A Book of Ghosts: 28
Author: Various authors
Date: 1857-12-31T15:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Ghost Stories; Supernatural Fiction; Weird Fiction; Horror
Description: A collection of ten stories of the uncanny and the macabre by various 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
– 28 –

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 1858 ~ 1922. This book is in the public domain where copyright is “Life+70” or less, and in the USA.

CONTENTS:

- The Dead Man’s Story  –1858
by James Hain Friswell
(1825–1878)

- The Child Stealer   –1871
by Emile Erckmann
(1822–1899)
and Alexandre Chatrian
(1826–1890)

- The Gray Wolf  –1871
by George MacDonald
(1824–1905)

- The Veiled Portrait  –1874
by James Grant
(1822–1887)

- The Haunted Dragoon  –1892
by Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch
(1863–1944)

- Uncle Abraham’s Romance  –1893
by Edith Nesbit
(1858–1924)

- The Gray Cat  –1901
by Barry Pain
(1864–1928)

- A Tropical Horror  –1905
by William Hope Hodgson
(1877–1918)

- Kerfol  –1916
by Edith Wharton
(1862–1937)

- The Tomb  –1922
by H.P. Lovecraft
(1890–1937)

THE DEAD MAN’S STORY

Hain Friswell

1858

On a dreary night in December, three gentlemen were seated in a painter’s studio. The night was intensely dark and cold, and a slight hail heat against the window with a monotonous and ceaseless noise.

The studio was immense and gloomy, the sole light within it proceeding from a stove, around which the three were seated. Although they were bold, and of the age when men are most jovial, the conversation had taken, in spite of their efforts to the contrary, a reflection from the dull weather without, and their jokes and frivolity were soon exhausted.

In addition to the light which issued from the crannies in the stove, there was another emitted from a howl of spirits, which was ceaselessly stirred by one of the young men, as he poured from an antique silver ladle some of the flaming spirit into the quaint old glasses from which the students drank. The blue flame of the spirit lighted up in a wild and fantastic manner the surrounding objects in the room, so that the heads of old prophets, of satyrs, or Madonnas, clothed in the same ghastly hue, seemed to move and to dance along the walls like a fantastic procession of the dead; and the vast room, which in the day time sparkled with the creations of genius, seemed now, in its alternate darkness and sulphuric light, to be peopled with its dreams.

Each time also that the silver spoon agitated the liquid, strange shadows traced themselves along the walls, hideous and of fantastic form. Unearthly tints spread also upon the hangings of the studio, from the old bearded prophet of Michael Angelo to those eccentric caricatures which the artist had scrawled upon his walls, and which resembled an army of demons that one sees in a dream, or such as Goya has painted; whilst the lull and rise of the tempest without but added to the fantastic and nervous feeling which pervaded those within.

Besides this, to add to the terror which was creeping over the three occupants of the room, each time that they looked at each other they appeared with faces of a blue tone, with eyes fixed and glittering like live embers, and with pale lips and sunken cheeks; but the most fearful object of all was that of a plaster mask taken from the face of an intimate friend but lately dead, which, hanging near the window, let the light from the spirit fall upon its face, turned three parts towards them, which gave it a strange, vivid, and mocking expression.

All people have felt the influence of large and dark rooms, such as Hoffman has portrayed and Rembrandt has painted; and all the world has experienced those wild and unaccountable terrors — panics without a cause — which seize on one like a spontaneous fever, at the sight of objects to which a stray glimpse of the moon or a feeble ray from a lamp gives a mysterious form; nay, all, we should imagine, have at some period of their lives found themselves by the side of a friend, in a dark and dismal chamber, listening to some wild story, which so enchains them, that although the mere lighting of a candle could put an end to their terror, they would not do so; so much need has the human heart of emotions, whether they be true or false.

So it was upon the evening mentioned. The conversation of the three companions never took a direct line, but followed all the phases of their thoughts; sometimes it was light as the smoke which curled from their cigars, then for a moment fantastic as the flame of the burning spirit, and then again dark, lurid, and sombre as the smile which lit up the mask from their dead friend’s face.

At last the conversation ceased altogether, and the respiration of the smokers was the only sound heard; and their cigars glowed in the dark, like Will-of-the-wisps brooding o’er a stagnant pool.

It was evident to them all, that the first who should break the silence, even if he spoke in jest, would cause in the hearts of the others a start and tremor, for each felt that he had almost unwittingly plunged into a ghastly reverie.

“Henry,” at last said one, again dipping the spoon into the flaming spirit, “hast thou read Hoffman?”

“I should think so,” said Henry.

“What think you of him?”

“Why, that he writes admirably; and, moreover, what is more admirable — in such a manner that you see at once he almost believes that which he relates. As for me, I know very well that when I read him of a dark night. I am obliged to creep to bed without shutting my book, and without daring to look behind me.”

“Indeed; then you love the terrible and fantastic?”

“I do,” said Henry.

“And what do you think of such romances?” said the questioner, addressing the third.

“I like them much,” was the answer.

“Good; then I will tell you a strange story which happened to myself.”

“I presumed as much,” said Henry.

“An adventure in which you are the hero?” said the third.

“Yes, I myself. I must again before I commence assure you that I am the hero of this strange adventure.”

“Go on, then; we will listen.”

The silver spoon fell from his fingers into the bowl; the flame of the spirit, not enlivened by agitation, faded out little by little, and in a few moments they were in almost complete darkness, a warm light only being thrown upon their legs by the fire in the stove.

He began his story:

•   •   •

One midwinter evening, it might be about a year ago, the weather was just as it is now — the same cold, the same sleet and hail, the same dullness. You know my profession is that of a surgeon, and on that day I had a great many cases to attend; so that after having made my last visit, instead of going, as sometimes I did, to the theatre, I made haste home. I then dwelt in one of the most deserted streets of the Faubourg Saint Germain. I was very tired and I quickly got to bed. I extinguished the lamp and amused myself with staring at my fire, watching the great shadows which each little flame made dance upon my bed-curtains; then at last my eyes shut, and I fell asleep.

It might have been an hour after I first closed my eyes, when I felt some person shaking me roughly. I woke with a start, and in not the very best temper, and stared with some surprise at my nocturnal visitor. It was my manservant.

“Sir,” said he, “rise at once; you are sent for to a young lady who is dying.”

“Where does she live?” said I.

“Nearly opposite; but there is a messenger down stairs who will take you to her-”

I rose, and thinking that at such a moment my toilet was of little consequence, dressed myself in haste. I took my instrument-case, and followed the man who had come for me.

It rained in torrents. Happily, however, I had only the street to cross; and I was almost immediately at the house of the person who required my assistance. She dwelt in a large and aristocratic hotel. I had to cross a wide courtyard, and to ascend a stone staircase which ran up outside the building: then, passing a vestibule, wherein some servants were waiting to show me upstairs, I was at once conducted to the chamber of the sick lady. It was a very large room, furnished throughout with oaken furniture very ancient and beautifully carved. A maid-servant showed me into the chamber, and then left me. I went at once to the bedside, carved like the rest of the furniture, with tall pillars running up to some height, supporting a canopy of rich arras, and upon which, pressing a snowy pillow, lay a head more ravishing than ever Raphael dreamed of when he painted his finest Madonna—

Locks, bright and golden as a wave of Pactolus, floated round her face. Her eyes were nearly closed, and her mouth partly open, discovering a row of teeth beautifully even and as white as pearls. Her neck surpassed the lily in whiteness; and when I took her hand I saw so fine an arm, that it recalled to me those which Homer has assigned to Juno.

I remained there, forgetful of the cause for which I came, gaping at her, and recalling nothing like her in my recollections or my dreams; when she turned towards me, and opening her large blue eyes, said to me, “I suffer much.”

Still there was, I found, little the matter with her. I took my lancet, but at the moment of touching an arm so beautiful and white, my hand trembled. However, the feelings of the doctor triumphed over those of the man; I opened a vein — there came from her blood pure and bright as melted coral — she fainted.

I did not wish to quit her. I remained with her. I felt a secret happiness in holding, as it were, the life of so beautiful a being in my hands. I stanched the blood; she -opened her eyes by degrees, carried the hand she had free to her bosom, turned towards me, and fixed upon me a grateful look.

“Thank you,” she said, “I suffer less.”

She had about her such beauty that I felt rooted to my place, counting each pulsation of my heart against each throb of her pulse; listening to her respiration, which each time grew less feverish, and thinking to myself that if ever there existed a, heaven upon earth, it must be in the love of such a woman as I saw before me.

She slept!

I remained, almost kneeling by the side of her bed. A lamp of alabaster, suspended from the ceiling, threw its golden light upon all the room. The woman who had come with me had gone away to announce that her mistress was better, and had no further need of any of the servants. I was alone; and there she lay, calm and beautiful as an angel who has fallen asleep in the midst of a prayer! As for me — I was madly in love.

However, I felt that I could no longer remain there; I retired, therefore, without making a noise, so as not to waken her. I ordered some little things to be given her when she woke, and I left word that I would return the next day.

When I reached my home, I could no longer sleep. I lay awake, thinking of her. I felt that the love of such a woman would be an eternal enchantment, made up of reverie and delight. With these thoughts of her, I passed away the night; and when the day came, I was still madly in love; madly — I was a maniac!

However, after these follies of a night so agitated, came morning’s reflections. I remembered that an unfathomable abyss separated me from the loved object; that she was too beautiful not to have long had some one who loved and would be united to her; that she would love him so tenderly, so devotedly, that she could not forget, or be faithless to him: so I set myself to hate him without knowing who he was — this man, to whom I thought, in my mad way, that Providence had given in this world such exquisite felicity that he could submit to suffer in the next an eternity of pain without a murmur.

I waited impatiently the hour when I could again visit her — each moment seemed an age; but at last the time came, and I set forth.

When I arrived, I was shown into a boudoir furnished with the most exquisite taste, and altogether with a lavish luxury, which was shown in every article of furniture. She was alone, reading; a large robe of black velvet covered her from head to foot so completely that, like one of Perugino’s angels, only her face and hands could be seen. She held coquettishly, in a scarf, the arm from which I had bled her and was holding to the fire her two pretty little feet, which did not seem formed for our earth; and there she sat, looking so pure and beautiful that I thought her an ideal of one of the angels! She held out her hand and bade me sit down beside her.

“So soon up, madam,” said I: “you are surely imprudent.”

“No,” she said, “I am quite strong;” she smiled sweetly as she said it; “besides, I have slept well, and am, moreover, not very ill.”

“You said, however, that you suffered.”

“More in mind than body,” said she, with a sigh.

“You are sad, madam!”

“Oh! deeply so,” she returned; “but happily Providence is also a physician, and has found for grief a universal panacea — forgetfulness!”

“But,” said I, “there are some griefs which kill.”

“True,” she said; “but the grave and forgetfulness, are they not the same? One is the tomb of the body, the other that of the heart. There is no other difference.”

“But you, madam, how can you suffer grief? You are too high to be touched by it; sorrow should pass beneath you like clouds pass under the feet of angels; to us come storms and lightning — to you the blue serenity of heaven.”

“Ah!” she said, “’tis there you deceive yourself; there all your science ends; your knowledge does not reach the heart.”

“Well,” said I, “try at least, madam, to forget. God sometimes permits a joy to succeed grief, and a smile to follow on our tears; and ’tis also true that when the heart of one He tries is too wide to refill of itself, and when the wound is too deep to heal without succour, He sends across the path of such a one a soul which can comprehend and know it; for He knows that we suffer less in suffering together, and that a moment must come when the desolate heart must leap again with joy, and when the deadly wound must heal.”

“And what is the prescription, doctor,” said she, “by which you would heal such a wound?”

“That must be according to the patient,” I returned; “to some I should counsel faith; to others, love!”

“You are right,” she answered; “they are the two sisters of charity who visit the soul.”

Then ensued a long silence, during which I fixed my eyes upon that sweet countenance, on which the light which peeped through the silken curtains cast such a charming tint; upon those beautiful tresses, which now no longer floated over her face like a veil, but which were banded on her temples, and were drawn behind her ears. The conversation had taken from the beginning a sad cast; but by this, the beautiful being before me seemed more radiant than before, diademed as she was with the triple crown of beauty, love, and grief.

Thus I remained gazing at her, not so mad as I was on the first evening, but the more collected by her quietude. If that moment had made her mine, I should have fallen at her feet. I should have taken her hands, I should have wept with her as a sister; and whilst I reverenced her as an angel, should have consoled her as a woman.

