorts and sizes on the premises.

“Perhaps the Herr Engländer is a light sleeper,” said his quick-witted wife, detecting my dismay. “If so, we can get him a bedroom elsewhere. Not, perhaps, in the town, for I know no place where he would be as comfortable as with ourselves; but just outside the Friedrich’s Thor, not five minute’s walk from out door.”

I accepted the offer gratefully.

“So long,” I said, “as I ensure cleanliness and quiet, I do not care how homely my lodgings may be.”

“Ay, you’ll have both, mein Herr, if you go where my wife is thinking of,” said the landlord. “It is at the house of our pastor — the Père Chessez.”

“The Père Chessez!” I exclaimed. “What, the pastor of the little church out yonder?”

“The same, mein Herr.”

“But — but surely the Père Chessez is dead! I saw a tablet to his memory in the chancel.”

“Nay, that was our pastor’s elder brother,” replied the landlord, looking grave. “He has been gone these thirty years and more. His was a tragical ending.”

But I was thinking too much of the younger brother just then to feel any curiosity about the elder; and I told myself that I would put up with the companionship of any number of clocks, rather than sleep under the same roof with that terrible face and those unearthly eyes.

“I saw your pastor just now in the church,” I said, with apparent indifference. “He’s a singular-looking man.”

“He is too good for this world,” said the landlady.

“He is a saint upon earth!” added the pretty Fräulein.

“He is one of the best of men,” said, more soberly, the husband and father. “I only wish he was less of a saint. He fasts, and prays, and works beyond his strength. A little more beef and a little less devotion would be all the better for him.”

“I should like to hear something more about the life of so good a man,” said I, having by this time come to the end of my simple dinner. “Come, Herr Wirth, let us have a bottle of your best, and then sit down and tell me your pastor’s history!”

The landlord sent his daughter for a bottle of the “green seal”, and, taking a chair, said:

“Ach Himmel! mein Herr, there is no history to tell. The good father has lived here all his life. He is one of us. His father, Johann Chessez, was a native of Rheinfelden and kept this very inn. He was a wealthy farmer and vine-grower. He had only those two sons — Nicholas, who took to the church and became pastor of Feldkirche; and this one, Matthias, who was intended to inherit the business; but who also entered religion after the death of his elder brother, and is now pastor of the same parish.”

“But why did he ‘enter religion?’” I asked. “Was he in any way to blame for the accident (if it was an accident) that caused the death of his elder brother?”

“Ah, heavens! no!” exclaimed the landlady, leaning on the back of her husband’s chair. “It was the shock — the shock that told so terribly upon his poor nerves! He was but a lad at that time, and as sensitive as a girl — but the Herr Engländer does not know the story. Go on, my husband.”

So the landlord, after a sip of the “green seal”, continued:

“At the time my wife alludes to, mein Herr, Johann Chessez was still living. Nicholas, the elder son, was in holy orders and established in the parish of Feldkirche, outside the walls; and Matthias, the younger, was a lad of about fourteen years old, and lived with his father. He was an amiable good boy — pious and thoughtful — fonder of his books than of the business. The neighbour-folk used to say even then that Matthias was cut out for a priest, like his elder brother. As for Nicholas, he was neither more nor less than a saint. Well, mein Herr, at this time there lived on the other side of the Rheinfelden, about a mile beyond the Basel Thor, a farmer named Caspar Rufenacht and his wife Margaret. Now Caspar Rufenacht was a jealous, quarrelsome fellow; and the Frau Margaret was pretty; and he led her a devil of a life. It was said that he used to beat her when he had been drinking, and that sometimes, when he went to fair or market, he would lock her up for the whole day in a room at the top of the house. Well, this poor, ill-used Frau Margaret—”

“Tut, tut, my man,” interrupted the landlady. “The Frau Margaret was a light one!”

“Peace, wife! Shall we speak hard words of the dead? The Frau Margaret was young and pretty, and a flirt; and she had a bad husband, who left her too much alone.”

The landlady pursed up her lips and shook her head, as the best of women will do when the character of another woman is under discussion. The innkeeper went on:

“Well, mein Herr, to cut a long story short, after having been jealous first of one and then of another, Caspar Rufenacht became furious about a certain German, a Badener named Schmidt, living on the opposite bank of the Rhine. I remember the man quite well — a handsome, merry fellow, and no saint; just the sort to make mischief between man and wife. Well, Caspar Rufenacht swore a great oath that, cost what it might, he would come at the truth about his wife and Schmidt; so he laid all manner of plots to surprise them — waylaid the Frau Margaret in her walks; followed her at a distance when she went to church; came home at unexpected hours; and played the spy as if he had been brought up to the trade. But his spying was all in vain. Either the Frau Margaret was too clever for him, or there was really nothing to discover; but still he was not satisfied. So he cast about for some way to attain his end, and, by the help of the Evil One, he found it.”

Here the innkeeper’s wife and daughter, who had doubtless heard the story a hundred times over, drew near and listened breathlessly.

“What, think you,” continued the landlord, “does this black-souled Caspar do? Does he punish the poor woman within an inch of her life, till she confesses? No. Does he charge Schmidt with having tempted her from her duty, and fight it out with him like a man? No. What else then? I will tell you. He waits till the vigil of St. Margaret — her saint’s day — when he knows the poor sinful soul is going to confession; and he marches straight to the house of the Père Chessez — the very house where our own Père Chessez is now living — and he finds the good priest at his devotions in his little study, and he says to him:

“‘Father Chessez, my wife is coming to the church this afternoon to make her confession to you.’

“‘She is,’ replies the priest.

“‘I want you to tell me all she tells you,’ says Caspar; ‘and I will wait here till you come back from the church, that I may hear it. Will you do so?’

“‘Certainly not,’ replies the Père Chessez. ‘You must surely know, Caspar, that we priests are forbidden to reveal the secrets of the confessional.’

“‘That is nothing to me,’ says Caspar, with an oath. ‘I am resolved to know whether my wife is guilty or innocent; and know it I will, by fair means or foul.’

“‘You shall never know it from me, Caspar,’ says the Père Chessez, very quietly.

“‘Then, by Heavens!’ says Caspar, ‘I’ll learn it for myself.’ And with that he pulls out a heavy horse-pistol from his pocket, and with the butt-end of it deals the Père Chessez a tremendous blow upon the head, and then another, and another, till the poor young man lay senseless at his feet. Then Caspar, thinking he had quite killed him, dressed himself in the priest’s own soutane and hat; locked the door; put the key in his pocket; and stealing round the back way into the church, shut himself up in the confessional.”

“Then the priest died!” I exclaimed, remembering the epitaph upon the tablet.

“Ay, mein Herr — the Père Chessez died; but not before he had told the story of his assassination, and identified his murderer.”

“And Caspar Rufenacht, I hope, was hanged?”

“Wait a bit, mein Herr, we have not come to that yet. We left Caspar in the confessional, waiting for his wife.”

“And she came?”

“Yes, poor soul! she came.”

“And made her confession?”

“And made her confession, mein Herr.”

“What did she confess?”

The innkeeper shook his head.

“That no one ever knew, save the good God and her murderer.”

“Her murderer!” I exclaimed.

“Ay, just that. Whatever it was that she confessed, she paid for it with her life. He heard her out, at all events, without discovering himself, and let her go home believing that she had received absolution for her sins. Those who met her that afternoon said she seemed unusually bright and happy. As she passed through the town, she went into the shop in the Mongarten Strasse, and bought some ribbons. About half-an-hour later, my own father met her outside the Basel Thor, walking briskly homewards. He was the last who saw her alive.

“That evening (it was in October, and the days were short), some travellers coming that way into the town heard shrill cries, as of a woman screaming, in the direction of Caspar’s farm. But the night was very dark, and the house lay back a little way from the road; so they told themselves it was only some drunken peasant quarrelling with his wife, and passed on. Next morning, Caspar Rufenacht came to Rheinfelden, walked very quietly into the Polizei, and gave himself up to justice.

“‘I have killed my wife,’ said he. ‘I have killed the Père Chessez. And I have committed sacrilege.’

“And so, indeed, it was. As for the Frau Margaret, they found her body in an upper chamber, well-nigh hacked to pieces, and the hatchet with which the murder was committed lying beside her on the floor. He had pursued her, apparently, from room to room; for there were pools of blood and handfuls of long light hair, and marks of bloody hands along the walls, all the way from the kitchen to the spot where she lay dead.”

“And so he was hanged?” said I, coming back to my original question.

“Yes, yes,” replied the innkeeper and his womankind in chorus. “He was hanged — of course he was hanged.”

“And it was the shock of this double tragedy that drove the younger Chessez into the church?”

“Just so, mein Herr.”

“Well, he carries it in his face. He looks like a most unhappy man.”

“Nay, he is not that, mein Herr!” exclaimed the landlady. “He is melancholy, but not unhappy.”

“Well, then, austere.”

“Nor is he austere, except towards himself.”

“True, wife,” said the innkeeper; “but, as I said, he carries that sort of thing too far. You understand, mein Herr,” he added, touching his forehead with his forefinger, “the good pastor has let his mind dwell too much upon the past. He is nervous — too nervous, and too low.”

I saw it all now. That terrible light in his eyes was the light of insanity. That stony look in his face was the fixed, hopeless melancholy of a mind diseased.

“Does he know that he is mad?” I asked, as the landlord rose to go.

He shrugged his shoulders and looked doubtful.

“I have not said that the Père Chessez is mad, mein Herr,” he replied. “He has strange fancies sometimes, and takes his fancies for facts — that is all. But I am quite sure that he does not believe himself to be less sane than his neighbours.”

So the innkeeper left me, and I (my head full of the story I had just heard) put on my hat, went out into the marketplace, asked my way to the Basel Thor, and set off to explore the scene of the Frau Margaret’s murder.

I found it without difficulty — a long, low-fronted, beetle-browed farmhouse, lying back a meadow’s length from the road. There were children playing upon the threshold, a flock of turkeys gobbling about the barn-door, and a big dog sleeping outside his kennel close by.

The chimneys, too, were smoking merrily. Seeing these signs of life and cheerfulness, I abandoned all idea of asking to go over the house. I felt that I had no right to carry my morbid curiosity into this peaceful home; so I turned away, and retraced my steps towards Rheinfelden.

It was not yet seven, and the sun had still an hour’s course to run. I re-entered the town, strolled back through the street, and presently came again to the Friedrich’s Thor and the path leading to the church. An irresistible impulse seemed to drag me back to the place.

Shudderingly, and with a sort of dread that was half longing, I pushed open the churchyard gate and went in. The doors were closed; a goat was browsing among the graves; and the rushing of the Rhine, some three hundred yards away, was distinctly audible in the silence. I looked round for the priest’s house — the scene of the first murder; but from this side, at all events, no house was visible. Going round, however, to the back of the church, I saw a gate, a box-bordered path, and, peeping through some trees, a chimney and the roof of a little brown-tiled house.

This, then, was the path along which Caspar Rufenacht, with the priest’s blood upon his hands and the priest’s gown upon his shoulders, had taken his guilty way to the confessional! How quiet it all looked in the golden evening light! How like the church-path of an English parsonage!

I wished I could have seen something more of the house than that bit of roof and that one chimney. There must, I told myself, be some other entrance — some way round by the road! Musing and lingering thus, I was startled by a quiet voice close against my shoulder, saying:

“A pleasant evening, mein Herr!”

I turned, and found the priest at my elbow. He had come noiselessly across the grass, and was standing between me and the sunset, like a shadow.

“I — I beg you pardon,” I stammered, moving away from the gate. “I was looking—”

I stopped in some surprise, and indeed with some sense of relief, for it was not the same priest that I had seen in the morning. No two, indeed, could well be more unlike, for this man was small, white-haired, gentle-looking, with a soft, sad smile inexpressibly sweet and winning.

“You were looking at my arbutus?” he said.

I had scarcely observed the arbutus till now, but I bowed and said something to the effect that it was an unusually fine tree.

“Yes,” he replied; “but I have a rhododendron round at the front that is still finer. Will you come in and see it?”

I said I should be pleased to do so. He led the way, and I followed.

“I hope you like this part of our Rhine-country?” he said, as we took the path through the shrubbery.

“I like it so well,” I replied, “that if I were to live anywhere on the banks of the Rhine, I should certainly choose some spot on the Upper Rhine between Schaffhausen and Basle.”

“And you would be right,” he said. “Nowhere is the river so beautiful. Nearer the glaciers it is milky and turbid — beyond Basle it soon becomes muddy. Here we have it blue as the sky — sparkling as champagne. Here is my rhododendron. It stands twelve feet high, and measures as many in diameter. I had more than two hundred blooms upon it last spring.”

When I had duly admired this giant shrub, he took me to a little arbour on a bit of steep green bank overlooking the river, where he invited me to sit down and rest. From hence I could see the porch and part of the front of his little house; but it was all so closely planted round with trees and shrubs that no clear view of it seemed obtainable in any direction. Here we sat for some time chatting about the weather, the approaching vintage, and so forth, and watching the sunset. Then I rose to take my leave.

“I heard of you this evening, at The Krone, mein Herr,” he said. “You were out, or I should have called upon you. I am glad that chance has made us acquainted. Do you remain over tomorrow?”

“No; I must go on tomorrow to Basle,” I answered. And then, hesitating a little, I added: “You heard of me, also, I fear, in the church.”

“In the church?” he repeated.

“Seeing the door open, I went in — from curiosity — as a traveller; just to look round for a moment and rest.”

“Naturally.”

“I — I had no idea, however, that I was not alone there. I would not for the world have intruded—”

“I do not understand,” he said, seeing me hesitate. “The church stands open all day long. It is free to everyone.”

“Ah! I see he has not told you!”

The priest smiled but looked puzzled.

“He? Whom do you mean?”

“The other priest, mon père — your colleague. I regret to have broken in upon his meditations; but I had been so long in the church, and it was all so still and quiet, that it never occurred to me that there might be someone in the confessional.”

The priest looked at me in a strange, startled way.

“In the confessional!” he repeated, with a catching of his breath. “You saw someone — in the confessional?”

“I am ashamed to say that, having thoughtlessly opened the door—”

“You saw — what did you see?”

“A priest, mon père.”

“A priest! Can you describe him? Should you know him again? Was he pale, and tall, and gaunt, with long black hair?”

“The same, undoubtedly.”

“And his eyes — did you observe anything particular about his eyes?”

“Yes: they were large, wild-looking, dark eyes, with a look in them — a look I cannot describe.”

“A look of terror!” cried the pastor, now greatly agitated. “A look of terror — of remorse — of despair!”

“Yes, it was a look that might mean all that,” I replied, my astonishment increasing at every word. “You seem troubled. Who is he?”

But instead of answering my question, the pastor took off his hat, looked up with a radiant, awe-struck face, and said:

“All-merciful God, I thank Thee! I thank Thee that I am not mad, and that Thou hast sent this stranger to be my assurance and my comfort!”

Having said these words, he bowed his head, and his lips moved in silent prayer. When he again looked up, his eyes were full of tears.

“My son,” he said, laying his trembling hand upon my arm, “I owe you an explanation; but I cannot give it to you now. It must wait till I can speak more calmly — till tomorrow, when I must see you again. It involves a terrible story — a story peculiarly painful to myself — enough now if I tell you that I have seen the thing that you describe — seen it many times; and yet, because it has been visible to my eyes alone, I have doubted the evidence of my senses. The good people here believe that much sorrow and meditation have touched my brain. I have half believed it myself till now. But you — you have proved to me that I am the victim of no illusion.”

“But in Heaven’s name,” I exclaimed, “what do you suppose I saw in the confessional?”

“You saw the likeness of one who, guilty also of a double murder, committed the deadly sin of sacrilege in that very spot, more than thirty years ago,” replied the Père Chessez, solemnly.

“Caspar Rufenacht!”

“Ah! you have heard the story? Then I am spared the pain of telling it to you. That is well.”

I bent my head in silence. We walked together without another word to the wicket, and thence round to the churchyard gate. It was now twilight, and the first stars were out.

“Good-night, my son,” said the pastor, giving me his hand. “Peace be with you.”

As he spoke the words, his grasp tightened — his eyes dilated — his whole countenance became rigid.

“Look!” he whispered. “Look where it goes!”

I followed the direction of his eyes, and there, with a freezing horror which I have no words to describe, I saw — distinctly saw through the deepening gloom — a tall, dark figure in a priest’s soutane and broad-brimmed hat, moving slowly across the path leading from the parsonage to the church. For a moment it seemed to pause — then passed on to the deeper shade, and disappeared.

“You saw it?” said the pastor.

“Yes — plainly.”

He drew a deep breath; crossed himself devoutly; and leaned upon the gate, as if exhausted.

“This is the third time I have seen it this year,” he said. “Again I thank God for the certainty that I see a visible thing, and that His great gift of reason is mine unimpaired. But I would that He were graciously pleased to release me from the sight — the horror of it is sometimes more than I know how to bear. Good-night.”

With this he again touched my hand; and so, seeing that he wished to be alone, I silently left him. At the Friedrich’s Thor I turned and looked back. He was still standing by the churchyard gate, just visible through the gloom of the fast deepening twilight.

I never saw the Père Chessez again. Save his own old servant, I was the last who spoke with him in this world. He died that night — died in his bed, where he was found next morning with his hands crossed upon his breast, and with a placid smile upon his lips, as if he had fallen asleep in the act of prayer.

As the news spread from house to house, the whole town rang with lamentations. The church-bells tolled; the carpenters left their work in the streets; the children, dismissed from school, went home weeping.

“’Twill be the saddest Kermess in Rheinfelden tomorrow, mein Herr!” said my good host of The Krone, as I shook hands with him at parting. “We have lost the best of pastors and of friends. He was a saint. If you had come but one day later, you would not have seen him!”

And with this he brushed his sleeve across his eyes, and turned away.

Every shutter was up, every blind down, every door closed, as I passed along the Friedrich’s Strasse about mid-day on my way to Basle; and the few townsfolk I met looked grave and downcast. Then I crossed the bridge, and, having shown my passport to the German sentry on the Baden side, I took one long, last farewell look at the little walled town as it lay sleeping in the sunshine by the river — knowing that I should see it no more.

AT CHRIGHTON ABBEY

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

1871

The Chrightons were very great people in that part of the country where my childhood and youth were spent. To speak of Squire Chrighton was to speak of a power in that remote western region of England. Chrighton Abbey had belonged to the family ever since the reign of Stephen, and there was a curious old wing and a cloistered quadrangle still remaining of the original edifice, and in excellent preservation. The rooms at this end of the house were low, and somewhat darksome and gloomy, it is true; but, though rarely used, they were perfectly habitable, and were of service on great occasions when the Abbey was crowded with guests.

The central portion of the Abbey had been rebuilt in the reign of Elizabeth, and was of noble and palatial proportions. The southern wing, and a long music-room with eight tall narrow windows added on to it, were as modern as the time of Anne. Altogether, the Abbey was a very splendid mansion, and one of the chief glories of our county.

All the land in Chrighton parish, and for a long way beyond its boundaries, belonged to the great Squire. The parish church was within the park walls, and the living in the Squire’s gift — not a very valuable benefice, but a useful thing to bestow upon a younger son’s younger son, once in a way, or sometimes on a tutor or dependent of the wealthy house.

I was a Chrighton, and my father, a distant cousin of the reigning Squire, had been rector of Chrighton parish. His death left me utterly unprovided for, and I was fain to go out into the bleak unknown world, and earn my living in a position of dependence — a dreadful thing for a Chrighton to be obliged to do.

Out of respect for the traditions and prejudices of my race, I made it my business to seek employment abroad, where the degradation of one solitary Chrighton was not so likely to inflict shame upon the ancient house to which I belonged. Happily for myself, I had been carefully educated, and had industriously cultivated the usual modern accomplishments in the calm retirement of the Vicarage. I was so fortunate as to obtain a situation at Vienna, in a German family of high rank; and here I remained seven years, laying aside year by year a considerable portion of my liberal salary. When my pupils had grown up, my kind mistress procured me a still more profitable position at St Petersburg, where I remained five more years, at the end of which time I yielded to a yearning that had been long growing upon me — an ardent desire to see my dear old country home once more.

I had no very near relations in England. My mother had died some years before my father; my only brother was far away, in the Indian Civil Service; sister I had none. But I was a Chrighton, and I loved the soil from which I had sprung. I was sure, moreover, of a warm welcome from friends who had loved and honoured my father and mother, and I was still further encouraged to treat myself to this holiday by the very cordial letters I had from time to time received from the Squire’s wife, a noble warm-hearted woman, who fully approved the independent course I had taken, and who had ever shown herself my friend.

In all her letters for some time past Mrs. Chrighton begged that, whenever I felt myself justified in coming home, I would pay a long visit to the Abbey.

“I wish you could come at Christmas,” she wrote, in the autumn of the year of which I am speaking. “We shall be very gay, and I expect all kinds of pleasant people at the Abbey. Edward is to be married early in the spring — much to his father’s satisfaction, for the match is a good and appropriate one. His fiancée is to be among our guests. She is a very beautiful girl; perhaps I should say handsome rather than beautiful. Julia Tremaine, one of the Tremaines of Old Court, near Hayswell — a very old family, as I daresay you remember. She has several brothers and sisters, and will have little, perhaps nothing, from her father; but she has a considerable fortune left her by an aunt, and is thought quite an heiress in the county — not, of course, that this latter fact had any influence with Edward. He fell in love with her at an assize ball in his usual impulsive fashion, and proposed to her in something less than a fortnight. It is, I hope and believe, a thorough love-match on both sides.”

After this followed a cordial repetition of the invitation to myself. I was to go straight to the Abbey when I went to England, and was to take up my abode there as long as ever I pleased.

This letter decided me. The wish to look on the dear scenes of my happy childhood had grown almost into a pain. I was free to take a holiday, without detriment to my prospects. So, early in December, regardless of the bleak dreary weather, I turned my face homewards, and made the long journey from St Petersburg to London, under the kind escort of Major Manson, a Queen’s Messenger, who was a friend of my late employer, the Baron Fruydorff, and whose courtesy had been enlisted for me by that gentleman.

I was three-and-thirty years of age. Youth was quite gone; beauty I had never possessed; and I was content to think of myself as a confirmed old maid, a quiet spectator of life’s great drama, disturbed by no feverish desire for an active part in the play. I had a disposition to which this kind of passive existence is easy. There was no wasting fire in my veins. Simple duties, rare and simple pleasures, filled up my sum of life. The dear ones who had given a special charm and brightness to my existence were gone. Nothing could recall them, and without them actual happiness seemed impossible to me. Everything had a subdued and neutral tint; life at its best was calm and colourless, like a grey sunless day in early autumn, serene but joyless.

The old Abbey was in its glory when I arrived there, at about nine o’clock on a clear starlit night. A light frost whitened the broad sweep of grass that stretched away from the long stone terrace in front of the house to a semicircle of grand old oaks and beeches. From the music-room at the end of the southern wing, to the heavily framed gothic windows of the old rooms on the north, there shone one blaze of light. The scene reminded me of some weird palace in a German legend; and I half expected to see the lights fade out all in a moment, and the long stone façade wrapped in sudden darkness.

The old butler, whom I remembered from my very infancy, and who did not seem to have grown a day older during my twelve years’ exile, came out of the dining-room as the footman opened the hall-door for me, and gave me cordial welcome, nay, insisted upon helping to bring in my portmanteau with his own hands, an act of unusual condescension, the full force of which was felt by his subordinates.

“It’s a real treat to see your pleasant face once more, Miss Sarah,” said this faithful retainer, as he assisted me to take off my travelling-cloak, and took my dressing-bag from my hand. “You look a trifle older than when you used to live at the Vicarage twelve year ago, but you’re looking uncommon well for all that; and, Lord love your heart, miss, how pleased they all will be to see you! Missus told me with her own lips about your coming. You’d like to take off your bonnet before you go to the drawing-room, I daresay. The house is full of company. Call Mrs. Marjorum, James, will you?”

The footman disappeared into the back regions, and presently reappeared with Mrs. Marjorum, a portly dame, who, like Truefold the butler, had been a fixture at the Abbey in the time of the present Squire’s father. From her I received the same cordial greeting, and by her I was led off up staircases and along corridor, till I wondered where I was being taken.

We arrived at last at a very comfortable room — a square, tapestried chamber, with a low ceiling supported by a great oaken beam. The room looked cheery enough, with a bright fire roaring in the wide chimney; but it had a somewhat ancient aspect, which the superstitiously inclined might have associated with possible ghosts.

I was fortunately of a matter-of-fact disposition, utterly sceptical upon the ghost subject; and the old-fashioned appearance of the room took my fancy.

“We are in King Stephen’s wing, are we not, Mrs. Marjorum?” I asked; “this room seems quite strange to me. I doubt if I have ever been in it before.”

“Very likely not, miss. Yes, this is the old wing. Your window looks out into the old stable-yard, where the kennel used to be in the time of our Squire’s grandfather, when the Abbey was even a finer place than it is now, I’ve heard say. We are so full of company this winter, you see, miss, that we are obliged to make use of all these rooms. You’ll have no need to feel lonesome. There’s Captain and Mrs. Cranwick in the next room to this, and the two Miss Newports in the blue room opposite.”

“My dear good Marjorum, I like my quarters excessively; and I quite enjoy the idea of sleeping in a room that was extant in the time of Stephen, when the Abbey really was an abbey. I daresay some grave old monk has worn these boards with his devout knees.”

The old woman stared dubiously, with the air of a person who had small sympathy with monkish times, and begged to be excused for leaving me, she had so much on her hands just now.

There was coffee to be sent in; and she doubted if the still-room maid would manage matters properly, if she, Mrs. Marjorum, were not at hand to see that things were right.

“You’ve only to ring your bell, miss, and Susan will attend to you. She’s used to help waiting on our young ladies sometimes, and she’s very handy. Missus has given particular orders that she should be always at your service.”

“Mrs. Chrighton is very kind; but I assure you, Marjorum, I don’t require the help of a maid once in a month. I am accustomed to do everything for myself. There, run along, Mrs. Marjorum, and see after your coffee; and I’ll be down in the drawing-room in ten minutes. Are there many people there, by-the-by?”

“A good many. There’s Miss Tremaine, and her mama and younger sister; of course you’ve heard all about the marriage — such a handsome young lady — rather too proud for my liking; but the Tremaines always were a proud family, and this one’s an heiress. Mr. Edward is so fond of her — thinks the ground is scarcely good enough for her to walk upon, I do believe; and somehow I can’t help wishing he’d chosen someone else — someone who would have thought more of him, and who would not take all his attentions in such a cool offhand way. But of course it isn’t my business to say such things, and I wouldn’t venture upon it to anyone but you, Miss Sarah.”

She told me that I would find dinner ready for me in the breakfast-room, and then bustled off, leaving me to my toilet.

This ceremony I performed as rapidly as I could, admiring the perfect comfort of my chamber as I dressed. Every modern appliance had been added to the sombre and ponderous furniture of an age gone by, and the combination produced a very pleasant effect. Perfume-bottles of ruby-coloured Bohemian glass, china brush-trays and ring-stands brightened the massive oak dressing-table; a low luxurious chintz-covered easy-chair of the Victorian era stood before the hearth; a dear little writing-table of polished maple was placed conveniently near it; and in the background the tapestried walls loomed duskily, as they had done hundreds of years before my time.

I had no leisure for dreamy musings on the past, however, provocative though the chamber might be of such thoughts. I arranged my hair in its usual simple fashion, and put on a dark-grey silk dress, trimmed with some fine old black lace that had been given to me by the Baroness — an unobtrusive demi-toilette, adapted to any occasion. I tied a massive gold cross, an ornament that had belonged to my dear mother, round my neck with a scarlet ribbon; and my costume was complete. One glance at the looking-glass convinced me that there was nothing dowdy in my appearance; and then I hurried along the corridor and down the staircase to the hall, where Truefold received me and conducted me to the breakfast-room, in which an excellent dinner awaited me.

I did not waste much time over this repast, although I had eaten nothing all day; for I was anxious to make my way to the drawing-room. Just as I had finished, the door opened, and Mrs. Chrighton sailed in, looking superb in a dark-green velvet dress richly trimmed with old point-lace. She had been a beauty in her youth, and, as a matron, was still remarkably handsome. She had, above all, a charm of expression which to me was rarer and more delightful than her beauty of feature and complexion.

She put her arms round me, and kissed me affectionately.

“I have only this moment been told of your arrival, my dear Sarah,” she said; “and I find you have been in the house half an hour. What must you have thought of me!”

“What can I think of you, except that you are all goodness, my dear Fanny? I did not expect you to leave your guests to receive me, and am really sorry that you have done so. I need no ceremony to convince me of your kindness.”

“But, my dear child, it is not a question of ceremony. I have been looking forward so anxiously to your coming, and I should not have liked to see you for the first time before all those people. Give me another kiss, that’s a darling. Welcome to Chrighton. Remember, Sarah, this house is always to be your home, whenever you have need of one.”

“My dear kind cousin! And you are not ashamed of me, who have eaten the bread of strangers?”

“Ashamed of you! No, my love; I admire your industry and spirit. And now come to the drawing-room. The girls will be so pleased to see you.”

“And I to see them. They were quite little things when I went away, romping in the hayfields in their short white frocks; and now, I suppose, they are handsome young women.”

“They are very nice-looking; not so handsome as their brother. Edward is really a magnificent young man. I do not think my maternal pride is guilty of any gross exaggeration when I say that.”

“And Miss Tremaine?” I said. “I am very curious to see her.”

I fancied a faint shadow came over my cousin’s face as I mentioned this name.

“Miss Tremaine, yes, you cannot fail to admire her,” she said, rather thoughtfully.

She drew my hand through her arm and led me to the drawing-room: a very large room, with a fireplace at each end, brilliantly lighted tonight, and containing about twenty people, scattered about in little groups, and all seeming to be talking and laughing merrily. Mrs. Chrighton took me straight to one of the fireplaces, beside which two girls were sitting on a low sofa, while a young man of something more than six feet high stood near them, with his arm resting on the broad marble slab of the mantelpiece. A glance told me that this young man with the dark eyes and crisp waving brown hair was Edward Chrighton. His likeness to his mother was in itself enough to tell me who he was; but I remembered the boyish face and bright eyes which had so often looked up to mine in the days when the heir of the Abbey was one of the most juvenile scholars at Eton.

The lady seated nearest Edward Chrighton attracted my chief attention; for I felt sure that this lady was Miss Tremaine. She was tall and slim, and carried her head and neck with a stately air, which struck me more than anything in that first glance. Yes, she was handsome, undeniably handsome; and my cousin had been right when she said I could not fail to admire her; but to me the dazzlingly fair face with its perfect features, the marked aquiline nose, the short upper lip expressive of unmitigated pride, the full cold blue eyes, pencilled brows, and aureole of pale golden hair, were the very reverse of sympathetic. That Miss Tremaine must needs be universally admired, it was impossible to doubt; but I could not understand how any man could fall in love with such a woman.

She was dressed in white muslin, and her only ornament was a superb diamond locket, heart-shaped, tied round her long white throat with a broad black ribbon. Her hair, of which she seemed to have a great quantity, was arranged in a massive coronet of plaits, which surmounted the small head as proudly as an imperial crown.

To this young lady Mrs. Chrighton introduced me.

“I have another cousin to present to you, Julia,” she said smiling “Miss Sarah Chrighton, just arrived from St Petersburg.”

“From St Petersburg? What an awful journey! How do you do, Miss Chrighton? It was really very courageous of you to come so far. Did you travel alone?”

“No; I had a companion as far as London, and a very kind one. I came on to the Abbey by myself.”

The young lady had given me her hand with rather a languid air, I thought. I saw the cold blue eyes surveying me curiously from head to foot, and it seemed to me as if I could read the condemnatory summing-up — “A frump, and a poor relation” — in Miss Tremaine’s face.

I had not much time to think about her just now; for Edward Chrighton suddenly seized both my hands, and gave me so hearty and loving a welcome, that he almost brought the tears “up from my heart into my eyes.”

Two pretty girls in blue dresses came running forward from different pans of the room, and gaily saluted me as “Cousin Sarah”; and the three surrounded me in a little cluster, and assailed me with a string of questions — whether I remembered this, and whether I had forgotten that, the battle in the hayfield, the charity-school tea-party in the vicarage orchard, our picnics in Hawsley Combe, our botanical and entomological excursions on Chorwell-common, and all the simple pleasures of their childhood and my youth. While this catechism was going on, Miss Tremaine watched us with a disdainful expression, which she evidently did not care to hide.

“I should not have thought you capable of such Arcadian simplicity, Mr. Chrighton,” she said at last. “Pray continue your recollections. These juvenile experiences are most interesting.”

“I don’t expect you to be interested in them, Julia,” Edward answered, with a tone that sounded rather too bitter for a lover. “I know what a contempt you have for trifling rustic pleasures. Were you ever a child yourself, I wonder, by the way? I don’t believe you ever ran after a butterfly in your life.”

Her speech put an end to our talk of the past, somehow. I saw that Edward was vexed, and that all the pleasant memories of his boyhood had fled before that cold scornful face. A young lady in pink, who had been sitting next Julia Tremaine, vacated the sofa, and Edward slipped into her place, and devoted himself for the rest of the evening to his betrothed. I glanced at his bright expressive face now and then as he talked to her, and could not help wondering what charm he could discover in one who seemed to me so unworthy of him.

It was midnight when I went back to my room in the north wing, thoroughly happy in the cordial welcome that had been given me. I rose early next morning — for early rising had long been habitual to me — and, drawing back the damask curtain that sheltered my window, looked out at the scene below.

I saw a stable-yard, a spacious quadrangle, surrounded by the closed doors of stables and dog-kennels: low massive buildings of grey stone, with the ivy creeping over them here and there, and with an ancient moss-grown look, that gave them a weird kind of interest in my eyes. This range of stabling must have been disused for a long time, I fancied. The stables now in use were a pile of handsome red-brick buildings at the other extremity of the house, to the rear of the music-room, and forming a striking feature in the back view of the Abbey.

I had often heard how the present Squire’s grandfather had kept a pack of hounds, which had been sold immediately after his death; and I knew that my cousin, the present Mr. Chrighton, had been more than once requested to follow his ancestor’s good example; for there were no hounds now within twenty miles of the Abbey, though it was a fine country for fox-hunting.

George Chrighton, however — the reigning lord of the Abbey — was not a hunting man. He had, indeed, a secret horror of the sport; for more than one scion of the house had perished untimely in the hunting-field. The family had not been altogether a lucky one, in spite of its wealth and prosperity. It was not often that the goodly heritage had descended to the eldest son. Death in some form or other on too many occasions a violent death had come between the heir and his inheritance. And when I pondered on the dark pages in the story of the house, I used to wonder whether my cousin Fanny was ever troubled by morbid forebodings about her only and fondly loved son.

Was there a ghost at Chrighton — that spectral visitant without which the state and splendour of a grand old house seem scarcely complete? Yes, I had heard vague hints of some shadowy presence that had been seen on rare occasions within the precincts of the Abbey; but I had never been able to ascertain what shape it bore.

Those whom I questioned were prompt to assure me that they had seen nothing. They had heard stories of the past — foolish legends, most likely, not worth listening to. Once, when I had spoken of the subject to my cousin George, he told me angrily never again to let him hear any allusion to that folly from my lips.

That December passed merrily. The old house was full of really pleasant people, and the brief winter days were spent in one unbroken round of amusement and gaiety. To me the old familiar English country-house life was a perpetual delight — to feel myself amongst kindred an unceasing pleasure. I could not have believed myself capable of being so completely happy.

I saw a great deal of my cousin Edward, and I think he contrived to make Miss Tremaine understand that, to please him, she must be gracious to me. She certainly took some pains to make herself agreeable to me; and I discovered that, in spite of that proud disdainful temper, which she so rarely took the trouble to conceal, she was really anxious to gratify her lover.

Their courtship was not altogether a halcyon period. They had frequent quarrels, the details of which Edward’s sisters Sophy and Agnes delighted to discuss with me. It was the struggle of two proud spirits for mastery; but my cousin Edward’s pride was of the nobler kind — the lofty scorn of all things mean — a pride that does not ill-become a generous nature. To me he seemed all that was admirable, and I was never tired of hearing his mother praise him. I think my cousin Fanny knew this, and that she used to confide in me as fully as if I had been her sister.