But I was yet ignorant what grief it was which she should forget, or what had caused the deep wound still unhealed: and this was what I had to find out, for between the physician and patient there was not as yet sufficient confidence for her to own her sorrow, although there had been enough for her to confess the cause. Nothing, however, that I could divine gave me the clue; no one had called at the hotel to inquire for her — none appeared to trouble themselves, as lovers would, about her. Her grief, then, must lay in the past, and must be reflected alone in the present.

“Doctor,” said she to me, suddenly awakening from her reverie, “can I soon dance?”

“Yes, madam,” I answered, astonished at the question.

“Because you must know that I must give a ball which I have promised for some long time; you must come — will you not? You will have very little opinion of my illness, which, making me dream all day, does not hinder me from dancing all night. My grief, however, is one of those which must be concealed in the depth of one’s heart, so that the world may learn nothing; there are tortures which must be masked with a smile, lest any one should guess them; mine I wish to keep to myself, as closely as some would conceal a hidden joy. The world around me envies me as beautiful and happy — it is a deception of which I do not wish to rob them. That is why I appear gay, and dance; surely do I weep on the morrow, but I weep alone.”

As she said these words, she threw upon me a glance inexpressibly sweet and confiding, and added—

“You will come — come soon, will you not?”

I carried her hand to my lips, and I retired.

When I got home. I seemed in a dream. My windows looked upon hers; I remained all the day looking at them, and all the day they were closed and dark. I forgot everything for this woman; I slept not. I eat nothing. That evening I fell into a fever, the next morning I was delirious, and the next evening I was dead!

•   •   •

“Dead!” cried his hearers.

“Dead!” answered the narrator, with a conviction in his voice which words alone cannot give; “dead as Fabian, the cast of whose dead face hangs from that wall!”

“Go on,” whispered the others, holding their breath. The hail still rattled against the windows, and the fire had so nearly died out, that they threw more wood on the feeble flame which penetrated the darkness of the studio and cast a faint light upon the pale face of him who told the story.

He resumed:

•   •   •

From that moment I felt nothing but a numbing chill, and a slight but still freezing motion. The latter was doubtless that of being put into the grave. I had been buried for some time — I do not exactly know how long, for there is no time-keeping in the grave — when I heard someone calling my name. I shook with cold and fear, without being able to answer. After a lapse of some moments, I was again called. I made an effort to speak, and then felt the bandage which wrapped me from head to foot. It was my shroud. At last, I managed feebly to articulate, “Who calls?”

“’Tis I!” said a voice.

“Who art thou?”

“I! I! I!” was the answer; and the voice grew weaker, as if it was lost in the distance; or as if it was but the icy rustle of the trees.

A third time my name sounded on my ears; but now it seemed to run from tree to tree, as if it whistled in each dead branch; so that the entire cemetery repeated it with a dull sound. Then I heard a noise of wings, as if my name, pronounced in the silence, had suddenly awakened a troop of night-birds. My hands, as if by some mysterious power, sought my face. In silence I undid the shroud which bound me, and tried to see. It seemed as if I had awakened from a long sleep. I was cold.

I then recalled the dread fear which oppressed me, and the mournful images by which I was surrounded. The trees had no longer any leaves upon them, and seemed to stretch forth their bare branches like huge spectres! A single ray of moonlight which shone forth, showed me a long row of tombs, forming an horizon around me, and seeming like the steps which might lead to Heaven. All the vague voices of the night, which seemed to preside at my awakening, were full of terror.

I turned my head, and sought for him who called me. He was seated at my side, watching me, his head leaning on his hands, and his face pregnant with a terrible look, and clothed with a horrible smile. Fear ran like an electric shock through me. “Who art thou?” said I, with an endeavour to gather up all my strength; “and why dost thou awaken me?”

“To render you a service.” he answered.

“Where am I?”

“In the graveyard.”

“Who art thou?”

“A friend.”

“Leave me to my sleep,” said I.

“Listen!” cried he to me; “dost thou remember aught of the earth?”

“No.”

“Dost thou regret anything?”

“No.”

“How long hast thou been asleep?”

“I know not.”

“I will tell you,” he said: “Thou hast been dead two days; and the last word you uttered was the name of a woman, instead of that of the Lord. Therefore, if Satan wished to possess it, your soul belongs to him. Dost understand me?”

“Yes,” I answered.

“And dost thou wish to live?”

“Who art thou who offerest me life? — art thou Satan?”

“Satan, or not,” was the answer; “will you live?”

“Alone?”

“No. You shall see her.”

“When?”

“This very night; and at her own house.”

“I accept it,” cried I, trying to rise; “what are thy conditions?”

“I make none,” said the speaker, with a lurid smile. “Do you believe that, from time to time, I am not capable of doing good? This very night she gives a ball: I will take you thither.”

“Let us set out.”

“Good!” cried Satan. He held forth his hand and dragged me from the place.

You imagine that what I say was impossible. All that I say is, that I felt a penetrating cold, which froze all my limbs.

“Now,” cried the fiend, “follow me! You must understand that I cannot get out by the great gate — the porter will not suffer that. Once here, there is no retreat. Follow me, therefore: we will just go to your house, where you shall dress yourself; for you can hardly go to a ball in your present costume — especially as it is not a bal masque. Mind and wrap yourself well up in your winding-sheet, for the nights are cold, and you may feel unpleasantly touched by it.”

As he said this, Satan laughed malignantly; and I continued silently to walk after him.

“I am sure,” continued he, “that, in spite of the service I am doing you, you do not yet like me. You are always thus, you men — ungrateful to your friends. Not that I blame ingratitude; it is a vice upon which I pride myself, since I invented it myself; and I must say, that it is one most in vogue. But I do wish to see you a little more merry — it is the only thing I ask of you.”

I answered not, but still followed my guide, white as a statue, and as cold. I was silent; but, at the pauses in the fiend’s voice, I could hear my teeth chatter against each other, and my bones rattle in my body.

“Shall we soon arrive?” said I, with effort.

“Still impatient,” said my guide, sardonically. “You must think her very beautiful?”

“As an angel!” I cried.

“Ah! my friend,” said he, with a laugh, “one must confess that you have a want of delicacy in your answers. How can you talk to me of angels, knowing I have been one: in fact, I have done for you today somewhat more than an angel could have done. I excuse you, however; one must excuse a good deal to a man who has been dead upwards of 116two days. Besides, I am, as I have told you, very good-tempered today. There has happened in the world a few things which please me very much. I did think that men were degenerate; I absolutely fancied that they were getting virtuous. But, no; they are always the same — just the same as when first created. Well, today has been a rare day for me: I have seldom found things succeed so well as today. I have counted, since yesterday evening, six hundred and twenty-two suicides in France alone! Among them, there has, however, been more young men than old fellows, which is a pity, because they die without children, and are therefore a loss to me. Two thousand four hundred and forty-three in the whole of Europe. The other parts of the world I do not count; there, I am like rich capitalists, who cannot count their gains. Twelve hundred judges, who have given false judgment: ordinarily I have more than this latter number. There are also twenty-seven cases of atheism — cases which gave me greater pleasure than all the rest put together. With these and others, you will find that they make together a rough aggregate of nearly three million souls in Europe alone! I have not reckoned petty crimes, such as theft, forgery, etc.; these are merely the farthings in the gross account. So you can easily calculate in what space of time the whole world will fall into my hands, at three millions of souls per day! I really fancy that I shall be obliged to enlarge my place of accommodation.”

“I understand your triumph,” I muttered to myself, as I hastened onwards.

“Indeed!” said Satan, with a sombre and melancholy air; “do you fear me, then, since you see me face to face? — am I so repulsive? Let us reason a little: What would become of your world without me? It would die of spleen. It is I who invented gold-gambling! ’Tis I love! Business — ’tis I! Thinking of these things, I cannot, for the life of me, understand the spite which you men seem to bear against me. Your poets, for instance, who keep talking of an ideal love, cannot understand that, in raving of the love which exalts, they point out the way to that which debases — that in seeking a Diana they manage to find an Aphrodite. Now look for instance to yourself; you have just arisen from the dead; you are yet as cold as a corpse; and yet you seek the embraces of love. You see evil survives death, and that a man who has lived a wicked life, would, if he were put to the proof, prefer an eternity of his own passions to an eternity of pure and heavenly happiness.”

I interrupted him with — “Shall we soon get there?” for the horizon seemed to grow lighter every moment, and still we did not seem to advance an inch.

“How impatient you are,” ejaculated the fiend, querulously: “you must know that over the great gate of the cemetery there is a cross, and that that cross is a kind of barrier or custom-house to me. As I generally travel about for purposes which the cross forbids, I should be obliged to make the sign of it upon my forehead to pass it. Now. I am willing enough to carry on my own little peccadilloes, but the fiend himself revolts at sacrilege: so, as I have told you before, we can’t pass there. But never mind that — follow me. I have promised to conduct you to a ball; and I will keep my word. My word.” added he, sardonically. “is well known to be as good as my bond.”

There was, in all this irony of the fiend, something so fatal, cold, and devilish, that almost each word which dropped from his mouth seemed to freeze me. Still, what I tell you I heard with these ears! I could not drag myself away from my strange companion.

We continued to walk for some hundred feet, when we came to a wall, before which an accumulation of tombstones formed a kind of flight of steps. Satan placed his foot upon the first, and, without any remorse, strode upon the sacred memorials till he reached the top of the wall.

I hesitated; I was afraid to follow him: but he held out his hand to me, saying, “There is not the slightest danger — you can step upon these paving-stones. They are those of some acquaintances of mine.”

When I had reached the place where he stood, he suddenly asked me, “Whether he should show me the town?”

But I answered, “No, no! let us move forward.” We therefore leapt down from the wall upon the ground.

The moon seemed to veil herself before the held looks of Satan. The night was cold. All the doors were closed, all the windows darkened, and the streets deserted. From their appearance, one would have imagined that, for a long time past no feet had traversed these silent streets. Everything around us here a death-like aspect. It seemed as if, when day came, no one would open their doors; that no head, of woman or of child, would look out of these dark, dull windows; that no step would break the silence which fell, like a pall, upon all around. I seemed to be walking in a city which had been buried some ages. In truth, the town seemed to have been depopulated, and the cemetery to have grown full.

Still we went forward, without hearing a murmur, or meeting even with a shadow. The street stretched for a long way across this fearful city of silence and repose. At last we reached my house.

“You remember it?” said the fiend.

“Yes,” replied I, sullenly, “let us enter.”

“First.” said he, “we must open the door. It is I, by the way, who invented the science of opening doors without breaking them in. In fact, I have a second key to all doors and gates — with one exception — that of Paradise!”

We entered. The calm without continued within. It was horrible!

I felt as in a dream: I did not breathe nor move. Imagine, if you can, yourselves entering your chambers after having been dead for two days — finding everything in the same position in which it was during your illness but wrapped in that dark gloom which death alone can give, and seeing all the objects arranged, never again to be disturbed by you! The only thing which seemed to have any motion in it which I had seen since I arose from the tomb, was a large clock, by the side of which a human being had ceased to exist, and which now ticked slowly on, counting the hours of my eternity, as it had the minutes of my life.

I went to the mantel-shelf; I lighted a wax candle to assure myself of the existence elf everything; for all which surrounded me appeared so strange that I could not believe my senses. Every object was real: I saw before me the portrait of my mother, with the same smile upon her lips — smiling on me now in death — as it had before in life. I opened the books which I had read only some few days before my death; everything was the same. The only alteration was, that the linen had been removed from the bed, and that on each chest and drawer there was a seal. As for Satan, he was sitting down upon the tester of the bed, reading attentively the “Lives of the Saints”.

I passed before a cheval glass, and I saw myself from head to feet in my strange costume, wrapped in my winding-sheet, my face pale, my eyes heavy and dull; I began to doubt this life which an unknown power had returned to me. I placed my hand upon my heart, it did not beat — I carried my hand to my brow, my brow was cold as ice; so also was my chest: my pulse was, of course, as motionless as my heart. However, memory lived within me, and I could move about; the thought was horrible, my eyes and my brain were alone really alive.

What was yet more horrible was, that I could not detach my eyes from the glass, which gave back my figure, cold, pale, and frozen. Each movement of my lips was reflected by a ghastly and sinister smile. I could not quit my place, and I had no power to cry out.