“I daresay you can see I am not quite so fond as I should wish to be of Julia Tremaine,” she said to me one day; “but I am very glad that my son is going to marry. My husband’s has not been a fortunate family, you know, Sarah. The eldest sons have been wild and unlucky for generations past; and when Edward was a boy I used to have many a bitter hour, dreading what the future might bring forth. Thank God he has been, and is, all that I can wish. He has never given me an hour’s anxiety by any act of his. Yet I am not the less glad of his marriage. The heirs of Chrighton who have come to an untimely end have all died unmarried. There was Hugh Chrighton, in the reign of George the Second, who was killed in a duel; John, who broke his back in the hunting-field thirty years later; Theodore, shot accidentally by a schoolfellow at Eton; Jasper, whose yacht went down in the Mediterranean forty years ago. An awful list, is it not, Sarah? I shall feel as if my son were safer somehow when he is married. It will seem as if he has escaped the ban that has fallen on so many of our house. He will have greater reason to be careful of his life when he is a married man.”

I agreed with Mrs. Chrighton; but could not help wishing that Edward had chosen any other woman than the cold handsome Julia. I could not fancy his future life happy with such a mate.

Christmas came by and by — a real old English Christmas — frost and snow without, warmth and revelry within; skating on the great pond in the park, and sledging on the icebound highroads by day; private theatricals, charades, and amateur concerts by night. I was surprised to find that Miss Tremaine refused to take any active part in these evening amusements. She preferred to sit among the elders as a spectator, and had the air and bearing of a princess for whose diversion all our entertainments had been planned. She seemed to think that she fulfilled her mission by sitting still and looking handsome. No desire to show off appeared to enter her mind. Her intense pride left no room for vanity. Yet I knew that she could have distinguished herself as a musician if she had chosen to do so; for I had heard her sing and play in Mrs. Chrighton’s morning-room, when only Edward, his sisters, and myself were present; and I knew that both as a vocalist and a pianist she excelled all our guests.

The two girls and I had many a happy morning and afternoon, going from cottage to cottage in a pony-carriage laden with Mrs. Chrighton’s gifts to the poor of her parish. There was no public formal distribution of blanketing and coals, but the wants of all were amply provided for in a quiet friendly way. Agnes and Sophy, aided by an indefatigable maid, the Rector’s daughter, and one or two other young ladies, had been at work for the last three months making smart warm frocks and useful under-garments for the children of the cottagers; so that on Christmas morning every child in the parish was arrayed in a complete set of new garments. Mrs. Chrighton had an admirable faculty of knowing precisely what was most wanted in every household; and our pony-carriage used to convey a varied collection of goods, every parcel directed in the firm free hand of the chatelaine of the Abbey.

Edward used sometimes to drive us on these expeditions, and I found that he was eminently popular among the poor of Chrighton parish. He had such an airy pleasant way of talking to them, a manner which set them at their ease at once. He never forgot their names or relationships, or wants or ailments; had a packet of exactly the kind of tobacco each man liked best always ready in his coat-pockets; and was full of jokes, which may not have been particularly witty, but which used to make the small low-roofed chambers ring with hearty laughter.

Miss Tremaine coolly declined any share in these pleasant duties.

“I don’t like poor people,” she said. “I daresay it sounds very dreadful, but it’s just as well to confess my iniquity at once. I never can get on with them, or they with me. I am not simpatica, I suppose. And then I cannot endure their stifling rooms. The close faint odour of their houses gives me a fever. And again, what is the use of visiting them? It is only an inducement to them to become hypocrites. Surely it is better to arrange on a sheet of paper what it is just and fair for them to have — blankets, and coals, and groceries, and money, and wine, and so on — and let them receive the things from some trustworthy servant. In that case, there need be no cringing on one side, and no endurance on the other.”

“But, you see, Julia, there are some kinds of people to whom that sort of thing is not a question of endurance,” Edward answered, his face flushing indignantly. “People who like to share in the pleasure they give — who like to see the poor careworn faces lighted up with sudden joy — who like to make these sons of the soil feel that there is some friendly link between themselves and their masters — some point of union between the cottage and the great house. There is my mother, for instance: all these duties which you think so tiresome are to her an unfailing delight. There will be a change, I’m afraid, Julia, when you are mistress of the Abbey.”

“You have not made me that yet,” she answered; “and there is plenty of time for you to change your mind, if you do not think me suited for the position. I do not pretend to be like your mother. It is better that I should not affect any feminine virtues which I do not possess.”

After this Edward insisted on driving our pony-carriage almost every day, leaving Miss Tremaine to find her own amusement; and I think this conversation was the beginning of an estrangement between them, which became more serious than any of their previous quarrels had been.

Miss Tremaine did not care for sledging, or skating, or billiard playing. She had none of the “fast” tendencies which have become so common lately. She used to sit in one particular bow-window of the drawing-room all the morning, working a screen in berlin-wool and beads, assisted and attended by her younger sister Laura, who was a kind of slave to her — a very colourless young lady in mind, capable of no such thing as an original opinion, and in person a pale replica of her sister.

Had there been less company in the house, the breach between Edward Chrighton and his betrothed must have become notorious; but with a house so full of people, all bent on enjoying themselves, I doubt if it was noticed. On all public occasions my cousin showed himself attentive and apparently devoted to Miss Tremaine. It was only I and his sisters who knew the real state of affairs.

I was surprised, after the young lady’s total repudiation of all benevolent sentiments, when she beckoned me aside one morning, and slipped a little purse of gold — twenty sovereigns — into my hand.

“I shall be very much obliged if you will distribute that among your cottagers today, Miss Chrighton,” she said. “Of course I should like to give them something; it’s only the trouble of talking to them that I shrink from; and you are just the person for an almoner. Don’t mention my little commission to anyone, please.”

“Of course I may tell Edward,” I said; for I was anxious that he should know his betrothed was not as hard-hearted as she had appeared.

“To him least of all,” she answered eagerly. “You know that our ideas vary on that point. He would think I gave the money to please him. Not a word, pray, Miss Chrighton.” I submitted, and distributed my sovereigns quietly, with the most careful exercise of my judgement.

So Christmas came and passed. It was the day after the great anniversary — a very quiet day for the guests and family at the Abbey, but a grand occasion for the servants, who were to have their annual ball in the evening — a ball to which all the humbler class of tenantry were invited. The frost had broken up suddenly, and it was a thorough wet day — a depressing kind of day for anyone whose spirits are liable to be affected by the weather, as mine are. I felt out of spirits for the first time since my arrival at the Abbey.

No one else appeared to feel the same influence. The elder ladies sat in a wide semicircle round one of the fireplaces in the drawing-room; a group of merry girls and dashing young men chatted gaily before the other. From the billiard-room there came the frequent clash of balls, and cheery peals of stentorian laughter. I sat in one of the deep windows, half hidden by the curtains, reading a novel — one of a boxful that came from town every month.

If the picture within was bright and cheerful, the prospect was dreary enough without. The fairy forest of snow-wreathed trees, the white valleys and undulating banks of snow, had vanished, and the rain dripped slowly and sullenly upon a darksome expanse of sodden grass, and a dismal background of leafless timber. The merry sound of the sledge-bells no longer enlivened the air; all was silence and gloom.

Edward Chrighton was not amongst the billiard-players; he was pacing the drawing-room to and fro from end to end, with an air that was at once moody and restless.

“Thank heaven, the frost has broken up at last!” he exclaimed, stopping in front of the window where I sat.

He had spoken to himself, quite unaware of my close neighbourhood. Unpromising as his aspect was just then, I ventured to accost him.

“What bad taste, to prefer such weather as this to frost and snow!” I answered. “The park looked enchanting yesterday — a real scene from fairyland. And only look at it today!”

“O yes, of course, from an artistic point of view, the snow was better. The place does look something like the great dismal swamp today; but I am thinking of hunting, and that confounded frost made a day’s sport impossible. We are in for a spell of mild weather now, I think.”

“But you are not going to hunt, are you, Edward?”

“Indeed I am, my gentle cousin, in spite of that frightened look in your amiable countenance.”

“I thought there were no hounds hereabouts.”

“Nor are there; but there is as fine a pack as any in the country — the Daleborough hounds — five-and-twenty miles away.”

“And you are going five-and-twenty miles for the sake of a day’s run?”

“I would travel forty, fifty, a hundred miles for that same diversion. But I am not going for a single day this time; I am going over to Sir Francis Wycherly’s place — young Frank Wycherly and I were sworn chums at Christchurch — for three or four days. I am due today, but I scarcely cared to travel by cross-country roads in such rain as this. However, if the floodgates of the sky are loosened for a new deluge, I must go tomorrow.”

“What a headstrong young man!” I exclaimed. “And what will Miss Tremaine say to this desertion?” I asked in a lower voice.

“Miss Tremaine can say whatever she pleases. She had it in her power to make me forget the pleasures of the chase, if she had chosen, though we had been in the heart of the shires, and the welkin ringing with the baying of hounds.”

“Oh, I begin to understand. This hunting engagement is not of long standing.”

“No; I began to find myself bored here a few days ago, and wrote to Frank to offer myself for two or three days at Wycherly. I received a most cordial answer by return, and am booked till the end of this week.”

“You have not forgotten the ball on the first?”

“Oh, no; to do that would be to vex my mother, and to offer a slight to our guests. I shall be here for the first, come what may.”

Come what may! so lightly spoken. The time came when I had bitter occasion to remember those words.

“I’m afraid you will vex your mother by going at all,” I said. “You know what a horror both she and your father have of hunting.”

“A most un-country-gentleman-like aversion on my father’s part. But he is a dear old bookworm, seldom happy out of his library. Yes, I admit they both have a dislike to hunting in the abstract; but they know I am a pretty good rider, and that it would need a bigger country than I shall find about Wycherly to floor me. You need not feel nervous, my dear Sarah; I am not going to give papa and mama the smallest ground for uneasiness.”

“You will take your own horses, I suppose?”

“That goes without saying. No man who has cattle of his own cares to mount another man’s horses. I shall take Pepperbox and the Druid.”

“Pepperbox has a queer temper, I have heard your sisters say.”

“My sisters expect a horse to be a kind of overgrown baa-lamb. Everything splendid in horseflesh and womankind is prone to that slight defect, an ugly temper. There is Miss Tremaine, for instance.”

“I shall take Miss Tremaine’s part. I believe it is you who are in the wrong in the matter of this estrangement, Edward.”

“Do you? Well, wrong or right, my cousin, until the fair Julia comes to me with sweet looks and gentle words, we can never be what we have been.”

“You will return from your hunting expedition in a softer mood,” I answered; “that is to say, if you persist in going. But I hope and believe you will change your mind.”

“Such a change is not within the limits of possibility, Sarah. I am fixed as Fate.”

He strolled away, humming some gay hunting-song as he went. I was alone with Mrs. Chrighton later in the afternoon, and she spoke to me about this intended visit to Wycherly.

“Edward has set his heart upon it, evidently,” she said regretfully, “and his father and I have always made a point of avoiding anything that could seem like domestic tyranny. Our dear boy is such a good son, that it would be very hard if we came between him and his pleasures. You know what a morbid horror my husband has of the dangers of the hunting-field, and perhaps I am almost as weak-minded. But in spite of this we have never interfered with Edward’s enjoyment of a sport which he is passionately fond of; and hitherto, thank God! he has escaped without a scratch. Yet I have had many a bitter hour, I can assure you, my dear, when my son has been away in Leicestershire hunting four days a week.”

“He rides well, I suppose.”

“Superbly. He has a great reputation among the sportsmen of our neighbourhood. I daresay when he is master of the Abbey he will start a pack of hounds, and revive the old days of his great-grandfather, Meredith Chrighton.”

“I fancy the hounds were kenneled in the stable-yard below my bedroom window in those days, were they not, Fanny?”

“Yes,” Mrs. Chrighton answered gravely; and I wondered at the sudden shadow that fell upon her face.

I went up to my room earlier than usual that afternoon, and I had a clear hour to spare before it would be time to dress for the seven o’clock dinner. This leisure hour I intended to devote to letter-writing; but on arriving in my room I found myself in a very idle frame of mind, and instead of opening my desk, I seated myself in the low easy-chair before the fire, and fell into a reverie.

How long I had been sitting there I scarcely know; I had been half meditating, half dozing, mixing broken snatches of thought with brief glimpses of dreaming, when I was startled into wakefulness by a sound that was strange to me.

It was a huntsman’s horn — a few low plaintive notes on a huntsman’s horn — notes which had a strange faraway sound, that was more unearthly than anything my ears had ever heard. I thought of the music in Der Freisckutz; but the weirdest snatch of melody Weber ever wrote had not so ghastly a sound as these few simple notes conveyed to my ear.

I stood transfixed, listening to that awful music. It had grown dusk, my fire was almost out, and the room in shadow. As I listened, a light flashed suddenly on the wall before me. The light was as unearthly as the sound — a light that never shone from earth or sky.

I ran to the window; for this ghastly shimmer flashed through the window upon the opposite wall. The great gates of the stable-yard were open, and men in scarlet coats were riding in, a pack of hounds crowding in before them, obedient to the huntsman’s whip. The whole scene was dimly visible by the declining light of the winter evening and the weird gleams of a lantern carried by one of the men. It was this lantern which had shone upon the tapestried wall. I saw the stable doors opened one after another; gentlemen and grooms alighting from their horses; the dogs driven into their kennel; the helpers hurrying to and fro; and that strange wan lantern-light glimmering here and there is the gathering dusk. But there was no sound of horse’s hoof or of human voices — not one yelp or cry from the hounds. Since those faint faraway sounds of the horn had died out in the distance, the ghastly silence had been unbroken.

I stood at my window quite calmly, and watched while the group of men and animals in the yard below noiselessly dispersed. There was nothing supernatural in the manner of their disappearance. The figures did not vanish or melt into empty air. One by one I saw the horses led into their separate quarters; one by one the redcoats strolled out of the gates, and the grooms departed, some one way, some another. The scene, but for its noiselessness, was natural enough; and had I been a stranger in the house, I might have fancied that those figures were real — those stables in full occupation.

But I knew that stable-yard and all its range of building to have been disused for more than half a century. Could I believe that, without an hour’s warning, the long-deserted quadrangle could be filled — the empty stalls tenanted?

Had some hunting-party from the neighbourhood sought shelter here, glad to escape the pitiless rain? That was not impossible, I thought. I was an utter unbeliever in all ghostly things — ready to credit any possibility rather than suppose that I had been looking upon shadows. And yet the noiselessness, the awful sound of that horn — the strange unearthly gleam of that lantern! Little superstitious as I might be, a cold sweat stood out upon my forehead, and I trembled in every limb.

For some minutes I stood by the window, statue-like, staring blankly into the empty quadrangle. Then I roused myself suddenly, and ran softly downstairs by a back staircase leading to the servants’ quarters, determined to solve the mystery somehow or other. The way to Mrs. Marjorum’s room was familiar to me from old experience, and it was thither that I bent my steps, determined to ask the housekeeper the meaning of what I had seen. I had a lurking conviction that it would be well for me not to mention that scene to any member of the family till I had taken counsel with someone who knew the secrets of Chrighton Abbey.

I heard the sound of merry voices and laughter as I passed the kitchen and servants’ hall. Men and maids were all busy in the pleasant labour of decorating their rooms for the evening’s festival. They were putting the last touches to garlands of holly and laurel, ivy and fir, as I passed the open doors; and in both rooms I saw tables laid for a substantial tea. The housekeeper’s room was in a retired nook at the end of a long passage — a charming old room, panelled with dark oak, and full of capacious cupboards, which in my childhood I had looked upon as storehouses of inexhaustible treasures in the way of preserves and other confectionery. It was a shady old room, with a wide old-fashioned fireplace, cool in summer, when the hearth was adorned with a great jar of roses and lavender; and warm in winter, when the logs burnt merrily all day long.

I opened the door softly, and went in. Mrs. Marjorum was dozing in a high-backed armchair by the glowing hearth, dressed in her state gown of grey watered silk, and with a cap that was a perfect rose-garden. She opened her eyes as I approached her, and stared at me with a puzzled look for the first moment or so.

“Why, is that you, Miss Sarah?” she exclaimed; “and looking as pale as a ghost, I can see, even by this firelight! Let me just light a candle, and then I’ll get you some sal volatile. Sit down in my armchair, miss; why, I declare you’re all of a tremble!”

She put me into her easy-chair before I could resist, and lighted the two candles which stood ready upon her table, while I was trying to speak. My lips were dry, and it seemed at first as if the power of speech had left me.

“Never mind the sal volatile, Marjorum,” I said at last. “I am not ill; I’ve been startled, that’s all; and I’ve come to ask you for an explanation of the business that frightened me.”

“What business, Miss Sarah?”

“You must have heard something of it yourself, surely. Didn’t you hear a horn just now, a huntsman’s horn?”

“A horn! Lord no, Miss Sarah. What ever could have put such a fancy into your head?”

I saw that Mrs. Marjorum’s ruddy cheeks had suddenly lost their colour, that she was now almost as pale as I could have been myself.

“It was no fancy,” I said; “I heard the sound, and saw the people. A hunting-party has just taken shelter in the north quadrangle. Dogs and horses, and gentlemen and servants.”

“What were they like, Miss Sarah?” the housekeeper asked in a strange voice.

“I can hardly tell you that. I could see that they wore red coats; and I could scarcely see more than that. Yes, I did get a glimpse of one of the gentlemen by the light of the lantern. A tall man, with grey hair and whiskers, and a stoop in his shoulders. I noticed that he wore a short waisted coat with a very high collar — a coat that looked a hundred years old.”

“The old Squire!” muttered Mrs. Marjorum under her breath; and then turning to me, she said with a cheery resolute air, “You’ve been dreaming, Miss Sarah, that’s just what it is. You’ve dropped off in your chair before the fire, and had a dream, that’s it.”

“No, Marjorum, it was no dream. The horn woke me, and I stood at my window and saw the dogs and huntsmen come in.”

“Do you know, Miss Sarah, that the gates of the north quadrangle have been locked and barred for the last forty years, and that no one ever goes in there except through the house?”

“The gates may have been opened this evening to give shelter to strangers,” I said.

“Not when the only keys that will open them hang yonder in my cupboard, miss,” said the housekeeper, pointing to a corner of the room.

“But I tell you, Marjorum, these people came into the quadrangle; the horses and dogs are in the stables and kennels at this moment. I’ll go and ask Mr. Chrighton, or my cousin Fanny, or Edward, all about it, since you won’t tell me the truth.”

I said this with a purpose, and it answered. Mrs. Marjorum caught me eagerly by the wrist.

“No, miss, don’t do that; for pity’s sake don’t do that; don’t breathe a word to missus or master.”

“But why not?”

“Because you’ve seen that which always brings misfortune and sorrow to this house, Miss Sarah. You’ve seen the dead.”

“What do you mean?” I gasped, awed in spite of myself.

“I daresay you’ve heard say that there’s been something seen at times at the Abbey — many years apart, thank God; for it never came that trouble didn’t come after it.”

“Yes,” I answered hurriedly; “but I could never get anyone to tell me what it was that haunted this place.”

“No, miss. Those that know have kept the secret. But you have seen it all tonight. There’s no use in trying to hide it from you any longer. You have seen the old Squire, Meredith Chrighton, whose eldest son was killed by a fall in the hunting-field, brought home dead one December night, an hour after his father and the rest of the party had come safe home to the Abbey. The old gentleman had missed his son in the field, but had thought nothing of that, fancying that master John had had enough of the day’s sport, and had turned his horse’s head homewards. He was found by a labouring-man, poor lad, lying in a ditch with his back broken, and his horse beside him staked. The old Squire never held his head up after that day, and never rode to hounds again, though he was passionately fond of hunting. Dogs and horses were sold, and the north quadrangle has been empty from that day.”

“How long is it since this kind of thing has been seen?”

“A long time, miss. I was a slip of a girl when it last happened. It was in the wintertime — this very night — the night Squire Meredith’s son was killed; and the house was full of company, just as it is now. There was a wild young Oxford gentleman sleeping in your room at that time, and he saw the hunting-party come into the quadrangle; and what did he do but throw his window wide open, and give them the view-halloo as loud as ever he could. He had only arrived the day before, and knew nothing about the neighbourhood; so at dinner he began to ask where were his friends the sportsmen, and to hope he should be allowed to have a run with the Abbey hounds next day. It was in the time of our master’s father; and his lady at the head of the table turned as white as a sheet when she heard this talk. She had good reason, poor soul. Before the week was out her husband was lying dead. He was struck with a fit of apoplexy, and never spoke or knew anyone afterwards.”

“An awful coincidence,” I said; “but it may have been only a coincidence.”

“I’ve heard other stories, miss — heard them from those that wouldn’t deceive — all proving the same thing: that the appearance of the old Squire and his pack is a warning of death to this house.”

“I cannot believe these things,” I exclaimed; “I cannot believe them. Does Mr. Edward know anything about this?”

“No, miss. His father and mother have been most careful that it should be kept from him.”

“I think he is too strong-minded to be much affected by the fact,” I said.

“And you’ll not say anything about what you’ve seen to my master or my mistress, will you, Miss Sarah?” pleaded the faithful old servant. “The knowledge of it would be sure to make them nervous and unhappy. And if evil is to come upon this house, it isn’t in human power to prevent its coming.”

“God forbid that there is any evil at hand!” I answered. “I am no believer in visions or omens. After all, I would sooner fancy that I was dreaming — dreaming with my eyes open as I stood at the window — than that I beheld the shadows of the dead.”

Mrs. Marjorum sighed, and said nothing. I could see that she believed firmly in the phantom hunt.

I went back to my room to dress for dinner. However rationally I might try to think of what I had seen, its effect upon my mind and nerves was not the less powerful. I could think of nothing else; and a strange morbid dread of coming misery weighted me down like an actual burden.

There was a very cheerful party in the drawing-room when I went downstairs, and at dinner the talk and laughter were unceasing — but I could see that my cousin Fanny’s face was a little graver than usual, and I had no doubt she was thinking of her son’s intended visit to Wycherly.

At the thought of this a sudden terror flashed upon me. How if the shadows I had seen that evening were ominous of danger to him — to Edward, the heir and only son of the house? My heart grew cold as I thought of this, and yet in the next moment I despised myself for such weakness.

“It is natural enough for an old servant to believe in such things,” I said to myself; “but for me — an educated woman of the world — preposterous folly.”

And yet from that moment I began to puzzle myself in the endeavour to devise some means by which Edward’s journey might be prevented. Of my own influence I knew that I was powerless to hinder his departure by so much as an hour; but I fancied that Julia Tremaine could persuade him to any sacrifice of his inclination, if she could only humble her pride so far as to entreat it. I determined to appeal to her in the course of the evening.

We were very merry all that evening. The servants and their guests danced in the great hall, while we sat in the gallery above, and in little groups upon the staircase, watching their diversions. I think this arrangement afforded excellent opportunities for flirtation, and that the younger members of our party made good use of their chances — with one exception: Edward Chrighton and his affianced contrived to keep far away from each other all the evening.

While all was going on noisily in the hall below, I managed to get Miss Tremaine apart from the others in the embrasure of a painted window on the stairs, where there was a wide oaken seat. Seated here side by side, I described to her, under a promise of secrecy, the scene which I had witnessed that afternoon, and my conversation with Mrs. Marjorum.

“But, good gracious me, Miss Chrighton!” the young lady exclaimed, lifting her pencilled eyebrows with unconcealed disdain, “you don’t mean to tell me that you believe in such nonsense — ghosts and omens, and old woman’s folly like that!”

“I assure you, Miss Tremaine, it is most difficult for me to believe in the supernatural,” I answered earnestly; “but that which I saw this evening was something more than human. The thought of it has made me very unhappy; and I cannot help connecting it somehow with my cousin Edward’s visit to Wycherly. If I had the power to prevent his going, I would do it at any cost; but I have not. You alone have influence enough for that. For heaven’s sake use it! do anything to hinder his hunting with the Daleborough hounds.”

“You would have me humiliate myself by asking him to forgo his pleasure, and that after his conduct to me during the last week?”

“I confess that he has done much to offend you. But you love him, Miss Tremaine. Though you are too proud to let your love be seen, I am certain that you do love him. For pity’s sake speak to him; do not let him hazard his life, when a few words from you may prevent the danger.”

“I don’t believe he would give up this visit to please me,” she answered; “and I shall certainly not put it in his power to humiliate me by a refusal. Besides, all this fear of yours is such utter nonsense. As if nobody had ever hunted before. My brothers hunt four times a week every winter, and not one of them has ever been the worse for it yet.”

I did not give up the attempt lightly. I pleaded with this proud obstinate girl for a long time, as long as I could induce her to listen to me; but it was all in vain. She stuck to her text — no one should persuade her to degrade herself by asking a favour of Edward Chrighton. He had chosen to hold himself aloof from her, and she would show him that she could live without him. When she left Chrighton Abbey, they would part as strangers.

So the night closed, and at breakfast next morning I heard that Edward had started for Wycherly soon after daybreak. His absence made, for me at least, a sad blank in our circle. For one other also, I think; for Miss Tremaine’s fair proud face was very pale, though she tried to seem gayer than usual, and exerted herself in quite an unaccustomed manner in her endeavour to be agreeable to everyone.

The days passed slowly for me after my cousin’s departure. There was a weight upon my mind, a vague anxiety, which I struggled in vain to shake off. The house, full as it was of pleasant people, seemed to me to have become dull and dreary now that Edward was gone. The place where he had sat appeared always vacant to my eyes, though another filled it, and there was no gap on either side of the long dinner-table. Light-hearted young men still made the billiard-room resonant with their laughter; merry girls flirted as gaily as ever, undisturbed in the smallest degree by the absence of the heir of the house. Yet for me all was changed. A morbid fancy had taken complete possession of me. I found myself continually brooding over the housekeeper’s words; those words which had told me that the shadows I had seen boded death and sorrow to the house of Chrighton.

My cousins, Sophy and Agnes, were no more concerned about their brother’s welfare than were their guests. They were full of excitement about the New-Year’s ball, which was to be a very grand affair. Everyone of importance within fifty miles was to be present, every nook and corner of the Abbey would be filled with visitors coming from a great distance, while others were to be billeted upon the better class of tenantry round about. Altogether the organization of this affair was no small business; and Mrs. Chrighton’s mornings were broken by discussions with the housekeeper, messages from the cook, interviews with the head-gardener on the subject of floral decorations, and other details, which all alike demanded the attention of the chatelaine herself. With these duties, and with the claims of her numerous guests, my cousin Fanny’s time was so fully occupied, that she had little leisure to indulge in anxious feelings about her son, whatever secret uneasiness may have been lurking in her maternal heart. As for the master of the Abbey, he spent so much of his time in the library, where, under the pretext of business with his bailiff, he read Greek, that it was not easy for anyone to discover what he did feel. Once, and once only, I heard him speak of his son, in a tone that betrayed an intense eagerness for his return.

The girls were to have new dresses from a French milliner in Wigmore Street; and as the great event drew near, bulky packages of millinery were continually arriving, and feminine consultations and expositions of finery were being held all day long in bedrooms and dressing-rooms with closed doors. Thus, with a mind always troubled by the same dark shapeless foreboding, I was perpetually being called upon to give an opinion about pink tulle and lilies of the valley, or maize silk and apple-blossoms.

New-Year’s morning came at last, after an interval of abnormal length, as it seemed to me. It was a bright clear day, an almost springlike sunshine lighting up the leafless landscape. The great dining-room was noisy with congratulations and good wishes as we assembled for breakfast on this first morning of a new year, after having seen the old one out cheerily the night before; but Edward had not yet returned, and I missed him sadly. Some touch of sympathy drew me to the side of Julia Tremaine on this particular morning. I had watched her very often during the last few days, and I had seen that her cheek grew paler every day. Today her eyes had the dull heavy look that betokens a sleepless night. Yes, I was sure that she was unhappy — that the proud relentless nature suffered bitterly.

“He must be home today,” I said to her in a low voice, as she sat in stately silence before an untasted breakfast.

“Who must?” she answered, turning towards me with a cold distant look.

“My cousin Edward. You know he promised to be back in time for the ball.”

“I know nothing of Mr. Chrighton’s intended movements,” she said in her haughtiest tone; “but of course it is only natural that he should be here tonight. He would scarcely care to insult half the county by his absence, however little he may value those now staying in his father’s house.”

“But you know that there is one here whom he does value better than anyone else in the world, Miss Tremaine,” I answered, anxious to soothe this proud girl.

“I know nothing of the kind. But why do you speak so solemnly about his return? He will come, of course. There is no reason he should not come.”

She spoke in a rapid manner that was strange to her, and looked at me with a sharp enquiring glance, that touched me somehow, it was so unlike herself — it revealed to me so keen an anxiety.

“No, there is no reasonable cause for anything like uneasiness,” I said; “but you remember what I told you the other night. That has preyed upon my mind, and it will be an unspeakable relief to me when I see my cousin safe at home.”

“I am sorry that you should indulge in such weakness, Miss Chrighton.”

That was all she said; but when I saw her in the drawing-room after breakfast, she had established herself in a window that commanded a view of the long winding drive leading to the front of the Abbey. From this point she could not fail to see anyone approaching the house. She sat there all day; everyone else was more or less busy with arrangements for the evening, or at any rate occupied wit an appearance of business; but Julia Tremaine kept her place by the window, pleading a headache as an excuse for sitting still, wit a book in her hand, all day, yet obstinately refusing to go to her room and lie down, when her mother entreated her to do so.

“You will be fit for nothing tonight, Julia,” Mrs. Tremaine said, almost angrily; “you have been looking ill for ever so long, and today you are as pale as a ghost.”

I knew that she was watching for him; and I pitied her with all my heart, as the day wore itself out, and he did not come.

We dined earlier than usual, played a game or two of billiards after dinner, made a tour of inspection through the bright rooms, lit with wax-candles only, and odorous with exotics; and then came a long interregnum devoted to the arts and mysteries of the toilet; while maids flitted to and fro laden with frilled muslin petticoats from the laundry, and a faint smell of singed hair pervaded the corridors. At ten o’clock the band were tuning their violins, and pretty girls and elegant-looking men were coming slowly down the broad oak staircase, as the roll of fast-coming wheels sounded louder without, and stentorian voices announced the best people in the county.

I have no need to dwell long upon the details of that evening’s festival. It was very much like other balls — a brilliant success, a night of splendour and enchantment for those whose hearts were light and happy, and who could abandon themselves utterly to the pleasure of the moment; a faraway picture of fair faces and bright-hued dresses, a wearisome kaleidoscopic procession of form and colour for those whose minds were weighed down with the burden of a hidden care.

For me the music had no melody, the dazzling scene no charm. Hour after hour went by; supper was over, and the waltzers were enjoying those latest dances which always seem the most delightful, and yet Edward Chrighton had not appeared amongst us.

There had been innumerable enquiries about him, and Mrs. Chrighton had apologized for his absence as best she might. Poor soul, I well knew that his non-return was now a source of poignant anxiety to her, although she greeted all her guests with the same gracious smile, and was able to talk gaily and well upon every subject. Once, when she was sitting alone for a few minutes, watching the dancers, I saw the smile fade from her face, and a look of anguish come over it. I ventured to approach her at this moment, and never shall I forget the look which she turned towards me.

“My son, Sarah!” she said in a low voice — “something has happened to my son!”

I did my best to comfort her; but my own heart was growing heavier and heavier, and my attempt was a very poor one.

Julia Tremaine had danced a little at the beginning of the evening, to keep up appearances, I believe, in order that no one might suppose that she was distressed by her lover’s absence; but after the first two or three dances she pronounced herself tired, and withdrew to a seat amongst the matrons. She was looking very lovely in spite of her extreme pallor, dressed in white tulle, a perfect cloud of airy puffings, and with a wreath of ivy-leaves and diamonds crowning her pale golden hair.

The night waned, the dancers were revolving in the last waltz, when I happened to look towards the doorway at the end of the room. I was startled by seeing a man standing there, with his hat in his hand, not in evening costume; a man with a pale anxious-looking face, peering cautiously into the room. My first thought was of evil; but in the next moment the man had disappeared, and I saw no more of him.

I lingered by my cousin Fanny’s side till the rooms were empty. Even Sophy and Aggy had gone off to their own apartments, their airy dresses sadly dilapidated by a night’s vigorous dancing. There were only Mr. and Mrs. Chrighton and myself in the long suite of rooms, where the flowers were drooping and the wax-lights dying out one by one in the silver sconces against the walls.

“I think the evening went off very well,” Fanny said, looking rather anxiously at her husband, who was stretching himself and yawning with an air of intense relief.

“Yes, the affair went off well enough. But Edward has committed a terrible breach of manners by not being here. Upon my word, the young men of the present day think of nothing but their own pleasures. I suppose that something especially attractive was going on at Wycherly today, and he couldn’t tear himself away.”

“It is so unlike him to break his word,” Mrs. Chrighton answered. “You are not alarmed, Frederick? You don’t think that anything has happened — any accident?”

“What should happen? Ned is one of the best riders in the county. I don’t think there’s any fear of his coming to grief.”

“He might be ill.”

“Not he. He’s a young Hercules. And if it were possible for him to be ill — which it is not — we should have had a message from Wycherly.”

The words were scarcely spoken when Truefold the old butler stood by his master’s side, with a solemn anxious face.

“There is a — a person who wishes to see you, sir,” he said in a low voice, “alone.”

Low as the words were, both Fanny and myself heard them.

“Someone from Wycherly?” she exclaimed. “Let him come here.”

“But, madam, the person most particularly wished to see master alone. Shall I show him into the library, sir? The lights are not out there.”

“Then it is someone from Wycherly,” said my cousin, seizing my wrist with a hand that was icy cold. “Didn’t I tell you so, Sarah? Something has happened to my son. Let the person come here, Truefold, here; I insist upon it.”

The tone of command was quite strange in a wife who was always deferential to her husband, in a mistress who was ever gentle to her servants.

“Let it be so, Truefold,” said Mr. Chrighton. “Whatever ill news has come to us we will hear together.”

He put his arm round his wife’s waist. Both were pale as marble, both stood in stony stillness waiting for the blow that was to fall upon them.

The stranger, the man I had seen in the doorway, came in. He was curate of Wycherly church, and chaplain to Sir Francis Wycherly; a grave middle-aged man. He told what he had to tell with all kindness, with all the usual forms of consolation which Christianity and an experience of sorrow could suggest. Vain words, wasted trouble. The blow must fall, and earthly consolation was unable to lighten it by a feather’s weight.

There had been a steeplechase at Wycherly — an amateur affair with gentlemen riders — on that bright New-Year’s Day, and Edward Chrighton had been persuaded to ride his favourite hunter Pepperbox. There would be plenty of time for him to return to Chrighton after the races. He had consented; and his horse was winning easily, when, at the last fence, a double one, with water beyond, Pepperbox baulked his leap, and went over head-foremost, flinging his rider over a hedge into a field close beside the course, where there was a heavy stone roller. Upon this stone roller Edward Chrighton had fallen, his head receiving the full force of the concussion. All was told. It was while the curate was relating the fatal catastrophe that I looked round suddenly, and saw Julia Tremaine standing a little way behind the speaker. She had heard all; she uttered no cry, she showed no signs of fainting, but stood calm and motionless, waiting for the end.

I know not how that night ended: there seemed an awful calm upon us all. A carriage was got ready, and Mr. and Mrs. Chrighton started for Wycherly to look upon their dead son. He had died while they were carrying him from the course to Sir Francis’s house. I went with Julia Tremaine to her room, and sat with her while the winter morning dawned slowly upon us — a bitter dawning.

•   •   •   •   •

I have little more to tell. Life goes on, though hearts are broken. Upon Chrighton Abbey there came a dreary time of desolation. The master of the house lived in his library, shut from the outer world, buried almost as completely as a hermit in his cell. I have heard that Julia Tremaine was never known to smile after that day. She is still unmarried, and lives entirely at her father’s country house; proud and reserved in her conduct to her equals, but a very angel of mercy and compassion amongst the poor of the neighbourhood. Yes; this haughty girl, who once declared herself unable to endure the hovels of the poor, is now a Sister of Charity in all but the robe. So does a great sorrow change the current of a woman’s life.

I have seen my cousin Fanny many times since that awful New-Year’s night; for I have always the same welcome at the Abbey. I have seen her calm and cheerful, doing her duty, smiling upon her daughter’s children, the honoured mistress of a great household; but I know that the mainspring of life is broken, that for her there hath passed a glory from the earth, and that upon all the pleasures and joys of this world she looks with the solemn calm of one for whom all things are dark with the shadow of a great sorrow.