The timepiece gave out that dull sound which warns us that it will soon strike; then it struck two o’clock. A few seconds after, the neighbouring church clock struck also, then another, and another, and all was again silent. By the reflection of the glass, I saw that the fiend had fallen comfortably to sleep over the volume he had tried to read.

I turned round, and caught my reflection in another glass with that pale clearness which a single wax candle in a vast chamber gives; I seemed haunted by myself; fear reached its culminating point, and I cried out aloud. Satan awoke.

“look,” said he, not regarding my fear, “how you men try to instil virtue into ethers. Here is this book, absolutely so nonsensical and dull, that I, who have not been to sleep for nearly six thousand years, am obliged to take a nap over it. How is this? Are you not yet ready?”

“look at me,” said I, mechanically.

“Come, come,” answered my companion, “break the seals, take your clothes, and plenty of gold — plenty of gold. Tomorrow, when it is found out, justice will step in and condemn some poor devil for the robbery, and,” continued he, condescending for a moment to be vulgar, for the devil is always a gentleman, “that will be a little bit of fat for me.”

I dressed myself in haste, but noticed every time that I touched my forehead or my bosom that they were still cold as ice. When ready, I looked at Satan.

“Shall we see her?” said I.

“In five minutes.”

“And tomorrow, what then?”

“Tomorrow,” said he, “you may take yourself to your ordinary pursuits and to your common life. I do not do things by halves.”

“Without conditions!”

“Without any.”

“Let us set out then,” I returned.

We did so; in a few minutes we were before the house at which I had called some few days previously.

“Let us go upstairs,” said my conductor. He did so. I recognized the grand staircase, the vestibule, the antechamber. The entrance of the saloon was crowded with people; the party was brilliant, the rooms seemed to glitter as it were with light, flowers, jewels, and beautiful women. When we entered they were dancing. I cannot tell how I felt, seeing all these things, and with yet the presence of the grave about me. I took Satan aside, and whispered to him.

“Where is she?”

“In her boudoir,” he answered. I waited till the dance was finished; I then crossed the saloon. The huge mirrors, by the light of the chandeliers, reflected my pale and sombre figure, and I recognised the deathlike smile which had so frozen me. But here at least I was safe — here was no solitude, but a crowd of joyous people; no cemetery, but a ballroom — no tomb, but beauty, ravishing beauty. For one moment, dreaming of her for whom I came, I forgot whence I came.

Arrived at the door of the boudoir. I glanced in, and saw her; there she sat, more beautiful than Beauty’s self, chaste as a statue of Diana. I stepped for an instant in an ecstasy: she was clothed in a dress of dazzling whiteness, with bare arms and shoulders; I thought I saw upon one of her arms the little red point where I had bled her; perhaps, however, this was more fancy than anything else. When I appeared she was surrounded by handsome young men, to whose vapid talk she did not, however, seem to listen; raising her beautiful eyes mechanically, she saw me, seemed to hesitate for a moment, and then, with a sweet smile, she quitted the rest and came to me.

“You see,” said she, “I am quite strong.” As she said this the orchestra again struck up; she continued, “And you can make proof of it if you wish; let us waltz together.” She then added some words to some one at her side; I looked towards him — it was Satan.

“You have kept your word,” said I; “I thank you for it, but this woman must become mine this very night.”

“Thou shalt have her,” he said, coldly; “but wipe your face before you dance, there is a worm crawling upon your cheek;” so saying he departed, leaving me more cold and ghastly than before — to restore my feelings, I pressed the arm of her for whom I had come from the grave, and thus I entered the ballroom with her.

It was one of these delicious entrancing waltzes where all these who surround us seem to disappear, and we see none but ourselves; so we waltzed with our eyes fixed on each ether, till they seemed to make a language of their own. Hers seemed to say, “I am young and beautiful, and to him who possesses me all the beauties of my heart and soul will be revealed.”

Still the waltz went on; the measure ceased at last, and we were alone. She leaned upon my arm, and turned her fine eyes upon me with a look which seemed to say, “I love you.”

I led her back into the saloon — it was deserted; she sat down, reclining on an ottoman, and turned her eyes to me, half closed, as if with love rather than fatigue. I leaned towards her: “Ah,” said I, “if you only knew how I love you!”

“I knew it,” she answered; “I love you equally as well.”

“I would give my soul,” said I, earnestly, “to possess you as my bride.”

The eyes of the lady lit up with a fire which resembled those of the fiend — their light seemed to enter into my soul.

“Listen,” she said, anxiously; “in a few moments we shall be alone; that door leads to my chamber; wait till all are gone, and we will ratify the compact.”

The door opened silently, and then shut upon me. I was alone in the chamber where first I had seen her: there was the same mysterious perfume, which one cannot describe. I glanced in the mirror — I was still as pale as ever; I heard the carriages which took up the guests, and departed one by one, until the last had disappeared, and the silence again became dreadful and mournful; I felt, little by little, step by step, my terrors return upon me. I dared not recall my former thoughts. I was astonished that my mistress never came. I counted the minutes till they seemed hours. I sat down and rested my elbows on my knees.

Then I began to think of my mother, who at that moment was weeping for me — my mother to whom I had been all in life — to whom, alas, I had given but little, too little thought. Then came back the days of my childhood: I remembered that I had never had a moment’s grief but that my mother had consoled it; and knew, perhaps, when I was about to prepare for a crime, she was passing a vigil of tears and prayers in remembrance of me. The thought was fearful; I felt full of remorse — tears came into my eyes. I rose and looked at myself again in the glass: my eyes, before dull, seemed to brighten with resolution. I prayed within myself, and determined to rush from the present danger. I saw behind me a pale and motionless figure, it was my mistress, she had just entered the room. I rushed past her, through the half-opened door, and before I thought of anything else, I regained my own home. In the sanctity of that I remained in meditation and prayer; I was safe from the intrusion of the fiend who tempted me. Not so, however, were my thoughts. In the morning, which slowly dawned, the beauty to which I had so blindly bowed myself seemed to have regained its power. I forgot my good resolutions -I threw behind me my prayers — I again gave myself up to the passions which devoured me. I determined again to seek her. It was broad daylight when I went out of my room, but by the door-post a figure, formed, it seemed to me, of a dark vapour, stood and looked at me sardonically. I felt that it was the fiend, and I knew his power over me, and that he followed upon my steps.

The day was dark, dull, and cold; I walked carelessly, and heedless of anything but of the purpose I had before me, I at last arrived.

At the moment I placed my feet upon the step, I saw an old man, pale and feeble, who was about to descend the flight of stairs which ran up to the door.

“Who do you want, sir?” said the perter.

“Madame P———,” I replied.

“Madame P———,” returned he, with a look of astonishment, pointing out the old man at the time; “that gentleman, now inhabits this hotel; Madame P——— died three months ago.”

I gave a loud cry, and fell forward senseless.

•   •   •   •   •   •

A silence fell upon the party who listened to this strange story: none dared for a few moments to break it. At last, one asked, “What further happened?” No one answered, and when they looked through the increasing gloom of the studio, they found that the narrator of the strange story had departed — none knew how, or when; nor did either of us ever again meet with the hero of the Dead Man’s Story.

Friswell’s Ghost Stories and Phantom Fancies (1858)

THE CHILD STEALER

Emile Erckmann

Alexander Chatrian

1871

CHAPTER ONE

In 1315, there was daily to be seen, wandering in the Hesse-Darmstadt quarter of Mayence, a tall emaciated woman with hollow cheeks and haggard eyes; a frightful picture of madness. This unfortunate woman, named Christine Evig, a mattress-maker, living in the narrow street called Petit Volet, at the back of the cathedral, had lost her reason through the occurrence of a terrible event. Passing one evening along the winding street of the Trois Bateaux leading her little daughter by the hand, and suddenly observing that she had for a moment let go of the child, and no longer heard the sound of its steps, the poor woman turned and called—

“Deubche! Deubche! where are you?”

Nobody answered, and the street, as far as she could see, was deserted.

Then running, crying, calling, she returned to the port, and peered into the dark water lying beneath the vessels. Her cries and moans drew the neighbours about her: the poor mother explained to them her agonies. They joined her in making fresh search, but nothing, not a trace, not an indication, was discovered to throw light on this frightful mystery.

From that time Christine Evig had never again set foot in her home; night and day she wandered through the town, crying in a voice growing feebler and more plaintive—

“Deubche! Deubche!”

She was pitied. Sometimes one, sometimes another kind person gave her food and cast-off clothes. And the police, in presence of a sympathy so general, did not think it their duty to interfere and shut Christine up in a madhouse, as was usual at that period.

She was left therefore to go about as she liked, without any one troubling himself concerning her ways.

But what gave to the misfortune of Christine a truly sinister character was that the disappearance of her little daughter had been, as it were, the signal for several events of the same kind; a dozen children disappeared in an astonishing and inexplicable manner, several of them belonging to the upper rank of townspeople.

These events usually occurred at nightfall, when the street-passengers were few, and every one of them was hastening home from business. A wilful child went out to the doorstep of its parent’s house, its mother calling after it, “Karl!” “Ludwig!” “Lotelé!” — absolutely like poor Christine. No answer! They rushed in every direction; the whole neighbourhood was ransacked; all was over!

To describe to you the inquiries of the police, the arrests that were made, the inquisitions, the terror of families, would be a thing impossible.

To see one’s child die is, doubtless, frightful; but to lose it without knowing what has become of it, to think that we shall never look upon it again, that the poor little being, so feeble and tender, which we have pressed to our heart with so much love, is ill perhaps — it may be calling for us, and we unable to help it — this passes all imagination — exceeds the power of human expression to convey.

Now one evening in the October of that year, 1317, Christine Evig, after having strayed about the streets, had seated herself on the trough of the Bishop’s Fountain, her long grey hair hanging about her face, and her eyes wandering dreamily into vacancy.

The servant-girls of the neighbourhood, instead of stopping to chat as usual at the fountain, made haste to fill their pitchers and regain their masters’ houses. The poor madwoman stayed there alone, motionless, under the icy shower in which the Rhine mist was falling. The high houses around, with their sharp gables, their latticed windows, their innumerable dormer-lights, were slowly becoming enveloped in darkness.

The Bishop’s Chapel clock struck seven, still Christine did not move, but sat shivering and murmuring—

“Deubche! Deubche!”

At that moment, while the pale hue of twilight yet lingered on the points of the roofs before finally disappearing, she suddenly shuddered from head to foot, stretched forward her neck, and her face, impassive for nearly two years, was lit with such an expression of intelligence, that Counsellor Trumf’s servant, who was at the moment holding her pitcher to the spout, turned in astonishment at seeing this gesture of the madwoman’s.

At the same moment, a woman, with head bent down, passed along the pavement at the other side of the square, holding in her arms something that was struggling with her, enveloped in a piece of linen cloth.

Seen through the rain, this woman was of striking aspect; she was hurrying away like a thief who has succeeded in effecting a robbery, slinking along in the shadow, her rags dragging behind her.

Christine Evig had extended her shrunken left hand, and a few inarticulate words fell from her lips; but suddenly a piercing cry escaped from her bosom—

“It is she!”

And bounding across the square, in less than a minute she 6reached the corner of the Rue des Vieilles Ferrailles, where the woman had passed out of her sight.

But there Christine stopped, breathless; the stranger was lost in the darkness of that filthy place, and nothing was to be heard but the monotonous sound of the water falling from the house-gutters.

What had passed through the madwoman’s mind? What had she remembered? Had she had some vision — one of those insights of the soul that for a moment unshroud to us the dark depths of the past? I do not know.

By whatever means, she had recovered her reason.

Without losing a moment in pursuing the vanished apparition, the unfortunate woman hurried up the Rue des Trois Bateaux as if carried along by vertigo, and turning at the corner of the Place Gutenberg, rushed into the hall of the provost, Kasper Schwartz, crying in a hoarse voice—

“Monsieur le Prévôt, the child-stealers are discovered! Quick! listen! listen!”

The provost was just finishing his evening meal. He was a grave, methodical man, liking to take his ease after supper. Thus the sight of this phantom greatly disturbed him, and setting down the cup of tea he was in the act of raising to his lips, he cried—

“Good God! am I not to have a single moment’s quiet during the day? Can there possibly be a more unfortunate man than I am? What does this madwoman want with me now? Why was she allowed to come in?”