VERA

Villiers de L’Isle-Adam

Translated from the French
by Hamish Miles

1874

The form of the body is more essential to him than its substance.

— La Physiologie Moderne

Love, said Solomon, is stronger than Death. And truly, its mysterious power knows no bounds.

Not many years since, an autumn evening was falling over Paris. Towards the gloomy Faubourg Saint-Germain carriages were driving, with lamps already lit, returning belatedly from the afternoon drive in the Bois. Before the gateway of a vast seigniorial mansion, set about with immemorial gardens, one of them drew up. The arch was surmounted by a stone escutcheon with the arms of the ancient family of the Counts d’Athol, to wit: on a field azure, a mullet argent, with the motto Pallida Victrix under the coronet with its upturned ermine of the princely cap. The heavy folding doors swung apart, and there descended a man between thirty and thirty-five, in mourning clothes, his face of deathly pallor. On the steps silent attendants raised aloft their torches, but with no eye for them he mounted the flight and went within. It was the Count d’Athol.

With unsteady tread he ascended the white staircases leading to the room where, that very morning, he had laid within a coffin, velvet-lined and covered with violets, amid billowing cambric, the lady of his delight, his bride of the gathering paleness, Vera, his despair.

At the top the quiet door swung across the carpet. He lifted the hangings.

All the objects in the room were just where the Countess had left them the evening before. Death, in his suddenness, had hurled the bolt. Last night his loved one had swooned in such penetrating joys, had surrendered in embraces so perfect, that her heart, weary with ecstasy, had given way. Suddenly her lips had been covered with a flood of mortal scarlet, and she had barely had time to give her husband one kiss of farewell, smiling, with not one word; and then her long lashes, like veils of mourning, had fallen over the lovely light of her eyes.

This day without a name had passed.

Towards noon the Count d’Athol, after the dread ceremonies of the family vault, had dismissed the bleak escort at the cemetery. Shutting himself up within the four marble walls, alone with her whom he had buried, he had closed behind him the iron door of the mausoleum. Incense was burning on a tripod before the coffin, bestarred by a shining crown of lamps over the pillow of this young woman, who was now no more.

Standing there lost in his thoughts, with his only sentiment a hopeless longing, he had stayed all day long in the tomb. At six o’clock, when dusk fell, he had come out from the sacred enclosure. Closing the sepulchre, he had torn the silver key from the lock, and, stretching up on the topmost step of the threshold, he had cast it softly into the interior of the tomb. Through the trefoil over the doorway, he thrust it on to the pavement inside. Why had he done this? Doubtless from some mysterious resolve to return no more.

And now he was viewing again the widowed chamber.

The window, under the great drapings of mauve cashmere with their broideries of gold, stood open; one last ray of evening lit up the great portrait of the departed one in its frame of old wood. Looking around him, the Count saw the robe lying where, the evening before, it had been flung upon the chair; on the mantel lay the jewels, the necklace of pearls, the half-closed fan, the heavy flasks of perfume which She no longer inhaled. On the ebony bed with its twisted pillars, still unmade, beside the pillow where the mask of the divine, the adored head, was still visible amidst the lace, his eye fell on the handkerchief stained with drops of blood, whereon for an instant the wings of her youthful spirit had quivered; on the open piano, upholding a melody forever unfinished; on the Indian flowers which she had gathered with her own hands in the conservatory, and which now were dying in vases of old Saxony ware; and there at the foot of the bed, on the tiny slippers of oriental velvet, on which glittered a laughing device of her name, stitched with pearls: Qui verra Vera l’aimera. And only yesterday morning the bare feet of the loved one were still playing there, kissed at every step by the swan’s-down! And there, there in the shadow, was the clock whose spring he had snapped, so that never again should it tell other hours.

Thus had she vanished…! But whither…? And living now? To what end…? It was impossible, it was absurd!

And the Count plunged into the darkness of unknown thoughts.

He thought of all the past existence. Six months had gone by since this marriage. Was it not abroad, at an embassy ball, that he had set eyes upon her for the first time? Yes. That moment rose up again before his eyes, in all its distinctness. She appeared to him there, radiant. That night their glances had met, and inwardly they had recognized their affinity, their obligation to a lasting love.

Deceitful talk, observant smiles, insinuations, all the difficulties thrust up by the world to delay the inevitable happiness of those who belong to each other — everything had vanished before the calm certitude which, at that very moment, they had exchanged. Weary of the insipid pomposities of her circle, Vera had come to meet him with the first hindrance that showed itself, and so straightened out in queenly fashion those dreary preliminaries which squander the precious days of life.

But ah! at their first words the empty comments of outsiders seemed no more than a flight of night-birds passing back into their darkness. What smiles they exchanged! What ineffable embraces were theirs!

And yet their nature was strange, strange in the extreme! They were two beings gifted with marvellous senses, but exclusively terrestrial. Sensations were prolonged within them with disturbing intensity, and in experiencing them they lost consciousness of themselves. On the other hand, certain ideas, those of the soul for instance, of the infinite, of God Himself, were as if veiled from their understanding. The faith of great numbers of living persons in supernatural things was for them only a matter for vague astonishment; a sealed book wherewith they had no concern, being qualified neither to justify nor to condemn. And so, recognizing fully that the world was something foreign to themselves, they had isolated themselves immediately upon their union in this ancient sombre mansion, where the noises of the outside world were deadened by the dense foliage of the gardens.

There the two lovers plunged into the ocean of those enjoyments, languorous and perverse, in which the spirit is merged with the mysteries of the flesh. They exhausted the violence of desires, the tremors, the distraught longings of their tenderness. They became each the very heartbeat of the other. In them the spirit flowed so completely into the body that their forms seemed to them to be instruments of comprehension, and that the blazing links of their kisses chained them together in a fusion of the ideal. A long-drawn rapture! And suddenly — the spell was broken! The terrible accident sundered them. Their arms had been entwined. What shadow had seized from his arms his dead beloved? Dead? No: is the soul of the violoncello snatched away in the cry of its breaking string?

The hours passed.

Through the casement he watched the night advancing in the heavens: and Night became personal to him — seeming like a queen walking into exile, with melancholy on her brow, while Venus, the diamond clasp of her mourning gown, gleamed there above the trees, alone, lost in the depths of azure.

“It is Vera,” he thought.

At the name, spoken under his breath, he shivered like a man awakening, and then, straightening himself, looked round him.

The objects in the room were now lighted by a glow which till then had been indefinite, that of a sanctuary-lamp, turning the darkness into deep blue; and now the night which had climbed the firmament made it seem like another star in here. It was the incense-perfumed lamp of an ikon, a family reliquary belonging to Vera. The triptych of precious antique wood was hung by its platted Russian esparto between the mirror and the picture. A reflection from the gold of its interior fell quivering on to the necklace, among the jewels on the mantel.

The circling halo of the Madonna in her sky-blue gown shone, patterned into a rose by the Byzantine cross, whose delicate red outline, melted in the reflection, darkened with a tincture of blood this orient gleaming in its pearls. From her childhood Vera had used to cast her great eyes of compassion on the pure and maternal features of the hereditary Madonna; her nature, alas! allowed her to consecrate only a superstitious love to the figure, but this she offered sometimes, naively and thoughtfully, when she passed in front of the lamp. At the sight of this the Count, touched in the most secret places of his soul, straightened himself, and quickly blew out the holy flame. Then, feeling with outstretched hand in the gloom for a bell-cord, he rang.

A servant appeared, an old man attired in black. In his hand was a lamp; he set it down before the portrait of the Countess. A shiver of superstitious terror ran through him as he turned and saw his master standing erect and smiling as if nothing had come to pass.

“Raymond,” said the Count in calm tones, “we are worn out with fatigue this evening, the Countess and I. You will serve supper about ten o’clock. And by the way, we have made up our minds that from tomorrow we shall isolate ourselves here more completely than ever. None of my servants, except yourself, must pass the night under this roof. You will send them three years’ wages, and they must go. Then you will close the bar of the gateway, and light the torches downstairs in the dining-room; you will be enough for our needs. For the future we shall receive nobody.”

The old man was trembling, watching him attentively.

The Count lit a cigar and went down into the gardens.

At first the servant imagined that grief, too crushing, too desperate, had unhinged his master’s mind. He had been familiar with him from his childhood, and instantly understood that the shock of too sudden an awakening could easily be fatal to this sleepwalker. His duty, to begin with, was respect for such a secret

He bowed his head. A devoted complicity in this religious fantasy…? To obey…? To continue to serve them without taking heed of Death? What a strange fancy! Would it endure for one night…? Tomorrow perhaps, alas…! Who could tell…? Maybe… But after all, a sacred project! What right had he to reflect like this…?

He left the chamber, carried out his orders to the letter, and that same evening the unwonted mode of life began.

A terrible mirage — this is what had to be brought into being!

The pain of the first days faded quickly away. Raymond, at first with stupefaction, afterwards from a sort of deference and fondness, had adapted himself so skillfully to a natural demeanour, that before three weeks had passed he felt at moments that he was himself the dupe of his good-will. The suppressed thought was fading! Sometimes, experiencing a kind of dizziness, he felt compelled to assure himself that the Countess was no more, positively was dead. He became adept in the melancholy pretence, and every moment he grew more forgetful of reality. Before long he needed to reflect more than once to convince himself and pull himself together. He realized clearly that in the end he would surrender utterly to the terrifying magnetism wherewith the Count, little by little, was infusing the atmosphere around them. A fear came over him, a quiet, uncertain fear.

D’Athol, in fact, was living in an absolute denial of the fact of his loved one’s death. So closely was the form of the young woman fused with his own that he could not but find her always with him. Now, on a garden seat on sunny days, he was reading aloud the poems that she loved. Now, in the evening, by the fireside, with two cups of tea on the little round table, he was chattering with the Illusion, who, for his eyes, sat smiling there in the other armchair.

Days, nights, weeks sped by. Neither one nor the other knew what they were bringing to pass. And strange happenings were now taking place, so that it became hard to distinguish how far the real and the imaginary coincided. A presence floated in the air. A form was struggling to become visible, to weave some pattern of its being upon the space no longer within its measure.

D’Athol lived a twofold life, like a visionary. The glimpse of a pale and gentle face, caught in a flash, within the twinkling of an eye; a faint chord struck on the piano, suddenly; a kiss that closed his lips at the instant of his speaking; the affinities of feminine thoughts which awoke within him in response to the words he uttered; a doubling of his own self which made him feel as if he were in some fluid mist; the perfume, the intoxicating, sweet perfume of his beloved by his side; and at night, betwixt waking and sleeping, words which he heard low-spoken — everything pointed to one thing: a negation of Death exalted finally into an unknown force!

Once d’Athol felt and saw her so clearly beside him that he took her in his arms. But with the movement she vanished.

“Poor child!” he murmured, smiling, and fell asleep again, like a lover repulsed by his smiling, drowsy mistress.

On her birthday, he placed in pleasantry some everlastings amid the bouquet of flowers which he laid on Vera’s pillow.

“Because she imagines that she’s dead!” said he.

In the end, by reason of the deep and all-compelling will of d’Athol, who thus from the strength of his love wrought the very life and presence of his wife into the lonely mansion, this mode of life acquired a gloomy and persuasive magic. Raymond himself no longer felt any alarm, having become gradually used to these impressions.

The glimpse of a black velvet robe at the bend of a pathway; the call of a laughing voice in the drawing-room; a bell rung when he awoke in the morning, just at it used to be — all this had become familiar to him: the dead woman, one might have thought, was playing with the invisible, as a child might. So well beloved did she feel herself! It was altogether natural.

A year had gone by.

On the evening of the Anniversary the Count was sitting by the fire in Vera’s room. He had just finished reading her the last verses of a Florentine tale, Callimachus, and he closed the book.

“Douschka,” he said, pouring himself out some tea, “do you remember the Vallée-des-Roses, and the banks of the Lahn, and the castle of Quatre-Tours? Do you? Didn’t that story bring them back to you?”

He rose, and in the bluish glass he saw himself paler than his wont. He took up a bracelet of pearls in a goblet and gazed at them attentively. Vera had taken the pearls from her arm (had she not?) just a little time ago, before disrobing, and the pearls were still warm, and their water softened, as by the warmth of her flesh. And here was the opal of that Siberian necklace; so well did it love Vera’s fair bosom that, when sometimes she forgot it for awhile, it would grow pale in its golden network, as if sick and languishing. (For that, in days gone by, the Countess used to love her devoted trinket!) And now this evening, the opal was gleaming as if it had just been left off, as if it were still infused with the rare magnetism of the dead beauty. As he set down the necklace and the precious stone, the count touched accidentally the cambric handkerchief: the drops of blood upon it were damp and red, like carnations on snow! And there, on the piano — who had turned the last page of that melody out of the past? Why, the sacred lamp had relit itself, there in the reliquary! Yes, its gilded flame threw a mystic light upon the face of the Madonna and on her closed eyes! And those eastern flowers, new-gathered, opening and blooming in those old Saxony vases — whose hand had just placed them there? The whole room seemed to be happy, seemed to be gifted with life, in some fashion more significant, more intense than usual. But nothing could surprise the Count! So normal did all appear to him, that he did not so much as notice the hour striking on that clock which through the whole long year had stood still.

That evening one would have said that, from out of the depths of the darkness, the Countess Vera was striving (and striving how adorably!) to come back to this room, whose every corner was impregnate with her own self! She had left behind so much of herself there! Everything that had gone to make up her existence was drawing her back thither. Her charm hung suspended in its air. The prolonged force sprung from her husband’s impassioned will must have loosened the vague bonds of the Invisible about her…

She was necessitated there. All that she loved was there.

She must have longed, surely, to come and smile to herself in that mysterious mirror wherein so often she had admired the lilies of her countenance. Yes, down there amid the violets, there beneath the cold and darkened lamps in the vault, in her loneliness, she had started, the lovely one, the dead one; she had shuddered, the divine one, shuddered as she gazed on the silver key flung upon the slabs. She longed to come to him, she in her turn! And her will vanished in the idea of the incense and the isolation. Death is a final and binding term only for those who cherish hopes from the heavens; but for her was not the final term the embrace of Death and the Heavens and Life? And there, in the gloom, the solitary kiss of her husband was drawing forth her own lips. And the vanished sound of the melodies, the intoxicating words of days gone by, the stuffs which had covered her body and still held its perfume, those magical jewels which still in their obscure sympathy longed for her, and above all the overwhelming and absolute impression of her presence, a feeling shared in the end even by the things themselves — everything had been calling, had been drawing her thither for so long now, and by such insensible degrees, that, cured at last of somnolent Death, there was lacking nothing, save only Her alone.

Ah, Ideas are living beings! The Count had hollowed out in the air the shape of his love, and necessity demanded that into this void should pour the only being that was homogeneous to it, for otherwise the Universe would have crashed into chaos. And at that instant the impression came, final, simple, absolute, that She must be there, there in the room! Of this he was as calmly certain as of his own existence, and all the objects about him were saturated with this conviction. One saw it there! And now, since nothing was lacking save only Vera herself, outwardly and tangibly there, it was inevitably ordained that there she should be, and that for an instant the great Dream of Life and Death should set its infinite gates ajar! By faith the pathway of resurrection had been driven right to her! Joyfully a clear burst of musical laughter lit up the nuptial bed. The Count turned round. And there, before his eyes, creature of memory and of will, ethereal, an elbow leaning on the lace of the pillow, one hand buried in her thick black hair, her lips deliciously parted in a smile that held a paradise of rare delights, lovely with the beauty that breaks the heart, there at last the Countess Vera was gazing on him, and sleep still lingering within her eyes.

“Roger!” spoke the distant voice.

He came over to her side. In joy, in divine, oblivious, deathless joy, their lips were united!

And then they perceived, then, that they were in reality but one single being.

The hours flew by in their strange flight, brushing with the tips of their wings this ecstasy wherein heaven and earth for the first time were mingled.

Suddenly, as if struck by some fatal memory, the Count d’Athol started.

“Ah, I remember!” he cried. “I remember now! What am I doing? You, you are dead!”

And at that moment, when that word was spoken, the mystic lamp before the ikon was extinguished. The pale, thin light of morning — a dreary, grey, raining morning — filtered through the gaps of the curtain into the room. The candles grew pale and went out, and there was only the acrid smoke from their glowing wicks; beneath a layer of chilling ashes the fire disappeared; within a few minutes the flowers faded and shrivelled up; and little by little the pendulum of the clock slowed down once more into immobility. The certitude of all the objects took sudden flight. The opal stone, turned dead, gleamed no longer; the stains of blood upon the cambric by her side had faded likewise; and the vision, in all its ardent whiteness, effacing itself between those despairing arms which sought in vain to clasp it still, returned into thin air. It was lost. One far faint sigh of farewell, distinct, reached even to the soul of the Count. He rose. He had just perceived that he was alone. His dream had melted away at one single touch. With one single word he had snapped the magnetic thread of his glittering pattern. And the atmosphere now was that of the dead.

Like those tear-shaped drops of glass, of chance formation, so solid that a hammer-blow on their thick part will not shatter them, yet such that they will crumble instantly into an impalpable dust if the narrow end, finer than a needle’s point, be broken — all had vanished.

“Oh!” he murmured, “then all is over! She is lost…and all alone! What path can bring me to you now? Show me the road that can lead me to you!”

Suddenly, as if in reply, a shining object fell with a metallic ring from off the nuptial bed, onto the black fur: a ray of that hateful, earthly day lit it up. Stooping down, the forsaken one seized it, and, as he recognized the object, his face was illumined with a sublime smile. It was the key of the tomb.

NUMBER TWO,
MELROSE SQUARE

Theo Gift

1879

CHAPTER I

I am asked to state as clearly as possible why I gave up the house in Melrose Square, Bloomsbury, as suddenly as I did, and what happened there. The landlord says that I have given it a bad name, and prevented him (owing to certain paragraphs which have lately appeared in one of the daily papers) from letting it to another tenant. That is why I have been called upon to make this statement, and I will do so accordingly as briefly and exactly as possible. If the landlord be further hurt by it, I cannot help it. Had I been allowed I would far rather have avoided ever saying or thinking anything more on the subject. To me it is still an inexpressibly painful one.

I first entered Number Two, Melrose Square, rather late in the afternoon of November 15, 1878; that is, just about a year ago. It was a furnished house taken for me by a friend who was slightly acquainted with the landlord. She had also, on his recommendation, engaged for me a temporary servant, and it was this woman who opened the door for me as I alighted from the cab at it.

She was not a pleasant looking person; and I remember my first impression of the house was that it looked dark and cheerless, and not so inviting by any means as my friend had described it to me. She, however, had seen it on a bright morning in October, when the sun was shining and the leaves were still ruddy on the trees, while I was entering it under the treble disadvantages of twilight, soaking rain, and a sky low and dense, and sooty enough to suggest its being compounded of nothing but exhalations from the river of black mud which lined the streets and made the pavements foul and slippery on every side. No house could look pleasant under such circumstances, and I had not come to London for pleasure, but for hard practical work. I had undertaken the translation of a book which necessitated my constant vicinity to the British Museum for at least six months, and the house in Melrose Square was at once so convenient for the purpose, and so exceedingly — I had almost said ridiculously — low rented that it seemed as though it had been left empty specially for my accommodation. It would have required something more than a little outward dreariness to damp my spirits on my first arrival.

Inside it was rather more cheerful. The entrance hall, it is true, was dark and narrow; but Mrs. Cathers, the servant, had lighted a bright fire in the dining-room, and the tea-things were already set out on the table. I began to think that the woman’s face belied her character, and that I should not have to suffer from want of attention at any rate; altogether I sat down to tea in very good spirits, and afterwards wrote a letter to brother John, with whom I had been staying ever since I let the cottage after our mother’s death. It had been a long visit — not too long for him, I hope; but Mrs. John was fussy in her kindness, would make a visitor of me, and fidget if I shut myself up for an hour with my writing. On the whole I had rather looked forward to being my own mistress again. This evening I did not mean to do anything, however. The journey from the north had been as long and tiring as such journeys always are, and I hardly felt equal to getting out any occupation; while in the room where I was sitting there was certainly nothing to interest me or amuse my thoughts.

It was a medium sized apartment, with a rather dingy red Turkey carpet, furniture in the orthodox brown leather and mahogany, and a wallpaper of dull orange striped with maroon. There were one or two very bad oil-paintings, and an engraving, not at all bad, representing Judas casting down the thirty pieces of silver in the Temple; a bookcase in one corner, but locked and with no key in it; and over the chimney-piece a mirror covered with yellow gauze. I have a particular objection to gilding covered up with yellow gauze anywhere or at any time; but in this case the glass was covered as well — a precaution as senseless as it was hideous; and I made up my mind to remove the eyesore on the morrow. For that night I was too lazy, and about nine o’clock rang for Mrs. Cathers to bring me my candle that I might go to bed. She went upstairs with me. It was rather a winding staircase, and my bedroom was on the second floor. I had to pass the drawing-room landing, and a window a little way above just where the stairs took a curve. I remember looking through this window and trying to discover what view it had, and being disappointed because the gloomy blackness of the night without only gave me back a vision of myself reflected in the glass with Mrs. Cathers’s decidedly unprepossessing features a little in my rear. For the moment, indeed, I fancied there were two Mrs. Cathers, or rather a second head a little below hers; but of course that was only a flaw in the glass, and I laughed at myself for the momentary idea that this second head had been more like an old man than my middle-aged servant woman. That is all I recollect of the first night; for after unpacking my trunks I made haste to bed, and slept so soundly that it required more than one knock at my door to arouse me in the morning.

I spent the whole of the next day at the Museum, only returning at dusk to a late dinner. It was still raining then, and the house looked as dreary as it had done on the previous evening. It did not face the square itself — which, indeed, hardly deserved the name, being only a narrow oblong enclosure where a score or so of melancholy trees shook down their last yellow leaves on a wilderness of tall grass and rank weeds, and round which all the house seemed to have acquired an air of damp and gloom. It opened into a little narrow street turning out of one end of the square, and cut off by iron posts and chains from being a thoroughfare to anywhere; and on that side it was divided from the next house by an archway leading down a long entry to some mews in the rear. The house on the other side, that looking into the square, was empty. So was the one immediately in front, and the big, gaunt letters, “To Let,” stared me whitely in the face from the dingy window above and below. It was not a cheerful place; but, as my friend wrote me, when I asked her to find me nice apartments near the Museum, a furnished house in a square, and with a servant included, for positively less money than you would pay for three rooms in anything like a decent street, was a thing to be grasped at, not despised; especially as I could be so much more my own mistress than in the latter place, and could ask Tom and Hester up from their barrack quarters to spend Christmas with me. So I tried to shut my eyes to the exterior look of things and went inside. Here there was one improvement at least — the yellow gauze was gone. I had stripped it off the mirror the last thing before leaving the house in the morning, as also from the glass in the drawing-room, which, though the gilding of the frame was decidedly shabby, was to my great amusement as carefully guarded as the other.

I went up to the latter apartment after dinner. Mrs. Cathers had suggested that “Of course I would not do so, as the dinin’-parlour were so much more cosy;” but I did not agree with Mrs. Cathers. That orange paper with its maroon stripes, and the grim old engraving of Judas, with the horrible expression of the traitor and the sinister, leering faces of the high priests and elders, were depressing to my spirits. The very force and realism of the picture made me feel as if the room were one in which it would be possible to plot a crime. Besides, a house in which a drawing-room is unused, except for company, is never a cosy or homelike one to me; and I knew that Hester felt still more strongly on the subject. I was determined that she should find me and my workbasket and books established there as a matter of course when she came.

Neither books nor work were much called into requisition on the present evening, however. There was a pleasant fire burning in the grate, and two candles on the little round table by the sofa, where the last number of the Cornhill, with a new novel, lay awaiting my perusal; but a day’s continuous writing and my dinner combined had made me sleepy; and after reading a few pages and finding that I was getting into a dreamy state, and mixing up the crackling of the fire with the roar of surf on a sunny beach, and my own position on the sofa with that of the Scottish heroine in a fast-flying cutter, I gave it up, blew out the candles, and composed myself for a nap till teatime.

Do these details appear irrelevant to you? They are not so in reality. I mention them to show you that nothing of what I may afterwards relate can be accounted for (as has been falsely suggested) by my being in an excited, overwrought state, worked up by loneliness or the writing and reading of sensational romances. I was in perfect health. I had lived alone for weeks, and sometimes months, when my dear mother was visiting her married children. I had been simply following my regular profession, which this day lay in the translating a number of dry, scientific rigidly matter-of-fact letters, had walked home, eaten a plain dinner, and read myself comfortably to sleep with one of our healthiest and most-bracing English writer’s descriptions of seacoast scenery. Bear this in mind as I wish you to do, and then listen to what follows.

I woke from my nap with a start, caused by the falling of a coal into the fender. How long I had slept I could not tell; but I had that instinctive consciousness, which I daresay most people have experienced, that it was a long time, much longer than I had intended; and this opinion was confirmed by the sight of the tea-things standing on the table, where Mrs. Cathers had evidently placed them without rousing me, and also by the fact that when I touched the teapot I found it was almost stone-cold. Vexed with myself I rose quickly to my feet and began putting the fire together; for it had got so low and dead that the room was almost dark. Indeed, I feared at first that there was not sufficient vitality in it to light a candle, and so enable me to see what time it was, and whether it was worth while beginning any occupation; but a few skilful touches with the poker soon dispelled this idea and produced a bright, wavering flame; and I stood up again, meaning to get a spill from the mantel-piece and light it at it. As I did so my glance naturally fell on my own face in the mirror before me, and I said to myself aloud, and smiling as one sometimes will when alone: “Well, Miss Mary Liddell, you have made your head into a furze-bush! It’s a mercy Mrs. John isn’t here to see you, or—” My voice broke off suddenly at that word; for in the act of uttering it, and smiling to myself at my dishevelledness, as I have said, I saw that I was not alone in the room.

Standing at the farther end of it, almost opposite to the grate, and reflected in the mirror by the ruddy light, was a woman: a woman I had never seen before. That she had not been there five minutes back when I awoke I could almost have sworn; for I had looked all round the room; and dim as the light was, I could see well enough that there was no one else in it, and that the door was closed. It was closed now, and how she could have opened and shut it again without my hearing her, unless during the moment that I was poking the fire, I could not imagine. The curious thing was that she did not look at or speak to me even now; but stood perfectly still, her face turned towards the door as if in the attitude of listening, and with all the appearance of a person belonging to the house, seeing that she was not dressed for walking, but in a loose sort of morning gown of white cambric, with deep ruffles down the front and at the wrists, and wore her hair loosely plaited down her back. I noticed this at the first glance as adding to the strangeness of her presence there at all; but in the same moment the fire shot up in a brilliant flame throwing a bright light on her face, and almost nailing me to the ground as my eyes read the expression on it. In all the years I have lived, in all the years I may yet have before me, I never have seen, I trust I never may see, such an expression on any human being’s face again! For it was a young face, that of a girl, almost a child; and would have been pretty but for the awful, corpse-like pallor which overshadowed the brow and cheeks, and the hopeless, unutterable depth of misery and fear, of utter despair, and ghastly, speechless, livid horror, all blended in one single effort, an intensity of listening, which seemed to absorb every nerve and power: listening to something outside the door, something which seemed from her starting eyeballs and the hopeless quiver in her lower jaw to be drawing nearer and nearer; for her slender, feeble body seemed to shrink with each breath, and draw itself farther and farther back, as though from some loathsome, terrible animal which she could see in act to spring, or as though — It was all visible in the sudden leaping up of that flame. The next moment it died down again, and I turned round sharply!

The woman was gone!

How I felt I cannot tell you. It has taken many words to write all this, but it did not require the space of one minute to see it. It must have taken you many seconds to read, but it did not take a dozen heartbeats to feel it in all its ghastly, inexplicable mystery. I was still breathless with the surprise of seeing her there, there in my room, which only a moment before had been empty save of myself; and she was gone — disappeared! The door had not opened. There was no sound, no cry, not even the lightest footfall. The house seemed wrapped in the most impenetrable silence. Even the noises in the street were hushed; and I was there alone in the firelight with the unlit spill in my hand. I suppose I rang the bell violently; for I remember listening to the sound of it jingling far away in the basement regions, and then ringing again and again, and waiting, with my heart beating like an alarm-clock, and my hands quite cold and damp, for Mrs. Cathers to answer it.

She made her appearance at last. It may not have been as long as it seemed. One does not tell time accurately at such moments; but it was long enough to give me time to recover myself a little, and to feel annoyed with the woman for the marked sullenness and unwillingness in her whole manner as she entered with the conventional query: “Did you ring, ma’am?” She was carrying a large kerosene lamp, and the sudden glare of light, as well as the sound of her voice, surly as it was, restored me further.

“I should think you heard me ring several times,” I answered. “Did you meet anyone on the stairs just now? I have been asleep longer than I intended, and I did not hear the door open; but—”

“Yes, ma’am, you ’ave been asleep,” Mrs. Cathers interrupted me in a tone of greater injury than before. “And if I didn’t answer of your bell the minnit it ringed, it was in cause of my bein’ that tired of waitin’ up I’d dropt into a doze myself a-sittin’ in my cheer. P’r’aps, ma’am, you don’t know as it’s twelve o’clock?”

“Twelve o’clock!” I repeated. Had I really slept as long? “Why did you not wake me when you brought up the tea?” I added, looking at the woman in surprise.

“Why, m’m,” she said peevishly, “I would have done so, in course, if you ’adn’t said at dinner as you were tired; an’ when I come up you were sleepin’ so sound I didn’t like. Dreamin’, I should think you was too, by your ’air,” the woman put in with a sudden furtive glance at me.

I had not been able to catch her eyes once before. She kept them rigidly fixed on the lamp she carried, never even looking about her; and, indeed, there was something now so unpleasant in her glance, that I felt almost unwilling to go on speaking to her. Still, if anyone had got into the house without my knowledge — anyone of feeble mind, or in great terror! Writing this as though I were in the witness-box, I can solemnly aver that so free was my mind from any morbid or romantic fancies that, even then, I could not think of my visitor as having any supernatural element.

“Have you let anyone into the house without my knowing?” I asked, rather sharply. “Or is the hall-door open? If you have been asleep yourself, you might not hear anyone come in at it; but I believe someone did just now — a woman. She was in this room a few minutes ago.”

Mrs. Cathers looked at me again, this time with barely veiled contempt.

“You ’ave been dreamin’, ma’am,” she said coolly. “The ’all door! Why, it ’ave been shut an’ locked ever since dusk, an’ as to me lettin’ anyone in, I’d not think of such a thing. There ain’t no one in this ’ouse but you and me, nor there hasn’t been, man or woman either. Lor, to think what queer dreams some folks ’ave! But I thought as you were give that way, when I ’eard you mumbling to yourself in your sleep.”

I did not believe her, for I knew that I had not been dreaming; and there was something in the woman’s whole manner which made me distrustful of her, and more especially of her almost impertinent determination to force a ready-made solution of my query on me. Why should she be so anxious to persuade me that I had been dreaming, when, as a matter of fact, she could have no idea of my grounds for speaking as I did? On second thoughts, I decided to say no more on the subject at present; but, simply observing that she ought to have woke me sooner, told her to light me up to bed, and make haste to her own. I could not have stayed longer just then in that drawing-room by myself, and I am perfectly willing to own that until I was safely in bed, with my room door locked, I avoided looking about me as carefully as Mrs. Cathers had done. I was honestly frightened and bewildered, and my mind was in a whirl. It was a comfort to me when three, striking from a church-clock hard-by, and followed by the crowing of an over-wakeful cock, showed me that the actual night was past, and gave me confidence enough to let me sleep.

The following day, the 17th of November, was bright and sunny; and I awoke, feeling more cheerful, and able to reason with myself quite calmly as to the last night’s occurrence. Looking back upon it thus, through the medium of sunlight and a refreshing sleep, I could only conclude that, however unlikely and foreign to all my previous experience, I had simply been the victim of some strange optical delusion, though how produced, and whence arising, I could not tell. Against any other idea, that, for instance, which had already presented itself to me, of some mad or imbecile girl being concealed in the house with Mrs. Cathers’s connivance, I guarded by looking into every room and cupboard immediately after breakfast, and, after locking up those which I did not require for present occupation, depositing the keys in my desk.

I spent the greater part of that day like the last at the British Museum, and afterwards called on some old friends in Russell Place, and stayed to dinner with them. I had been half in hopes of carrying off one of the girls to sleep and spend a few days with me, for the strange vividness and reality of the last night’s vision, and the ghastly sense of horror and mystery encompassing it, had left a sufficiently strong impression on me still to make me wishful for some other company than my own. I was not exactly afraid to be alone, but my nerves had received an unpleasant shock, and I wished to assist myself to recover from it. I was disappointed, however, both the daughters being away on a visit in the country; but their father, one of the kindest and most genial men living, insisted on seeing me home at night, and even came in and sat for half an hour or so talking to me, greatly, as I judged from her face, to the discontent of Mrs. Cathers. Indeed, the sourness of her expression, when she saw me return accompanied by a clergyman, even attracted the old gentleman’s attention, and caused him to observe laughingly to me:

“Why, Mary, my dear, one would think you were a jealous wife, with a husband partial to pretty servant girls, and had chosen the most repellent you could find accordingly. Does your Abigail always present such an unamiable appearance?”

She was to have her amiability further tried. My kind friend, to whom I had half jestingly mentioned the previous night’s fright, insisted on looking over the house with me before he left, so as to “set my mind at rest,” he said; and Mrs. Cathers resented the proceeding so much that she came up to me in the middle of it, and, without taking any notice of Mr. L———’s presence, asked me, in her strongest tone of ill usage, whether I objected to her going to bed: “seeing as how it were past twelve before she got to rest last night, and just on eleven now, and having been hard at work since—”

I told her shortly that she might go to bed as soon as she pleased. When you are used to nice old family servants with gentle, respectful ways, this sort of coarse incivility grates on you, and as I bid my kind old friend good night, a few minutes later, I told him, smiling:

“Well, I think I shall take your advice in one respect before Tom and Hester come, although she is rather a jealous wife. I shall look out for a pleasanter maid.”

I said this, with the hall-door in my hand — he will bear witness now, how cheerfully, and how little the thought that I should never require another maid in that house, or sleep another night there, had occurred to me. Indeed, I can safely say that such an idea had never been further from my mind. I went back to the dining-room quite cheerfully too. Originally, I had intended going to bed very early, and had even, by an impulse which I was ashamed to put into words, re-covered the mirror with its hideous yellow veil; but the evening with my cheery-hearted friends had so restored my natural spirits that I felt divided between laughter and blushes at my own folly in so doing, and finding a little pile of letters and proofs which had come for me by the last post lying on the side-table, I sat down to look over them, and speedily got so absorbed in the task as to forget altogether how time was passing.

I was aroused from it quite suddenly by a feeling which I cannot explain, but yet which was strong enough to make me lift my head with a start, and look sharply around: a feeling that someone was in the same room with me!

CHAPTER II

I said at the end of the first part of this statement that I was aroused from my occupation by the sudden sensation that someone was in the room with me. It was not so in fact. One glance round the formal gas-lit apartment, with its rather skimpy curtains looped flatly against the wall, and its utter absence of anything like dark corners or ghostly recesses, was enough to assure me of my error; but the feeling remained with me all the same, and grew stronger instead of passing away. It almost seemed as though someone were seated at the same table with me, breathing near me, occupying the very next chair; and then gradually there stole over me the same sensation I had had before with regard to this room, as if some crime, some deadly, sickening sin which appalled me even while I was utterly ignorant of its nature, were being plotted and worked out in it — something too hideous to be rendered into words, but to which I, by the very fact of my presence there, was being made a party. It was then, at that moment, that the thought of what I had seen in the mirror last night came into my mind. I was exactly under the drawing-room floor where it had stood — the vision-woman with that awful, unspoken mystery of horror and despair in her livid cheeks and dim, dilated eyes. Was this unknown, unguessed-at wickedness being woven and worked out against her? Was she up there now, waiting?

I had been sitting down, holding my letters in my hand, trying honestly and hard to think of them and nothing else. I could not do so any longer. I stood up abruptly. There was a trembling in my limbs and hands, and my forehead felt cold and moist. All the while I was putting up my papers my eyes would keep wandering by a sort of fascination to the mirror. I could see nothing in it. The gauze prevented me; yet it seemed to me more than once as if the reflection of something — some moving figure, not mine, had passed across it; as if, but for the veil — I could not bear it, and went out quickly from the room, shutting and locking the door behind me. There was no light in the hall or upon the stairs, except the candle I carried. After putting that ready for me, Mrs. Cathers had turned out the gas. I went upstairs with swift steps; swiftest in passing the drawing-room door.

I have said the staircase took a bend here and crossed a long window, which in daylight lighted it from top to bottom. This window gave on the dead wall of a neighbouring house about eight feet distant. There was no blind to it. As on the first night, it frowned on me in black, unsheltered nakedness when I turned the corner. As on the first night, I saw myself reflected at full length in it, the candle in my hand, the buttons and fringes of my dress, the — My God! but who, who or what was that behind me, that crouching figure which froze me to the spot, actually paralysed with dread — a dread which was all the more overmastering because I had heard no faintest rustle or sound to give me warning of it.

Believe me or not; but just below me, creeping slowly with soft, gliding, noiseless steps, was the figure of a man!

At the moment he was not on the same angle of the stairs with me. The banisters separated us, and at first the light only fell on his head: the head of an old man, bald, with tufts of greyish-white hair hanging in coarse, shaggy locks over the large, red, wrinkly ears, and a short, stubbly beard, white too — an old man with stooping shoulders and heavily corrugated brow. The face beneath was inexpressibly evil and repulsive: evil and repulsive in the loose, hanging, sensual lips; evil and repulsive in the cruel, vindictive eyes almost hidden under their overhanging brows; so evil and repulsive in every line and curve of the hoary head and brutal, wolfish jaws, that even if met by daylight in a crowded street one would instinctively have shuddered and shrunk away from contact with him. How much more so now when illumined by an expression of such deadly, sinister determination that the very sight of it seemed to chill one’s heart and limbs, and deprive one even of the power of a cry for help.

In that moment of mortal, agonised terror, longer in seeming than all the years of my past life, I felt as though in the presence of some ferocious animal; some creature without pity, without conscience, without soul, whose very glance must foul and destroy if it once fell on one.

For that was the strangest part of it, adding in one way to the mystery and horror of his presence. This creature, man or devil, never looked at me; seemed, if it were possible to believe such a thing, unconscious even of my presence. Like the vision-woman of last night, its eyes were fixed straight before it. Like the vision-woman of last night, they never blinked or wandered once, but seemed concentrated in one fixed, deadly stare; a stare which had for its object the drawing-room door! Could it be — was it possible, or was this some horrible, fevered dream? — that she was there now, cowering behind that door; a woman, young, almost a child, alone in the night, utterly friendless, utterly helpless, waiting and listening in an anguish of fear beyond words, beyond hope, beyond even prayer, for the approach of this very man who, step by step, was gradually drawing nearer to her — the man whose unseen presence had made the room below horrible with meditated crime, whom I had thought to leave behind me there!

I could see the whole of him now. Inch by inch with a stealthy, crawling movement, as though he were raising himself by the wrinkled, sinewy hand, which grasped the rail of the banisters so close to me that it almost touched my dress, rather than by the use of his feet. He had gained the landing outside the drawing-room door; and I saw that he was clad only in trousers and shirt — the latter open at the throat so as to show the wrinkled, hairy skin; also that he carried in his left hand an ordinary table-knife with a black horn handle, the blade of which, worn to a point like a dagger, had evidently been recently sharpened. I saw, too, for the first time, that he was not alone. Close to his side, and alternately rubbing herself against his legs and the knuckles of his left hand, was a big, yellow, gaunt-bodied cat, with an unusually large head, and one eye bleeding and sore from some recent wound. There was something peculiarly horrible about this cat, horrible even in the almost obtrusive way in which she lavished her caresses on her sinister companion, and then, leaping forward, crouched down at the door, smelling at it and turning her sound eye on her master as if aware of his object and inviting him to hurry with it. Still without a word, and seeming indeed to hold his breath between his clenched teeth, he struck at her with the knife to drive her off; and then, gliding closer to the door, gave one furtive glance around him, and tightening his hold of the weapon, laid his hand upon the lock.

That broke the spell which held me, and had held me till then numb and speechless; and as the handle slowly turned under those cruel, sinewy fingers I shrieked aloud, shrieked again and again, till the whole house rang with my cries of fear and horror; shrieked, and springing wildly forward, saw — nothing! a blank, empty space, where a moment before had been man and animal, and let the candle fall out of my nerveless fingers down between the banister and far below, clattering into the darkness.

•   •   •   •   •

What happened next, or how I got there, I shall never know; but it was early dawn when I recovered consciousness, and I was lying face downwards on the floor in my own room. Someone — Mrs. Cathers it was — was trying to lift me up; but at first I did not recognise her, and the touch of a hand only wrung a faint cry from me, and made me go off again into a second fainting-fit. I suppose she must have got some water then and dashed it in my face; for, when I next revived, both it and my hair were dripping with wet, and I opened my eyes and saw her bending over me. But I was still only half-conscious. I did not know where I was or what had happened to me, and my first effort of returning life was to cling to this woman, so repugnant to me usually, and moan out faint contradictory entreaties that she would stay with me, that she would not leave me; and then, at the same time, that she would run to that poor girl and save her. “Oh, do go to her; do, do, or he will kill her. He will have killed her by now.”

“Killed her! Why, ma’am, whatever are you talking on? There’s no one in the ’ouse but you an’ me. There ain’t, indeed. On my conscience there ain’t.” This, or something like this, Mrs. Cathers kept repeating; but I hardly heard or understood. The frenzy of terror, only half subdued by exhaustion, was still on me; and when I found she would not move I tried to rise, and failing, burst into a fit of hysterical weeping, which lasted so long that Mrs. Cathers got quite frightened. She ran for some brandy and poured it down my throat, and this partially revived me; but by this time I was as weak as a child, and the woman had to half lift, half drag me on to the bed, and then stoop her head low to hear my whispered request, urged with tremulous eagerness, that even if she were sure that there was no one in the house, she would send at once to the friends I had been with last evening, and beg Mrs. L——— to come to me. To my surprise and sorrow, however, this Mrs. Cathers would not do. She had a hundred reasons to the contrary. There was no one to send, and I was not well enough to be left, and if I liked to write to Mrs. L——— later she would put the note in the pillar; all of which did not satisfy me; for with all my suspicions of the woman revived by her reluctance to carry out such a simple and natural wish, I could not feel sure that any letter I might write would reach its destination. Besides, a better idea had come into my head, and finding her obstinate on that score, I begged her to help me to dress, and call a cab, declaring that I would go to the L———’s myself. That would save all delay, and they would take care of me. I could not and would not sleep another night in that house.

Mrs. Cathers lost patience.

“Tush, ma’am! What’s the matter with the ’ouse?” she said rudely, and pressing me back on the pillows with a hand strong enough to be unpleasantly suggestive in my weakened state. “There’s not a soul stirred in it but yourself after the gentleman went last night, and nothing ain’t happened excep’ that you’ve nearly druv yourself into a fever an’ got a fit of the hystericks with the bad air in that beastly Museum, and writin’ mornin’, noon, an’ evenin’, too, as is enough to drive anyone mad. I expect you was reg’lar wore out, and most like fell asleep aside of your bed a-sayin’ your prayers, and got awful nightmares in consequence, as was only natural. Why, you was cryin’ out and struggling in one still when I came upstairs. And now just you lie down, ma’am, an’ take a sleep to quiet you. Why, bless you! you’ll be all right when you wake, and thankful to me I didn’t let you go rampagin’ about when you wasn’t sensible what you was sayin’ or doin’.”

I looked up in the woman’s face and saw that it was useless to try either argument or command on her; for there was a darkly obstinate expression about her mouth which told me she meant to have her way. Perhaps if I pretended to give in to her, and lay still for a while, I might be able to get up later and leave the house without any further appeal to her. That any such appeal would be futile I felt sure. Indeed, her resoluteness in keeping me in the house and preventing me from speaking to other people, with her peculiarly persistent avoidance of asking me any question, either now or on the previous night, as to what had happened, preferring to put forward a made-up story of her own as though she were going through a programme learned by rote beforehand, made me certain that she either knew more of the secrets of this gloomy house than anyone suspected, or was in the landlord’s pay to keep them from being brought to the light of day at any cost, even of life or reason, to a tenant. Put before yourself what would be the natural curiosity, wonder, and sympathy of most women of the lower orders on such an occasion, and I think you will come to a similar conclusion.

Acting on this idea I made believe to yield to her way of thinking, and also to her making me a cup of tea, which she declared would do me all the good in the world. In truth I was both thirsty and anxious above all things to regain strength enough to carry out my purpose; and, therefore, when she brought me up a large breakfast-cup full, I raised myself and drank it off greedily, although it struck me in so doing that it was not good tea, and had a strange bitter flavour. The next moment I felt myself sinking heavily back and my eyes closing. I opened them with an effort, and looked at Mrs. Cathers. There was a smile on her face; but it seemed to be getting fainter, as though I saw it through a thickening mist; and when I tried to say, “You have given me a narcotic,” my voice sounded thick, and the words seemed to lose themselves between my teeth. Before they were fairly uttered, sound and sight, too, had faded away, and I was fast asleep.

How long I slept I do not know, but I should judge it was about four hours. Narcotics, especially in strong doses, have rather a curious effect on me. They both operate and lose their power far more rapidly and thoroughly than with most people. It wanted a few minutes to eleven when I awoke, and, with the exception of a slight headache, I felt at once that both my perceptions and my memory were quite clear. My bodily powers, too, had come back in a great degree; for though I felt much weaker than usual I was quite able to rise, and lost no time in dressing myself for walking, and putting up my money and a few valuables in a small handbag as softly and swiftly as possible. My intention was to leave the house, if possible without seeing Mrs. Cathers again; and at first I seemed likely to succeed. There was no sign of her on the stairs as I passed that awful window, now blank and bare, and filled with raw, white daylight; or in the drawing-room, the door of which stood wide open; and as I hastened down a shudder ran through my limbs, and a feeling of sickness came over me, when I noticed, what I had not seen before, a large brownish stain, which had been partially obliterated by scraping and washing, on the stencilled wall just outside the room.

There was no sign of Mrs. Cathers in the hall either, and the whole house was as still and silent as if she too had dosed herself off to sleep. It was, therefore, an unpleasant shock to me when I lifted the latch of the front door, expecting next moment to be in the street, to find that it was locked and the key gone. The dining-room too was in darkness, the shutters being still up and barred; and a feeling of nervous dread prevented me from giving more than a hasty glance into it. I preferred to boldly invade the kitchen regions, and, if I saw Mrs. Cathers, desire her to let me out by the area door. She could hardly refuse; and if she did, there were enough passers-by at this time for me to easily attract someone’s attention. I went downstairs accordingly. They were narrow stairs, and, though clean enough at present, had evidently not been kept so by previous tenants, for they were stained with blackish spots and patches nearly all the way to the bottom, as though something had been spilt down them, and soaking into the wood remained there. I noticed too that the wall on one side had been whitewashed for about three feet up at a much later period than the rest.

To my surprise Mrs. Cathers was not in the kitchen below; nor in her own room, which adjoined it, and the door of which standing open showed me that her bonnet and shawl were gone from the peg where, on my previous visits to the basement, I had always seen them hanging. It flashed upon me then that she had gone out on some errand of her own, trusting to my being sound asleep, and probably meaning to return before the influence of the narcotic had worn off; and when, to my intense relief and thankfulness, I discovered that she had omitted or forgotten to fasten the area door behind her, I felt as though a heavy weight had been rolled off my heart, and a sudden resolution came to me to profit by her absence by endeavouring to discover some clue, if any existed, to those horrors nightly enacted upstairs. It did not seem likely that I should; but at least I had courage to try.

The kitchen and lower offices generally I had examined before, and found them all alike, dreary in the dreariness of dark November days, rather bare and very clean. Mrs. Cathers’s room remained; but that came under the same category. There was not even anything lying about in it. She kept all her possessions in a small trunk, which was locked. There was no looking-glass in the room; and the key was inside the door. Did she fasten herself in at night, and remain so, unmoved by any shrieks or cries for help from upstairs? There was nothing to be learned here.

I had only one more place to visit, a small yard at the back of the house. Originally, perhaps, it had been a garden; for there were a couple of lilac-bushes and a holly at one end of it; but these had evidently not borne a leaf for years, and being coated with a thick garment of soot stood up against the dank, mildewed walls like black spectres. They were high walls, so high that even if there had been any sun it could hardly have forced an entrance; and the ground beneath was black, too, and sodden with moisture. At one side there was a huge tub for rainwater, and a pile of old bottles; at the bottom a worm-eaten, tumbling-to-pieces summerhouse. That was all. I do not know what took my steps to the last-named place. Standing there under the low leaden sky, and half hidden by the spectral lilac-bushes, it presented an appearance even more gloomy, sinister, and desolate than the rest; yet something within me, something which I could not resist, seemed to force me to the door and compel me to look inside. There was nothing to be seen there at first — nothing, at least, but a pile of wood heaped up on one side, and a rusty old chopper lying across some of the billets with which Mrs. Cathers had evidently been chopping them up for her fire; but as I stood gazing, something living seemed to move at one end of the wood-stack; and to my unutterable horror — a horror which must have been felt to be understood — there came out a large yellow cat, very gaunt and rough-skinned, with an unusually big head and only one eye.

For the moment I thought I should have fainted again. This animal, hideous in itself, and the very facsimile of that whose horrible gambols I had witnessed the previous night, seemed like a part of that ghastly scene risen up again in proof of its reality; and for a minute or so the walls of the building seemed to swim round with me, and I was forced to lean on the wood-stack to save myself from falling. Then I saw that the ground where the animal had been crouching was hollowed into a hole, partly by her own claws, partly, perhaps, by chopping billets on it; and at the present moment she had returned there, and was licking and growling over a bone, which, from its whiteness and the earth on one end of it, appeared to have been disinterred in the process. It was a very small bone, not bigger than that in a rabbit’s foreleg or a human finger; and close by I saw a gleam of something else, also white, showing through the loosened mould. Conquering my repugnance I stooped down, and with a shrinking beyond all words, and which gives me a sick feeling now to think of it, drew out this white thing, discovering it to be a second bone resembling the first. A few blackish fibres like threads were hanging from it, and to it a fragment of stuff — muslin, apparently — was adhering.

The cat lay still, watching me all the while with her one vicious eye, and growling furtively. With an involuntary gesture of disgust I dropped the bone almost as soon as I had touched it, but the bit of muslin had got caught on my finger, and obliged me to look at it more closely. It was a scrap of cambric about nine inches long and two broad, hemmed at one side and gathered at the other, like a frill or ruffle; but it had evidently been torn roughly from the article of dress to which it belonged, and one end was stained with some dark brown liquid, which had dried and caked it into a hard, crumpled mass.

Like a frill or ruffle! Like — like — good God! was it only a fancy? — the ruffles at her wrist; and stained with —

How I left that horrible house I hardly know; but five minutes later I was outside it in the open street, and I have never entered it again. For several weeks I lay very ill in Russell Place; so ill that Hester was sent for from Aldershot to help the L———’s in nursing me; and as soon as I was well enough to be moved she took me back there with her, and afterwards returned with me to the North, where I have remained quietly almost ever since. On the second day of my illness Mrs. L——— and my brother-in-law went to the house in Melrose Square. Mrs. Cathers was there, and opened the door to them, professing great alarm at my absence and entire innocence as to the possibility of anything in the house being the occasion of it; but when she found that one of their first objects was to summarily send her about her business her manner altered, and she sturdily refused to go, declaring that she had been put into the house by the other lady and the landlord, and that no one had any right to send her off at a moment’s warning because a poor, weak-minded lady had got a fever. She had done all she could for her, and tried to keep her quietly in bed; though as to drugging her that was all an invention, and she would swear she had not. Let them take her to a magistrate and try; and if the poor, silly woman would get up and go out what could be expected but she would get worse? Why, she had seen at the very beginning what a nervous, hysterical state she was in; and had told the landlord she did not much like being alone with such a person; and the least she expected was a month’s board and wages in compensation. Tom had written to the landlord already, and an angry interview and correspondence ensued; the latter gentleman persisting in treating all suspicion of there being anything wrong in the house as equally childish and insulting, had the ground of the summer-house dug up, and triumphantly pointed out that there was nothing buried there (this was a week after my visit to the spot, and who could tell what had been done in the interim?) and spoke of me uniformly as a poor, nervous bibliomaniac, worked up into a brain-fever by a disordered digestion and an overwrought brain. Indeed, he even threatened to claim a quarter’s rent, declaring that the house had been taken for six months; but my brother-in-law fought this valiantly, and he had to be content with the month’s rent he had received in advance.

As to Mrs. Cathers, she disappeared during the quarrel between her superiors, and was heard of no more. My firm belief is, and always will be, that she was aware of the evil character of the house, and was heavily paid by the landlord to act as servant to his tenants in it, and cast a slur on anything they might declare they had seen there. He, of course, spoke of her as a person of the highest character, and pointed to the fact that none of my property had been disturbed in my absence as proof thereof.

But what was the explanation of the mystery? What was the dark secret of this house, so strangely shadowed forth to me, a plain matter-of-fact woman of the nineteenth century? After minute enquiries among the neighbours and shopkeepers in the vicinity, I can only say I do not know! The mystery is still unexplained: the secret still hidden in those dreary walls, never probably to be unveiled on earth.

All that the lawyer and Mrs. L———, acting for me, could find out in their research was this: The house had been untenanted for a year and a half before I took it; the last people who lived there being a blind old lady with her husband and two servants. The aged couple used to go to bed very early, and the servants slept downstairs, and never spoke of having heard or seen anything out of the common; but one night the husband, having to come downstairs for his wife’s medicine, must have missed his footing, for he was heard falling to the bottom, and was picked up speechless and dying. The blind widow went away after that, and the household broke up.

Who had the house before them? Oh, a young couple; but they only stayed a week or so, and left suddenly. Reported in the neighbourhood that the landlord turned them out; said they were not respectable people.

And before that? Before that it had been empty a good while, ever since the old gentleman lived there who owned it and was uncle to the present landlord. Married? No; nor likely to have been; a very ill-favoured old gent, and not pleasant in his manners either. Had a ward living with him, however — a young lady; but she was said to be a sad invalid, never went out, and no one ever saw her, except now and then at an upper window. They went away all in a hurry to France — indeed, no one knew till they were gone; for they were not sociable people, only kept one servant, latterly a charwoman who did not sleep in the house, and had no acquaintances in the neighbourhood. Folks said the young lady died abroad, and perhaps her guardian found the house lonesome without her; for though he came back after a time he did not stay. Anyhow, he was dead, too, now; for that was how the house came to the present owner, who had never lived there himself, but let it just as it stood, furnished.

Dead! And there was an end of the clue, if any had existed. It could be traced no farther. Probably it never will be now, since, as I have said, the man and his ward are both dead; though how she died, or where, no one will ever know save God, who looks down on every ghastly secret of this earth and suffers them to lie hidden in His hand until the Day of Judgment. Anyhow, the house is there now, empty. You may pass it any day and read the big “To Let” in sprawling letters on a card in the dining-room window. No one has ever opened the shutters in that dreary room. A rumour has got about that Number Two is haunted, and that evil sights are seen there; and the landlord cannot let it in consequence. That is why he is now threatening me with an action for libel; and if he chooses he may, of course, carry it out. In my defence I can only make a plain statement, the same that I have written here. Let anyone else make what further examination he pleases, and draw his own conclusions.

A LOST DAY

Edgar Fawcett

1891

“My Family,” John Dalrymple would say, “have the strange failing (that is, nearly all of them except myself, on the paternal side) of—”

And then somebody would always try to interrupt him. At the Gramercy, the small but charming club of which he had been for years an honored member, they made a point of interrupting him when he began on his family failing. Not a few of them held to the belief that it was a myth of Dalrymple’s imagination. Still, others argued, all of the clan except John himself had been a queer lot; there was no real certainty that they had not done extraordinary acts. Meanwhile, apart from his desire to delve among ancestral records and repeat tales which had been told many times before, he was a genuine favorite with his friends. But that series of family anecdotes remained a standing joke.

They all pitied him when it became known that his engagement to the pretty winsome widow, Mrs. Carrington, was definitely broken. He was past forty now, and had not been known to pay serious court to any woman before in at least ten years. Of course Mrs. Carrington was rich. But then her money could not have attracted Dalrymple, for he was rich himself, in spite of his plain way of living there in that small Twenty-second Street basement house.

But the widow’s money had doubtless lured to her side the gentleman who had cut poor Dalrymple out. A number of years ago, when this little occurrence which we are chronicling took place, it was not so easy as it is now to make sure of a foreigner’s credentials and antecedents. The Count de Pommereul, a reputed French nobleman of high position, had managed to get into the Gramercy as a six-months’ member, and had managed also to cross the thresholds of numerous select New York drawing-rooms. At the very period of his introduction to Mrs. Carrington her engagement with Dalrymple had already become publicly announced. Then, in a few weeks, society received a shock. Dalrymple was thrown over, and it transpired that the brilliant young widow was betrothed to the Count.

Dalrymple, calm and self-contained, had nothing to say on the subject of why he had received such shabby treatment, and nobody ventured to interrogate him. Some people believed in the Count, others thought that there was a ring of falsity about him, for all his frame was so elegantly slender and supple, for all his mustache was so glossily dark, and his eyes so richly lustrous. Dalrymple meanwhile hid his wound, met the Count constantly at the Club, though no longer even exchanging bows with him, and — worked at his revenge in secret as a beaver works at the building of his winter ranch. He succeeded, too, in getting superb materials for that revenge. They surprised even himself when a few relatives and friends in Paris mailed him appalling documentary evidence as to what sort of a character this Count really was. There is no doubt that he now held in his hand a thunderbolt, and had only to hurl it when he pleased.

He did not tell a single soul what he had learned. The thought of just how he should act haunted him for several days. One evening he went home from the club a little earlier than usual, and tossed restlessly for a good while after going to bed. When sleep came it found him still irresolute as to what course he should take.

It seemed to him that he had now a succession of dreams, but he could recall none of them on awaking. And he awoke in a peculiar way. There was yet no hint of dawn in the room, and only the light from his gas, turned down to a very dim star. He was sitting bolt upright in bed, and feverish, fatigued sensations oppressed him. “What have I been dreaming?” he asked himself again and again. But as only a confused jumble of memories answered him, he sank back upon the pillows, and was soon buried in slumber.

It was past nine o’clock in the morning when he next awoke. He felt decidedly better. Both the feverishness and the fatigue had left him. He went to the club and breakfasted there. It was almost empty of members, as small clubs are apt to be at that hour of the morning. But in the hall he met his old friend Langworth and bowed to him. Langworth, who was rather nearsighted, gave a sudden start and a stare. “How odd,” thought Dalrymple, as he passed on into the reading-room, “I hope there’s nothing unexpected about my personal appearance.” Just at the doorway of the room he met another old friend, Summerson, a man extremely strict about all matters of propriety. Summerson saw him and then plainly made believe that he had not seen. As they moved by one another Dalrymple said lightly, “Good-morning, old chap. How’s your gout?”

Summerson, who was very tall and excessively dignified, gave a comic squirm. Then his eyelids fluttered and with the tips of his lips he murmured, “Better,” as he glided along.

“Pooh,” said Dalrymple to himself. “Getting touchy, I suppose, in his old age. How longevity disagrees with some of us mortals.”

He nearly always took a bottle of seltzer before breakfast, and this morning old Andrew (a servant who had been in the club many years) poured it out for him.

“I hope you’re all right again this mornin’, sorr,” said Andrew with his Celtic accent and in an affable half whisper.

“All right, Andrew,” was the reply. “Why, you must be thinking of someone else. I haven’t been ill. My health has been excellent for a long time past.”

“Yes, sorr,” said Andrew, lowering his eyes and respectfully retiring.

That last “Yes, sorr,” had a dubious note about its delivery that almost made Dalrymple call the faithful old fellow back and further question him. “All right again?” As if he had ever been all wrong! Oh, well, poor Andrew was ageing; others had remarked that fact months ago.

A different servant came to announce breakfast. There were only about five men in the dining-room as Dalrymple entered it. All of them gazed at him in an unusual way, or had late events led him to think that they did so? At the table nearest him sat Everdell, one of the jolliest men in the club, a person whose face was nearly always wreathed in smiles.

“Good-morning!” said Dalrymple, as he caught Everdell’s eye!

“Good-morning!” The tones were replete with mild consternation, and the look that went with them was smileless to the degree of actual gloom. Then Everdell, who had just finished his breakfast, rose and drew near to Dalrymple.

“’Pon my word,” he said, “I’m delighted to see you all right again so soon.”

“All right again so soon?” was the reply. “What in mercy’s name do you mean?”

“Oh, my dear old fellow,” began Everdell, fumbling with his watch-chain, “it was pretty bad, you know, yesterday.”

“Pretty — bad — yesterday?”

“I saw you in the morning, and for an hour or so in the afternoon. Perhaps no one would have noticed it if you hadn’t stayed here all day, and poured those confidences into people’s ears about De Pommereul. You didn’t appear to have drank a drop in the club; there’s the funny part of it. You went out several times, though, and came back again. All that you had to drink (except some wine here at dinner, you remember) you must have got outside. I wasn’t here at ten o’clock when De Pommereul came in. I’m glad I wasn’t. You must have been dreadful. If Summerson and Joyce hadn’t rushed in between you and the Count, heaven knows what would have happened. As it is—”

At this point Dalrymple broke in with cold harshness: “Look here, Everdell, I always disliked practical jokes, and I’ve known for a number of years that you’re given to them. You’ve never attempted to make me your butt before, however, and you’ll have the kindness to discontinue any such proceeding now.”

Everdell drew back for a moment, frowned, shrugged his shoulders, and then muttering, “Oh, if you’re going to put it in that way,” strode quickly out of the dining-room.

Dalrymple scarcely ate a morsel of breakfast. After he had gulped down some hot coffee he repaired to the reading-room. As he re-entered it a waiter handed him several letters. One, which he opened first, was marked “immediate,” and had been sent him from his own house by an intelligent and devoted woman servant there, who had been for a long period in his employ. This letter made poor Dalrymple’s head swim as he read it. Written and signed by Mr. Summerson himself, as chairman of the house committee of the club, it ordered him to appear that same evening before a meeting of the governors and answer to a charge of disorderly conduct on the previous night. Then it went on to state that he (Dalrymple) had been seen throughout the previous day at the club in a state of evident intoxication, and had, finally, between the hours of 10 and 11 p.m., accosted and grossly insulted the Count de Pommereul in the main drawing-room of the Gramercy.

“Disorderly conduct,” “evident intoxication,” “grossly insulted the Count de Pommereul.” These words were trembling on Dalrymple’s lips as he presently approached Summerson himself, the very gentleman who had signed the letter, and who stood in the hall, arrayed for the street.

“What — what does it all mean?” gasped Dalrymple. “I — I never was intoxicated in my life, Lawrence Summerson; you ought to know that! I played euchre last night, up in the card-room, from nine o’clock till twelve, with Ogden and Folsom and yourself. If there’s any practical joke being got up against me, for God’s sake—”

“Wait a minute, please,” said Summerson. He went back into the coatroom, disarrayed himself of his street wraps, and finally joined Dalrymple. His first words, low and grave, ran thus: “Can it be possible you don’t recollect that our game of euchre was played the night before last and not last night?” Then he went with Dalrymple into a corner of the reading room, and they talked together for a good while.

Dalrymple went back to his home that day in a mental whirl. It still wanted a number of hours before the Governing Committee would meet. He had lost a day out of his life — there could be no doubt of that. If he had moved about the Club at all yesterday with a drunken manner, reviling De Pommereul to everybody who would lend him an ear — if he had afterward met De Pommereul in the Club and directed toward him in loud and furious tones a perfect torrent of accusation — he himself was completely, blankly ignorant.

For a good while he sat quite still and thought. Then he summoned Ann, the elderly and very trustworthy Ann, who had been his dear mother’s maid, and was now his housekeeper. He questioned Ann, and after dismissing her he pondered her answers. Three times yesterday she had seen him, and regarding his appearance Ann had her distinct opinions.

Suddenly a light flashed upon Dalrymple while he sat alone and brooded. He sprang up and a cry, half of awe, half of gladness, left his lips. The baffling problem had been solved!

That evening he presented himself before the Governing Committee. All assembled were sorry for him. Of course, punishment must be dealt, but for an old and popular member like Dalrymple it must not be expulsion. The general feeling of the Club had indeed already been gauged, and it was in favor of suspension for six months or a year at the farthest.

Dalrymple, however, was determined that he should be visited with no punishment at all. And he meant to state why.

The judges, as he faced them, all looked politely grim. The President, after a few suave preliminaries, asked Dalrymple if he had anything to say concerning the charges preferred against him. Dalrymple then proceeded to speak with a clear voice and composed demeanour.

His first sentences electrified his hearers. “I have no possible recollection of yesterday,” he began, “and it is precisely as much of a lost day to me as though I had lain chloroformed for twenty-four hours. On Wednesday night I returned home from this club and went to rest. I never really woke until Friday, possibly a little while after midnight, and then within my own bed. On Thursday morning I must have risen in a state of somnambulism, hypnotism, mental aberration, whatever you please, and not come to myself until Thursday had passed, and I had once more retired. Of what yesterday occurred I therefore claim to have been the irresponsible agent, and to have become so through no fault of my own. I am completely innocent of the misdemeanors charged against me, and I now solemnly swear this, on my word of honor as a gentleman.”

Here Dalrymple paused. The members of the committee interchanged glances amid profound silence. On some faces doubt could be read, but on others its veriest opposite. The intense stillness had become painful when Dalrymple spoke again.

“I had hoped that I should escape throughout my own lifetime all visitations of this distressing kind. My grandfather and two of my uncles not only walked in their sleep to an alarming degree, but were each subject to strange conditions of mind, in which acts were performed by them that they could not possibly remember afterward.” Here the speaker paused, soon continuing, however, in a lower and more reflective tone:

“Yes, my family have had the strange failing (that is, nearly all of them except myself, on the paternal side) of—”

But he said no more. The tension was loosened, and a great roar of laughter rose from the whole committee. How often every man there had joked him about that marvelous budget of stories which he infallibly began one way and one way only! And when the familiar formula sounded forth, it was all the funnier to those who heard it because of the solemn, judicial circumstances in which it again met their hearing.

The plaintiff was honorably acquitted. As for De Pommereul, as every word that Dalrymple had said concerning his past life in France happened to be perfectly true, the Count never reappeared at the Gramercy. His engagement with Mrs. Carrington was soon afterward broken off by the lady herself, and for a good while it was rumored that this lady had repentantly made it optional with Dalrymple whether he should once more become her accepted sweetheart.

But Dalrymple remained a bachelor. He is quite an old man now, yet he may be found in the card-room of the Gramercy nearly every evening. He is very willing to tell you the story of his “lost day” if you ask him courteously for it, and not in any strain of fun-poking; but he attempts no more voluntary recitals on the subject of his “family’s” maladies or mishaps.

THE SEVENTH MAN

A.T. Quiller-Couch

1900

In a one-room hut, high within the Arctic Circle, and only a little south of the eightieth parallel, six men were sitting — much as they had sat, evening after evening, for months. They had a clock, and by it they divided the hours into day and night. As a matter of fact, it was always night. But the clock said half-past eight, and they called the time evening.

The hut was built of logs, with an inner skin of rough match-boarding, daubed with pitch. It measured seventeen feet by fourteen; but opposite the door four bunks — two above and two below — took a yard off the length, and this made the interior exactly square. Each of these bunks had two doors, with brass latches on the inner side; so that the owner, if he chose, could shut himself up and go to sleep in a sort of cupboard. But as a rule, he closed one of them only — that by his feet. The other swung back, with its brass latch showing. The men kept these latches in a high state of polish.

Across the angle of the wall, to the left of the door, and behind it when it opened, three hammocks were slung, one above another. No one slept in the uppermost.

But the feature of the hut was its fireplace; and this was merely a square hearthstone, raised slightly above the floor, in the middle of the room. Upon it, and upon a growing mountain of soft grey ash, the fire burned always. It had no chimney, and so the men lost none of its warmth. The smoke ascended steadily and spread itself under the blackened beams and roof-boards in dense blue layers. But about eighteen inches beneath the spring of the roof there ran a line of small trapdoors with sliding panels, to admit the cold air, and below these the room was almost clear of smoke. A newcomer’s eyes might have smarted, but these men stitched their clothes and read in comfort. To keep the up-draught steady they had plugged every chink and crevice in the match-boarding below the trapdoors with moss, and painted the seams with pitch. The fire they fed from a stack of drift and wreck wood piled to the right of the door, and fuel for the fetching strewed the frozen beach outside — whole trees notched into lengths by lumberers’ axes and washed thither from they knew not what continent. But the wreck-wood came from their own ship, the J. R. MacNeill, which had brought them from Dundee.

They were Alexander Williamson, of Dundee, better known as The Gaffer; David Faed, also of Dundee; George Lashman, of Cardiff; Long Ede, of Hayle, in Cornwall; Charles Silchester, otherwise The Snipe, of Ratcliff Highway or thereabouts; and Daniel Cooney, shipped at Tromso six weeks before the wreck, an Irish-American by birth and of no known address.

The Gaffer reclined in his bunk, reading by the light of a smoky and evil-smelling lamp. He had been mate of the J. R. MacNeill, and was now captain as well as patriarch of the party. He possessed three books — the Bible, Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” and an odd volume of “The Turkish Spy.” Just now he was reading “The Turkish Spy.” The lamplight glinted on the rim of his spectacles and on the silvery hairs in his beard, the slack of which he had tucked under the edge of his blanket. His lips moved as he read, and now and then he broke off to glance mildly at Faed and the Snipe, who were busy beside the fire with a greasy pack of cards; or to listen to the peevish grumbling of Lashman in the bunk below him. Lashman had taken to his bed six weeks before with scurvy, and complained incessantly; and though they hardly knew it, these complaints were wearing his comrades’ nerves to fiddle-strings — doing the mischief that cold and bitter hard work and the cruel loneliness had hitherto failed to do. Long Ede lay stretched by the fire in a bundle of skins, reading in his only book, the Bible, open now at the Song of Solomon. Cooney had finished patching a pair of trousers, and rolled himself in his hammock, whence he stared at the roof and the moonlight streaming up there through the little trapdoors and chivying the layers of smoke. Whenever Lashman broke out into fresh quaverings of self-pity, Cooney’s hands opened and shut again, till the nails dug hard into the palm. He groaned at length, exasperated beyond endurance.

“Oh, stow it, George! Hang it all, man…!”

He checked himself, sharp and short: repentant, and rebuked by the silence of the others. They were good seamen all, and tender dealing with a sick shipmate was part of their code.

Lashman’s voice, more querulous than ever, cut into the silence like a knife —

“That’s it. You’ve thought it for weeks, and now you say it. I’ve knowed it all along. I’m just an encumbrance, and the sooner you’re shut of me the better, says you. You needn’t to fret. I’ll be soon out of it; out of it — out there, alongside of Bill—”

“Easy there, matey.” The Snipe glanced over his shoulder and laid his cards face downward. “Here, let me give the bed a shake up. It’ll ease yer.”

“It’ll make me quiet, you mean. Plucky deal you care about easin’ me, any of yer!”

“Get out with yer nonsense! Dan didn’ mean it.” The Snipe slipped an arm under the invalid’s head and rearranged the pillow of skins and gunny-bags.