Recovering her calmness at these words, Christine replied in a suppliant manner—

“Ah, monsieur! you ask if there is a being more unfortunate than yourself; lock at me — look at me!”

Her voice was broken with tears; her clenched hands put aside the long grey hair from her pale face. She was terrible to see.

“Mad! yes, my God! I have been mad; the Lord, in His mercy, hid from me my misfortune; but I am mad no longer. Oh, what I have seen! That woman was carrying off a child — for it was a child; I am sure of it.”

“Go to the devil with your woman and child! — go to the devil!” cried the provost. Seeing the unfortunate woman throw herself upon her knees. “Hans! Hans!” he cried, “will you come and turn this woman out of doors? To the devil with the office of provost! It brings me nothing but annoyance.”

The servant appeared, and Monsieur Kasper Schwartz pointed to Christine —

“Show her out,” he said. “Tomorrow I shall certainly draw out a warrant in due form, to rid the town of this unfortunate creature. Thank Heaven we are not without madhouses!”

The madwoman laughed dreamily, while the servant, full of pity for her, took her by the arm, and said gently to her—

“Come, Christine — come.”

She had relapsed into madness, and murmured—

“Deubche! — Deubche!”

CHAPTER TWO

While these things were passing in the house of the provost, Kasper Schwartz, a carriage came down the Rue de l’Arsenal; the sentinel on guard before the shot-park, recognizing the equipage as that of Count Diderich, colonel of the Imperial regiment of Hilbourighausen, carried arms; a salute answered him from the interior of the vehicle. The carriage, drawn at full speed, seemed as if going towards the Porte d’Allemagne, but it took the Rue de l’Homme de Fer, and stopped before the door of the provost’s house.

As the colonel, in full uniform, got out, he raised his eyes, and appeared stupefied, for the shocking laughter of the madwoman made itself heard outside the house. Count Diderich was a man about five-and-thirty or forty years of age, tall, with brown beard and hair, and a severe and energetic physiognomy.

He entered the provost’s hall abruptly, saw Hans leading Christine, and, without waiting to have himself announced, walked into Monsieur Schwartz’s dining-room, exclaiming—

“Monsieur, the police of your district is intolerable! Twenty minutes ago I stopped in front of the cathedral, at the moment of the Angelus. As I got out of my carriage, seeing the Countess Hilbourighausen coming down the steps of the cathedral, I moved on one side to allow her to pass, and I then found that my son — a child of three years old, who had been seated by my side — had disappeared. The carriage door on the side towards the bishop’s house was open: advantage had been taken of the moment when I was letting down the carriage steps to carry off the child! All the search and inquiries of my people have been fruitless. I am in despair, monsieur! — in despair!”

The colonel’s agitation was extreme; his dark eyes flashed like lightning through the tears he tried to repress; his hand clasped the hilt of his sword.

The provost appeared dumbfounded; his apathetic nature was distressed at the idea of having to exert himself and pass the night in giving orders, and going about from place to place — in short, to recommence, for the hundredth time, the hitherto fruitless search.

He would rather have put off the business till the next day.

“Monsieur,” replied the colonel, “understand that I will not be trifled with. You shall answer for my son with your head. It is your place to watch over the public security — you fail in your duty — it is scandalous! Oh, that I at least knew who has struck the blow!”

While pronouncing these incoherent words, he paced up and down the room, with clenched teeth and sombre looks. Perspiration stood on the purple brow of Master Schwartz, who murmured, as he looked at the plate before him—

“I’m very sorry, monsieur — very sorry; but this is the tenth! — the thieves are much more clever than my detectives. What would you have me do?”

At this imprudent response the colonel bounded with rage, and seizing the fat provost by the shoulders, dragged him out of his armchair.

“What would I have you do? — Is that the answer you give to a father who comes to demand of you his child?”

“Let me go, monsieur! — let me go!” roared the provost, choking with alarm. “In Heaven’s name calm yourself! A woman — a madwoman — Christine Evig, has just been here — she told me — yes, I remember — Hans! Hans!” The servant, who had overheard all at the keyhole, entered the room instantly.

“Monsieur?”

“Fetch back the madwoman.”

“She’s still outside, monsieur.”

“Well, bring her in. Pray sit down, colonel.”

Count Diderich remained standing in the middle of the room, and a moment afterwards Christine Evig returned, haggard, and laughing insanely, as she had gone out. Hans and a servant-girl, curious as to what was passing, stood in the open doorway open-mouthed. The colonel, with an imperious gesture, made a sign to them to go away, then, crossing his arms and confronting Master Schwartz, he cried—

“Well, monsieur, what kind of intelligence do you expect to obtain from this unfortunate creature? ”

The provost moved, as if he were going to speak; his fat cheeks shook.

The madwoman uttered a sort of sobbing laughter.

“Monsieur,” said the provost, at length, “this woman’s case is the same as your own; two years ago she lost her child, and that drove her mad.”

The colonel’s eyes overflowed with tears.

“Go on,” he said.

“When she came here a little while ago she appeared to have recovered a spark of reason, and told me-”

Master Schwartz paused.

“What did she tell you, monsieur?”

“That she had seen a woman carrying a child.”

“Ah!”

“Thinking that she was only raving, I sent her away.”

The colonel smiled bitterly.

“You sent her away?” he cried.

“Yes; she seemed to me to have relapsed into her state of madness.”

“Parbleu!” cried the count, in a tone of thunder, “you refuse assistance to this unfortunate woman? You drive away from her her last gleam of hope, instead of sustaining and defending her, as it is your duty to do? And you dare to retain your office! — you dare to receive its emoluments!”

He walked up close to the provost, whose wig trembled, and added, in a low concentrated tone—

“You are a scoundrel! If I do not recover my child, I’ll kill you like a dog.”

Master Schwartz, his staring eyes nearly starting from his head, his hands helplessly open, his mouth clammy, said not a word; terror held him by the throat; and besides, he knew not what to answer.

Suddenly the colonel turned his back on him, and going to Christine, looked at her for a few seconds, then, raising his voice—

“My good woman,” he said, “try and answer me. In the name of God — in the name of your child — where did you see that woman?”

He paused, and the poor woman murmured in a plaintive voice—

“Deubche! Deubche! — they have killed her!”

The count turned pale, and, carried away by terror, seized the madwoman’s hand.

“Answer me, unfortunate creature! — answer me!” he cried. He shook her; Christine’s head fell back; she uttered a peal of frightful laughter, and said—

“Yes — yes — it is done! — the wicked woman has killed it!”

The count felt his knees giving way, and sank rather than sat down upon a chair, his elbows upon the table, his pale face between his hands, his eyes fixed, as if gazing upon some fearful scene.

The minutes passed slowly in silence.

The clock struck ten; the sound made the colonel start. He rose, opened the door, and Christine went out.

“Monsieur,” said Master Schwartz.

“Hold your tongue!” interrupted the colonel, with a withering look.

And he followed the madwoman down the dark street.

A singular idea had come into his mind.

“All is lost,” he said to himself; “this unhappy woman cannot reason, cannot comprehend questions put to her; but she has seen something — her instinct may lead her.”

It is almost needless to add that the provost was amazed. The worthy magistrate lost not a moment in double-locking his door; that done, he was carried away by a noble indignation.

“A man like me threatened! — seized by the collar! Aha, colonel! we’ll see whether there are any laws in this country! Tomorrow morning I shall address a complaint to the Grand Duke, and expose to him the conduct of his officers,”

CHAPTER THREE

Meanwhile the colonel followed the madwoman, and by a strange effect of the super-excitation of his senses, saw her in the darkness, through the mist, as plainly as in broad daylight; he heard her sighs, her confused words, in spite of the continual moan of the autumn winds rushing through the deserted streets.

A few late townspeople, the collars of their coats raised to the level of their ears, their hands in their pockets, and their hats pressed down over their eyes, passed, at infrequent intervals, along the pavements; doors were heard to shut with a crash, an ill-fastened shutter hanged against a wall, a tile torn from a housetop by the wind fell into the street; then, again, the immense torrent of air whirled on its course, drowning with its lugubrious voice all other sounds of the night.

It was one of those cold nights at the end of October, when the weathercocks, shaken by the north Wind, turn giddily on the high roofs, and cry with shrill voices, “Winter! — Winter! — Winter is come!”

On reaching the wooden bridge Christine leaned over the pier and looked down into the dark muddy water that dragged itself along in the canal; then, rising with an uncertain air, she went on her way, shivering and murmuring—

“Oh! oh! — it is cold!”

The colonel, clutching the folds of his cloak with one hand, pressed the other against his heart, which felt almost ready to burst.

Eleven o’clock was struck by the church of St. Ignatius, then midnight.

Christine Evig still went on; she had passed through the narrow streets of l’Imprimerie, of the Maillet, of the Halle aux Vins, of the Vieilles Boucheries, and of the Fosses de l’Evêché.

A hundred times, in despair, the count had said to himself that this nocturnal pursuit would lead to nothing; but, remembering that it was his last resource, he followed her as she went from place to place, stopping, now by a corner-stone, now in the recess of a wall, then continuing her uncertain course — absolutely like a homeless brute wandering at hazard in the darkness.

At length, towards one o’clock in the morning, Christine came once more into the Place de l’Evêché. The weather appeared to have somewhat cleared up; the rain no longer fell, a fresh wind swept the streets, and the moon, now and then surrounded by dark clouds, now and then shining in full brilliancy, shed its rays, smooth and cold as blades of steel, upon the thousand pools of water lying in the hollows of the paving-stones.

The madwoman tranquilly seated herself on the edge of the fountain, in the place she had occupied some hours before. For a long time she remained in the same attitude, with dull eyes, and her rags clinging to her withered form.

All the count’s hopes had vanished.

But, at one of those moments when the moon, breaking through the clouds, threw its pale light upon the silent edifices, she rose suddenly, stretched forward her neck, and the colonel, following the direction of her gaze, observed that it was fixed on the narrow lane of the Vieilles Ferrailles, about two hundred paces distant from the fountain. At the same moment she darted forward like an arrow. The count followed instantly upon her steps, plunging into the block of tall old buildings that overlook the church of St. Ignatius.

The madwoman seemed to have wings; ten times he was on the point of losing her, so rapid was her pace through these winding lanes, encumbered with carts, dung-heaps, and faggots piled before the doors on the approach of winter.

Suddenly she disappeared into a sort of blind alley, pitch dark, and the colonel was obliged to stop, not knowing how to proceed further.

Fortunately, after a few seconds, the sickly yellow rays of a lamp pierced the darkness of the depths of this filthy hole, through a small cracked windowpane; this light was stationary, but now and then it was momentarily obscured by some intervening figure.

Some one was evidently awake in that foul den.

What was being done?

Without hesitation, the colonel went straight towards the light.

In the midst of the obstructions he found the madwoman, standing in the mire, her eyes staring, her mouth open, looking at the solitary glimmer.

The appearance of the count did not seem at all to surprise her; only, pointing to the window on the first floor in which the light was seen, she said. “It’s there!” in an accent so impressive that the count started.

Under the influence of this impulsion he sprang towards the door of the house, and with one pressure of his shoulder burst it open. Impenetrable darkness filled the place. The madwoman was close behind him.

“Hush!” she cried.

And, once more giving way to the unfortunate woman’s instinct, the count remained motionless and listened. The profoundest silence reigned in the house; it might have been supposed that everybody in it was either sleeping or dead.

The clock of St. Ignatius struck two.

A faint whispering was then heard on the first floor, then a vague light appeared on a crumbling wall at the back; boards creaked above the colonel, and the light came nearer and nearer, falling first upon a ladder-staircase, a heap of old iron in a corner, a pile of wood; further on, upon a sash-window looking out into a yard, bottles right and left, a basket of rags — a dark, ruinous, and hideous interior. At last a tin lamp with a smoky wick, held by a small hand, as dry and sinewy as the claw of a bird of prey, was slowly projected over the stair-rail, and above the light appeared the head of an anxious-looking woman, with hair the colour of tow, bony cheeks, tall ears standing almost straight out from the head, light grey eyes glittering under deep brows — in short, a sinister being, dressed in a filthy petticoat, her feet in old shoes, her fleshless arms bare to the elbows, holding a lamp in one hand and in the other a sharp slater’s hatchet.

Scarcely had this abominable being glared into the darkness than she rushed back up the stairs with astonishing agility.

But it was too late: the colonel had bounded after her, sword in hand, and seized the old witch by the petticoat.