“He didn’t, didn’t he? Let him say it then…”

The Gaffer read on, his lips moving silently. Heaven knows how he had acquired this strayed and stained and filthy little demi-octavo with the arms of Saumarez on its book-plate — “The Sixth Volume of Letters writ by a Turkish Spy, who liv’d Five-and-Forty Years Undiscovered at Paris: Giving an Impartial Account to the Divan at Constantinople of the most remarkable Transactions of Europe, And discovering several Intrigues and Secrets of the Christian Courts (especially of that of France),” etc., etc. “Written originally in Arabick. Translated into Italian, and from thence into English by the Translator of the First Volume. The Eleventh Edition. London: Printed for G. Strahan, S. Ballard” — and a score of booksellers — “MDCCXLI.” Heavens knows why he read it; since he understood about one-half, and admired less than one-tenth. The Oriental reflections struck him as mainly blasphemous. But the Gaffer’s religious belief marked down nine-tenths of mankind for perdition: which perhaps made him tolerant. At any rate, he read on gravely between the puffs of his short clay —

“On the 19th of this Moon, the King and the whole Court were present at a Ballet, representing the grandeur of the French monarchy. About the Middle of the Entertainment, there was an Antique Dance perform d by twelve Masqueraders, in the suppos’d form of Daemons. But before they had advanc’d far in their Dance, they found an Interloper amongst ’em, who by increasing the Number to thirteen, put them quite out of their Measure: For they practise every Step and Motion beforehand, till they are perfect. Being abash’d therefore at the unavoidable Blunders the thirteenth Antique made them commit, they stood still like Fools, gazing at one another: None daring to unmask, or speak a Word; for that would have put all the Spectators into a Disorder and Confusion. Cardinal Mazarmi (who was the chief Contriver of these Entertainments, to divert the King from more serious Thoughts) stood close by the young Monarch, with the Scheme of the Ballet in his Hand. Knowing therefore that this Dance was to consist but of twelve Antiques, and taking notice that there were actually thirteen, he at first imputed it to some Mistake. But, afterwards, when he perceived the Confusion of the Dancers, he made a more narrow Enquiry into the Cause of this Disorder. To be brief, they convinced the Cardinal that it could be no Error of theirs, by a kind of Demonstration, in that they had but twelve Antique Dresses of that sort, which were made on purpose for this particular Ballet. That which made it seem the greater Mystery was, that when they came behind the Scenes to uncase, and examine the Matter, they found but twelve Antiques, whereas on the Stage there were thirteen…”

“Let him say it. Let him say he didn’t mean it, the rotten Irishman!”

Cooney flung a leg wearily over the side of his hammock, jerked himself out, and shuffled across to the sick man’s berth.

“Av coorse I didn’ mane it. It just took me, ye see, lyin’ up yondher and huggin’ me thoughts in this — wilderness. I swear to ye, George: and ye’ll just wet your throat to show there’s no bad blood, and that ye belave me.” He took up a pannikin from the floor beside the bunk, pulled a hot iron from the fire, and stirred the frozen drink. The invalid turned his shoulder pettishly. “I didn’t mane it,” Cooney repeated. He set down the pannikin, and shuffled wearily back to his hammock.

The Gaffer blew a long cloud and stared at the fire; at the smoke mounting and the grey ash dropping; at David Faed dealing the cards and licking his thumb between each. Long Ede shifted from one cramped elbow to another and pushed his Bible nearer the blaze, murmuring, “Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil our vines.”

“Full hand,” the Snipe announced.

“Ay.” David Faed rolled the quid in his cheek. The cards were so thumbed and tattered that by the backs of them each player guessed pretty shrewdly what the other held. Yet they went on playing night after night; the Snipe shrilly blessing or cursing his luck, the Scotsman phlegmatic as a bolster.

“Play away, man. What ails ye?” he asked.

The Snipe had dropped both hands to his thighs and sat up, stiff and listening.

“Whist! Outside the door.…”

All listened. “I hear nothing,” said David, after ten seconds.

“Hush, man — listen! There, again…”

They heard now. Cooney slipped down from his hammock, stole to the door and listened, crouching, with his ear close to the jamb. The sound resembled breathing — or so he thought for a moment. Then it seemed rather as if some creature were softly feeling about the door — fumbling its coating of ice and frozen snow.

Cooney listened. They all listened. Usually, as soon as they stirred from the scorching circle of the fire, their breath came from them in clouds. It trickled from them now in thin wisps of vapour. They could almost hear the soft grey ash dropping on the hearth.

A log spluttered. Then the invalid’s voice clattered in —

“It’s the bears — the bears! They’ve come after Bill, and next it’ll be my turn. I warned you — I told you he wasn’t deep enough. O Lord, have mercy…mercy…!” He pattered off into a prayer, his voice and teeth chattering.

“Hush!” commanded the Gaffer gently; and Lashman choked on a sob.

“It ain’t bears,” Cooney reported, still with his ear to the door. “Leastways…we’ve had bears before. The foxes, maybe…let me listen.”

Long Ede murmured: “Take us the foxes, the little foxes…”

“I believe you’re right,” the Gaffer announced cheerfully. “A bear would sniff louder — though there’s no telling. The snow was falling an hour back, and I dessay ’tis pretty thick outside. If ’tis a bear, we don’t want him fooling on the roof, and I misdoubt the drift by the north corner is pretty tall by this time. Is he there still?”

“I felt something then…through the chink, here…like a warm breath. It’s gone now. Come here, Snipe, and listen.”

“‘Breath,’ eh? Did it smell like bear?”

“I don’t know…I didn’t smell nothing, to notice. Here, put your head down, close.”

The Snipe bent his head. And at that moment the door shook gently. All stared; and saw the latch move up, up…and falteringly descend on the staple. They heard the click of it.

The door was secured within by two stout bars. Against these there had been no pressure. The men waited in a silence that ached. But the latch was not lifted again.

The Snipe, kneeling, looked up at Cooney. Cooney shivered and looked at David Faed. Long Ede, with his back to the fire, softly shook his feet free of the rugs. His eyes searched for the Gaffer’s face. But the old man had drawn back into the gloom of his bunk, and the lamplight shone only on a grey fringe of beard. He saw Long Ede’s look, though, and answered it quietly as ever.

“Take a brace of guns aloft, and fetch us a look round. Wait, if there’s a chance of a shot. The trap works. I tried it this afternoon with the small chisel.”

Long Ede lit his pipe, tied down the earpieces of his cap, lifted a light ladder off its staples, and set it against a roof-beam: then, with the guns under his arm, quietly mounted. His head and shoulders wavered and grew vague to sight in the smoke-wreaths. “Heard anything more?” he asked. “Nothing since,” answered the Snipe. With his shoulder Long Ede pushed up the trap. They saw his head framed in a panel of moonlight, with one frosty star above it. He was wriggling through. “Pitch him up a sleeping-bag, somebody,” the Gaffer ordered, and Cooney ran with one. “Thank ’ee, mate,” said Long Ede, and closed the trap.

They heard his feet stealthily crunching the frozen stuff across the roof. He was working towards the eaves overlapping the door. Their breath tightened. They waited for the explosion of his gun. None came. The crunching began again: it was heard down by the very edge of the eaves. It mounted to the blunt ridge overhead; then it ceased.

“He will not have seen aught,” David Faed muttered.

“Listen, you. Listen by the door again.” They talked in whispers. Nothing; there was nothing to be heard. They crept back to the fire, and stood there warming themselves, keeping their eyes on the latch. It did not move. After a while Cooney slipped off to his hammock; Faed to his bunk, alongside Lashman’s. The Gaffer had picked up his book again. The Snipe laid a couple of logs on the blaze, and remained beside it, cowering, with his arms stretched out as if to embrace it. His shapeless shadow wavered up and down on the bunks behind him; and, across the fire, he still stared at the latch.

Suddenly the sick man’s voice quavered out —

“It’s not him they want — it’s Bill! They’re after Bill, out there! That was Bill trying to get in.… Why didn’t yer open? It was Bill, I tell yer!”

At the first word the Snipe had wheeled right-about-face, and stood now, pointing, and shaking like a man with ague.

“Matey…for the love of God…”

“I won’t hush. There’s something wrong here tonight. I can’t sleep. It’s Bill, I tell yer. See his poor hammock up there shaking.…”

Cooney tumbled out with an oath and a thud. “Hush it, you white-livered swine! Hush it, or by—” His hand went behind him to his knife-sheath.

“Dan Cooney” — the Gaffer closed his book and leaned out — “go back to your bed.”

“I won’t, Sir. Not unless—”

“Go back.”

“Flesh and blood—”

“Go back.” And for the third time that night Cooney went back.

The Gaffer leaned a little farther over the ledge, and addressed the sick man.

“George, I went to Bill’s grave not six hours agone. The snow on it wasn’t even disturbed. Neither beast nor man, but only God, can break up the hard earth he lies under. I tell you that, and you may lay to it. Now go to sleep.”

Long Ede crouched on the frozen ridge of the hut, with his feet in the sleeping-bag, his knees drawn up, and the two guns laid across them. The creature, whatever its name, that had tried the door, was nowhere to be seen; but he decided to wait a few minutes on the chance of a shot; that is, until the cold should drive him below. For the moment the clear tingling air was doing him good. The truth was Long Ede had begun to be afraid of himself, and the way his mind had been running for the last forty-eight hours upon green fields and visions of spring. As he put it to himself, something inside his head was melting. Biblical texts chattered within him like running brooks, and as they fleeted he could almost smell the blown meadow-scent. “Take us the foxes, the little foxes…for our vines have tender grapes… A fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon… Awake, O north wind, and come, thou south…blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out…” He was light-headed, and he knew it. He must hold out. They were all going mad; were, in fact, three parts crazed already, all except the Gaffer. And the Gaffer relied on him as his right-hand man. One glimpse of the returning sun — one glimpse only — might save them yet.

He gazed out over the frozen hills, and northward across the icepack. A few streaks of pale violet — the ghost of the Aurora — fronted the moon. He could see for miles. Bear or fox, no living creature was in sight. But who could tell what might be hiding behind any one of a thousand hummocks? He listened. He heard the slow grinding of the ice-pack off the beach: only that. “Take us the foxes, the little foxes…”

This would never do. He must climb down and walk briskly, or return to the hut. Maybe there was a bear, after all, behind one of the hummocks, and a shot, or the chance of one, would scatter his head clear of these tom-fooling notions. He would have a search round.

What was that, moving…on a hummock, not five hundred yards away? He leaned forward to gaze.

Nothing now: but he had seen something. He lowered himself to the eaves by the north corner, and from the eaves to the drift piled there. The drift was frozen solid, but for a treacherous crust of fresh snow. His foot slipped upon this, and down he slid of a heap.

Luckily he had been careful to sling the guns tightly at his back. He picked himself up, and unstrapping one, took a step into the bright moonlight to examine the nipples; took two steps: and stood stock-still.

There, before him, on the frozen coat of snow, was a footprint. No: two, three, four — many footprints: prints of a naked human foot: right foot, left foot, both naked, and blood in each print — a little smear.

It had come, then. He was mad for certain. He saw them: he put his fingers in them; touched the frozen blood. The snow before the door was trodden thick with them — some going, some returning.

“The latch…lifted…” Suddenly he recalled the figure he had seen moving upon the hummock, and with a groan he set his face northward and gave chase. Oh, he was mad for certain! He ran like a madman — floundering, slipping, plunging in his clumsy moccasins. “Take us the foxes, the little foxes… My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him… I charge you, O daughters of Jerusalem… I charge you… I charge you…”

He ran thus for three hundred yards maybe, and then stopped as suddenly as he had started.

His mates — they must not see these footprints, or they would go mad too: mad as he. No, he must cover them up, all within sight of the hut. And tomorrow he would come alone, and cover those farther afield. Slowly he retraced his steps. The footprints — those which pointed towards the hut and those which pointed away from it — lay close together; and he knelt before each, breaking fresh snow over the hollows and carefully hiding the blood. And now a great happiness filled his heart; interrupted once or twice as he worked by a feeling that someone was following and watching him. Once he turned northwards and gazed, making a telescope of his hands. He saw nothing, and fell again to his long task.

Within the hut the sick man cried softly to himself. Faed, the Snipe, and Cooney slept uneasily, and muttered in their dreams. The Gaffer lay awake, thinking. After Bill, George Lashman; and after George?… Who next? And who would be the last — the unburied one? The men were weakening fast; their wits and courage coming down at the end with a rush. Faed and Long Ede were the only two to be depended on for a day. The Gaffer liked Long Ede, who was a religious man. Indeed he had a growing suspicion that Long Ede, in spite of some amiable laxities of belief, was numbered among the Elect: or might be, if interceded for. The Gaffer began to intercede for him silently; but experience had taught him that such “wrestlings,” to be effective, must be noisy, and he dropped off to sleep with a sense of failure…

The Snipe stretched himself, yawned, and awoke. It was seven in the morning: time to prepare a cup of tea. He tossed an armful of logs on the fire, and the noise awoke the Gaffer, who at once inquired for Long Ede. He had not returned. “Go you up to the roof. The lad must be frozen.” The Snipe climbed the ladder, pushed open the trap, and came back, reporting that Long Ede was nowhere to be seen. The old man slipped a jumper over his suits of clothing — already three deep — reached for a gun, and moved to the door. “Take a cup of something warm to fortify,” the Snipe advised. “The kettle won’t be five minutes boiling.” But the Gaffer pushed up the heavy bolts and dragged the door open.

“What in the…! Here, bear a hand, lads!”

Long Ede lay prone before the threshold, his outstretched hands almost touching it, his moccasins already covered out of sight by the powdery snow which ran and trickled incessantly — trickled between his long, dishevelled locks, and over the back of his gloves, and ran in a thin stream past the Gaffer’s feet.

They carried him in and laid him on a heap of skins by the fire. They forced rum between his clenched teeth and beat his hands and feet, and kneaded and rubbed him. A sigh fluttered on his lips: something between a sigh and a smile, half seen, half heard. His eyes opened, and his comrades saw that it was really a smile.

“Wot cheer, mate?” It was the Snipe who asked.

“I — I seen…” The voice broke off, but he was smiling still.

What had he seen? Not the sun, surely! By the Gaffer’s reckoning the sun would not be due for a week or two yet: how many weeks he could not say precisely, and sometimes he was glad enough that he did not know.

They forced him to drink a couple of spoonfuls of rum, and wrapped him up warmly. Each man contributed some of his own bedding. Then the Gaffer called to morning prayers, and the three sound men dropped on their knees with him. Now, whether by reason of their joy at Long Ede’s recovery, or because the old man was in splendid voice, they felt their hearts uplifted that morning with a cheerfulness they had not known for months. Long Ede lay and listened dreamily while the passion of the Gaffer’s thanksgiving shook the hut. His gaze wandered over their bowed forms — “The Gaffer, David Faed, Dan Cooney, the Snipe, and — and George Lashman in his bunk, of course — and me.” But, then, who was the seventh? He began to count. “There’s myself — Lashman, in his bunk — David Faed, the Gaffer, the Snipe, Dan Cooney… One, two, three, four — well, but that made seven. Then who was the seventh? Was it George who had crawled out of bed and was kneeling there? Decidedly there were five kneeling. No: there was George, plain enough, in his berth, and not able to move. Then who was the stranger? Wrong again: there was no stranger. He knew all these men — they were his mates. Was it — Bill? No, Bill was dead and buried: none of these was Bill, or like Bill. Try again — One, two, three, four, five — and us two sick men, seven. The Gaffer, David Faed, Dan Cooney — have I counted Dan twice? No, that’s Dan, yonder to the right, and only one of him. Five men kneeling, and two on their backs: that makes seven every time. Dear God — suppose—”

The Gaffer ceased, and in the act of rising from his knees, caught sight of Long Ede’s face. While the others fetched their breakfast-cans, he stepped over, and bent and whispered —

“Tell me. Ye’ve seen what?”

“Seen?” Long Ede echoed.

“Ay, seen what? Speak low — was it the sun?”

“The s—” But this time the echo died on his lips, and his face grew full of awe uncomprehending. It frightened the Gaffer.

“Ye’ll be the better of a snatch of sleep,” said he; and was turning to go, when Long Ede stirred a hand under the edge of his rugs.

“Seven…count…” he whispered.

“Lord have mercy upon us!” the Gaffer muttered to his beard as he moved away. “Long Ede; gone crazed!”

And yet, though an hour or two ago this had been the worst that could befall, the Gaffer felt unusually cheerful. As for the others, they were like different men, all that day and through the three days that followed. Even Lashman ceased to complain, and, unless their eyes played them a trick, had taken a turn for the better. “I declare, if I don’t feel like pitching to sing!” the Snipe announced on the second evening, as much to his own wonder as to theirs. “Then why in thunder don’t you strike up?” answered Dan Cooney, and fetched his concertina. The Snipe struck up, then and there — “Villikins and his Dinah”! What is more, the Gaffer looked up from his “Paradise Lost,” and joined in the chorus.

By the end of the second day, Long Ede was up and active again. He went about with a dazed look in his eyes. He was counting, counting to himself, always counting. The Gaffer watched him furtively.

Since his recovery, though his lips moved frequently, Long Ede had scarcely uttered a word. But towards noon on the fourth day he said an extraordinary thing.

“There’s that sleeping-bag I took with me the other night. I wonder if ’tis on the roof still. It will be froze pretty stiff by this. You might nip up and see, Snipe, and” — he paused — “if you find it, stow it up yonder on Bill’s hammock.”

The Gaffer opened his mouth, but shut it again without speaking. The Snipe went up the ladder.

A minute passed; and then they heard a cry from the roof — a cry that fetched them all trembling, choking, weeping, cheering, to the foot of the ladder.

“Boys! Boys! — the Sun!”

Months later — it was June, and even George Lashman had recovered his strength — the Snipe came running with news of the whaling fleet. And on the beach, as they watched the vessels come to anchor, Long Ede told the Gaffer his story. “It was a hall — a hallu — what d’ye call it, I reckon. I was crazed, eh?” The Gaffer’s eyes wandered from a brambling hopping about the lichen-covered boulders, and away to the sea-fowl wheeling above the ships: and then came into his mind a tale he had read once in The Turkish Spy. “I wouldn’t say just that,” he answered slowly.

“Anyway,” said Long Ede, “I believe the Lord sent a miracle to us to save us all.”

“I wouldn’t say just that, either,” the Gaffer objected. “I doubt it was meant just for you and me, and the rest were presairved, as you might say incidentally.”

THE MAN
WHO WENT TOO FAR

E.F. Benson

1904

The little village of St. Faith’s nestles in a hollow of wooded till up on the north bank of the river Fawn in the country of Hampshire, huddling close round its grey Norman church as if for spiritual protection against the fays and fairies, the trolls and “little people,” who might be supposed still to linger in the vast empty spaces of the New Forest, and to come after dusk and do their doubtful businesses. Once outside the hamlet you may walk in any direction (so long as you avoid the high road which leads to Brockenhurst) for the length of a summer afternoon without seeing sign of human habitation, or possibly even catching sight of another human being. Shaggy wild ponies may stop their feeding for a moment as you pass, the white scuts of rabbits will vanish into their burrows, a brown viper perhaps will glide from your path into a clump of heather, and unseen birds will chuckle in the bushes, but it may easily happen that for a long day you will see nothing human. But you will not feel in the least lonely; in summer, at any rate, the sunlight will be gay with butterflies, and the air thick with all those woodland sounds which like instruments in an orchestra combine to play the great symphony of the yearly festival of June. Winds whisper in the birches, and sigh among the firs; bees are busy with their redolent labour among the heather, a myriad birds chirp in the green temples of the forest trees, and the voice of the river prattling over stony places, bubbling into pools, chuckling and gulping round corners, gives you the sense that many presences and companions are near at hand.

Yet, oddly enough, though one would have thought that these benign and cheerful influences of wholesome air and spaciousness of forest were very healthful comrades for a man, in so far as Nature can really influence this wonderful human genus which has in these centuries learned to defy her most violent storms in its well-established houses, to bridle her torrents and make them light its streets, to tunnel her mountains and plough her seas, the inhabitants of St. Faith’s will not willingly venture into the forest after dark. For in spite of the silence and loneliness of the hooded night it seems that a man is not sure in what company he may suddenly find himself, and though it is difficult to get from these villagers any very clear story of occult appearances, the feeling is widespread. One story indeed I have heard with some definiteness, the tale of a monstrous goat that has been seen to skip with hellish glee about the woods and shady places, and this perhaps is connected with the story which I have here attempted to piece together. It too is well-known to them; for all remember the young artist who died here not long ago, a young man, or so he struck the beholder, of great personal beauty, with something about him that made men’s faces to smile and brighten when they looked on him. His ghost, they will tell you, “walks” constantly by the stream and through the woods which he loved so, and in especial it haunts a certain house, the last of the village, where he lived, and its garden in which he was done to death. For my part I am inclined to think that the terror of the forest dates chiefly from that day.

So, such as the story is, I have set it forth in connected form. It is based partly on the accounts of the villagers, but mainly on that of Darcy, a friend of mine and a friend of the man with whom these events were chiefly concerned.

•  •  •

The day had been one of untarnished midsummer splendour, and as the sun drew near to its setting, the glory of the evening grew every moment more crystalline, more miraculous. Westward from St. Faith’s the beechwood which stretched for some miles toward the heathery upland beyond already cast its veil of clear shadow over the red roofs of the village, but the spire of the grey church, over-topping all, still pointed a flaming orange finger into the sky. The river Fawn, which runs below, lay in sheets of sky-reflected blue, and wound its dreamy devious course round the edge of this wood, where a rough two-planked bridge crossed from the bottom of the garden of the last house in the village, and communicated by means of a little wicker gate with the wood itself. Then once out of the shadow of the wood the stream lay in flaming pools of the molten crimson of the sunset, and lost itself in the haze of woodland distances.

This house at the end of the village stood outside the shadow, and the lawn which sloped down to the river was still flecked with sunlight. Garden-beds of dazzling colour lined its gravel walks, and down the middle of it ran a brick pergola, half-hidden in clusters of rambler-rose and purple with starry clematis. At the bottom end of it, between two of its pillars, was slung a hammock containing a shirtsleeved figure.

The house itself lay somewhat remote from the rest of the village, and a footpath leading across two fields, now tall and fragrant with hay, was its only communication with the high road. It was low-built, only two stories in height, and like the garden, its walls were a mass of flowering roses. A narrow stone terrace ran along the garden front, over which was stretched an awning, and on the terrace a young silent-footed man-servant was busied with the laying of the table for dinner. He was neat-handed and quick with his job, and having finished it he went back into the house, and reappeared again with a large rough bath-towel on his arm. With this he went to the hammock in the pergola.

“Nearly eight, sir,” he said.

“Has Mr. Darcy come yet?” asked a voice from the hammock.

“No, sir.”

“If I’m not back when he comes, tell him that I’m just having a bathe before dinner.”

The servant went back to the house, and after a moment or two Frank Halton struggled to a sitting posture, and slipped out on to the grass. He was of medium height and rather slender in build, but the supple ease and grace of his movements gave the impression of great physical strength: even his descent from the hammock was not an awkward performance. His face and hands were of very dark complexion, either from constant exposure to wind and sun, or, as his black hair and dark eyes tended to show, from some strain of southern blood. His head was small, his face of an exquisite beauty of modelling, while the smoothness of its contour would have led you to believe that he was a beardless lad still in his teens. But something, some look which living and experience alone can give, seemed to contradict that, and finding yourself completely puzzled as to his age, you would next moment probably cease to think about that, and only look at this glorious specimen of young manhood with wondering satisfaction.

He was dressed as became the season and the heat, and wore only a shirt open at the neck, and a pair of flannel trousers. His head, covered very thickly with a somewhat rebellious crop of short curly hair, was bare as he strolled across the lawn to the bathing-place that lay below. Then for a moment there was silence, then the sound of splashed and divided waters, and presently after, a great shout of ecstatic joy, as he swam upstream with the foamed water standing in a frill round his neck. Then after some five minutes of limb-stretching struggle with the flood, he turned over on his back, and with arms thrown wide, floated downstream, ripple-cradled and inert. His eyes were shut, and between half-parted lips he talked gently to himself.

“I am one with it,” he said to himself, “the river and I, I and the river. The coolness and splash of it is I, and the water-herbs that wave in it are I also. And my strength and my limbs are not mine but the river’s. It is all one, all one, dear Fawn.”

•  •  •

A quarter of an hour later he appeared again at the bottom of the lawn, dressed as before, his wet hair already drying into its crisp short curls again. There he paused a moment, looking back at the stream with the smile with which men look on the face of a friend, then turned towards the house. Simultaneously his servant came to the door leading on to the terrace, followed by a man who appeared to be some half-way through the fourth decade of his years. Frank and he saw each other across the bushes and garden-beds, and each quickening his step, they met suddenly face to face round an angle of the garden walk, in the fragrance of syringa.

“My dear Darcy,” cried Frank, “I am charmed to see you.”

But the other stared at him in amazement.

“Frank!” he exclaimed.

“Yes, that is my name,” he said, laughing; “what is the matter?”

Darcy took his hand.

“What have you done to yourself?” he asked. “You are a boy again.”

“Ah, I have a lot to tell you,” said Frank. “Lots that you will hardly believe, but I shall convince you—”

He broke off suddenly, and held up his hand.

“Hush, there is my nightingale,” he said.

The smile of recognition and welcome with which he had greeted his friend faded from his face, and a look of rapt wonder took its place, as of a lover listening to the voice of his beloved. His mouth parted slightly, showing the white line of teeth, and his eyes looked out and out till they seemed to Darcy to be focussed on things beyond the vision of man. Then something perhaps startled the bird, for the song ceased.

“Yes, lots to tell you,” he said. “Really I am delighted to see you. But you look rather white and pulled down; no wonder after that fever. And there is to be no nonsense about this visit. It is June now, you stop here till you are fit to begin work again. Two months at least.”

“Ah, I can’t trespass quite to that extent.”

Frank took his arm and walked him down the grass.

“Trespass? Who talks of trespass? I shall tell you quite openly when I am tired of you, but you know when we had the studio together, we used not to bore each other. However, it is ill talking of going away on the moment of your arrival. Just a stroll to the river, and then it will be dinner-time.”

Darcy took out his cigarette case, and offered it to the other.

Frank laughed.

“No, not for me. Dear me, I suppose I used to smoke once. How very odd!”

“Given it up?”

“I don’t know. I suppose I must have. Anyhow I don’t do it now. I would as soon think of eating meat.”

“Another victim on the smoking altar of vegetarianism?”

“Victim?” asked Frank. “Do I strike you as such?”

He paused on the margin of the stream and whistled softly. Next moment a moor-hen made its splashing flight across the river, and ran up the bank. Frank took it very gently in his hands and stroked its head, as the creature lay against his shirt.

“And is the house among the reeds still secure?” he half-crooned to it. “And is the missus quite well, and are the neighbours flourishing? There, dear, home with you,” and he flung it into the air.

“That bird’s very tame,” said Darcy, slightly bewildered.

“It is rather,” said Frank, following its flight.

•  •  •

During dinner Frank chiefly occupied himself in bringing himself up-to-date in the movements and achievements of this old friend whom he had not seen for six years. Those six years, it now appeared, had been full of incident and success for Darcy; he had made a name for himself as a portrait painter which bade fair to outlast the vogue of a couple of seasons, and his leisure time had been brief. Then some four months previously he had been through a severe attack of typhoid, the result of which as concerns this story was that he had come down to this sequestered place to recuperate.

“Yes, you’ve got on,” said Frank at the end. “I always knew you would. A.R.A. with more in prospect. Money? You roll in it, I suppose, and, O Darcy, how much happiness have you had all these years? That is the only imperishable possession. And how much have you learned? Oh, I don’t mean in Art. Even I could have done well in that.”

Darcy laughed.

“Done well? My dear fellow, all I have learned in these six years you knew, so to speak, in your cradle. Your old pictures fetch huge prices. Do you never paint now?”

Frank shook his head.

“No, I’m too busy,” he said.

“Doing what? Please tell me. That is what everyone is forever asking me.”

“Doing? I suppose you would say I do nothing.”

Darcy glanced up at the brilliant young face opposite him.

“It seems to suit you, that way of being busy,” he said. “Now, it’s your turn. Do you read? Do you study? I remember you saying that it would do us all — all us artists, I mean — a great deal of good if we would study any one human face carefully for a year, without recording a line. Have you been doing that?”

Frank shook his head again.

“I mean exactly what I say,” he said. “I have been doing nothing. And I have never been so occupied. Look at me; have I not done something to myself to begin with?”

“You are two years younger than I,” said Darcy, “at least you used to be. You therefore are thirty-five. But had I never seen you before I should say you were just twenty. But was it worth while to spend six years of greatly-occupied life in order to look twenty? Seems rather like a woman of fashion.”

Frank laughed boisterously.

“First time I’ve ever been compared to that particular bird of prey,” he said. “No, that has not been my occupation — in fact I am only very rarely conscious that one effect of my occupation has been that. Of course, it must have been if one comes to think of it. It is not very important. Quite true my body has become young. But that is very little; I have become young.”

Darcy pushed back his chair and sat sideways to the table looking at the other.

“Has that been your occupation then?” he asked.

“Yes, that anyhow is one aspect of it. Think what youth means! It is the capacity for growth, mind, body, spirit, all grow, all get stronger, all have a fuller, firmer life every day. That is something, considering that every day that passes after the ordinary man reaches the full-blown flower of his strength, weakens his hold on life. A man reaches his prime, and remains, we say, in his prime for ten years, or perhaps twenty. But after his primest prime is reached, he slowly, insensibly weakens. These are the signs of age in you, in your body, in your art probably, in your mind. You are less electric than you were. But I, when I reach my prime — I am nearing it — ah, you shall see.”

The stars had begun to appear in the blue velvet of the sky, and to the east the horizon seen above the black silhouette of the village was growing dove-coloured with the approach of moonrise. White moths hovered dimly over the garden-beds, and the footsteps of night tiptoed through the bushes. Suddenly Frank rose.

“Ah, it is the supreme moment,” he said softly. “Now more than at any other time the current of life, the eternal imperishable current runs so close to me that I am almost enveloped in it. Be silent a minute.”

He advanced to the edge of the terrace and looked out, standing stretched with arms outspread. Darcy heard him draw a long breath into his lungs, and after many seconds expel it again. Six or eight times he did this, then turned back into the lamplight.

“It will sound to you quite mad, I expect,” he said, “but if you want to hear the soberest truth I have ever spoken and shall ever speak, I will tell you about myself. But come into the garden if it is not damp for you. I have never told anyone yet, but I shall like to tell you. It is long, in fact, since I have even tried to classify what I have learned.”

They wandered into the fragrant dimness of the pergola, and sat down. Then Frank began:

“Years ago, do you remember,” he said, “we used often to talk about the decay of joy in the world. Many impulses, we settled, had contributed to this decay, some of which were good in themselves, others that were quite completely bad. Among the good things, I put what we may call certain Christian virtues, renunciation, resignation, sympathy with suffering, and the desire to relieve sufferers, but out of those things spring very bad ones, useless renunciation, asceticism for its own sake, mortification of the flesh with nothing to follow, no corresponding gain that is, and that awful and terrible disease which devastated England some centuries ago, and from which by heredity of spirit we suffer now, Puritanism. That was a dreadful plague, the brutes held and taught that joy and laughter and merriment were evil: it was a doctrine the most profane and wicked. Why, what is the commonest crime one sees? A sullen face. That is the truth of the matter.

“Now all my life I have believed that we are intended to be happy, that joy is of all gifts the most divine. And when I left London, abandoned my career, such as it was, I did so because I intended to devote my life to the cultivation of joy, and, by continuous and unsparing effort to be happy. Among people, and in constant intercourse with others, I did not find it possible; there were too many distractions in towns and workrooms, and also too much suffering. So I took one step backwards or forwards, as you may choose to put it, and went straight to Nature, to trees, birds, animals, to all those things which quite clearly pursue one aim only, which blindly follow the great native instinct to be happy without any care at all for morality, or human law or divine law. I wanted, you understand, to get all joy first-hand and unadulterated, and I think it scarcely exists among men; it is obsolete.”

Darcy turned in his chair.

“Ah, but what makes birds and animals happy?” he asked. “Food, food and mating.”

Frank laughed gently in the stillness.

“Do not think I became a sensualist,” he said. “I did not make that mistake. For the sensualist carries his miseries pick-a-back, and round his feet is wound the shroud that shall soon enwrap him. I may be mad, it is true, but I am not so stupid anyhow as to have tried that. No, what is it that makes puppies play with their own tails, that sends cats on their prowling ecstatic errands at night?”

He paused a moment.

“So I went to Nature,” he said. “I sat down here in this New Forest, sat down fair and square, and looked. That was my first difficulty, to sit here quiet without being bored, to wait without being impatient, to be receptive and very alert, though for a long time nothing particular happened. The change in fact was slow in those early stages.”

“Nothing happened?” asked Darcy, rather impatiently, with the sturdy revolt against any new idea which to the English mind is synonymous with nonsense. “Why, what in the world should happen?”

Now Frank as he had known him was the most generous but most quick-tempered of mortal men; in other words his anger would flare to a prodigious beacon, under almost no provocation, only to be quenched again under a gust of no less impulsive kindliness. Thus the moment Darcy had spoken, an apology for his hasty question was half-way up his tongue. But there was no need for it to have travelled even so far, for Frank laughed again with kindly, genuine mirth.

“Oh, how I should have resented that a few years ago,” he said. “Thank goodness that resentment is one of the things I have got rid of. I certainly wish that you should believe my story — in fact, you are going to — but that you at this moment should imply that you do not does not concern me.”

“Ah, your solitary sojournings have made you inhuman,” said Darcy, still very English.

“No, human,” said Frank. “Rather more human, at least rather less of an ape.

“Well, that was my first quest,” he continued, after a moment, “the deliberate and unswerving pursuit of joy, and my method, the eager contemplation of Nature. As far as motive went, I daresay it was purely selfish, but as far as effect goes, it seems to me about the best thing one can do for one’s follow-creatures, for happiness is more infectious than smallpox. So, as I said, I sat down and waited; I looked at happy things, zealously avoided the sight of anything unhappy, and by degrees a little trickle of the happiness of this blissful world began to filter into me. The trickle grew more abundant, and now, my dear fellow, if I could for a moment divert from me into you one half of the torrent of joy that pours through me day and night, you would throw the world, art, everything aside, and just live, exist. When a man’s body dies, it passes into trees and flowers. Well, that is what I have been trying to do with my soul before death.”

The servant had brought into the pergola a table with syphons and spirits, and had set a lamp upon it. As Frank spoke he leaned forward towards the other, and Darcy for all his matter-of-fact common sense could have sworn that his companion’s face shone, was luminous in itself. His dark brown eyes glowed from within, the unconscious smile of a child irradiated and transformed his face. Darcy felt suddenly excited, exhilarated.

“Go on,” he said. “Go on. I can feel you are somehow telling me sober truth. I daresay you are mad; but I don’t see that matters.”

Frank laughed again.

“Mad?” he said. “Yes, certainly, if you wish. But I prefer to call it sane. However, nothing matters less than what anybody chooses to call things. God never labels his gifts; He just puts them into our hands; just as he put animals in the garden of Eden, for Adam to name if he felt disposed.

“So by the continual observance and study of things that were happy,” continued he, “I got happiness, I got joy. But seeking it, as I did, from Nature, I got much more which I did not seek, but stumbled upon originally by accident. It is difficult to explain, but I will try.

“About three years ago I was sitting one morning in a place I will show you tomorrow. It is down by the river brink, very green, dappled with shade and sun, and the river passes there through some little clumps of reeds. Well, as I sat there, doing nothing, but just looking and listening, I heard the sound quite distinctly of some flute-like instrument playing a strange unending melody. I thought at first it was some musical yokel on the highway and did not pay much attention. But before long the strangeness and indescribable beauty of the tune struck me.

“It never repeated itself, but it never came to an end, phrase after phrase ran its sweet course, it worked gradually and inevitably up to a climax, and having attained it, it went on; another climax was reached and another and another. Then with a sudden gasp of wonder I localised where it came from. It came from the reeds and from the sky and from the trees. It was everywhere, it was the sound of life. It was, my dear Darcy, as the Greeks would have said, it was Pan playing on his pipes, the voice of Nature. It was the life-melody, the world-melody.”

Darcy was far too interested to interrupt, though there was a question he would have liked to ask, and Frank went on:

“Well, for the moment I was terrified, terrified with the impotent horror of nightmare, and I stopped my ears and just ran from the place and got back to the house panting, trembling, literally in a panic. Unknowingly, for at that time I only pursued joy, I had begun, since I drew my joy from Nature, to get in touch with Nature. Nature, force, God, call it what you will, had drawn across my face a little gossamer web of essential life. I saw that when I emerged from my terror, and I went very humbly back to where I had heard the Pan-pipes. But it was nearly six months before I heard them again.”

“Why was that?” asked Darcy.

“Surely because I had revolted, rebelled, and worst of all been frightened. For I believe that just as there is nothing in the world which so injures one’s body as fear, so there is nothing that so much shuts up the soul. I was afraid, you see, of the one thing in the world which has real existence. No wonder its manifestation was withdrawn.”

“And after six months?”

“After six months one blessed morning I heard the piping again. I wasn’t afraid that time.”

“And since then it has grown louder, it has become more constant. I now hear it often, and I can put myself into such an attitude towards Nature that the pipes will almost certainly sound. And never yet have they played the same tune, it is always something new, something fuller, richer, more complete than before.”

“What do you mean by ‘such an attitude towards Nature’?” asked Darcy.

“I can’t explain that; but by translating it into a bodily attitude it is this.”

Frank sat up for a moment quite straight in his chair, then slowly sunk back with arms outspread and head drooped.

“That;” he said, “an effortless attitude, but open, resting, receptive. It is just that which you must do with your soul.”

Then he sat up again.

“One word more,” he said, “and I will bore you no further. Nor unless you ask me questions shall I talk about it again. You will find me, in fact, quite sane in my mode of life. Birds and beasts you will see behaving somewhat intimately to me, like that moor-hen, but that is all. I will walk with you, ride with you, play golf with you, and talk with you on any subject you like. But I wanted you on the threshold to know what has happened to me. And one thing more will happen.”

He paused again, and a slight look of fear crossed his eyes.

“There will be a final revelation,” he said, “a complete and blinding stroke which will throw open to me, once and for all, the full knowledge, the full realisation and comprehension that I am one, just as you are, with life. In reality there is no ‘me,’ no ‘you,’ no ‘it.’ Everything is part of the one and only thing which is life. I know that that is so, but the realisation of it is not yet mine.

“But it will be, and on that day, so I take it, I shall see Pan. It may mean death, the death of my body, that is, but I don’t care. It may mean immortal, eternal life lived here and now and for ever. Then having gained that, ah, my dear Darcy, I shall preach such a gospel of joy, showing myself as the living proof of the truth, that Puritanism, the dismal religion of sour faces, shall vanish like a breath of smoke, and be dispersed and disappear in the sunlit air. But first the full knowledge must be mine.”

Darcy watched his face narrowly.

“You are afraid of that moment,” he said. Frank smiled at him.

“Quite true; you are quick to have seen that. But when it comes I hope I shall not be afraid.”

For some little time there was silence; then Darcy rose.

“You have bewitched me, you extraordinary boy,” he said. “You have been telling me a fairy-story, and I find myself saying, ‘Promise me it is true.”’

“I promise you that,” said the other.

“And I know I shan’t sleep,” added Darcy.

Frank looked at him with a sort of mild wonder as if he scarcely understood.

“Well, what does that matter?” he said.

“I assure you it does. I am wretched unless I sleep.”

“Of course I can make you sleep if I want,” said Frank in a rather bored voice.

“Well, do.”

“Very good: go to bed. I’ll come upstairs in ten minutes.”

Frank busied himself for a little after the other had gone, moving the table back under the awning of the verandah and quenching the lamp. Then he went with his quick silent tread upstairs and into Darcy’s room. The latter was already in bed, but very wide-eyed and wakeful, and Frank with an amused smile of indulgence, as for a fretful child, sat down on the edge of the bed.

“Look at me,” he said, and Darcy looked.

“The birds are sleeping in the brake,” said Frank softly, “and the winds are asleep. The sea sleeps, and the tides are but the heaving of its breast. The stars swing slow, rocked in the great cradle of the Heavens, and—”

He stopped suddenly, gently blew out Darcy’s candle, and left him sleeping.

Morning brought to Darcy a flood of hard common sense, as clear and crisp as the sunshine that filled his room. Slowly as he woke he gathered together the broken threads of the memories of the evening which had ended, so he told himself, in a trick of common hypnotism. That accounted for it all; the whole strange talk he had had was under a spell of suggestion from the extraordinary vivid boy who had once been a man; all his own excitement, his acceptance of the incredible had been merely the effect of a stronger, more potent will imposed on his own. How strong that will was, he guessed from his own instantaneous obedience to Frank’s suggestion of sleep. And armed with impenetrable common sense he came down to breakfast. Frank had already begun, and was consuming a large plateful of porridge and milk with the most prosaic and healthy appetite.

“Slept well?” he asked.

“Yes, of course. Where did you learn hypnotism?”

“By the side of the river.”

“You talked an amazing quantity of nonsense last night,” remarked Darcy, in a voice prickly with reason.

“Rather. I felt quite giddy. Look, I remembered to order a dreadful daily paper for you. You can read about money markets or politics or cricket matches.”

Darcy looked at him closely. In the morning light Frank looked even fresher, younger, more vital than he had done the night before, and the sight of him somehow dinted Darcy’s armour of common sense.

“You are the most extraordinary fellow I ever saw,” he said. “I want to ask you some more questions.”

“Ask away,” said Frank.

•  •  •

For the next day or two Darcy plied his friend with many questions, objections and criticisms on the theory of life, and gradually got out of him a coherent and complete account of his experience. In brief, then, Frank believed that “by lying naked,” as he put it, to the force which controls the passage of the stars, the breaking of a wave, the budding of a tree, the love of a youth and maiden, he had succeeded in a way hitherto undreamed of in possessing himself of the essential principle of life. Day by day, so he thought, he was getting nearer to, and in closer union with, the great power itself which caused all life to be, the spirit of nature, of force, or the spirit of God. For himself, he confessed to what others would call paganism; it was sufficient for him that there existed a principle of life. He did not worship it, he did not pray to it, he did not praise it. Some of it existed in all human beings, just as it existed in trees and animals; to realise and make living to himself the fact that it was all one, was his sole aim and object.

Here perhaps Darcy would put in a word of warning.

“Take care,” he said. “To see Pan meant death, did it not.”

Frank’s eyebrows would rise at this.

“What does that matter?” he said. “True, the Greeks were always right, and they said so, but there is another possibility. For the nearer I get to it, the more living, the more vital and young I become.”

“What then do you expect the final revelation will do for you?”

“I have told you,” said he. “It will make me immortal.”

But it was not so much from speech and argument that Darcy grew to grasp his friend’s conception, as from the ordinary conduct of his life. They were passing, for instance, one morning down the village street, when an old woman, very bent and decrepit, but with an extraordinary cheerfulness of face, hobbled out from her cottage. Frank instantly stopped when he saw her.

“You old darling! How goes it all?” he said.

But she did not answer, her dim old eyes were riveted on his face; she seemed to drink in like a thirsty creature the beautiful radiance which shone there. Suddenly she put her two withered old hands on his shoulders.

“You’re just the sunshine itself,” she said, and he kissed her and passed on.

But scarcely a hundred yards further a strange contradiction of such tenderness occurred. A child running along the path towards them fell on its face and set up a dismal cry of fright and pain. A look of horror came into Frank’s eyes, and, putting his fingers in his ears, he fled at full speed down the street, and did not pause till he was out of hearing. Darcy, having ascertained that the child was not really hurt, followed him in bewilderment.

“Are you without pity then?” he asked. Frank shook his head impatiently.

“Can’t you see?” he asked. “Can’t you understand that that sort of thing, pain, anger, anything unlovely, throws me back, retards the coming of the great hour! Perhaps when it comes I shall be able to piece that side of life on to the other, on to the true religion of joy. At present I can’t.”

“But the old woman. Was she not ugly?”

Frank’s radiance gradually returned.

“Ah, no. She was like me. She longed for joy, and knew it when she saw it, the old darling.”

Another question suggested itself.

“Then what about Christianity?” asked Darcy.

“I can’t accept it. I can’t believe in any creed of which the central doctrine is that God who is Joy should have had to suffer. Perhaps it was so; in some inscrutable way I believe it may have been so, but I don’t understand how it was possible. So I leave it alone; my affair is joy.”

They had come to the weir above the village, and the thunder of riotous cool water was heavy in the air. Trees dipped into the translucent stream with slender trailing branches, and the meadow where they stood was starred with midsummer blossomings. Larks shot up carolling into the crystal dome of blue, and a thousand voices of June sang round them. Frank, bare-headed as was his wont, with his coat slung over his arm and his shirt sleeves rolled up above the elbow, stood there like some beautiful wild animal with eyes half-shut and mouth half-open, drinking in the scented warmth of the air. Then suddenly he flung himself face downwards on the grass at the edge of the stream, burying his face in the daisies and cowslips, and lay stretched there in wide-armed ecstasy, with his long fingers pressing and stroking the dewy herbs of the field. Never before had Darcy seen him thus fully possessed by his idea; his caressing fingers, his half-buried face pressed close to the grass, even the clothed lines of his figure were instinct with a vitality that somehow was different from that of other men. And some faint glow from it reached Darcy, some thrill, some vibration from that charged recumbent body passed to him, and for a moment he understood as he had not understood before, despite his persistent questions and the candid answers they received, how real, and how realised by Frank, his idea was.

Then suddenly the muscles in Frank’s neck became stiff and alert, and he half-raised his head.

“The Pan-pipes, the Pan-pipes,” he whispered. “Close, oh, so close.”

Very slowly, as if a sudden movement might interrupt the melody, he raised himself and leaned on the elbow of his bent arm. His eyes opened wider, the lower lids drooped as if he focussed his eyes on something very far away, and the smile on his face broadened and quivered like sunlight on still water, till the exultance of its happiness was scarcely human. So he remained motionless and rapt for some minutes, then the look of listening died from his face, and he bowed his head, satisfied.

“Ah, that was good,” he said. “How is it possible you did not hear? Oh, you poor fellow! Did you really hear nothing?”

A week of this outdoor and stimulating life did wonders in restoring to Darcy the vigour and health which his weeks of fever had filched from him, and as his normal activity and higher pressure of vitality returned, he seemed to himself to fall even more under the spell which the miracle of Frank’s youth cast over him. Twenty times a day he found himself saying to himself suddenly at the end of some ten minutes silent resistance to the absurdity of Frank’s idea: “But it isn’t possible; it can’t be possible,” and from the fact of his having to assure himself so frequently of this, he knew that he was struggling and arguing with a conclusion which already had taken root in his mind. For in any case a visible living miracle confronted him, since it was equally impossible that this youth, this boy, trembling on the verge of manhood, was thirty-five.

Yet such was the fact.

July was ushered in by a couple of days of blustering and fretful rain, and Darcy, unwilling to risk a chill, kept to the house. But to Frank this weeping change of weather seemed to have no bearing on the behaviour of man, and he spent his days exactly as he did under the suns of June, lying in his hammock, stretched on the dripping grass, or making huge rambling excursions into the forest, the birds hopping from tree to tree after him, to return in the evening, drenched and soaked, but with the same unquenchable flame of joy burning within him.

“Catch cold?” he would ask; “I’ve forgotten how to do it, I think I suppose it makes one’s body more sensible always to sleep out-of-doors. People who live indoors always remind me of something peeled and skinless.”

“Do you mean to say you slept out-of-doors last night in that deluge?” asked Darcy. “And where, may I ask?”

Frank thought a moment.

“I slept in the hammock till nearly dawn,” he said. “For I remember the light blinked in the east when I awoke. Then I went — where did I go — oh, yes, to the meadow where the Pan-pipes sounded so close a week ago. You were with me, do you remember? But I always have a rug if it is wet.”

And he went whistling upstairs.

Somehow that little touch, his obvious effort to recall where he had slept, brought strangely home to Darcy the wonderful romance of which he was the still half-incredulous beholder. Sleep till close on dawn in a hammock, then the tramp — or probably scamper — underneath the windy and weeping heavens to the remote and lonely meadow by the weir! The picture of other such nights rose before him; Frank sleeping perhaps by the bathing-place under the filtered twilight of the stars, or the white blaze of moonshine, a stir and awakening at some dead hour, perhaps a space of silent wide-eyed thought, and then awandering through the hushed woods to some other dormitory, alone with his happiness, alone with the joy and the life that suffused and enveloped him, without other thought or desire or aim except the hourly and never-ceasing communion with the joy of nature.

They were in the middle of dinner that night, talking on indifferent subjects, when Darcy suddenly broke off in the middle of a sentence.

“I’ve got it,” he said. “At last I’ve got it.”

“Congratulate you,” said Frank. “But what?”

“The radical unsoundness of your idea. It is this: ‘All Nature from highest to lowest is full, crammed full of suffering; every living organism in Nature preys on another, yet in your aim to get close to, to be one with Nature, you leave suffering altogether out; you run away from it, you refuse to recognise it. And you are waiting, you say, for the final revelation.”

Frank’s brow clouded slightly.

“Well,” he asked, rather wearily.

“Cannot you guess then when the final revelation will be? In joy you are supreme, I grant you that; I did not know a man could be so master of it. You have learned perhaps practically all that Nature can teach. And if, as you think, the final revelation is coming to you, it will be the revelation of horror, suffering, death, pain in all its hideous forms. Suffering does exist: you hate it and fear it.”

Frank held up his hand.

“Stop; let me think,” he said.

There was silence for a long minute.

“That never struck me,” he said at length. “It is possible that what you suggest is true. Does the sight of Pan mean that, do you think? Is it that Nature, take it altogether, suffers horribly, suffers to a hideous inconceivable extent? Shall I be shown all the suffering?”

He got up and came round to where Darcy sat.

“If it is so, so be it,” he said. “Because, my dear fellow, I am near, so splendidly near to the final revelation. Today the pipes have sounded almost without pause. I have even heard the rustle in the bushes, I believe, of Pan’s coming. I have seen, yes, I saw today, the bushes pushed aside as if by a hand, and piece of a face, not human, peered through. But I was not frightened, at least I did not run away this time.”

He took a turn up to the window and back again.

“Yes, there is suffering all through,” he said, “and I have left it all out of my search. Perhaps, as you say, the revelation will be that. And in that case, it will be good-bye. I have gone on one line. I shall have gone too far along one road, without having explored the other. But I can’t go back now. I wouldn’t if I could; not a step would I retrace! In any case, whatever the revelation is, it will be God. I’m sure of that.”

•  •  •

The rainy weather soon passed, and with the return of the sun Darcy again joined Frank in long rambling days. It grew extraordinarily hotter, and with the fresh bursting of life, after the rain, Frank’s vitality seemed to blaze higher and higher. Then, as is the habit of the English weather, one evening clouds began to bank themselves up in the west, the sun went down in a glare of coppery thunder-rack, and the whole earth broiling under an unspeakable oppression and sultriness paused and panted for the storm. After sunset the remote fires of lightning began to wink and flicker on the horizon, but when bed-time came the storm seemed to have moved no nearer, though a very low unceasing noise of thunder was audible. Weary and oppressed by the stress of the day, Darcy fell at once into a heavy uncomforting sleep.

He woke suddenly into full consciousness, with the din of some appalling explosion of thunder in his ears, and sat up in bed with racing heart. Then for a moment, as he recovered himself from the panic-land which lies between sleeping and waking, there was silence, except for the steady hissing of rain on the shrubs outside his window. But suddenly that silence was shattered and shredded into fragments by a scream from somewhere close at hand outside in the black garden, a scream of supreme and despairing terror. Again and once again it shrilled up, and then a babble of awful words was interjected. A quivering sobbing voice that he knew said:

“My God, oh, my God; oh, Christ!”

And then followed a little mocking, bleating laugh. Then was silence again; only the rain hissed on the shrubs.

All this was but the affair of a moment, and without pause either to put on clothes or light a candle, Darcy was already fumbling at his doorhandle. Even as he opened it he met a terror-stricken face outside, that of the man-servant who carried a light.

“Did you hear?” he asked.

The man’s face was bleached to a dull shining whiteness. “Yes, sir,” he said. “It was the master’s voice.”

•  •  •

Together they hurried down the stairs and through the dining-room where an orderly table for breakfast had already been laid, and out on to the terrace. The rain for the moment had been utterly stayed, as if the tap of the heavens had been turned off, and under the lowering black sky, not quite dark, since the moon rode somewhere serene behind the conglomerated thunderclouds, Darcy stumbled into the garden, followed by the servant with the candle. The monstrous leaping shadow of himself was cast before him on the lawn; lost and wandering odours of rose and lily and damp earth were thick about him, but more pungent was some sharp and acrid smell that suddenly reminded him of a certain châlet in which he had once taken refuge in the Alps. In the blackness of the hazy light from the sky, and the vague tossing of the candle behind him, he saw that the hammock in which Frank so often lay was tenanted. A gleam of white shirt was there, as if a man were sitting up in it, but across that there was an obscure dark shadow, and as he approached the acrid odour grew more intense.

He was now only some few yards away, when suddenly the black shadow seemed to jump into the air, then came down with tappings of hard hoofs on the brick path that ran down the pergola, and with frolicsome skippings galloped off into the bushes. When that was gone Darcy could see quite clearly that a shirted figure sat up in the hammock. For one moment, from sheer terror of the unseen, he hung on his step, and the servant joining him they walked together to the hammock.

It was Frank. He was in shirt and trousers only, and he sat up with braced arms. For one half-second he stared at them, his face a mask of horrible contorted terror. His upper lip was drawn back so that the gums of the teeth appeared, and his eyes were focussed not on the two who approached him, but on something quite close to him; his nostrils were widely expanded, as if he panted for breath, and terror incarnate and repulsion and deathly anguish ruled dreadful lines on his smooth cheeks and forehead. Then even as they looked the body sank backwards, and the ropes of the hammock wheezed and strained.

Darcy lifted him out and carried him indoors. Once he thought there was a faint convulsive stir of the limbs that lay with so dead a weight in his arms, but when they got inside, there was no trace of life. But the look of supreme terror and agony of fear had gone from his face, a boy tired with play but still smiling in his sleep was the burden he laid on the floor. His eyes had closed, and the beautiful mouth lay in smiling curves, even as when a few mornings ago, in the meadow by the weir, it had quivered to the music of the unheard melody of Pan’s pipes. Then they looked further.

•  •  •

Frank had come back from his bathe before dinner that night in his usual costume of shirt and trousers only. He had not dressed, and during dinner, so Darcy remembered, he had rolled up the sleeves of his shirt to above the elbow. Later, as they sat and talked after dinner on the close sultriness of the evening, he had unbuttoned the front of his shirt to let what little breath of wind there was play on his skin. The sleeves were rolled up now, the front of the shirt was unbuttoned, and on his arms and on the brown skin of his chest were strange discolourations which grew momently more clear and defined, till they saw that the marks were pointed prints, as if caused by the hoofs of some monstrous goat that had leaped and stamped upon him.

THE HOUSE
OF THE NIGHTMARE

Edward Lucas White

1906

I first caught sight of the house from the brow of the mountain as I cleared the woods and looked across the broad valley several hundred feet below me, to the low sun sinking toward the far blue hills. From that momentary viewpoint I had an exaggerated sense of looking almost vertically down. I seemed to be hanging over the checkerboard of roads and fields, dotted with farm buildings, and felt the familiar deception that I could almost throw a stone upon the house. I barely glimpsed its slate roof.

What caught my eyes was the bit of road in front of it, between the mass of dark-green trees about the house and the orchard opposite. Perfectly straight it was, bordered by an even row of trees, through which I made out a cinder side path and a low stone wall.

Conspicuous on the orchard side between two of the flanking trees was a white object, which I took to be a tall stone, a vertical splinter of one of the tilted limestone reefs with which the fields of the region are scarred.

The road itself I saw plain as a boxwood ruler on a green baize table. It gave me a pleasurable anticipation of a chance for a burst of speed. I had been painfully traversing closely forested, semi-mountainous hills. Not a farmhouse had I passed, only wretched cabins by the road, more than twenty miles of which I had found very bad and hindering. Now, when I was not many miles from my expected stopping-place, I looked forward to better going, and to that straight, level bit in particular.

As I sped cautiously down the sharp beginning of the long descent the trees engulfed me again, and I lost sight of the valley. I dipped into a hollow, rose on the crest of the next hill, and again saw the house, nearer, and not so far below.

The tall stone caught my eye with a shock of surprise. Had I not thought it was opposite the house next the orchard? Clearly it was on the left-hand side of the road toward the house. My self-questioning lasted only the moment as I passed the crest. Then the outlook was cut off again; but I found myself gazing ahead, watching for the next chance at the same view.

At the end of the second hill I only saw the bit of road obliquely and could not be sure, but, as at first, the tall stone seemed on the right of the road.

At the top of the third and last hill I looked down the stretch of road under the overarching trees, almost as one would look through a tube. There was a line of whiteness which I took for the tall stone. It was on the right.

I dipped into the last hollow. As I mounted the farther slope I kept my eyes on the top of the road ahead of me. When my line of sight surmounted the rise I marked the tall stone on my right hand among the serried maples. I leaned over, first on one side, then on the other, to inspect my tires, then I threw the lever.

As I flew forward, I looked ahead. There was the tall stone — on the left of the road! I was really scared and almost dazed. I meant to stop dead, take a good look at the stone, and make up my mind beyond peradventure whether it was on the right or the left — if not, indeed, in the middle of the road.

In my bewilderment I put on the highest speed. The machine leaped forward; everything I touched went wrong; I steered wildly, slewed to the left, and crashed into a big maple.

When I came to my senses, I was flat on my back in the dry ditch. The last rays of the sun sent shafts of golden-green light through the maple boughs overhead. My first thought was an odd mixture of appreciation of the beauties of nature and disapproval of my own conduct in touring without a companion — a fad I had regretted more than once. Then my mind cleared and I sat up. I felt myself from the head down. I was not bleeding; no bones were broken; and, while much shaken, I had suffered no serious bruises.

Then I saw the boy. He was standing at the edge of the cinderpath, near the ditch. He was so stocky and solidly built; barefoot, with his trousers rolled up to his knees; wore a sort of butternut shirt, open at the throat; and was coatless and hatless. He was tow-headed, with a shock of tousled hair; was much freckled, and had a hideous harelip. He shifted from one foot to the other, twiddled his toes, and said nothing whatever, though he stared at me intently.

I scrambled to my feet and proceeded to survey the wreck. It seemed distressingly complete. It had not blown up, nor even caught fire; but otherwise the ruin appeared hopelessly thorough. Everything I examined seemed worse smashed than the rest. My two hampers, alone, by one of those cynical jokes of chance, had escaped — both had pitched clear of the wreckage and were unhurt, not even a bottle broken.

During my investigations the boy’s faded eyes followed me continuously, but he uttered no word. When I had convinced myself of my helplessness I straightened up and addressed him:

“How far is it to a blacksmith’s shop?”

“Eight mile,” he answered. He had a distressing case of cleft palate and was scarcely intelligible.

“Can you drive me there?” I inquired.

“Nary team on the place,” he replied; “nary horse, nary cow.”

“How far to the next house?” I continued.

“Six mile,” he responded.

I glanced at the sky. The sun had set already. I looked at my watch: it was going — seven thirty-six.

“May I sleep in your house tonight?” I asked.

“You can come in if you want to,” he said, “and sleep if you can. House all messy; ma’s been dead three year, and dad’s away. Nothin’ to eat but buckwheat flour and rusty bacon.”

“I’ve plenty to eat,” I answered, picking up a hamper. “Just take that hamper, will you?”

“You can come in if you’ve a mind to,” he said, “but you got to carry your own stuff.” He did not speak gruffly or rudely, but appeared mildly stating an inoffensive fact.

“All right,” I said, picking up the other hamper; “lead the way.”

The yard in front of the house was dark under a dozen or more immense ailanthus trees. Below them many smaller trees had grown up, and beneath these a dank underwood of tall, rank suckers Out of the deep, shaggy, matted grass. What had once been, apparently, a carriage-drive, left a narrow, curved track, disused and grass-grown, leading to the house. Even here were some shoots of the ailanthus, and the air was unpleasant with the vile smell of the roots and suckers and the insistent odor of their flowers.

The house was of gray stone, with green shutters faded almost as gray as the stone. Along its front was a veranda, not much raised from the ground, and with no balustrade or railing. On it were several hickory splint rockers. There were eight shuttered windows toward the porch, and midway of them a wide door, with small violet panes on either side of it and a fanlight above.

“Open the door,” I said to the boy.

“Open it yourself,” he replied, not unpleasantly nor disagreeably, but in such a tone that one could not but take the suggestion as a matter of course.

I put down the two hampers and tried the door. It was latched but not locked, and opened with a rusty grind of its hinges, on which it sagged crazily, scraping the floor as it turned. The passage smelt moldy and damp. There were several doors on either side; the boy pointed to the first on the right.

“You can have that room,” he said.

I opened the door. What with the dusk, he interlacing trees outside, the piazza roof, and the closed shutters, I could make out little.

“Better get a lamp,” I said to the boy.

“Nary lamp,” he declared cheerfully. “Nary candle. Mostly I get abed before dark.”

I returned to the remains of my conveyance. All four of my lamps were merely scrap metal and splintered glass. My lantern was mashed flat. I always, however, carried candles in my valise. This I found split and crushed, but still holding together. I carried it to the porch, opened it, and took out three candles.

Entering the room, where I found the boy standing just where I had left him. I lit the candle. The walls were whitewashed, the floor bare. There was a mildewed, chilly smell, but the bed looked freshly made up and clean, although it felt clammy.

With a few drops of its own grease I stuck the candle on the corner of a mean, rickety little bureau. There was nothing else in the room save two rush-bottomed chairs and a small table. I went out on the porch, brought in my valise, and put it on the bed. I raised the sash of each window and pushed open the shutter. Then I asked the boy, who had not moved or spoken, to show me the way to the kitchen. He led me straight through the hail to the back of the house. The kitchen was large, and had no furniture save some pine chairs, a pine bench, and a pine table.

I stuck two candles on opposite corners of the table. There was no stove or range in the kitchen, only a big hearth, the ashes in which smelt and looked a month old. The wood in the woodshed was dry enough, but even it had a cellary, stale smell. The axe and hatchet were both rusty and dull, but usable, and I quickly made a big fire. To my amazement, for the mid-June evening was hot and still, the boy, a wry smile on his ugly face, almost leaned over the flame, hands and arms spread out, and fairly roasted himself.

“Are you cold?” I inquired.

“I’m allus cold,” he replied, hugging the fire closer than ever, till I thought he must scorch.

I left him toasting himself while I went in search of water. I discovered the pump, which was in working order and not dry on the valves; but I had a furious struggle to fill the two leaky pails I had found. When I had put water to boil I fetched my hampers from the porch.

I brushed the table and set out my meal — cold fowl, cold ham, white and brown bread, olives, jam, and cake. When the can of soup was hot and the coffee made I drew up two chairs to the table and invited the boy to join me.

“I ain’t hungry,” he said; “I’ve had supper.”

He was a new sort of boy to me; all the boys I knew were hearty eaters and always ready. I had felt hungry myself, but somehow when I came to eat I had little appetite and hardly relished the food. I soon made an end of my meal, covered the fire, blew out the candles, and returned to the porch, where I dropped into one of the hickory rockers to smoke. The boy followed me silently and seated himself on the porch floor, leaning against a pillar, his feet on the grass outside.

“What do you do,” I asked, “when your father is away?”

“Just loaf ’round,” he said. “Just fool ’round.”

“How far off are your nearest neighbors?” I asked.

“Don’t no neighbors never come here,” he stated. “Say they’re afeared of the ghosts.”

I was not at all startled; the place had all those aspects which lead to a house being called haunted. I was struck by his odd matter-of-fact way of speaking — it was as if he had said they were afraid of a cross dog.

“Do you ever see any ghosts around here?” I continued.

“Never see ’em,” he answered, as if I had mentioned tramps or partridges. “Never hear ’em. Sort o’ feel ’em ’round sometimes.”

“Are you afraid of them?” I asked.

“Nope,” he declared. “I ain’t skeered o’ ghosts; I’m skeered o’ nightmares. Ever have nightmares?”

“Very seldom,” I replied.

“I do,” he returned. “Allus have the same nightmare — big sow, big as a steer, trying to eat me up. Wake up so skeered I could run to never. Nowheres to run to. Go to sleep, and have it again. Wake up worse skeered than ever. Dad says it’s buckwheat cakes in summer.”

“You must have teased a sow sometime,” I said.

“Yep,” he answered. “Teased a big sow wunst, holding up one of her pigs by the hind leg. Teased her too long. Fell in the pen and got bit up some. Wisht I hadn’t a’ teased her. Have that nightmare three times a week sometimes. Worse’n being burnt out. Worse’n ghosts. Say, I sorter feel ghosts around now.”

He was not trying to frighten me. He was as simply stating an opinion as if he had spoken of bats or mosquitoes. I made no reply, and found myself listening involuntarily. My pipe went out. I did not really want another, but felt disinclined for bed as yet, and was comfortable where I was, while the smell of the ailanthus blossoms was very disagreeable. I filled my pipe again, lit it, and then, as I puffed, somehow dozed off for a moment.

I awoke with a sensation of some light fabric trailed across my face. The boy’s position was unchanged.

“Did you do that?” I asked sharply.

“Ain’t done nary thing,” he rejoined. “What was it?”

“It was like a piece of mosquito-netting brushed over my face.”

“That ain’t netting,” he asserted; “that’s a veil. That’s one of the ghosts. Some blow on you; some touch you with their long, cold fingers. That one with the veil she drags acrosst your face — well, mostly I think it’s ma.”

He spoke with the unassailable conviction of the child in We Are Seven. I found no words to reply, and rose to go to bed.

“Good night,” I said.

“Good night,” he echoed. “I’ll sit out here a spell yet.”

I lit a match, found the candle I had stuck on the corner of the shabby little bureau, and undressed. The bed had a comfortable husk mattress, and I was soon asleep.

I had the sensation of having slept some time when I had a nightmare — the very nightmare the boy had described. A huge sow, big as a dray horse, was reared up with her forelegs over the foot-board of the bed, trying to scramble over to me. She grunted and puffed, and I felt I was the food she craved. I knew in the dream that it was only a dream, and strove to wake up.

Then the gigantic dream-beast floundered over the foot-board, fell across my shins, and I awoke.

I was in darkness as absolute as if I were sealed in a jet vault, yet the shudder of the nightmare instantly subsided, my nerves quieted; I realized where I was, and felt not the least panic. I turned over and was asleep again almost at once. Then I had a real nightmare, not recognizable as a dream, but appallingly real — an unutterable agony of reasonless horror.

There was a Thing in the room; not a sow, nor any other nameable creature, but a Thing. It was as big as an elephant, filled the room to the ceiling, was shaped like a wild boar, seated on its haunches, with its forelegs braced stiffly in front of it. It had a hot, slobbering, red mouth, full of big tusks, and its jaws worked hungrily. It shuffled and hunched itself forward, inch by inch, till its vast forelegs straddled the bed.

The bed crushed up like wet blotting-paper, and I felt the weight of the Thing on my feet, on my legs, on my body, on my chest. It was hungry, and I was what it was hungry for, and it meant to begin on my face. Its dripping mouth was nearer and nearer.

Then the dream-helplessness that made me unable to call or move suddenly gave way, and I yelled and awoke. This time my terror was positive and not to be shaken off.

It was near dawn: I could descry dimly the cracked, dirty windowpanes. I got up, lit the stump of my candle and two fresh ones, dressed hastily, strapped my ruined valise, and put it on the porch against the wall near the door. Then I called the boy. I realized quite suddenly that I had not told him my name or asked his.

1 shouted. “Hello!” a few times, but won no answer. I had had enough of that house. I was still permeated with the panic of the nightmare. I desisted from shouting, made no search, but with two candles went out to the kitchen. I took a swallow of cold coffee and munched a biscuit as I hustled my belongings into my hampers. Then, leaving a silver dollar on the table, I carried the hampers out on the porch and dumped them by my valise.

It was now light enough to see the walk, and I went out to the road. Already the night-dew had rusted much of the wreck, making it look more hopeless than before. It was, however, entirely undisturbed. There was not so much as a wheel-track or a hoof-print on the road. The tall, white stone, uncertainty about which had caused my disaster, stood like a sentinel opposite where I had upset.

I set out to find that blacksmith shop. Before I had gone far the sun rose clear from the horizon, and was almost at once scorching. As I footed it along I grew very much heated, and it seemed more like ten miles than six before I reached the first house. It was a new frame house, neatly painted and close to the road, with a whitewashed fence along its garden front.

I was about to open the gate when a big black dog with a curly tail bounded out of the bushes. He did not bark but stood inside the gate wagging his tail and regarding me with a friendly eye; yet I hesitated with my hand on the latch and considered. The dog might not be as friendly as he looked, and the sight of him made me realize that except for the boy I had seen no creature about the house where I had spent the night; no dog or cat; not even a toad or bird. While I was ruminating upon this a man came from behind the house.

“Will your dog bite?” I asked.

“Naw,” he answered; “he don’t bite. Come in.”

I told him I had had an accident to my automobile, and asked if he could drive me to the blacksmith shop and back to my wreckage.

“Cert,” he said. “Happy to help you. I’ll hitch up foreshortly. Where’d you smash?”

“In front of the gray house about six miles back,” I answered.

“That big stone-built house?” he queried.

“The same,” I assented.

“Did you go a-past here?” he inquired astonished. “I didn’t hear ye.”

“No,” I said; “I came from the other direction.”

“Why,” he meditated, “you must’a’ smashed about sunup. Did you come over them mountains in the dark?”

“No,” I replied; “I came over them yesterday evening. I smashed up about sunset.”

“Sundown!” he exclaimed. “Where in thunder’ve ye been all night?”

“I slept in the house where I broke down.”

“In that big stone-built house in the trees?” he demanded.

“Yes,” I agreed.

“Why,” he answered excitedly, “that there house is haunted! They say if you have to drive past it after dark, you can’t tell which side of the road the big white stone is on.”

“I couldn’t tell even before sunset,” I said.

“There!” he exclaimed. “Look at that, now! And you slep’ in that house! Did you sleep, honest?”

“I slept pretty well,” I said. “Except for a nightmare, I slept all night.”

“Well,” he commented, “I wouldn’t go in that there house for a farm, nor sleep in it for my salvation. And you slep’! How in thunder did you get in?”

“The boy took me in,” I said.

“What sort of boy?” he queried, his eyes fixed on me with a queer, countrified look of absorbed interest.

“A thickset, freckle-faced boy with a harelip,” I said.

“Talk like his mouth was full of mush?” he demanded.

“Yes,” I said; “bad case of cleft palate.”

“Well!” he exclaimed. “I never did believe in ghosts, and I never did half believe that house was haunted, but I know it now. And you slep’!”

“I didn’t see any ghosts,” I retorted irritably.

“You seen a ghost for sure,” he rejoined solemnly. “That there harelip boy’s been dead six months.”

THE EYES

Edith Wharton

1910

I

We had been put in the mood for ghosts, that evening, after an excellent dinner at our old friend Culwin’s, by a tale of Fred Murchard’s — the narrative of a strange personal visitation.

Seen through the haze of our cigars, and by the drowsy gleam of a coal fire, Culwin’s library, with its oak walls and dark old bindings, made a good setting for such evocations; and ghostly experiences at first hand being, after Murchard’s opening, the only kind acceptable to us, we proceeded to take stock of our group and tax each member for a contribution. There were eight of us, and seven contrived, in a manner more or less adequate, to fulfil the condition imposed. It surprised us all to find that we could muster such a show of supernatural impressions, for none of us, excepting Murchard himself and young Phil Frenham — whose story was the slightest of the lot — had the habit of sending our souls into the invisible. So that, on the whole, we had every reason to be proud of our seven “exhibits,” and none of us would have dreamed of expecting an eighth from our host.

Our old friend, Mr. Andrew Culwin, who had sat back in his armchair, listening and blinking through the smoke circles with the cheerful tolerance of a wise old idol, was not the kind of man likely to be favoured with such contacts, though he had imagination enough to enjoy, without envying, the superior privileges of his guests. By age and by education he belonged to the stout Positivist tradition, and his habit of thought had been formed in the days of the epic struggle between physics and metaphysics. But he had been, then and always, essentially a spectator, a humorous detached observer of the immense muddled variety show of life, slipping out of his seat now and then for a brief dip into the convivialities at the back of the house, but never, as far as one knew, showing the least desire to jump on the stage and do a “turn.”

Among his contemporaries there lingered a vague tradition of his having, at a remote period, and in a romantic clime, been wounded in a duel; but this legend no more tallied with what we younger men knew of his character than my mother’s assertion that he had once been “a charming little man with nice eyes” corresponded to any possible reconstitution of his physiognomy.