“My child, wretch!” he cried; “my child!”

At this roar of the lion, the hyena turned and struck at random with her hatchet.

A frightful struggle ensued; the woman, thrown down upon the stairs, tried to bite; the lamp, which had fallen on the ground, burned there, its wick sputtering in the damp and throwing changing shadows on the dusky wall.

“My child!” repeated the colonel: “my child, or I’ll kill you!”

“You — yes, you shall have your child.” replied the breathless woman in an ironical tone. “Oh! it’s not finished — not — I’ve good teeth — the coward, to — to strangle me! Ho! — above, there! — are you deaf? — let me go — I’ll — I’ll tell you all.”

She was nearly exhausted, when another witch, older and more haggard, tottered down the stairs, crying—

“I’m here.”

The wretch was armed with a large butcher’s knife, and the count, looking up, saw that she was selecting a place in which to strike him between the shoulders.

He felt himself lost; a providential accident alone could save him.

The madwoman, until then a motionless spectator, sprang upon the old woman, crying—

“It is she! — there she is! Oh, I know her! — she shall not escape me.”

The only answer was a gush of blood, which inundated the landing place; the old woman had cut the unfortunate Christine’s throat.

It was the work of a second.

The colonel had time to spring to his feet and put himself on his guard; seeing which the two frightful old women fled rapidly up the stairs and disappeared in the darkness. The flame of the smoky lamp flickered in the oil, and the count took advantage of its last rays to follow the murderers. But on reaching the top of the stairs, prudence counselled him not to abandon this point of egress.

He heard Christine breathing below, and drops of blood fell from stair to stair in the midst of the silence. It was horrible!

On the other hand, a sound at the back of the den made the count fear that the two women were attempting to escape by the windows.

Ignorance of the place for a moment prevented his moving from the spot on which he was standing, when a ray of light shining through a glass door allowed him to see the two windows of a room looking into the alley lit by a light from without. At the same time he heard, in the alley, a loud voice call out—

“Hallo! — what’s going on here? A door open!”

“Come this way! — come this way!” cried the colonel.

At the same moment the light gleamed inside of the house.

“Ah!” cried the voice, “blood! The devil! — I can’t be mistaken — it’s Christine!”

“Come here,” repeated the colonel.

A heavy step sounded on the stairs, and the hairy face of the watchman, Sélig, with his big otter-skin cap, and his goatskin over his shoulders, appeared at the head of the stairs, directing the light of his lantern towards the count. The sight of the uniform astonished the worthy fellow.

“Who’s there?” he inquired.

“Come up, my good fellow, come up!”

“Pardon, colonel — but, down below, there’s—”

“Yes — a woman has been killed; her murderers are in this house.”

The watchman ascended the few remaining stairs, and, holding up his lantern, threw a light on the place; it was a landing about six feet square, on to which opened the door of the room in which the two women had taken refuge. A ladder on the left hand, leading up to the garret-story, still further contracted the space.

The count’s paleness astonished Sélig. However, he dared not question the colonel; who asked—

“Who lives here?”

“Two women — a mother and daughter; they are called about the market the Jösels. The mother sells butcher’s meat in the market, the daughter makes sausage meat-”

The count, recalling the words uttered by Christine in her delirium — “Poor child! — they have killed it!” — was seized with giddiness, and a cold perspiration burst from his forehead.

By the most frightful chance he discovered, at the same instant, behind the stairs, a little frock of blue and red tartan, a pair of small shoes, and a black cap, thrown there out of the light. He shuddered, but an invincible power urged him on to look: — to contemplate with his own eyes; he approached, therefore, trembling from head to foot, and with a faltering hand raised these articles of dress.

They had belonged to his child!

Some drops of blood stained his fingers.

Heaven knows what passed in the count’s heart. For a long while, leaning for support against the wall, with fixed eyes, arms hanging helplessly by his side, and open mouth, he remained as if stunned. But suddenly he sprang against the door with a yell of fury that terrified the watchman. Nothing could have resisted such a shock. Within the room was heard the crashing of the furniture which the two women had piled up to barricade the entrance; the building shook to its foundation. The count disappeared into the obscurity; then came shrieks, wild cries, imprecations, hoarse clamours, from the midst of the darkness.

There was nothing human in it; it was as if wild beasts were tearing each other to pieces in the recesses of their den! The alley filled with people. The neighbours from all sides rushed into the house, inquiring—

“What’s the matter? Are they murdering one another here?”

Suddenly all became silent, and the count, covered with wounds from a knife, his uniform in tatters, came down the stairs, his sword red to the hilt; even his moustaches were bloodstained, and those who saw him must have thought that he had been fighting after the manner of tigers.

•   •   •   •   •   •

What more is there for me to tell you?

Colonel Diderich was cured of his wounds, and disappeared from Mayence.

The authorities of the town considered it judicious to keep these horrible details from the parents of the victims; I learned them from the watchman Sélig himself, after he had grown old, and had retired to his village near Saarbrük. He alone knew these details, having appeared as witness at the secret inquiry which was instituted before the criminal tribunal of Mayence.

“Temple Bar”, April 1871

THE GRAY WOLF

George MacDonald

1871

One evening-twilight in spring, a young English student, who had wandered northwards as far as the outlying fragments of Scotland called the Orkney and Shetland islands, found himself on a small island of the latter group, caught in a storm of wind and hail, which had come on suddenly. It was in vain to look about for any shelter; for not only did the storm entirely obscure the landscape, but there was nothing around him save a desert moss.

At length, however, as he walked on for mere walking’s sake, he found himself on the verge of a cliff, and saw, over the brow of it, a few feet below him, a ledge of rock, where he might find some shelter from the blast, which blew from behind. Letting himself down by his hands, he alighted upon something that crunched beneath his tread, and found the bones of many small animals scattered about in front of a little cave in the rock, offering the refuge he sought. He went in, and sat upon a stone. The storm increased in violence, and as the darkness grew he became uneasy, for he did not relish the thought of spending the night in the cave. He had parted from his companions on the opposite side of the island, and it added to his uneasiness that they must be full of apprehension about him. At last there came a lull in the storm, and the same instant he heard a footfall, stealthy and light as that of a wild beast, upon the bones at the mouth of the cave. He started up in some fear, though the least thought might have satisfied him that there could be no very dangerous animals upon the island. Before he had time to think, however, the face of a woman appeared in the opening. Eagerly the wanderer spoke. She started at the sound of his voice. He could not see her well, because she was turned towards the darkness of the cave.

“Will you tell me how to find my way across the moor to Shielness?” he asked.

“You cannot find it tonight,” she answered, in a sweet tone, and with a smile that bewitched him, revealing the whitest of teeth.

“What am I to do, then?” he asked.

“My mother will give you shelter, but that is all she has to offer.”

“And that is far more than I expected a minute ago,” he replied. “I shall be most grateful.”

She turned in silence and left the cave. The youth followed.

She was barefooted, and her pretty brown feet went catlike over the sharp stones, as she led the way down a rocky path to the shore. Her garments were scanty and torn, and her hair blew tangled in the wind. She seemed about five and twenty, lithe and small. Her long fingers kept clutching and pulling nervously at her skirts as she went. Her face was very gray in complexion, and very worn, but delicately formed, and smooth-skinned. Her thin nostrils were tremulous as eyelids, and her lips, whose curves were faultless, had no colour to give sign of indwelling blood. What her eyes were like he could not see, for she had never lifted the delicate films of her eyelids.

At the foot of the cliff they came upon a little hut leaning against it, and having for its inner apartment a natural hollow within it. Smoke was spreading over the face of the rock, and the grateful odour of food gave hope to the hungry student. His guide opened the door of the cottage; he followed her in, and saw a woman bending over a fire in the middle of the floor. On the fire lay a large fish broiling. The daughter spoke a few words, and the mother turned and welcomed the stranger. She had an old and very wrinkled, but honest face, and looked troubled. She dusted the only chair in the cottage, and placed it for him by the side of the fire, opposite the one window, whence he saw a little patch of yellow sand over which the spent waves spread themselves out listlessly. Under this window there was a bench, upon which the daughter threw herself in an unusual posture, resting her chin upon her hand. A moment after the youth caught the first glimpse of her blue eyes. They were fixed upon him with a strange look of greed, amounting to craving, but as if aware that they belied or betrayed her, she dropped them instantly. The moment she veiled them, her face, notwithstanding its colourless complexion, was almost beautiful.

When the fish was ready, the old woman wiped the deal table, steadied it upon the uneven floor, and covered it with a piece of fine table-linen. She then laid the fish on a wooden platter, and invited the guest to help himself. Seeing no other provision, he pulled from his pocket a hunting knife, and divided a portion from the fish, offering it to the mother first.

“Come, my lamb,” said the old woman; and the daughter approached the table. But her nostrils and mouth quivered with disgust.

The next moment she turned and hurried from the hut.

“She doesn’t like fish,” said the old woman, “and I haven’t anything else to give her.”

“She does not seem in good health,” he rejoined.

The woman answered only with a sigh, and they ate their fish with the help of a little rye-bread. As they finished their supper, the youth heard the sound as of the pattering of a dog’s feet upon the sand close to the door; but ere he had time to look out of the window, the door opened and the young woman entered. She looked better, perhaps from having just washed her face. She drew a stool to the corner of the fire opposite him. But as she sat down, to his bewilderment, and even horror, the student spied a single drop of blood on her white skin within her torn dress. The woman brought out a jar of whisky, put a rusty old kettle on the fire, and took her place in front of it. As soon as the water boiled, she proceeded to make some toddy in a wooden bowl.

Meantime the youth could not take his eyes off the young woman, so that at length he found himself fascinated, or rather bewitched. She kept her eyes for the most part veiled with the loveliest eyelids fringed with darkest lashes, and he gazed entranced; for the red glow of the little oil-lamp covered all the strangeness of her complexion. But as soon as he met a stolen glance out of those eyes unveiled, his soul shuddered within him. Lovely face and craving eyes alternated fascination and repulsion.

The mother placed the bowl in his hands. He drank sparingly, and passed it to the girl. She lifted it to her lips, and as she tasted — only tasted it — looked at him. He thought the drink must have been drugged and have affected his brain. Her hair smoothed itself back, and drew her forehead backwards with it; while the lower part of her face projected towards the bowl, revealing, ere she sipped, her dazzling teeth in strange prominence. But the same moment the vision vanished; she returned the vessel to her mother, and rising, hurried out of the cottage.

Then the old woman pointed to a bed of heather in one corner with a murmured apology; and the student, wearied both with the fatigues of the day and the strangeness of the night, threw himself upon it, wrapped in his cloak. The moment he lay down, the storm began afresh, and the wind blew so keenly through the crannies of the hut, that it was only by drawing his cloak over his head that he could protect himself from its currents. Unable to sleep, he lay listening to the uproar which grew in violence, till the spray was dashing against the window. At length the door opened, and the young woman came in, made up the fire, drew the bench before it, and lay down in the same strange posture, with her chin propped on her hand and elbow, and her face turned towards the youth. He moved a little; she dropped her head, and lay on her face, with her arms crossed beneath her forehead. The mother had disappeared.

Drowsiness crept over him. A movement of the bench roused him, and he fancied he saw some four-footed creature as tall as a large dog trot quietly out of the door. He was sure he felt a rush of cold wind. Gazing fixedly through the darkness, he thought he saw the eyes of the damsel encountering his, but a glow from the falling together of the remnants of the fire, revealed clearly enough that the bench was vacant. Wondering what could have made her go out in such a storm, he fell fast sleep.

In the middle of the night he felt a pain in his shoulder, came broad awake, and saw the gleaming eyes and grinning teeth of some animal close to his face. Its claws were in his shoulder, and its mouth in the act of seeking his throat. Before it had fixed its fangs, however, he had its throat in one hand, and sought his knife with the other. A terrible struggle followed; but regardless of the tearing claws, he found and opened his knife. He had made one futile stab, and was drawing it for a surer, when, with a spring of the whole body, and one wildly-contorted effort, the creature twisted its neck from his hold, and with something betwixt a scream and a howl, darted from him. Again he heard the door open; again the wind blew in upon him, and it continued blowing; a sheet of spray dashed across the floor, and over his face. He sprung from his couch and bounded to the door.