“He never can have looked like anything but a bundle of sticks,” Murchard had once said of him. “Or a phosphorescent log, rather,” someone else amended; and we recognised the happiness of this description of his small squat trunk, with the red blink of the eyes in a face like mottled bark. He had always been possessed of a leisure which he had nursed and protected, instead of squandering it in vain activities. His carefully guarded hours had been devoted to the cultivation of a fine intelligence and a few judiciously chosen habits; and none of the disturbances common to human experience seemed to have crossed his sky. Nevertheless, his dispassionate survey of the universe had not raised his opinion of that costly experiment, and his study of the human race seemed to have resulted in the conclusion that all men were superfluous, and women necessary only because someone had to do the cooking. On the importance of this point his convictions were absolute, and gastronomy was the only science which he revered as a dogma. It must be owned that his little dinners were a strong argument in favour of this view, besides being a reason — though not the main one — for the fidelity of his friends.

Mentally he exercised a hospitality less seductive but no less stimulating. His mind was like a forum, or some open meeting-place for the exchange of ideas: somewhat cold and draughty, but light, spacious and orderly — a kind of academic grove from which all the leaves have fallen. In this privileged area a dozen of us were wont to stretch our muscles and expand our lungs; and, as if to prolong as much as possible the tradition of what we felt to be a vanishing institution, one or two neophytes were now and then added to our band.

Young Phil Frenham was the last, and the most interesting, of these recruits, and a good example of Murchard’s somewhat morbid assertion that our old friend “liked ’em juicy.” It was indeed a fact that Culwin, for all his dryness, specially tasted the lyric qualities in youth. As he was far too good an Epicurean to nip the flowers of soul which he gathered for his garden, his friendship was not a disintegrating influence: on the contrary, it forced the young idea to robuster bloom. And in Phil Frenham he had a good subject for experimentation. The boy was really intelligent, and the soundness of his nature was like the pure paste under a fine glaze. Culwin had fished him out of a fog of family dullness, and pulled him up to a peak in Darien; and the adventure hadn’t hurt him a bit. Indeed, the skill with which Culwin had contrived to stimulate his curiosities without robbing them of their bloom of awe seemed to me a sufficient answer to Murchard’s ogreish metaphor. There was nothing hectic in Frenham’s efflorescence, and his old friend had not laid even a fingertip on the sacred stupidities. One wanted no better proof of that than the fact that Frenham still reverenced them in Culwin.

“There’s a side of him you fellows don’t see. I believe that story about the duel!” he declared; and it was of the very essence of this belief that it should impel him — just as our little party was dispersing — to turn back to our host with the joking demand: “And now you’ve got to tell us about your ghost!”

The outer door had closed on Murchard and the others; only Frenham and I remained; and the devoted servant who presided over Culwin’s destinies, having brought a fresh supply of soda-water, had been laconically ordered to bed.

Culwin’s sociability was a night-blooming flower, and we knew that he expected the nucleus of his group to tighten around him after midnight. But Frenham’s appeal seemed to disconcert him comically, and he rose from the chair in which he had just reseated himself after his farewells in the hall.

“My ghost? Do you suppose I’m fool enough to go to the expense of keeping one of my own, when there are so many charming ones in my friends’ closets? — Take another cigar,” he said, revolving toward me with a laugh.

Frenham laughed too, pulling up his slender height before the chimney-piece as he turned to face his short bristling friend.

“Oh,” he said, “you’d never be content to share if you met one you really liked.”

Culwin had dropped back into his armchair, his shock head embedded in the hollow of worn leather, his little eyes glimmering over a fresh cigar.

“Liked — liked? Good Lord!” he growled.

“Ah, you have, then!” Frenham pounced on him in the same instant, with a side-glance of victory at me; but Culwin cowered gnomelike among his cushions, dissembling himself in a protective cloud of smoke.

“What’s the use of denying it? You’ve seen everything, so of course you’ve seen a ghost!” his young friend persisted, talking intrepidly into the cloud. “Or, if you haven’t seen one, it’s only because you’ve seen two!”

The form of the challenge seemed to strike our host. He shot his head out of the mist with a queer tortoise-like motion he sometimes had, and blinked approvingly at Frenham.

“That’s it,” he flung at us on a shrill jerk of laughter; “it’s only because I’ve seen two!”

The words were so unexpected that they dropped down and down into a deep silence, while we continued to stare at each other over Culwin’s head, and Culwin stared at his ghosts. At length Frenham, without speaking, threw himself into the chair on the other side of the hearth, and leaned forward with his listening smile….

—    —    —    —

II

Oh, of course they’re not show ghosts — a collector wouldn’t think anything of them … Don’t let me raise your hopes … their one merit is their numerical strength: the exceptional fact of their being two. But, as against this, I’m bound to admit that at any moment I could probably have exorcised them both by asking my doctor for a prescription, or my oculist for a pair of spectacles. Only, as I never could make up my mind whether to go to the doctor or the oculist — whether I was afflicted by an optical or a digestive delusion — I left them to pursue their interesting double life, though at times they made mine exceedingly uncomfortable….

Yes — uncomfortable; and you know how I hate to be uncomfortable! But it was part of my stupid pride, when the thing began, not to admit that I could be disturbed by the trifling matter of seeing two —

And then I’d no reason, really, to suppose I was ill. As far as I knew I was simply bored — horribly bored. But it was part of my boredom — I remember — that I was feeling so uncommonly well, and didn’t know how on earth to work off my surplus energy. I had come back from a long journey — down in South America and Mexico — and had settled down for the winter near New York, with an old aunt who had known Washington Irving and corresponded with N. P. Willis. She lived, not far from Irvington, in a damp Gothic villa, overhung by Norway spruces, and looking exactly like a memorial emblem done in hair. Her personal appearance was in keeping with this image, and her own hair — of which there was little left — might have been sacrificed to the manufacture of the emblem.

I had just reached the end of an agitated year, with considerable arrears to make up in money and emotion; and theoretically it seemed as though my aunt’s mild hospitality would be as beneficial to my nerves as to my purse. But the deuce of it was that as soon as I felt myself safe and sheltered my energy began to revive; and how was I to work it off inside of a memorial emblem? I had, at that time, the illusion that sustained intellectual effort could engage a man’s whole activity; and I decided to write a great book — I forget about what. My aunt, impressed by my plan, gave up to me her Gothic library, filled with classics bound in black cloth and daguerreotypes of faded celebrities; and I sat down at my desk to win myself a place among their number. And to facilitate my task she lent me a cousin to copy my manuscript.

The cousin was a nice girl, and I had an idea that a nice girl was just what I needed to restore my faith in human nature, and principally in myself. She was neither beautiful nor intelligent — poor Alice Nowell! — but it interested me to see any woman content to be so uninteresting, and I wanted to find out the secret of her content. In doing this I handled it rather rashly, and put it out of joint — oh, just for a moment! There’s no fatuity in telling you this, for the poor girl had never seen anyone but cousins….

Well, I was sorry for what I’d done, of course, and confoundedly bothered as to how I should put it straight. She was staying in the house, and one evening, after my aunt had gone to bed, she came down to the library to fetch a book she’d mislaid, like any artless heroine on the shelves behind us. She was pink-nosed and flustered, and it suddenly occurred to me that her hair, though it was fairly thick and pretty, would look exactly like my aunt’s when she grew older. I was glad I had noticed this, for it made it easier for me to decide to do what was right; and when I had found the book she hadn’t lost I told her I was leaving for Europe that week.

Europe was terribly far off in those days, and Alice knew at once what I meant. She didn’t take it in the least as I’d expected — it would have been easier if she had. She held her book very tight, and turned away a moment to wind up the lamp on my desk — it had a ground glass shade with vine leaves, and glass drops around the edge, I remember. Then she came back, held out her hand, and said: “Good-bye.” And as she said it she looked straight at me and kissed me. I had never felt anything as fresh and shy and brave as her kiss. It was worse than any reproach, and it made me ashamed to deserve a reproach from her. I said to myself: “I’ll marry her, and when my aunt dies she’ll leave us this house, and I’ll sit here at the desk and go on with my book; and Alice will sit over there with her embroidery and look at me as she’s looking now. And life will go on like that for any number of years.” The prospect frightened me a little, but at the time it didn’t frighten me as much as doing anything to hurt her; and ten minutes later she had my seal ring on her finger, and my promise that when I went abroad she should go with me.

You’ll wonder why I’m enlarging on this incident. It’s because the evening on which it took place was the very evening on which I first saw the queer sight I’ve spoken of. Being at that time an ardent believer in a necessary sequence between cause and effect I naturally tried to trace some kind of link between what had just happened to me in my aunt’s library, and what was to happen a few hours later on the same night; and so the coincidence between the two events always remained in my mind.

I went up to bed with rather a heavy heart, for I was bowed under the weight of the first good action I had ever consciously committed; and young as I was, I saw the gravity of my situation. Don’t imagine from this that I had hitherto been an instrument of destruction. I had been merely a harmless young man, who had followed his bent and declined all collaboration with Providence. Now I had suddenly undertaken to promote the moral order of the world, and I felt a good deal like the trustful spectator who has given his gold watch to the conjurer, and doesn’t know in what shape he’ll get it back when the trick is over … Still, a glow of self-righteousness tempered my fears, and I said to myself as I undressed that when I’d got used to being good it probably wouldn’t make me as nervous as it did at the start. And by the time I was in bed, and had blown out my candle, I felt that I really was getting used to it, and that, as far as I’d got, it was not unlike sinking down into one of my aunt’s very softest wool mattresses.

I closed my eyes on this image, and when I opened them it must have been a good deal later, for my room had grown cold, and intensely still. I was waked by the queer feeling we all know — the feeling that there was something in the room that hadn’t been there when I fell asleep. I sat up and strained my eyes into the darkness. The room was pitch black, and at first I saw nothing; but gradually a vague glimmer at the foot of the bed turned into two eyes staring back at me. I couldn’t distinguish the features attached to them, but as I looked the eyes grew more and more distinct: they gave out a light of their own.

The sensation of being thus gazed at was far from pleasant, and you might suppose that my first impulse would have been to jump out of bed and hurl myself on the invisible figure attached to the eyes. But it wasn’t — my impulse was simply to lie still… I can’t say whether this was due to an immediate sense of the uncanny nature of the apparition — to the certainty that if I did jump out of bed I should hurl myself on nothing — or merely to the benumbing effect of the eyes themselves. They were the very worst eyes I’ve ever seen: a man’s eyes — but what a man! My first thought was that he must be frightfully old. The orbits were sunk, and the thick red-lined lids hung over the eyeballs like blinds of which the cords are broken. One lid drooped a little lower than the other, with the effect of a crooked leer; and between these folds of flesh, with their scant bristle of lashes, the eyes themselves, small glassy disks with an agate-like rim, looked like sea-pebbles in the grip of a starfish.

But the age of the eyes was not the most unpleasant thing about them. What turned me sick was their expression of vicious security. I don’t know how else to describe the fact that they seemed to belong to a man who had done a lot of harm in his life, but had always kept just inside the danger lines. They were not the eyes of a coward, but of someone much too clever to take risks; and my gorge rose at their look of base astuteness. Yet even that wasn’t the worst; for as we continued to scan each other I saw in them a tinge of derision, and felt myself to be its object.

At that I was seized by an impulse of rage that jerked me to my feet and pitched me straight at the unseen figure. But of course there wasn’t any figure there, and my fists struck at emptiness. Ashamed and cold, I groped about for a match and lit the candles. The room looked just as usual — as I had known it would; and I crawled back to bed, and blew out the lights.

As soon as the room was dark again the eyes reappeared; and I now applied myself to explaining them on scientific principles. At first I thought the illusion might have been caused by the glow of the last embers in the chimney; but the fireplace was on the other side of my bed, and so placed that the fire could not be reflected in my toilet glass, which was the only mirror in the room. Then it struck me that I might have been tricked by the reflection of the embers in some polished bit of wood or metal; and though I couldn’t discover any object of the sort in my line of vision, I got up again, groped my way to the hearth, and covered what was left of the fire. But as soon as I was back in bed the eyes were back at its foot.

They were an hallucination, then: that was plain. But the fact that they were not due to any external dupery didn’t make them a bit pleasanter. For if they were a projection of my inner consciousness, what the deuce was the matter with that organ? I had gone deeply enough into the mystery of morbid pathological states to picture the conditions under which an exploring mind might lay itself open to such a midnight admonition; but I couldn’t fit it to my present case. I had never felt more normal, mentally and physically; and the only unusual fact in my situation — that of having assured the happiness of an amiable girl — did not seem of a kind to summon unclean spirits about my pillow. But there were the eyes still looking at me.

I shut mine, and tried to evoke a vision of Alice Nowell’s. They were not remarkable eyes, but they were as wholesome as fresh water, and if she had had more imagination — or longer lashes — their expression might have been interesting. As it was, they did not prove very efficacious, and in a few moments I perceived that they had mysteriously changed into the eyes at the foot of the bed. It exasperated me more to feel these glaring at me through my shut lids than to see them, and I opened my eyes again and looked straight into their hateful stare….

And so it went on all night. I can’t tell you what that night was like, nor how long it lasted. Have you ever lain in bed, hopelessly wide awake, and tried to keep your eyes shut, knowing that if you opened ’em you’d see something you dreaded and loathed? It sounds easy, but it’s devilish hard. Those eyes hung there and drew me. I had the vertige de l’abîme [vertigo], and their red lids were the edge of my abyss… I had known nervous hours before: hours when I’d felt the wind of danger in my neck; but never this kind of strain. It wasn’t that the eyes were awful; they hadn’t the majesty of the powers of darkness. But they had — how shall I say? — a physical effect that was the equivalent of a bad smell: their look left a smear like a snail’s. And I didn’t see what business they had with me, anyhow — and I stared and stared, trying to find out….

I don’t know what effect they were trying to produce; but the effect they did produce was that of making me pack my portmanteau and bolt to town early the next morning. I left a note for my aunt, explaining that I was ill and had gone to see my doctor; and as a matter of fact I did feel uncommonly ill — the night seemed to have pumped all the blood out of me. But when I reached town I didn’t go to the doctor’s. I went to a friend’s rooms, and threw myself on a bed, and slept for ten heavenly hours. When I woke it was the middle of the night, and I turned cold at the thought of what might be waiting for me. I sat up, shaking, and stared into the darkness; but there wasn’t a break in its blessed surface, and when I saw that the eyes were not there I dropped back into another long sleep.

I had left no word for Alice when I fled, because I meant to go back the next morning. But the next morning I was too exhausted to stir. As the day went on the exhaustion increased, instead of wearing off like the fatigue left by an ordinary night of insomnia: the effect of the eyes seemed to be cumulative, and the thought of seeing them again grew intolerable. For two days I fought my dread; and on the third evening I pulled myself together and decided to go back the next morning. I felt a good deal happier as soon as I’d decided, for I knew that my abrupt disappearance, and the strangeness of my not writing, must have been very distressing to poor Alice. I went to bed with an easy mind, and fell asleep at once; but in the middle of the night I woke, and there were the eyes….

Well, I simply couldn’t face them; and instead of going back to my aunt’s I bundled a few things into a trunk and jumped aboard the first steamer for England. I was so dead tired when I got on board that I crawled straight into my berth, and slept most of the way over; and I can’t tell you the bliss it was to wake from those long dreamless stretches and look fearlessly into the dark, knowing that I shouldn’t see the eyes….

I stayed abroad for a year, and then I stayed for another; and during that time I never had a glimpse of them. That was enough reason for prolonging my stay if I’d been on a desert island. Another was, of course, that I had perfectly come to see, on the voyage over, the complete impossibility of my marrying Alice Nowell. The fact that I had been so slow in making this discovery annoyed me, and made me want to avoid explanations. The bliss of escaping at one stroke from the eyes, and from this other embarrassment, gave my freedom an extraordinary zest; and the longer I savoured it the better I liked its taste.

The eyes had burned such a hole in my consciousness that for a long time I went on puzzling over the nature of the apparition, and wondering if it would ever come back. But as time passed I lost this dread, and retained only the precision of the image. Then that faded in its turn.

The second year found me settled in Rome, where I was planning, I believe, to write another great book — a definitive work on Etruscan influences in Italian art. At any rate, I’d found some pretext of the kind for taking a sunny apartment in the Piazza di Spagna and dabbling about in the Forum; and there, one morning, a charming youth came to me. As he stood there in the warm light, slender and smooth and hyacinthine, he might have stepped from a ruined altar — one to Antinous, say; but he’d come instead from New York, with a letter (of all people) from Alice Nowell. The letter — the first I’d had from her since our break — was simply a line introducing her young cousin, Gilbert Noyes, and appealing to me to befriend him. It appeared, poor lad, that he “had talent,” and “wanted to write”; and, an obdurate family having insisted that his calligraphy should take the form of double entry, Alice had intervened to win him six months’ respite, during which he was to travel abroad on a meagre pittance, and somehow prove his ability to increase it by his pen. The quaint conditions of the test struck me first: it seemed about as conclusive as a mediaeval “ordeal.” Then I was touched by her having sent him to me. I had always wanted to do her some service, to justify myself in my own eyes rather than hers; and here was a beautiful occasion.

I imagine it’s safe to lay down the general principle that predestined geniuses don’t, as a rule, appear before one in the spring sunshine of the Forum looking like one of its banished gods. At any rate, poor Noyes wasn’t a predestined genius. But he was beautiful to see, and charming as a comrade. It was only when he began to talk literature that my heart failed me. I knew all the symptoms so well — the things he had “in him,” and the things outside him that impinged! There’s the real test, after all. It was always — punctually, inevitably, with the inexorableness of a mechanical law — it was always the wrong thing that struck him. I grew to find a certain fascination in deciding in advance exactly which wrong thing he’d select; and I acquired an astonishing skill at the game….

The worst of it was that his bêtise [stupidity] wasn’t of the too obvious sort. Ladies who met him at picnics thought him intellectual; and even at dinners he passed for clever. I, who had him under the microscope, fancied now and then that he might develop some kind of a slim talent, something that he could make “do” and be happy on; and wasn’t that, after all, what I was concerned with? He was so charming — he continued to be so charming — that he called forth all my charity in support of this argument; and for the first few months I really believed there was a chance for him….

Those months were delightful. Noyes was constantly with me, and the more I saw of him the better I liked him. His stupidity was a natural grace — it was as beautiful, really, as his eyelashes. And he was so gay, so affectionate, and so happy with me, that telling him the truth would have been about as pleasant as slitting the throat of some gentle animal. At first I used to wonder what had put into that radiant head the detestable delusion that it held a brain. Then I began to see that it was simply protective mimicry — an instinctive ruse to get away from family life and an office desk. Not that Gilbert didn’t — dear lad! — believe in himself. There wasn’t a trace of hypocrisy in him. He was sure that his “call” was irresistible, while to me it was the saving grace of his situation that it wasn’t, and that a little money, a little leisure, a little pleasure would have turned him into an inoffensive idler. Unluckily, however, there was no hope of money, and with the alternative of the office desk before him he couldn’t postpone his attempt at literature. The stuff he turned out was deplorable, and I see now that I knew it from the first. Still, the absurdity of deciding a man’s whole future on a first trial seemed to justify me in withholding my verdict, and perhaps even in encouraging him a little, on the ground that the human plant generally needs warmth to flower.

At any rate, I proceeded on that principle, and carried it to the point of getting his term of probation extended. When I left Rome he went with me, and we idled away a delicious summer between Capri and Venice. I said to myself: “If he has anything in him, it will come out now,” and it did. He was never more enchanting and enchanted. There were moments of our pilgrimage when beauty born of murmuring sound seemed actually to pass into his face — but only to issue forth in a flood of the palest ink….

Well, the time came to turn off the tap; and I knew there was no hand but mine to do it. We were back in Rome, and I had taken him to stay with me, not wanting him to be alone in his pension when he had to face the necessity of renouncing his ambition. I hadn’t, of course, relied solely on my own judgment in deciding to advise him to drop literature. I had sent his stuff to various people — editors and critics — and they had always sent it back with the same chilling lack of comment. Really there was nothing on earth to say —

I confess I never felt more shabbily than I did on the day when I decided to have it out with Gilbert. It was well enough to tell myself that it was my duty to knock the poor boy’s hopes into splinters — but I’d like to know what act of gratuitous cruelty hasn’t been justified on that plea? I’ve always shrunk from usurping the functions of Providence, and when I have to exercise them I decidedly prefer that it shouldn’t be on an errand of destruction. Besides, in the last issue, who was I to decide, even after a year’s trial, if poor Gilbert had it in him or not?

The more I looked at the part I’d resolved to play, the less I liked it; and I liked it still less when Gilbert sat opposite me, with his head thrown back in the lamplight, just as Phil’s is now … I’d been going over his last manuscript, and he knew it, and he knew that his future hung on my verdict — we’d tacitly agreed to that. The manuscript lay between us, on my table — a novel, his first novel, if you please! — and he reached over and laid his hand on it, and looked up at me with all his life in the look.

I stood up and cleared my throat, trying to keep my eyes away from his face and on the manuscript.

“The fact is, my dear Gilbert,” I began —

I saw him turn pale, but he was up and facing me in an instant.

“Oh, look here, don’t take on so, my dear fellow! I’m not so awfully cut up as all that!” His hands were on my shoulders, and he was laughing down on me from his full height, with a kind of mortally-stricken gaiety that drove the knife into my side.

He was too beautifully brave for me to keep up any humbug about my duty. And it came over me suddenly how I should hurt others in hurting him: myself first, since sending him home meant losing him; but more particularly poor Alice Nowell, to whom I had so longed to prove my good faith and my desire to serve her. It really seemed like failing her twice to fail Gilbert —

But my intuition was like one of those lightning flashes that encircle the whole horizon, and in the same instant I saw what I might be letting myself in for if I didn’t tell the truth. I said to myself: “I shall have him for life” — and I’d never yet seen anyone, man or woman, whom I was quite sure of wanting on those terms. Well, this impulse of egotism decided me. I was ashamed of it, and to get away from it I took a leap that landed me straight in Gilbert’s arms.

“The thing’s all right, and you’re all wrong!” I shouted up at him; and as he hugged me, and I laughed and shook in his clutch, I had for a minute the sense of self-complacency that is supposed to attend the footsteps of the just. Hang it all, making people happy has its charms —

Gilbert, of course, was for celebrating his emancipation in some spectacular manner; but I sent him away alone to explode his emotions, and went to bed to sleep off mine. As I undressed I began to wonder what their aftertaste would be — so many of the finest don’t keep! Still, I wasn’t sorry, and I meant to empty the bottle, even if it did turn a trifle flat.

After I got into bed I lay for a long time smiling at the memory of his eyes — his blissful eyes… Then I fell asleep, and when I woke the room was deathly cold, and I sat up with a jerk — and there were the other eyes….

It was three years since I’d seen them, but I’d thought of them so often that I fancied they could never take me unawares again. Now, with their red sneer on me, I knew that I had never really believed they would come back, and that I was as defenceless as ever against them … As before, it was the insane irrelevance of their coming that made it so horrible. What the deuce were they after, to leap out at me at such a time? I had lived more or less carelessly in the years since I’d seen them, though my worst indiscretions were not dark enough to invite the searchings of their infernal glare; but at this particular moment I was really in what might have been called a state of grace; and I can’t tell you how the fact added to their horror….

But it’s not enough to say they were as bad as before: they were worse. Worse by just so much as I’d learned of life in the interval; by all the damnable implications my wider experience read into them. I saw now what I hadn’t seen before: that they were eyes which had grown hideous gradually, which had built up their baseness coral-wise, bit by bit, out of a series of small turpitudes slowly accumulated through the industrious years. Yes — it came to me that what made them so bad was that they’d grown bad so slowly….

There they hung in the darkness, their swollen lids dropped across the little watery bulbs rolling loose in the orbits, and the puff of flesh making a muddy shadow underneath — and as their stare moved with my movements, there came over me a sense of their tacit complicity, of a deep hidden understanding between us that was worse than the first shock of their strangeness. Not that I understood them; but that they made it so clear that someday I should … Yes, that was the worst part of it, decidedly; and it was the feeling that became stronger each time they came back….

For they got into the damnable habit of coming back. They reminded me of vampires with a taste for young flesh, they seemed so to gloat over the taste of a good conscience. Every night for a month they came to claim their morsel of mine: since I’d made Gilbert happy they simply wouldn’t loosen their fangs. The coincidence almost made me hate him, poor lad, fortuitous as I felt it to be. I puzzled over it a good deal, but couldn’t find any hint of an explanation except in the chance of his association with Alice Nowell. But then the eyes had let up on me the moment I had abandoned her, so they could hardly be the emissaries of a woman scorned, even if one could have pictured poor Alice charging such spirits to avenge her. That set me thinking, and I began to wonder if they would let up on me if I abandoned Gilbert. The temptation was insidious, and I had to stiffen myself against it; but really, dear boy! he was too charming to be sacrificed to such demons. And so, after all, I never found out what they wanted…

—    —    —    —

III

The fire crumbled, sending up a flash which threw into relief the narrator’s gnarled face under its grey-black stubble. Pressed into the hollow of the chair-back, it stood out an instant like an intaglio of yellowish red-veined stone, with spots of enamel for the eyes; then the fire sank and it became once more a dim Rembrandtish blur.

Phil Frenham, sitting in a low chair on the opposite side of the hearth, one long arm propped on the table behind him, one hand supporting his thrown-back head, and his eyes fixed on his old friend’s face, had not moved since the tale began. He continued to maintain his silent immobility after Culwin had ceased to speak, and it was I who, with a vague sense of disappointment at the sudden drop of the story, finally asked: “But how long did you keep on seeing them?”

Culwin, so sunk into his chair that he seemed like a heap of his own empty clothes, stirred a little, as if in surprise at my question. He appeared to have half-forgotten what he had been telling us.

“How long? Oh, off and on all that winter. It was infernal. I never got used to them. I grew really ill.”

Frenham shifted his attitude, and as he did so his elbow struck against a small mirror in a bronze frame standing on the table behind him. He turned and changed its angle slightly; then he resumed his former attitude, his dark head thrown back on his lifted palm, his eyes intent on Culwin’s face. Something in his silent gaze embarrassed me, and as if to divert attention from it I pressed on with another question:

“And you never tried sacrificing Noyes?”

“Oh, no. The fact is I didn’t have to. He did it for me, poor boy!”

“Did it for you? How do you mean?”

“He wore me out — wore everybody out. He kept on pouring out his lamentable twaddle, and hawking it up and down the place till he became a thing of terror. I tried to wean him from writing — oh, ever so gently, you understand, by throwing him with agreeable people, giving him a chance to make himself felt, to come to a sense of what he really had to give. I’d foreseen this solution from the beginning — felt sure that, once the first ardour of authorship was quenched, he’d drop into his place as a charming parasitic thing, the kind of chronic Cherubino for whom, in old societies, there’s always a seat at table, and a shelter behind the ladies’ skirts. I saw him take his place as ‘the poet’: the poet who doesn’t write. One knows the type in every drawing-room. Living in that way doesn’t cost much — I’d worked it all out in my mind, and felt sure that, with a little help, he could manage it for the next few years; and meanwhile he’d be sure to marry. I saw him married to a widow, rather older, with a good cook and a well-run house. And I actually had my eye on the widow … Meanwhile I did everything to help the transition — lent him money to ease his conscience, introduced him to pretty women to make him forget his vows. But nothing would do him: he had but one idea in his beautiful obstinate head. He wanted the laurel and not the rose, and he kept on repeating Gautier’s axiom, and battering and filing at his limp prose till he’d spread it out over Lord knows how many hundred pages. Now and then he would send a barrelful to a publisher, and of course it would always come back.

“At first it didn’t matter — he thought he was ‘misunderstood.’ He took the attitudes of genius, and whenever an opus came home he wrote another to keep it company. Then he had a reaction of despair, and accused me of deceiving him, and Lord knows what. I got angry at that, and told him it was he who had deceived himself. He’d come to me determined to write, and I’d done my best to help him. That was the extent of my offence, and I’d done it for his cousin’s sake, not his.

“That seemed to strike home, and he didn’t answer for a minute. Then he said: ‘My time’s up and my money’s up. What do you think I’d better do?’

“‘I think you’d better not be an ass,’ I said.

“‘What do you mean by being an ass?’ he asked.

“I took a letter from my desk and held it out to him.

“‘I mean refusing this offer of Mrs. Ellinger’s: to be her secretary at a salary of five thousand dollars. There may be a lot more in it than that.’

“He flung out his hand with a violence that struck the letter from mine. ‘Oh, I know well enough what’s in it!’ he said, red to the roots of his hair.

“‘And what’s the answer, if you know?’ I asked.

“He made none at the minute, but turned away slowly to the door. There, with his hand on the threshold, he stopped to say, almost under his breath: ‘Then you really think my stuff’s no good?’

“I was tired and exasperated, and I laughed. I don’t defend my laugh — it was in wretched taste. But I must plead in extenuation that the boy was a fool, and that I’d done my best for him — I really had.

“He went out of the room, shutting the door quietly after him. That afternoon I left for Frascati, where I’d promised to spend the Sunday with some friends. I was glad to escape from Gilbert, and by the same token, as I learned that night, I had also escaped from the eyes. I dropped into the same lethargic sleep that had come to me before when I left off seeing them; and when I woke the next morning, in my peaceful room above the ilexes, I felt the utter weariness and deep relief that always followed on that sleep. I put in two blessed nights at Frascati, and when I got back to my rooms in Rome I found that Gilbert had gone … Oh, nothing tragic had happened — the episode never rose to that. He’d simply packed his manuscripts and left for America — for his family and the Wall Street desk. He left a decent enough note to tell me of his decision, and behaved altogether, in the circumstances, as little like a fool as it’s possible for a fool to behave…”

IV

Culwin paused again, and Frenham still sat motionless, the dusky contour of his young head reflected in the mirror at his back.

“And what became of Noyes afterward?” I finally asked, still disquieted by a sense of incompleteness, by the need of some connecting thread between the parallel lines of the tale.

Culwin twitched his shoulders. “Oh, nothing became of him — because he became nothing. There could be no question of ‘becoming’ about it. He vegetated in an office, I believe, and finally got a clerkship in a consulate, and married drearily in China. I saw him once in Hong Kong, years afterward. He was fat and hadn’t shaved. I was told he drank. He didn’t recognise me.”

“And the eyes?” I asked, after another pause which Frenham’s continued silence made oppressive.

Culwin, stroking his chin, blinked at me meditatively through the shadows. “I never saw them after my last talk with Gilbert. Put two and two together if you can. For my part, I haven’t found the link.”

He rose, his hands in his pockets, and walked stiffly over to the table on which reviving drinks had been set out.

“You must be parched after this dry tale. Here, help yourself, my dear fellow. Here, Phil—” He turned back to the hearth.

Frenham made no response to his host’s hospitable summons. He still sat in his low chair without moving, but as Culwin advanced toward him, their eyes met in a long look; after which the young man, turning suddenly, flung his arms across the table behind him, and dropped his face upon them.

Culwin, at the unexpected gesture, stopped short, a flush on his face.

“Phil — what the deuce? Why, have the eyes scared you? My dear boy — my dear fellow — I never had such a tribute to my literary ability, never!”

He broke into a chuckle at the thought, and halted on the hearthrug, his hands still in his pockets, gazing down at the youth’s bowed head. Then, as Frenham still made no answer, he moved a step or two nearer.

“Cheer up, my dear Phil! It’s years since I’ve seen them — apparently I’ve done nothing lately bad enough to call them out of chaos. Unless my present evocation of them has made you see them; which would be their worst stroke yet!”

His bantering appeal quivered off into an uneasy laugh, and he moved still nearer, bending over Frenham, and laying his gouty hands on the lad’s shoulders.

“Phil, my dear boy, really — what’s the matter? Why don’t you answer? Have you seen the eyes?”

Frenham’s face was still hidden, and from where I stood behind Culwin I saw the latter, as if under the rebuff of this unaccountable attitude, draw back slowly from his friend. As he did so, the light of the lamp on the table fell full on his congested face, and I caught its reflection in the mirror behind Frenham’s head.

Culwin saw the reflection also. He paused, his face level with the mirror, as if scarcely recognising the countenance in it as his own. But as he looked his expression gradually changed, and for an appreciable space of time he and the image in the glass confronted each other with a glare of slowly gathering hate. Then Culwin let go on Frenham’s shoulders, and drew back a step….

Frenham, his face still hidden, did not stir.

THE GROVE OF ASHTAROTH

John Buchan

1910

“C’est enfin que dans leurs prunelles

Rit et pleure-fastidieux —

L’amour des choses eternelles

Des vieux morts et des anciens dieux!”

— PAUL VERLAINE.

We were sitting around the camp fire, some thirty miles north of a place called Taqui, when Lawson announced his intention of finding a home. He had spoken little the last day or two, and I had guessed that he had struck a vein of private reflection. I thought it might be a new mine or irrigation scheme, and I was surprised to find that it was a country house.

“I don’t think I shall go back to England,” he said, kicking a sputtering log into place. “I don’t see why I should. For business purposes I am far more useful to the firm in South Africa than in Throgmorton Street. I have no relation left except a third cousin, and I have never cared a rush for living in town. That beastly house of mine in Hill Street will fetch what I gave for it, — Isaacson cabled about it the other day, offering for furniture and all. I don’t want to go into Parliament, and I hate shooting little birds and tame deer. I am one of those fellows who are born Colonial at heart, and I don’t see why I shouldn’t arrange my life as I please. Besides, for ten years I have been falling in love with this country, and now I am up to the neck.”

He flung himself back in the camp-chair till the canvas creaked, and looked at me below his eyelids. I remember glancing at the lines of him, and thinking what a fine make of a man he was. In his untanned field-boots, breeches, and grey shirt, he looked the born wilderness hunter, though less than two months before he had been driving down to the City every morning in the sombre regimentals of his class. Being a fair man, he was gloriously tanned, and there was a clear line at his shirt-collar to mark the limits of his sunburn. I had first known him years ago, when he was a broker’s clerk working on half-commission. Then he had gone to South Africa, and soon I heard he was a partner in a mining house which was doing wonders with some gold areas in the North. The next step was his return to London as the new millionaire, — young, good-looking, wholesome in mind and body, and much sought after by the mothers of marriageable girls. We played polo together, and hunted a little in the season, but there were signs that he did not propose to become the conventional English gentleman. He refused to buy a place in the country, though half the Homes of England were at his disposal. He was a very busy man, he declared, and had not time to be a squire. Besides, every few months he used to rush out to South Africa. I saw that he was restless, for he was always badgering me to go big-game hunting with him in some remote part of the earth. There was that in his eyes, too, which marked him out from the ordinary blond type of our countrymen. They were large and brown and mysterious, and the light of another race was in their odd depths.

To hint such a thing would have meant a breach of friendship, for Lawson was very proud of his birth. When he first made his fortune he had gone to the Heralds to discover his family, and these obliging gentlemen had provided a pedigree. It appeared that he was a scion of the house of Lowson or Lowieson, an ancient and rather disreputable clan on the Scottish side of the Border. He took a shooting in Teviotdale on the strength of it, and used to commit lengthy Border ballads to memory. But I had known his father, a financial journalist who never quite succeeded, and I had heard of a grandfather who sold antiques in a back street at Brighton. The latter, I think, had not changed his name, and still frequented the synagogue. The father was a progressive Christian, and the mother had been a blonde Saxon from the Midlands. In my mind there was no doubt, as I caught Lawson’s heavy-lidded eyes fixed on me. My friend was of a more ancient race than the Lowsons of the Border.

“Where are you thinking of looking for your house?” I asked. “In Natal or in the Cape Peninsula? You might get the Fishers’ place if you paid a price.”

“The Fishers’ place be hanged!” he said crossly. “I don’t want any stuccoed, overgrown Dutch farm. I might as well be at Roehampton as in the Cape.”

He got up and walked to the far side of the fire, where a lane ran down through the thornscrub to a gully of the hills. The moon was silvering the bush of the plains, forty miles off and three thousand feet below us.

“I am going to live somewhere hereabouts,” he answered at last. I whistled. “Then you’ve got to put your hand in your pocket, old man. You’ll have to make everything, including a map of the countryside.”

“I know,” he said; “that’s where the fun comes in. Hang it all, why shouldn’t I indulge my fancy? I’m uncommonly well off, and I haven’t chick or child to leave it to. Supposing I’m a hundred miles from rail-head, what about it? I’ll make a motor-road and fix up a telephone. I’ll grow most of my supplies, and start a colony to provide labour. When you come and stay with me, you’ll get the best food and drink on earth, and sport that will make your mouth water. I’ll put Lochleven trout in these streams, — at 6,000 feet you can do anything. We’ll have a pack of hounds, too, and we can drive pig in the woods, and if we want big game there are the Mangwe flats at our feet. I tell you I’ll make such a country-house as nobody ever dreamed of. A man will come plumb out of stark savagery into lawns and rose-gardens.” Lawson flung himself into his chair again and smiled dreamily at the fire.