It was a wild night — dark, but for the flash of whiteness from the waves as they broke within a few yards of the cottage; the wind was raving, and the rain pouring down the air. A gruesome sound as of mingled weeping and howling came from somewhere in the dark. He turned again into the hut and closed the door, but could find no way of securing it. The lamp was nearly out, and he could not be certain whether the form of the young woman was upon the bench or not. Overcoming a strong repugnance, he approached it, and put out his hands — there was nothing there. He sat down and waited for the daylight: he dared not sleep any more.

When the day dawned at length, he went out yet again, and looked around. The morning was dim and gusty and gray. The wind had fallen, but the waves were tossing wildly. He wandered up and down the little strand, longing for more light.

At length he heard a movement in the cottage. By and by the voice of the old woman called to him from the door.

“You’re up early, sir. I doubt you didn’t sleep well.”

“Not very well,” he answered. “But where is your daughter?”

“She’s not awake yet,” said the mother. “I’m afraid I have but a poor breakfast for you. But you’ll take a dram and a bit of fish. It’s all I’ve got.”

Unwilling to hurt her, though hardly in good appetite, he sat down at the table. While they were eating, the daughter came in, but turned her face away and went to the further end of the hut. When she came forward after a minute or two, the youth saw that her hair was drenched, and her face whiter than before. She looked ill and faint, and when she raised her eyes, all their fierceness had vanished, and sadness had taken its place. Her neck was now covered with a cotton handkerchief. She was modestly attentive to and no longer shunned his gaze. He was gradually yielding to the temptation of braving another night in the hut, and seeing what would follow, when the old woman spoke.

“The weather will be broken all day, sir,” she said. “You had better be going, or your friends will leave without you.”

Ere he could answer, he saw such a beseeching glance on the face of the girl, that he hesitated, confused. Glancing at the mother, he saw the flash of wrath in her face. She rose and approached her daughter, with her hand lifted to strike her. The young woman stooped her head with a cry. He darted round the table to interpose between them. But the mother had caught hold of her; the handkerchief had fallen from her neck; and the youth saw five blue bruises on her lovely throat — the marks of the four fingers and the thumb of a left hand. With a cry of horror he darted from the house, but as he reached the door he turned. His hostess was lying motionless on the floor, and a huge gray wolf came bounding after him.

There was no weapon at hand; and if there had been, his inborn chivalry would never have allowed him to harm a woman even under the guise of a wolf. Instinctively, he set himself firm, leaning a little forward, with half outstretched arms, and hands curved ready to clutch again at the throat upon which he had left those pitiful marks. But the creature as she sprung eluded his grasp, and just as he expected to feel her fangs, he found a woman weeping on his bosom, with her arms around his neck. The next instant, the gray wolf broke from him, and bounded howling up the cliff. Recovering himself as he best might, the youth followed, for it was the only way to the moor above, across which he must now make his way to find his companions.

All at once he heard the sound of a crunching of bones — not as if a creature was eating them, but as if they were ground by the teeth of rage and disappointment: looking up, he saw close above him the mouth of the little cavern in which he had taken refuge the day before. Summoning all his resolution, he passed it slowly and softly. From within came the sounds of a mingled moaning and growling. Having reached the top, he ran at full-speed for some distance across the moor before venturing to look behind him. When at length he did so, he saw against the sky, the girl standing on the edge of the cliff, wringing her hands. One solitary wail crossed the space between. She made no attempt to follow him, and he reached the opposite shore in safety.

Works of Fancy and Imagination (1871)

THE VEILED PORTRAIT

James Grant

1874

It has been asserted that one cannot hold intercourse with that which is generally called the Unseen World, or behold anything supernatural, and live; but these ideas, from my own experience, I am inclined to doubt.

In the year subsequent to the great Bengal mutiny, I found myself at home on sick leave. My health had been injured by service in India, and by our sufferings consequent on the revolt; while my nervous system had been so seriously shaken by a grape-shot wound received at Lucknow, that it was completely changed, and I became cognisant of many things so utterly new to me, and so bewildering, that until I read Baron Reichenbach’s work on magnetism and crystalism, I feared that I was becoming insane. I was sensible of the power of a magnet over me, though it might be three rooms distant, and twice, in darkness which seemed perfect to others, my room became filled with light; but the Baron holds that darkness is full of light, and that to increase the sensitiveness of the visual organs is to render that rare and dissipated light susceptible, with all that it may contain.

I was now compelled to acknowledge the existence of that new power in nature which the Baron calls the Odic Light, and of many other phenomena that are described in “Der Geist in der Natur,” of Christian Oersted — the understanding that pervades all things.

But to my story.

Nearly a year had elapsed since the mutiny. The massacres at Delhi, Lucknow, Cawnpore, and elsewhere had been fearfully avenged by that army of retribution which marched from Umballah, and I found myself in London, enfeebled, enervated, and, as the saying is, “weak as a child.” The bustle of the great capital stunned and bewildered me; thus I gladly accepted a hearty invitation which I received from Sidney Warren, one of “ours,” but latterly of the Staff Corps, to spend a few weeks — months if I chose — at his place in Herts; a fine old house of the Tudor times, approached from the London road by an avenue that was a grand triumphal arch of nature’s own creation, with lofty interlacing boughs and hanging foliage.

Who, thought I, that was lord of such a place could dream of broiling in India — of sweltering in the white-washed barrack at Dumdum, or the thatched cantonments of Delhi or Meerut!

My friend came hurrying forth to meet me.

“How goes it, old fellow? Welcome to my new quarters,” he exclaimed.

“Well, Sidney, old man, how are you?”

Then we grasped each other’s hands as only brother soldiers do.

I found Warren, whom I had not seen since the commencement of the revolt, nearly as much changed and shattered in constitution as myself; but I knew that he had lost those whom he loved most in the world amid the massacre at Meerut. He received me, however, with all the warmth of an old comrade, for we had a thousand topics in common to con over; while the regiment, which neither of us might ever see again — he certainly not, as he had sold out — would prove an endless source of conversation.

Sidney Warren was in his fortieth year, but looked considerably older. His once dark hair and coal-black moustache were quite grizzled now. The expression of his face was one of intense sadness, as if some secret grief consumed him; while there was a weird and far-seeing expression that led me to fear he was not fated to be long in this world. Yet he had gone through the storm of the Indian war without receiving even a scratch! Why was this?

Before I had spent two days with Sidney, he had shown me all the objects of interest around the Warren and in it — the portrait gallery, with its courtiers in high ruffs, and dames in the long stomachers of one period and décolletée dresses of another; his collection of Indian antiquities, amassed at the plundering of Delhi; and those which were more interesting to me, ponderous suits of mail which had been hacked and battered in the wars of the Roses, and a torn pennon unfurled by Warren’s troop of horse, “for God and the King,” at Naseby.

But there was one object which he would neither show nor permit me to look upon, and which seemed to make him shiver or shudder whenever it caught his eye, and this was a picture of some kind in the library — a room he very rarely entered. It was the size of a life-portrait, but covered closely by a green-baize hanging. Good taste compelled me to desist from talking to him on the subject, but I resolved to gratify my curiosity on the first convenient occasion; so one day when he was absent at the stable court I drew back the hanging of this mysterious picture.

It proved to be the full-length portrait of a very beautiful girl — a proud and stately one, too — bordering on blooming womanhood. Her features were clearly cut and classic; she had an olive-coloured complexion, that seemed to tell of another land than England, yet the type of her rare beauty was purely English. Her forehead was broad and low; her dark eyes, that seemed to haunt and follow me, were deeply set, with black brows well defined; her chin was rather massive, as if indicating resolution of character, yet the soft, ripe lips were full of sweetness; while the gorgeous coils of her dark hair were crisp and wavy. Her attire was a green riding-habit, the skirt of which was gathered in her left hand, while the right grasped the bridle of her horse.

It was not a portrait of his wife, whom I remember to have been a fair-haired little woman; so who was this mysterious lady? I cannot describe the emotion this portrait excited within me; but I started and let fall the curtain, with a distinct sensation of some one, or something I could not see, being close beside me; so I hurried from the shady library into the sunshine. Lovely though the face — I can see it yet in all its details — it haunted me with an unpleasant pertinacity, impossible either to analyse or portray. But I was a creature of fancies then.

“Herein,” thought I, “lurks some mystery, which may never be cleared up to me.” But in this surmise I was wrong, for one night — the night of Sunday, the 10th May, the first anniversary of the outbreak at Meerut, after we had discussed an excellent dinner, with a bottle or two of Moselle, and betaken us to iced brandy pawnee (for so we still loved to call it), and to the “soothing weed,” on the sofas of the smoking-room, Warren became suddenly seized by one of those confidential fits which many men unaccountably have at such times, and, while he unsparingly and bitterly reproached himself for the part he had acted in it, I drew from him, little by little, the secret story of his life.

Some ten years before those days of which I write, when in the Guards, and deeply dipped in debt by extravagance, he had, unknown to his family, married secretly a beautiful girl who was penniless, at the very time his friends were seeking to retrieve his fortune by a wealthy alliance. An exchange into the Line — “the sliding scale” — became necessary, thus he was gazetted to our regiment in India, at a period when his young wife was in extremely delicate health; so much so that the idea of her voyaging round the Cape — there were no P. and O. Liners then — was not to be thought of, as it was expressly forbidden by the medical men; so they were to be separated for a time; and that time of parting, so dreaded by Constance, came inexorably.

The last fatal evening came — the last Sidney was to spend with her. His strapped overlands and bullock-trunks, his sword and cap, both cased, were already in the entrance hall; the morrow’s morning would see him off by the train for Southampton, and his place would be vacant; and she should see his fond hazel eyes no more.

“Tears again!” said he, almost impatiently, while tenderly caressing the dark and glossy hair of his girl-wife; “why on earth are you so sad, Conny, about this temporary separation?”

“Would that I could be certain it is only such!” she exclaimed. “Sad; oh, can you ask me, Sidney, darling? The presentiment of a great sorrow to come is hanging over me.”

“A presentiment, Constance! Do not indulge in this folly.”

“If I did not love you dearly, Sidney, would such a painful emotion rack my heart?”

“It is the merest superstition, darling, and you will get over it when I am fairly away.”

Her tender eyes regarded him wistfully for a moment, and then her tears fell faster at the contemplation of the coming loneliness.

After a pause, she asked:

“Are there many passengers going out with you?”

“A few — in the cuddy,” he replied carelessly.

“Do you know any of them?”

“Yes; one or two fellows on the staff.”

“And the ladies?” she asked, after another pause.

“I don’t know, Conny dear; what do they matter to me?”

“I heard incidentally that — that Miss Dashwood was going out in your vessel.”

“Indeed; I believe she will.”

Constance shivered, for with the name of this finished flirt that of her husband had been more than once linked, and his change of colour was unseen by her as he turned to manipulate a cigar. So for four, perhaps six months, these two would be together upon the sea.

Constance knew too well the irritable nature of her husband’s temper to say more on the subject of her secret thoughts; and deeply loth was she that such ideas should embitter the few brief hours they were to be together now; so a silence ensued, which, after a time, she broke, while taking between her slender fingers a hand of Sidney, who was leaning half moodily, half listlessly against the mantelpiece, twisting his moustache with a somewhat mingled expression of face.

“Sidney, darling,” said she entreatingly, “do forgive me if I am dull and sad — so triste — this evening.”

“I do forgive you, little one.”

“You know, Sidney, that I would die for you!”

“Yes; but don’t, Conny — for I hate scenes,” said he, playfully kissing her sweetly sad, upturned face; and the poor girl was forced to be contented with this matter-of-fact kind of tenderness.

So the dreaded morrow came with its sad moment of parting.

To muffle the sound of the departing wheels she buried her head, with all its wealth of dark, dishevelled hair, among the pillows of her bed, and some weeks — weeks of the most utter loneliness, elapsed, ere she left it, with the keen and ardent desire to recover health and strength, to the end that she might follow her husband over the world of waters and rejoin him; but the strength and health, so necessary for the journey, were long of coming back to her.

She had hoped he would write her before sailing from Southampton — a single line would have satisfied the hungry cravings of her heart; but, as he did not do so, she supposed there was not time; yet the transport lay three days in the docks after the troops were on board. He would write by some passing ship, he had said, and one letter, dated from Ascension, reached her; but its cold and careless tone struck a mortal chill to the sensitive heart of Constance, and one or two terms of endearment it contained were manifestly forced and ill-expressed.

“He writes me thus,” she muttered, with her hand pressed upon her heaving bosom; “thus — and with that woman, perhaps, by his side!”

She consulted the map, and saw how far, far away on the lonely ocean was that island speck. Months had elapsed since he had been there; so she knew that he must be in India now, and she had the regular mails to look to with confidence — a confidence, alas! that soon faded away. Long, tender, and passionate was the letter she wrote in reply; she fondly fixed the time when she proposed to leave England and rejoin him, if he sent her the necessary remittances; but mail after mail came in without any tidings from Sidney, and she felt all the unspeakable misery of watching the postman for letters that never, never came!

Yet she never ceased to write, entreating him for answers and assuring him of unswerving affection.

Slowly, heavily, and imperceptibly a year passed away — a whole year — to her now a black eternity of time!

“Could Sidney be dead?” she asked herself with terror; but she knew that his family (who were all unaware of her existence) had never been in mourning, as they must infallibly have been in the event of such a calamity; and in her simplicity she never thought of applying to the Horse Guards for information concerning him — more information than she might quite have cared to learn.

Her old thoughts concerning Miss Dashwood took a strange hold of her imagination now; a hundred “trifles light as air” came back most gallingly to memory and took coherent and tangible shapes; but a stray number of the “Indian Mail” informed her of the marriage of Miss Dashwood — her bête-noire — to a Major Milton; and also that the regiment to which Sidney belonged “was moving up country,” a phrase to her perplexing and vague.

Her funds were gone — her friends were few and poor. Her jewels — his treasured presents — were first turned into cash; then the furniture of her pretty villa, and next the villa itself with its sweet rose-garden, had to be exchanged for humbler apartments in a meaner street; and, ere long, Constance Warren found, that if she was to live, it must be by her own unaided efforts; and for five years she maintained a desperate struggle for existence — five years!

A lady going to India “wanted a young person as a governess and companion.”

To India — to India! On her knees Constance prayed that her application might prove successful; and her prayer was heard, for out of some hundred letters — from a few which were selected — the tenor of hers suited best the taste of the lady in question. She said nothing of her marriage or of her apparent desertion; but as her wedding ring, which, with a fond superstition of the heart, she never drew from her finger, told a tale, she had to pass for a widow.

So in the fullness of time she found herself far away from England, and duly installed with an Anglo-Indian family in one of the stately villas of the European quarter of Calcutta — a veritable palace in the city of palaces, overlooking the esplanade before Fort William — in charge of one sickly, but gentle little pale-faced girl.

She had been a month there when her employer’s family proposed to visit some relatives at Meerut, where she heard that Sidney’s regiment was cantoned! To her it seemed as if the hand of Fate was in all this. Oh the joy of such tidings! Some one there must be able to unravel the horrible mystery involving his fate; for by this time she had ascertained that his name was out of the corps; but her heart suggested that he might have exchanged into another.

“If alive, is he worth caring for?” She often asked this of herself, but thrust aside the idea, and pursued with joy the long journey up country by river steamers, dawk-boats, and otherwise, on the Ganges to Jehangeerabad, from whence they were to travel by carriages to the place of their destination, some fifty miles distant.

On the way Constance had an addition to her charge in the person of a little boy, who, with his ayah, was going to join his parents at Meerut. This little boy was more than usually beautiful, with round and dimpled cheeks, dark hazel eyes, curly golden hair, and a sweet and winning smile. Something in the child’s face or its expression attracted deeply the attention of Constance, and seemed to stir some memory in her heart. Where had she seen those eyes before?

She drew the boy caressingly towards her, and when kissing his fair and open forehead, her eyes fell involuntarily on a ring that secured his necktie, a mere blue riband. It was of gold, and on it were graven the initials C. and S. with a lover’s knot between. These were those of herself and her husband, and the ring was one she had seen him wear daily. Constance trembled in every limb; she felt a deadly paleness overspread her face, and the room in which she sat swam round her; but on recovering her self-possession, she said:

“Child, let me look at this ring.”

The wondering boy placed in her hand the trinket, which she had not the slightest doubt of having seen years before in London.

“Who gave you this, my child?” she asked.

“My papa.”

“Your papa! — what is your name?”

“Sidney.”

“What else?” she asked impetuously.

“Sidney Warren Milton.”

“Thank God! But how came you to be named so? There is some mystery in this — a mystery that must soon be solved now. Where were you born, dear little Sidney?”

“In Calcutta.”

“What is your age, child?”

“Next year, I shall be seven years old.”

“Seven — how strange it is that you have the name you bear!”

“It is my papa’s,” said the boy, with a little proud irritability of manner.

“Where did your papa live before he came to Calcutta?”

“I don’t know — in many places — soldiers always do.”

“He is a soldier?”

“My papa is Major Milton, and lives in the cantonments at Meerut.”

“A little time, and I shall know all,” replied poor Constance, caressing the boy with great tenderness.

On arriving at Meerut, however, she found herself ill — faint and feverish, so that for days she was confined to her bed, where she lay wakeful by night, watching the red fireflies flashing about the green jalousies, and full of strange, wild dreams by day. She had but one keen and burning desire — to see Major Milton, and to learn from his lips the fate of her husband. On the evening of the fifth day — the evening of the 10th of May — she was lying on her pillow, watching the red sunshine fading on the ruined mosques, and Abu’s stately tomb, when just as the sunset gun pealed over the cantonments, the ayah brought her a card, inscribed, “Major Milton — Staff Corps.”

“Desire the Major to come to me!” said Constance in a broken voice, and terribly convulsed by emotion; for now she was on the eve of knowing all.

“Here to the mehm sahib’s bedside?” asked the astonished ayah.

“Here instantly — go — go!”

Endued with new strength, as the woman withdrew, she sprang from her bed, put on her slippers, threw round her an ample cashmere dressing robe, and seated herself in a bamboo chair, trembling in every fibre. In a mirror opposite she could see that her face was as white as snow. The door was opened.

“Major Milton,” said a voice that made her tremble, and attired in undress uniform, pith-helmet in hand, her husband, looking scarcely a day older, stood gazing at her in utter bewilderment. He gave one convulsive start, and then stood rooted to the spot; but no expression or glance of tenderness escaped him. His whole aspect bore the impress of terror.

Years had elapsed as a dream, and they were again face to face, those two, whom no man might put asunder. Softness, sorrow, and reproach faded from the face of Constance. Her broad, low forehead became stern; her deep-set, dark eyes sparkled perilously, her full lips became set, and her chin seemed to express more than ever, resolution.

“Oh, Constance — Constance,” he faltered, “I know not what to say!”

“It may well be so, Sidney” (and at the utterance of his name her lips quivered). “So you are Major Milton, and the supposed husband of Miss Dashwood?”

There was a long pause, after which she said:

“I ask not the cause of your most cruel desertion; but whence this name of Milton?”

“A property was left me — and — but of course, you have long since ceased to love me, Constance?”

“You actually dare to take an upbraiding tone to me!” she exclaimed, her dark eyes flashing fire. Then looking upward appealingly, she wailed, “Oh, my God! my God! and this is the man for whom, during these bitter years, I have been eating my own heart!”

“Pardon me, Constance; you may now learn that there is no gauge to measure the treachery of which the human heart in its weakness is capable. Yet there has been a worm in mine that has never died.”

She wrung her hands, and then said, with something of her old softness of manner:

“You surely loved me once, Sidney?”

“I did.” He drew nearer, but she recoiled from him.

“Then whence this cruel change?”

“Does not some one write, that we love, and think we love truly, and yet find another to whom one will cling as if it required these two hearts to make a perfect whole?”

“Most accursed sophistry! But if you have no pity, have you not fear?”

“I have great fear,” said he in a broken voice; “thus, Constance, by the love you once bore me, I beseech you to have pity, not on me, but on my little boy, and his poor mother — preserve their happiness—”

“And sacrifice my own?” said she in a hollow voice.

“Spare, and do not expose me — my commission — my position here—”

“Neither shall be lost through me,” she replied, in a voice that grew more and more weak; “but leave me — leave me — the air is suffocating — the light has left my eyes. Farewell, Sidney — kiss your child, for my sake.”

He drew near to take her hand, but she repulsed him with a wild gesture of despair, and throwing up her arms, fell back in her seat, with a gurgle in her throat, her head on one side and her jaw fallen.

“Dead — quite dead!” was his first exclamation, and with his terror was blended a certain selfish emotion of satisfaction and relief at his escape. The blood again flowed freely in his veins, and he was roused by the cantonment ghurries clanging the hour of nine.

“Help — help!” cried he; but no help came, and as he hurried away, the sudden din of musket-shots, of shrieks and yells, announced that the great revolt had begun at Meerut, and that the expected massacre of the Europeans had commenced. In that butchery, those he loved most on earth perished, and midnight saw him, wifeless and childless, lurking in misery and alone in a mango tope, on the road to Kurnaul.

•   •   •   •   •   •

While listening to the narrative of my friend Sidney, whom I had always known as Warren, rather than Milton, the clock on the mantelpiece struck nine, and he said in a broken voice:

“It was at this very hour, twelve months ago, that my boy and his mother were murdered by the 3rd Cavalry, at the moment that Constance was dying!”

As he spoke, a strange white light suddenly filled one end of the smoking-room, and amid it there came gradually, but distinctly to view, two figures, one was a little boy with golden hair, the other a woman whose left arm was around him — a beautiful woman, with clearly-cut features, masses of dark hair curling over a low, broad forehead, lips full and handsome, with a massive chin and classic throat — the woman of the veiled picture, line for line, but to all appearance living and breathing, with a beautiful smile in her eyes, and wearing, not the riding-habit, but a floating crape-like white garment, impossible to describe. There was a strange weird brightness in her face — the transfigured brightness of great joy and greater love.

“Constance — Constance and my child!” cried Sidney, in a voice that rose to a shriek; and like a dissolving view, the light, and all we looked on with eyes transfixed, faded away!

I was aware of an excess of sensitiveness, and that my heart was beating with painful rapidity. I did not become insensible, but some time elapsed before I became aware that lights were in the room, and that several servants, whom my friend’s cry had summoned in haste and alarm, were endeavouring to rouse him to consciousness from a fit that had seized him; but from that fit he never recovered. His heavy stertorous breathing gradually grew less and less, and ere a doctor came, he had ceased to respire.

His death — sudden as hers on that eventful night, but a retributive one — was declared to be apoplexy; but I knew otherwise. Since then, though the effect of the grape-shot wound on my nervous system has quite passed away, I feel myself compelled to agree with the hackneyed remark of Hamlet, that “there are more things in heaven and earth, than are dreamt of in our philosophy.”

“London Society Christmas Number”, 1874

THE HAUNTED DRAGOON

Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

1892

Beside the Plymouth road, as it plunges downhill past Ruan Lanihale church towards Ruan Cove, and ten paces beyond the lych-gate — where the graves lie level with the coping, and the horseman can decipher their inscriptions in passing, at the risk of a twisted neck — the base of the churchyard wall is pierced with a low archway, festooned with toad-flax and fringed with the hart’s-tongue fern. Within the archway bubbles a well, the water of which was once used for all baptisms in the parish, for no child sprinkled with it could ever be hanged with hemp. But this belief is discredited now, and the well neglected: and the events which led to this are still a winter’s tale in the neighbourhood. I set them down as they were told me, across the blue glow of a wreck-wood fire, by Sam Tregear, the parish bedman. Sam himself had borne an inconspicuous share in them; and because of them Sam’s father had carried a white face to his grave.

My father and mother (said Sam) married late in life, for his trade was what mine is, and ’twasn’t till her fortieth year that my mother could bring herself to kiss a gravedigger. That accounts, maybe, for my being born rickety and with other drawbacks that only made father the fonder. Weather permitting, he’d carry me off to churchyard, set me upon a flat stone, with his coat folded under, and talk to me while he delved. I can mind, now, the way he’d settle lower and lower, till his head played hidey-peep with me over the grave’s edge, and at last he’d be clean swallowed up, but still discoursing or calling up how he’d come upon wonderful towns and kingdoms down underground, and how all the kings and queens there, in dyed garments, was offering him meat for his dinner every day of the week if he’d only stop and hobbynob with them — and all such gammut. He prettily doted on me — the poor old ancient!