“But why here, of all places?” I persisted. I was not feeling very well and did not care for the country.

“I can’t quite explain. I think it’s the sort of land I have always been looking for. I always fancied a house on a green plateau in a decent climate looking down on the tropics. I like heat and colour, you know, but I like hills too, and greenery, and the things that bring back Scotland. Give me a cross between Teviotdale and the Orinoco, and, by Gad! I think I’ve got it here.”

I watched my friend curiously, as with bright eyes and eager voice he talked of his new fad. The two races were very clear in him — the one desiring gorgeousness, the other athirst for the soothing spaces of the North. He began to plan out the house. He would get Adamson to design it, and it was to grow out of the landscape like a stone on the hillside. There would be wide verandahs and cool halls, but great fireplaces against winter time. It would all be very simple and fresh — “clean as morning” was his odd phrase; but then another idea supervened, and he talked of bringing the Tintorets from Hill Street. “I want it to be a civilised house, you know. No silly luxury, but the best pictures and china and books. I’ll have all the furniture made after the old plain English models out of native woods. I don’t want second-hand sticks in a new country. Yes, by Jove, the Tintorets are a great idea, and all those Ming pots I bought. I had meant to sell them, but I’ll have them out here.”

He talked for a good hour of what he would do, and his dream grew richer as he talked, till by the time we went to bed he had sketched something more like a palace than a country-house. Lawson was by no means a luxurious man. At present he was well content with a Wolseley valise, and shaved cheerfully out of a tin mug. It struck me as odd that a man so simple in his habits should have so sumptuous a taste in bric-a-brac. I told myself, as I turned in, that the Saxon mother from the Midlands had done little to dilute the strong wine of the East.

It drizzled next morning when we inspanned, and I mounted my horse in a bad temper. I had some fever on me, I think, and I hated this lush yet frigid tableland, where all the winds on earth lay in wait for one’s marrow. Lawson was, as usual, in great spirits. We were not hunting, but shifting our hunting-ground, so all morning we travelled fast to the north along the rim of the uplands.

At midday it cleared, and the afternoon was a pageant of pure colour. The wind sank to a low breeze; the sun lit the infinite green spaces, and kindled the wet forest to a jewelled coronal. Lawson gaspingly admired it all, as he cantered bareheaded up a bracken-clad slope. “God’s country,” he said twenty times. “I’ve found it.” Take a piece of Sussex downland; put a stream in every hollow and a patch of wood; and at the edge, where the cliffs at home would fall to the sea, put a cloak of forest muffling the scarp and dropping thousands of feet to the blue plains. Take the diamond air of the Gornergrat, and the riot of colour which you get by a West Highland lochside in late September. Put flowers everywhere, the things we grow in hothouses, geraniums like sun-shades and arums like trumpets. That will give you a notion of the countryside we were in. I began to see that after all it was out of the common.

And just before sunset we came over a ridge and found something better. It was a shallow glen, half a mile wide, down which ran a blue-grey stream in lings like the Spean, till at the edge of the plateau it leaped into the dim forest in a snowy cascade. The opposite side ran up in gentle slopes to a rocky knell, from which the eye had a noble prospect of the plains. All down the glen were little copses, half moons of green edging some silvery shore of the burn, or delicate clusters of tall trees nodding on the hill brow. The place so satisfied the eye that for the sheer wonder of its perfection we stopped and stared in silence for many minutes.

Then “The House,” I said, and Lawson replied softly, “The House!”

We rode slowly into the glen in the mulberry gloaming. Our transport waggons were half an hour behind, so we had time to explore. Lawson dismounted and plucked handfuls of flowers from the water meadows. He was singing to himself all the time — an old French catch about Cadet Rousselle and his Trois maisons.

“Who owns it?” I asked.

“My firm, as like as not. We have miles of land about here. But whoever the man is, he has got to sell. Here I build my tabernacle, old man. Here, and nowhere else!”

In the very centre of the glen, in a loop of the stream, was one copse which even in that half light struck me as different from the others. It was of tall, slim, fairy-like trees, the kind of wood the monks painted in old missals. No, I rejected the thought. It was no Christian wood. It was not a copse, but a “grove,” — one such as Artemis may have flitted through in the moonlight. It was small, forty or fifty yards in diameter, and there was a dark something at the heart of it which for a second I thought was a house.

We turned between the slender trees, and — was it fancy? — an odd tremor went through me. I felt as if I were penetrating the temenos of some strange and lovely divinity, the goddess of this pleasant vale. There was a spell in the air, it seemed, and an odd dead silence.

Suddenly my horse started at a flutter of light wings. A flock of doves rose from the branches, and I saw the burnished green of their plumes against the opal sky. Lawson did not seem to notice them. I saw his keen eyes staring at the centre of the grove and what stood there.

It was a little conical tower, ancient and lichened, but, so far as I could judge, quite flawless. You know the famous Conical Temple at Zimbabwe, of which prints are in every guidebook. This was of the same type, but a thousandfold more perfect. It stood about thirty feet high, of solid masonry, without door or window or cranny, as shapely as when it first came from the hands of the old builders. Again I had the sense of breaking in on a sanctuary. What right had I, a common vulgar modern, to be looking at this fair thing, among these delicate trees, which some white goddess had once taken for her shrine?

Lawson broke in on my absorption. “Let’s get out of this,” he said hoarsely and he took my horse’s bridle (he had left his own beast at the edge) and led him back to the open. But I noticed that his eyes were always turning back and that his hand trembled.

“That settles it,” I said after supper. “What do you want with your mediaeval Venetians and your Chinese pots now? You will have the finest antique in the world in your garden — a temple as old as time, and in a land which they say has no history. You had the right inspiration this time.”

I think I have said that Lawson had hungry eyes. In his enthusiasm they used to glow and brighten; but now, as he sat looking down at the olive shades of the glen, they seemed ravenous in their fire. He had hardly spoken a word since we left the wood.

“Where can I read about these things?” he asked, and I gave him the names of books. Then, an hour later, he asked me who were the builders. I told him the little I knew about Phoenician and Sabaen wanderings, and the ritual of Sidon and Tyre. He repeated some names to himself and went soon to bed.

As I turned in, I had one last look over the glen, which lay ivory and black in the moon. I seemed to hear a faint echo of wings, and to see over the little grove a cloud of light visitants. “The Doves of Ashtaroth have come back,” I said to myself. “It is a good omen. They accept the new tenant.” But as I fell asleep I had a sudden thought that I was saying something rather terrible.

II

Three years later, pretty nearly to a day, I came back to see what Lawson had made of his hobby. He had bidden me often to Welgevonden, as he chose to call it — though I do not know why he should have fixed a Dutch name to a countryside where Boer never trod. At the last there had been some confusion about dates, and I wired the time of my arrival, and set off without an answer. A motor met me at the queer little wayside station of Taqui, and after many miles on a doubtful highway I came to the gates of the park, and a road on which it was a delight to move. Three years had wrought little difference in the landscape. Lawson had done some planting, — conifers and flowering shrubs and suchlike, — but wisely he had resolved that Nature had for the most part forestalled him. All the same, he must have spent a mint of money. The drive could not have been beaten in England, and fringes of mown turf on either hand had been pared out of the lush meadows. When we came over the edge of the hill and looked down on the secret glen, I could not repress a cry of pleasure. The house stood on the farther ridge, the viewpoint of the whole neighbourhood; and its brown timbers and white rough-cast walls melted into the hillside as if it had been there from the beginning of things. The vale below was ordered in lawns and gardens. A blue lake received the rapids of the stream, and its banks were a maze of green shades and glorious masses of blossom. I noticed, too, that the little grove we had explored on our first visit stood alone in a big stretch of lawn, so that its perfection might be clearly seen. Lawson had excellent taste, or he had had the best advice.

The butler told me that his master was expected home shortly, and took me into the library for tea. Lawson had left his Tintorets and Ming pots at home after all. It was a long, low room, panelled in teak halfway up the walls, and the shelves held a multitude of fine bindings. There were good rugs on the parquet door, but no ornaments anywhere, save three. On the carved mantelpiece stood two of the old soapstone birds which they used to find at Zimbabwe, and between, on an ebony stand, a half moon of alabaster, curiously carved with zodiacal figures. My host had altered his scheme of furnishing, but I approved the change.

He came in about half-past six, after I had consumed two cigars and all but fallen asleep. Three years make a difference in most men, but I was not prepared for the change in Lawson. For one thing, he had grown fat. In place of the lean young man I had known, I saw a heavy, flaccid being, who shuffled in his gait, and seemed tired and listless. His sunburn had gone, and his face was as pasty as a city clerk’s. He had been walking, and wore shapeless flannel clothes, which hung loose even on his enlarged figure. And the worst of it was, that he did not seem over-pleased to see me. He murmured something about my journey, and then flung himself into an armchair and looked out of the window.

I asked him if he had been ill.

“Ill! No!” he said crossly. “Nothing of the kind. I’m perfectly well.”

“You don’t look as fit as this place should make you. What do you do with yourself? Is the shooting as good as you hoped?”

He did not answer, but I thought I heard him mutter something like “shooting be damned.”

Then I tried the subject of the house. I praised it extravagantly, but with conviction. “There can be no place like it in the world,” I said.

He turned his eyes on me at last, and I saw that they were as deep and restless as ever. With his pallid face they made him look curiously Semitic. I had been right in my theory about his ancestry.

“Yes,” he said slowly, “there is no place like it — in the world.”

Then he pulled himself to his feet. “I’m going to change,” he said. “Dinner is at eight. Ring for Travers, and he’ll show you your room.”

I dressed in a noble bedroom, with an outlook over the garden-vale and the escarpment to the far line of the plains, now blue and saffron in the sunset. I dressed in an ill temper, for I was seriously offended with Lawson, and also seriously alarmed. He was either very unwell or going out of his mind, and it was clear, too, that he would resent any anxiety on his account. I ransacked my memory for rumours, but found none. I had heard nothing of him except that he had been extraordinarily successful in his speculations, and that from his hilltop he directed his firm’s operations with uncommon skill. If Lawson was sick or mad, nobody knew of it.

Dinner was a trying ceremony. Lawson, who used to be rather particular in his dress, appeared in a kind of smoking suit with a flannel collar. He spoke scarcely a word to me, but cursed the servants with a brutality which left me aghast. A wretched footman in his nervousness spilt some sauce over his sleeve. Lawson dashed the dish from his hand and volleyed abuse with a sort of epileptic fury. Also he, who had been the most abstemious of men, swallowed disgusting quantities of champagne and old brandy.

He had given up smoking, and half an hour after we left the dining-room he announced his intention of going to bed. I watched him as he waddled upstairs with a feeling of angry bewilderment. Then I went to the library and lit a pipe. I would leave first thing in the morning — on that I was determined. But as I sat gazing at the moon of alabaster and the soapstone birds my anger evaporated, and concern took its place. I remembered what a fine fellow Lawson had been, what good times we had had together. I remembered especially that evening when we had found this valley and given rein to our fancies. What horrid alchemy in the place had turned a gentleman into a brute? I thought of drink and drugs and madness and insomnia, but I could fit none of them into my conception of my friend. I did not consciously rescind my resolve to depart, but I had a notion that I would not act on it.

The sleepy butler met me as I went to bed. “Mr. Lawson’s room is at the end of your corridor, sir,” he said. “He don’t sleep over well, so you may hear him stirring in the night. At what hour would you like breakfast, sir? Mr. Lawson mostly has his in bed.”

My room opened from the great corridor, which ran the full length of the front of the house. So far as I could make out, Lawson was three rooms off, a vacant bedroom and his servant’s room being between us. I felt tired and cross, and tumbled into bed as fast as possible. Usually I sleep well, but now I was soon conscious that my drowsiness was wearing off and that I was in for a restless night. I got up and laved my face, turned the pillows, thought of sheep coming over a hill and clouds crossing the sky; but none of the old devices were of any use. After about an hour of make-believe I surrendered myself to facts, and, lying on my back, stared at the white ceiling and the patches of moonshine on the walls.

It certainly was an amazing night. I got up, put on a dressing-gown, and drew a chair to the window. The moon was almost at its full, and the whole plateau swam in a radiance of ivory and silver. The banks of the stream were black, but the lake had a great belt of light athwart it, which made it seem like a horizon and the rim of land beyond it like a contorted cloud. Far to the right I saw the delicate outlines of the little wood which I had come to think of as the Grove of Ashtaroth. I listened. There was not a sound in the air. The land seemed to sleep peacefully beneath the moon, and yet I had a sense that the peace was an illusion. The place was feverishly restless.

I could have given no reason for my impression but there it was. Something was stirring in the wide moonlit landscape under its deep mask of silence. I felt as I had felt on the evening three years ago when I had ridden into the grove. I did not think that the influence, whatever it was, was maleficent. I only knew that it was very strange, and kept me wakeful.

By-and-by I bethought me of a book. There was no lamp in the corridor save the moon, but the whole house was bright as I slipped down the great staircase and across the hall to the library. I switched on the lights and then switched them off. They seemed profanation, and I did not need them.

I found a French novel, but the place held me and I stayed. I sat down in an armchair before the fireplace and the stone birds. Very odd those gawky things, like prehistoric Great Auks, looked in the moonlight. I remember that the alabaster moon shimmered like translucent pearl, and I fell to wondering about its history. Had the old Sabaens used such a jewel in their rites in the Grove of Ashtaroth?

Then I heard footsteps pass the window. A great house like this would have a watchman, but these quick shuffling footsteps were surely not the dull plod of a servant. They passed on to the grass and died away. I began to think of getting back to my room.

In the corridor I noticed that Lawson’s door was ajar, and that a light had been left burning. I had the unpardonable curiosity to peep in. The room was empty, and the bed had not been slept in. Now I knew whose were the footsteps outside the library window.

I lit a reading-lamp and tried to interest myself in “La Cruelle Enigme.” But my wits were restless, and I could not keep my eyes on the page. I flung the book aside and sat down again by the window. The feeling came over me that I was sitting in a box at some play. The glen was a huge stage, and at any moment the players might appear on it. My attention was strung as high as if I had been waiting for the advent of some world-famous actress. But nothing came. Only the shadows shifted and lengthened as the moon moved across the sky.

Then quite suddenly the restlessness left me and at the same moment the silence was broken by the crow of a cock and the rustling of trees in a light wind. I felt very sleepy, and was turning to bed when again I heard footsteps without. From the window I could see a figure moving across the garden towards the house. It was Lawson, got up in the sort of towel dressing-gown that one wears on board ship. He was walking slowly and painfully, as if very weary. I did not see his face, but the man’s whole air was that of extreme fatigue and dejection. I tumbled into bed and slept profoundly till long after daylight.

III

The man who valeted me was Lawson’s own servant. As he was laying out my clothes I asked after the health of his master, and was told that he had slept ill and would not rise till late. Then the man, an anxious-faced Englishman, gave me some information on his own account. Mr. Lawson was having one of his bad turns. It would pass away in a day or two, but till it had gone he was fit for nothing. He advised me to see Mr. Jobson, the factor, who would look to my entertainment in his master’s absence.

Jobson arrived before luncheon, and the sight of him was the first satisfactory thing about Welgevonden. He was a big, gruff Scot from Roxburghshire, engaged, no doubt, by Lawson as a duty to his Border ancestry. He had short grizzled whiskers, a weatherworn face, and a shrewd, calm blue eye. I knew now why the place was in such perfect order.

We began with sport, and Jobson explained what I could have in the way of fishing and shooting. His exposition was brief and business-like, and all the while I could see his eye searching me. It was clear that he had much to say on other matters than sport.

I told him that I had come here with Lawson three years before, when he chose the site. Jobson continued to regard me curiously. “I’ve heard tell of ye from Mr. Lawson. Ye’re an old friend of his, I understand.”

“The oldest,” I said. “And I am sorry to find that the place does not agree with him. Why it doesn’t I cannot imagine, for you look fit enough. Has he been seedy for long?”

“It comes and it goes,” said Mr. Jobson. “Maybe once a month he has a bad turn. But on the whole it agrees with him badly. He’s no’ the man he was when I first came here.”

Jobson was looking at me very seriously and frankly. I risked a question.

“What do you suppose is the matter?”

He did not reply at once, but leaned forward and tapped my knee. “I think it’s something that doctors canna cure. Look at me, sir. I’ve always been counted a sensible man, but if I told you what was in my head you would think me daft. But I have one word for you. Bide till tonight is past and then speir your question. Maybe you and me will be agreed.”

The factor rose to go. As he left the room he flung me back a remark over his shoulder — “Read the eleventh chapter of the First Book of Kings.”

After luncheon I went for a walk. First I mounted to the crown of the hill and feasted my eyes on the unequalled loveliness of the view. I saw the far hills in Portuguese territory, a hundred miles away, lifting up thin blue fingers into the sky. The wind blew light and fresh, and the place was fragrant with a thousand delicate scents. Then I descended to the vale, and followed the stream up through the garden. Poinsettias and oleanders were blazing in coverts, and there was a paradise of tinted waterlilies in the slacker reaches. I saw good trout rise at the fly, but I did not think about fishing. I was searching my memory for a recollection which would not come. By-and-by I found myself beyond the garden, where the lawns ran to the fringe of Ashtaroth’s Grove.

It was like something I remembered in an old Italian picture. Only, as my memory drew it, it should have been peopled with strange figures — nymphs dancing on the sward, and a prick-eared faun peeping from the covert. In the warm afternoon sunlight it stood, ineffably gracious and beautiful, tantalising with a sense of some deep hidden loveliness. Very reverently I walked between the slim trees, to where the little conical tower stood half in the sun and half in shadow. Then I noticed something new. Round the tower ran a narrow path, worn in the grass by human feet. There had been no such path on my first visit, for I remembered the grass growing tall to the edge of the stone. Had the Kaffirs made a shrine of it, or were there other and strange votaries?

When I returned to the house I found Travers with a message for me. Mr. Lawson was still in bed, but he would like me to go to him. I found my friend sitting up and drinking strong tea, — a bad thing, I should have thought, for a man in his condition. I remember that I looked about the room for some sign of the pernicious habit of which I believed him a victim. But the place was fresh and clean, with the windows wide open, and, though I could not have given my reasons, I was convinced that drugs or drink had nothing to do with the sickness.

He received me more civilly, but I was shocked by his looks. There were great bags below his eyes, and his skin had the wrinkled puffy appearance of a man in dropsy. His voice, too, was reedy and thin. Only his great eyes burned with some feverish life.

“I am a shocking bad host,” he said, “but I’m going to be still more inhospitable. I want you to go away. I hate anybody here when I’m off colour.”

“Nonsense,” I said; “you want looking after. I want to know about this sickness. Have you had a doctor?”

He smiled wearily. “Doctors are no earthly use to me. There’s nothing much the matter I tell you. I’ll be all right in a day or two, and then you can come back. I want you to go off with Jobson and hunt in the plains till the end of the week. It will be better fun for you, and I’ll feel less guilty.”

Of course I pooh-poohed the idea, and Lawson got angry. “Damn it, man,” he cried, “why do you force yourself on me when I don’t want you? I tell you your presence here makes me worse. In a week I’ll be as right as the mail and then I’ll be thankful for you. But get away now; get away, I tell you.”

I saw that he was fretting himself into a passion. “All right,” I said soothingly; “Jobson and I will go off hunting. But I am horribly anxious about you, old man.”

He lay back on his pillows. “You needn’t trouble. I only want a little rest. Jobson will make all arrangements, and Travers will get you anything you want. Good-bye.”

I saw it was useless to stay longer, so I left the room. Outside I found the anxious-faced servant “Look here,” I said, “Mr. Lawson thinks I ought to go, but I mean to stay. Tell him I’m gone if he asks you. And for Heaven’s sake keep him in bed.”

The man promised, and I thought I saw some relief in his face.

I went to the library, and on the way remembered Jobson’s remark about 1st Kings. With some searching I found a Bible and turned up the passage. It was a long screed about the misdeeds of Solomon, and I read it through without enlightenment. I began to re-read it, and a word suddenly caught my attention —

“For Solomon went after Ashtaroth, the goddess of the Zidonians.”

That was all, but it was like a key to a cipher. Instantly there flashed over my mind all that I had heard or read of that strange ritual which seduced Israel to sin. I saw a sunburnt land and a people vowed to the stern service of Jehovah. But I saw, too, eyes turning from the austere sacrifice to lonely hilltop groves and towers and images, where dwelt some subtle and evil mystery. I saw the fierce prophets, scourging the votaries with rods, and a nation Penitent before the Lord; but always the backsliding again, and the hankering after forbidden joys. Ashtaroth was the old goddess of the East. Was it not possible that in all Semitic blood there remained transmitted through the dim generations, some craving for her spell? I thought of the grandfather in the back street at Brighten and of those burning eyes upstairs.

As I sat and mused my glance fell on the inscrutable stone birds. They knew all those old secrets of joy and terror. And that moon of alabaster! Some dark priest had worn it on his forehead when he worshipped, like Ahab, “all the host of Heaven.” And then I honestly began to be afraid. I, a prosaic, modern Christian gentleman, a half-believer in casual faiths, was in the presence of some hoary mystery of sin far older than creeds or Christendom. There was fear in my heart — a kind of uneasy disgust, and above all a nervous eerie disquiet. Now I wanted to go away and yet I was ashamed of the cowardly thought. I pictured Ashtaroth’s Grove with sheer horror. What tragedy was in the air? What secret awaited twilight? For the night was coming, the night of the Full Moon, the season of ecstasy and sacrifice.

I do not know how I got through that evening. I was disinclined for dinner, so I had a cutlet in the library and sat smoking till my tongue ached. But as the hours passed a more manly resolution grew up in my mind. I owed it to old friendship to stand by Lawson in this extremity. I could not interfere — God knows, his reason seemed already rocking, but I could be at hand in case my chance came. I determined not to undress, but to watch through the night. I had a bath, and changed into light flannels and slippers. Then I took up my position in a corner of the library close to the window, so that I could not fail to hear Lawson’s footsteps if he passed.

Fortunately I left the lights unlit, for as I waited I grew drowsy, and fell asleep. When I woke the moon had risen, and I knew from the feel of the air that the hour was late. I sat very still, straining my ears, and as I listened I caught the sound of steps. They were crossing the hall stealthily, and nearing the library door. I huddled into my corner as Lawson entered.

He wore the same towel dressing-gown, and he moved swiftly and silently as if in a trance. I watched him take the alabaster moon from the mantelpiece and drop it in his pocket. A glimpse of white skin showed that the gown was his only clothing. Then he moved past me to the window, opened it and went out.

Without any conscious purpose I rose and followed, kicking off my slippers that I might go quietly. He was running, running fast, across the lawns in the direction of the Grove — an odd shapeless antic in the moonlight. I stopped, for there was no cover, and I feared for his reason if he saw me. When I looked again he had disappeared among the trees.

I saw nothing for it but to crawl, so on my belly I wormed my way over the dripping sward. There was a ridiculous suggestion of deer-stalking about the game which tickled me and dispelled my uneasiness. Almost I persuaded myself I was tracking an ordinary sleepwalker. The lawns were broader than I imagined, and it seemed an age before I reached the edge of the Grove. The world was so still that I appeared to be making a most ghastly amount of noise. I remember that once I heard a rustling in the air, and looked up to see the green doves circling about the treetops.

There was no sign of Lawson. On the edge of the Grove I think that all my assurance vanished. I could see between the trunks to the little tower, but it was quiet as the grave, save for the wings above. Once more there came over me the unbearable sense of anticipation I had felt the night before. My nerves tingled with mingled expectation and dread. I did not think that any harm would come to me, for the powers of the air seemed not malignant. But I knew them for powers, and felt awed and abased. I was in the presence of the “host of Heaven,” and I was no stern Israelitish prophet to prevail against them.

I must have lain for hours waiting in that spectral place, my eyes riveted on the tower and its golden cap of moonshine. I remember that my head felt void and light, as if my spirit were becoming disembodied and leaving its dew-drenched sheath far below. But the most curious sensation was of something drawing me to the tower, something mild and kindly and rather feeble, for there was some other and stronger force keeping me back. I yearned to move nearer, but I could not drag my limbs an inch. There was a spell somewhere which I could not break. I do not think I was in any way frightened now. The starry influence was playing tricks with me, but my mind was half asleep. Only I never took my eyes from the little tower. I think I could not, if I had wanted to.

Then suddenly from the shadows came Lawson. He was stark-naked, and he wore, bound across his brow, the half-moon of alabaster. He had something, too, in his hand, — something which glittered.

He ran round the tower, crooning to himself, and flinging wild arms to the skies. Sometimes the crooning changed to a shrill cry of passion, such as a manad may have uttered in the train of Bacchus. I could make out no words, but the sound told its own tale. He was absorbed in some infernal ecstasy. And as he ran, he drew his right hand across his breast and arms, and I saw that it held a knife.

I grew sick with disgust, — not terror, but honest physical loathing. Lawson, gashing his fat body, affected me with an overpowering repugnance. I wanted to go forward and stop him, and I wanted, too, to be a hundred miles away. And the result was that I stayed still. I believe my own will held me there, but I doubt if in any case I could have moved my legs.

The dance grew swifter and fiercer. I saw the blood dripping from Lawson’s body, and his face ghastly white above his scarred breast. And then suddenly the horror left me; my head swam; and for one second — one brief second — I seemed to peer into a new world. A strange passion surged up in my heart. I seemed to see the earth peopled with forms not human, scarcely divine, but more desirable than man or god. The calm face of Nature broke up for me into wrinkles of wild knowledge. I saw the things which brush against the soul in dreams, and found them lovely. There seemed no cruelty in the knife or the blood. It was a delicate mystery of worship, as wholesome as the morning song of birds. I do not know how the Semites found Ashtaroth’s ritual; to them it may well have been more rapt and passionate than it seemed to me. For I saw in it only the sweet simplicity of Nature, and all riddles of lust and terror soothed away as a child’s nightmares are calmed by a mother. I found my legs able to move, and I think I took two steps through the dusk towards the tower.

And then it all ended. A cock crew, and the homely noises of earth were renewed. While I stood dazed and shivering, Lawson plunged through the Grove toward me. The impetus carried him to the edge, and he fell fainting just outside the shade.

My wits and common-sense came back to me with my bodily strength. I got my friend on my back, and staggered with him towards the house. I was afraid in real earnest now, and what frightened me most was the thought that I had not been afraid sooner. I had come very near the “abomination of the Zidonians.”

At the door I found the scared valet waiting. He had apparently done this sort of thing before.

“Your master has been sleepwalking and has had a fall,” I said. “We must get him to bed at once.”

We bathed the wounds as he lay in a deep stupor, and I dressed them as well as I could. The only danger lay in his utter exhaustion, for happily the gashes were not serious, and no artery had been touched. Sleep and rest would make him well, for he had the constitution of a strong man. I was leaving the room when he opened his eyes and spoke. He did not recognize me, but I noticed that his face had lost its strangeness, and was once more that of the friend I had known. Then I suddenly bethought me of an old hunting remedy which he and I always carried on our expeditions. It is a pill made up from an ancient Portuguese prescription. One is an excellent specific for fever. Two are invaluable if you are lost in the bush, for they send a man for many hours into a deep sleep, which prevents suffering and madness, till help comes. Three give a painless death. I went to my room and found the little box in my jewel-case. Lawson swallowed two, and turned wearily on his side. I bade his man let him sleep till he woke, and went off in search of food.

IV

I had business on hand which would not wait. By seven, Jobson, who had been sent for, was waiting for me in the library. I knew by his grim face that here I had a very good substitute for a prophet of the Lord.

“You were right,” I said. “I have read the 11th chapter of 1st Kings, and I have spent such a night as I pray God I shall never spend again.”

“I thought you would,” he replied. “I’ve had the same experience myself.”

“The Grove?” I said.

“Ay, the wud,” was the answer in broad Scots.

I wanted to see how much he understood. “Mr. Lawson’s family is from the Scottish Border?”

“Ay. I understand they come off Borthwick Water side,” he replied, but I saw by his eyes that he knew what I meant.

“Mr. Lawson is my oldest friend,” I went on, “and I am going to take measures to cure him. For what I am going to do I take the sole responsibility. I will make that plain to your master. But if I am to succeed I want your help. Will you give it me? It sounds like madness and you are a sensible man and may like to keep out of it. I leave it to your discretion.”

Jobson looked me straight in the face. “Have no fear for me,” he said; “there is an unholy thing in that place, and if I have the strength in me I will destroy it. He has been a good master to me, and, forbye I am a believing Christian. So say on, sir.”

There was no mistaking the air. I had found my Tishbite.

“I want men,” I said, “ — as many as we can get.”

Jobson mused. “The Kaffirs will no’ gang near the place, but there’s some thirty white men on the tobacco farm. They’ll do your will, if you give them an indemnity in writing.”

“Good,” said I. “Then we will take our instructions from the only authority which meets the case. We will follow the example of King Josiah. I turned up the 23rd chapter of end Kings, and read —

“And the high places that were before Jerusalem, which were on the right hand of the Mount of Corruption, which Solomon the king of Israel had builded for Ashtaroth the abomination of the Zidonians…did the king defile.

“And he brake in Pieces the images, and cut down the groves, and filled their places with the bones of men.…’

“Moreover the altar that was at Beth-el, and the high place which Jeroboam the son of Nebat, who made Israel to sin, had made, both that altar and the high place he brake down, and burned the high place, and stamped it small to powder, and burned the grove.”

Jobson nodded. “It’ll need dinnymite. But I’ve plenty of yon down at the workshops. I’ll be off to collect the lads.”

Before nine the men had assembled at Jobson’s house. They were a hardy lot of young farmers from home, who took their instructions docilely from the masterful factor. On my orders they had brought their shotguns. We armed them with spades and woodmen’s axes, and one man wheeled some coils of rope in a handcart.

In the clear, windless air of morning the Grove, set amid its lawns, looked too innocent and exquisite for ill. I had a pang of regret that a thing so fair should suffer; nay, if I had come alone, I think I might have repented. But the men were there, and the grim-faced Jobson was waiting for orders. I placed the guns, and sent beaters to the far side. I told them that every dove must be shot.

It was only a small flock, and we killed fifteen at the first drive. The poor birds flew over the glen to another spinney, but we brought them back over the guns and seven fell. Four more were got in the trees, and the last I killed myself with a long shot. In half an hour there was a pile of little green bodies on the sward.

Then we went to work to cut down the trees. The slim stems were an easy task to a good woodman, and one after another they toppled to the ground. And meantime, as I watched, I became conscious of a strange emotion.

It was as if someone were pleading with me. A gentle voice, not threatening, but pleading — something too fine for the sensual ear, but touching inner chords of the spirit. So tenuous it was and distant that I could think of no personality behind it. Rather it was the viewless, bodiless grace of this delectable vale, some old exquisite divinity of the groves. There was the heart of all sorrow in it, and the soul of all loveliness. It seemed a woman’s voice, some lost lady who had brought nothing but goodness unrepaid to the world. And what the voice told me was that I was destroying her last shelter.

That was the pathos of it — the voice was homeless. As the axes flashed in the sunlight and the wood grew thin, that gentle spirit was pleading with me for mercy and a brief respite. It seemed to be telling of a world for centuries grown coarse and pitiless, of long sad wanderings, of hardly-won shelter, and a peace which was the little all she sought from men. There was nothing terrible in it. No thought of wrong-doing. The spell, which to Semitic blood held the mystery of evil, was to me, of the Northern race, only delicate and rare and beautiful. Jobson and the rest did not feel it, I with my finer senses caught nothing but the hopeless sadness of it. That which had stirred the passion in Lawson was only wringing my heart. It was almost too pitiful to bear. As the trees crashed down and the men wiped the sweat from their brows, I seemed to myself like the murderer of fair women and innocent children. I remember that the tears were running over my cheeks. More than once I opened my mouth to countermand the work, but the face of Jobson, that grim Tishbite, held me back.

I knew now what gave the Prophets of the Lord their mastery, and I knew also why the people sometimes stoned them.

The last tree fell, and the little tower stood like a ravished shrine, stripped of all defence against the world. I heard Jobson’s voice speaking. “We’d better blast that stane thing now. We’ll trench on four sides and lay the dinnymite. Ye’re no’ looking weel, sir. Ye’d better go and sit down on the braeface.”

I went up the hillside and lay down. Below me, in the waste of shorn trunks, men were running about, and I saw the mining begin. It all seemed like an aimless dream in which I had no part. The voice of that homeless goddess was still pleading. It was the innocence of it that tortured me Even so must a merciful Inquisitor have suffered from the plea of some fair girl with the aureole of death on her hair. I knew I was killing rare and unrecoverable beauty. As I sat dazed and heartsick, the whole loveliness of Nature seemed to plead for its divinity. The sun in the heavens, the mellow lines of upland, the blue mystery of the far plains, were all part of that soft voice. I felt bitter scorn for myself. I was guilty of blood; nay, I was guilty of the sin against light which knows no forgiveness. I was murdering innocent gentleness — and there would be no peace on earth for me. Yet I sat helpless. The power of a sterner will constrained me. And all the while the voice was growing fainter and dying away into unutterable sorrow.

Suddenly a great flame sprang to heaven, and a pall of smoke. I heard men crying out, and fragments of stone fell around the ruins of the grove. When the air cleared, the little tower had gone out of sight.

The voice had ceased and there seemed to me to be a bereaved silence in the world. The shock moved me to my feet, and I ran down the slope to where Jobson stood rubbing his eyes.

“That’s done the job. Now we maun get up the tree roots. We’ve no time to howk. We’ll just blast the feck o’ them.”

The work of destruction went on, but I was coming back to my senses. I forced myself to be practical and reasonable. I thought of the night’s experience and Lawson’s haggard eyes, and I screwed myself into a determination to see the thing through. I had done the deed; it was my business to make it complete. A text in Jeremiah came into my head:

“Their children remember their altars and their groves by the green trees upon the high hills.”

I would see to it that this grove should be utterly forgotten.

We blasted the tree-roots, and, yoking oxen, dragged the debris into a great heap. Then the men set to work with their spades, and roughly levelled the ground. I was getting back to my old self, and Jobson’s spirit was becoming mine.

“There is one thing more,” I told him “Get ready a couple of ploughs. We will improve upon King Josiah.” My brain was a medley of Scripture precedents, and I was determined that no safeguard should be wanting.

We yoked the oxen again and drove the ploughs over the site of the grove. It was rough ploughing, for the place was thick with bits of stone from the tower, but the slow Afrikaner oxen plodded on, and sometime in the afternoon the work was finished. Then I sent down to the farm for bags of rock-salt, such as they use for cattle. Jobson and I took a sack apiece, and walked up and down the furrows, sowing them with salt.

The last act was to set fire to the pile of tree trunks. They burned well, and on the top we flung the bodies of the green doves. The birds of Ashtaroth had an honourable pyre.

Then I dismissed the much-perplexed men, and gravely shook hands with Jobson. Black with dust and smoke I went back to the house, where I bade Travers pack my bags and order the motor. I found Lawson’s servant, and heard from him that his master was sleeping peacefully. I gave him some directions, and then went to wash and change.

Before I left I wrote a line to Lawson. I began by transcribing the verses from the 23rd chapter of 2nd Kings. I told him what I had done, and my reason. “I take the whole responsibility upon myself,” I wrote. “No man in the place had anything to do with it but me. I acted as I did for the sake of our old friendship, and you will believe it was no easy task for me. I hope you will understand. Whenever you are able to see me send me word, and I will come back and settle with you. But I think you will realise that I have saved your soul.”

The afternoon was merging into twilight as I left the house on the road to Taqui. The great fire, where the Grove had been, was still blazing fiercely, and the smoke made a cloud over the upper glen, and filled all the air with a soft violet haze. I knew that I had done well for my friend, and that he would come to his senses and be grateful. My mind was at ease on that score, and in something like comfort I faced the future. But as the car reached the ridge I looked back to the vale I had outraged. The moon was rising and silvering the smoke, and through the gaps I could see the tongues of fire. Somehow, I know not why, the lake, the stream, the garden-coverts, even the green slopes of hill, wore an air of loneliness and desecration. And then my heartache returned, and I knew that I had driven something lovely and adorable from its last refuge on earth.