But there came a day — a dry afternoon in the late wheat harvest — when we were up in the churchyard together, and though father had his tools beside him, not a tint did he work, but kept travishing back and forth, one time shading his eyes and gazing out to sea, and then looking far along the Plymouth road for minutes at a time. Out by Bradden Point there stood a little dandy-rigged craft, tacking lazily to and fro, with her mains’le all shiny-yellow in the sunset. Though I didn’t know it then, she was the Preventive boat, and her business was to watch the Hauen: for there had been a brush between her and the Unity lugger, a fortnight back, and a Preventive man shot through the breast-bone, and my mother’s brother Philip was hiding down in the town. I minded, later, how that the men across the vale, in Farmer Tresidder’s wheat-field, paused every now and then, as they pitched the sheaves, to give a look up towards the churchyard, and the gleaners moved about in small knots, causeying and glancing over their shoulders at the cutter out in the bay; and how, when all the field was carried, they waited round the last load, no man offering to cry the Neck, as the fashion was, but lingering till sun was near down behind the slope and the long shadows stretching across the stubble.

“Shan’t thee go underground today, father?” says I, at last.

He turned slowly round, and says he, “No, sonny. ‘Reckon us’ll climb skywards for a change.”

And with that, he took my hand, and pushing abroad the belfry door began to climb the stairway. Up and up, round and round we went, in a sort of blind-man’s-holiday full of little glints of light and whiff’s of wind where the open windows came; and at last stepped out upon the leads of the tower and drew breath.

“There’s two-an’-twenty parishes to be witnessed from where we’re standin’, sonny — if ye’ve got eyes,” says my father.

Well, first I looked down towards the harvesters and laughed to see them so small: and then I fell to counting the church-towers dotted across the highlands, and seeing if I could make out two-and-twenty. ’Twas the prettiest sight — all the country round looking as if ’twas dusted with gold, and the Plymouth road winding away over the hills like a long white tape. I had counted thirteen churches, when my father pointed his hand out along this road and called to me—

“Look’ee out yonder, honey, an’ say what ye see!”

“I see dust,” says I.

“Nothin’ else? Sonny boy, use your eyes, for mine be dim.”

“I see dust,” says I again, “an’ suthin’ twinklin’ in it, like a tin can—”

“Dragooners!” shouts my father; and then, running to the side of the tower facing the harvest-field, he put both hands to his mouth and called:

“What have ’ee? What have ’ee?” — very loud and long.

“A neck — a neck!” came back from the field, like as if all shouted at once — dear, the sweet sound! And then a gun was fired, and craning forward over the coping I saw a dozen men running across the stubble and out into the road towards the Hauen; and they called as they ran, “A neck — a neck!”

“Iss,” says my father, “’tis a neck, sure ’nuff. Pray God they save en! Come, sonny—”

But we dallied up there till the horsemen were plain to see, and their scarlet coats and armour blazing in the dust as they came. And when they drew near within a mile, and our limbs ached with crouching — for fear they should spy us against the sky — father took me by the hand and pulled hot foot down the stairs. Before they rode by he had picked up his shovel and was shovelling out a grave for his life.

Forty valiant horsemen they were, riding two-and-two (by reason of the narrowness of the road) and a captain beside them — men broad and long, with hairy top-lips, and all clad in scarlet jackets and white breeches that showed bravely against their black war-horses and jet-black holsters, thick as they were wi’ dust. Each man had a golden helmet, and a scabbard flapping by his side, and a piece of metal like a half-moon jingling from his horse’s cheek-strap. 12 D was the numbering on every saddle, meaning the Twelfth Dragoons.

Tramp, tramp! they rode by, talking and joking, and taking no more heed of me — that sat upon the wall with my heels dangling above them — than if I’d been a sprig of stonecrop. But the captain, who carried a drawn sword and mopped his face with a handkerchief so that the dust ran across it in streaks, drew rein, and looked over my shoulder to where father was digging.

“Sergeant!” he calls back, turning with a hand upon his crupper; “didn’t we see a figger like this a-top o’ the tower, some way back?”

The sergeant pricked his horse forward and saluted. He was the tallest, straightest man in the troop, and the muscles on his arm filled out his sleeve with the three stripes upon it — a handsome red-faced fellow, with curly black hair.

Says he, “That we did, sir — a man with sloping shoulders and a boy with a goose neck.” Saying this, he looked up at me with a grin.

“I’ll bear it in mind,” answered the officer, and the troop rode on in a cloud of dust, the sergeant looking back and smiling, as if ’twas a joke that he shared with us. Well, to be short, they rode down into the town as night fell. But ’twas too late, Uncle Philip having had fair warning and plenty of time to flee up towards the little secret hold under Mabel Down, where none but two families knew how to find him. All the town, though, knew he was safe, and lashins of women and children turned out to see the comely soldiers hunt in vain till ten o’clock at night.

The next thing was to billet the warriors. The captain of the troop, by this, was pesky cross-tempered, and flounced off to the “Jolly Pilchards” in a huff. “Sergeant,” says he, “here’s an inn, though a damned bad ’un, an’ here I means to stop. Somewheres about there’s a farm called Constantine, where I’m told the men can be accommodated. Find out the place, if you can, an’ do your best: an’ don’t let me see yer face till tomorra,” says he.

So Sergeant Basket — that was his name — gave the salute, and rode his troop up the street, where — for his manners were mighty winning, notwithstanding the dirty nature of his errand — he soon found plenty to direct him to Farmer Noy’s, of Constantine; and up the coombe they rode into the darkness, a dozen or more going along with them to show the way, being won by their martial bearing as well as the sergeant’s very friendly way of speech.

Farmer Noy was in bed — a pock-marked, lantern-jawed old gaffer of sixty-five; and the most remarkable point about him was the wife he had married two years before — a young slip of a girl but just husband-high. Money did it, I reckon; but if so, ’twas a bad bargain for her. He was noted for stinginess to such a degree that they said his wife wore a brass wedding-ring, weekdays, to save the genuine article from wearing out. She was a Ruan woman, too, and therefore ought to have known all about him. But woman’s ways be past finding out.

Hearing the hoofs in his yard and the sergeant’s stram-a-ram upon the door, down comes the old curmudgeon with a candle held high above his head.

“What the devil’s here?” he calls out. Sergeant Basket looks over the old man’s shoulder; and there, halfway up the stairs, stood Madam Noy in her night rail — a high-coloured ripe girl, languishing for love, her red lips parted and neck all lily-white against a loosened pile of dark-brown hair.

“Be cussed if I turn back!” said the sergeant to himself; and added out loud—

“Forty souldjers, in the King’s name!”

“Forty devils!” says old Noy.

“They’re devils to eat,” answered the sergeant, in the most friendly manner; “an’, begad, ye must feed an’ bed ’em this night — or else I’ll search your cellars. Ye are a loyal man — eh, farmer? An’ your cellars are big, I’m told.”

“Sarah,” calls out the old man, following the sergeant’s bold glance, “go back an’ dress yersel’ dacently this instant! These here honest souldjers — forty damned honest gormandisin’ souldjers — be come in his Majesty’s name, forty strong, to protect honest folks’ rights in the intervals of eatin’ ’em out o’ house an’ home. Sergeant, ye be very welcome i’ the King’s name. Cheese an’ cider ye shall have, an’ I pray the mixture may turn your forty stomachs.”

In a dozen minutes he had fetched out his stable-boys and farm-hands, and, lantern in hand, was helping the sergeant to picket the horses and stow the men about on clean straw in the outhouses. They were turning back to the house, and the old man was turning over in his mind that the sergeant hadn’t yet said a word about where he was to sleep, when by the door they found Madam Noy waiting, in her wedding gown, and with her hair freshly braided.

Now, the farmer was mortally afraid of the sergeant, knowing he had thirty ankers and more of contraband liquor in his cellars, and minding the sergeant’s threat. None the less his jealousy got the upper hand.

“Woman,” he cries out, “to thy bed!”

“I was waiting,” said she, “to say the Cap’n’s bed—”

“Sergeant’s,” says the dragoon, correcting her.

“ — Was laid i’ the spare room.”

“Madam,” replies Sergeant Basket, looking into her eyes and bowing, “a soldier with my responsibility sleeps but little. In the first place, I must see that my men sup.”

“The maids be now cuttin’ the bread an’ cheese and drawin’ the cider.”

“Then, Madam, leave me but possession of the parlour, and let me have a chair to sleep in.”

By this they were in the passage together, and her gaze devouring his regimentals. The old man stood a pace off, looking sourly. The sergeant fed his eyes upon her, and Satan got hold of him.

“Now if only,” said he, “one of you could play cards!”

“But I must go to bed,” she answered; “though I can play cribbage, if only you stay another night.”

For she saw the glint in the farmer’s eye; and so Sergeant Basket slept bolt upright that night in an armchair by the parlour fender. Next day the dragooners searched the town again, and were billeted all about among the cottages. But the sergeant returned to Constantine, and before going to bed — this time in the spare room — played a game of cribbage with Madam Noy, the farmer smoking sulkily in his armchair.

“Two for his heels!” said the rosy woman suddenly, halfway through the game. “Sergeant, you’re cheatin’ yoursel’ an’ forgettin’ to mark. Gi’e me the board; I’ll mark for both.”

She put out her hand upon the board, and Sergeant Basket’s closed upon it. ’Tis true he had forgot to mark; and feeling the hot pulse in her wrist, and beholding the hunger in her eyes, ’tis to be supposed he’d have forgot his own soul.

He rode away next day with his troop: but my uncle Philip not being caught yet, and the Government set on making an example of him, we hadn’t seen the last of these dragoons. ’Twas a time of fear down in the town. At dead of night or at noonday they came on us — six times in all: and for two months the crew of the Unity couldn’t call their souls their own, but lived from day to day in secret closets and wandered the country by night, hiding in hedges and straw-houses. All that time the revenue men watched the Hauen, night and day, like dogs before a rat-hole.

But one November morning ’twas whispered abroad that Uncle Philip had made his way to Falmouth, and slipped across to Guernsey. Time passed on, and the dragooners were seen no more, nor the handsome devil-may-care face of Sergeant Basket. Up at Constantine, where he had always contrived to billet himself, ’tis to be thought pretty Madam Noy pined to see him again, kicking his spurs in the porch and smiling out of his gay brown eyes; for her face fell away from its plump condition, and the hunger in her eyes grew and grew. But a more remarkable fact was that her old husband — who wouldn’t have yearned after the dragoon, ye’d have thought — began to dwindle and fall away too. By the New Year he was a dying man, and carried his doom on his face. And on New Year’s Day he straddled his mare for the last time, and rode over to Looe, to Doctor Gale’s.

“Goody-losh!” cried the doctor, taken aback by his appearance — “What’s come to ye, Noy?”

“Death!” says Noy. “Doctor, I hain’t come for advice, for before this day week I’ll be a clay-cold corpse. I come to ax a favour. When they summon ye, before lookin’ at my body — that’ll be past help — go you to the little left-top corner drawer o’ my wife’s bureau, an’ there ye’ll find a packet. You’re my executor,” says he, “and I leaves ye to deal wi’ that packet as ye thinks fit.”

With that, the farmer rode away home-along, and the very day week he went dead.

The doctor, when called over, minded what the old chap had said, and sending Madam Noy on some pretence to the kitchen, went over and unlocked the little drawer with a duplicate key, that the farmer had unhitched from his watch-chain and given him. There was no parcel of letters, as he looked to find, but only a small packet crumpled away in the corner. He pulled it out and gave a look, and a sniff, and another look: then shut the drawer, locked it, strode straight downstairs to his horse and galloped away.

In three hours’ time, pretty Madam Noy was in the constables’ hands upon the charge of murdering her husband by poison.

They tried her, next Spring Assize, at Bodmin, before the Lord Chief Justice. There wasn’t evidence enough to put Sergeant Basket in the dock alongside of her — though ’twas freely guessed he knew more than anyone (saving the prisoner herself) about the arsenic that was found in the little drawer and inside the old man’s body. He was subpoena’d from Plymouth, and cross-examined by a great hulking King’s Counsel for three-quarters of an hour. But they got nothing out of him. All through the examination the prisoner looked at him and nodded her white face, every now and then, at his answers, as much as to say, “That’s right — that’s right: they shan’t harm thee, my dear.” And the love-light shone in her eyes for all the court to see. But the sergeant never let his look meet it. When he stepped down at last she gave a sob of joy, and fainted bang-off.

They roused her up, after this, to hear the verdict of Guilty and her doom spoken by the judge. “Pris’ner at the bar,” said the Clerk of Arraigns, “have ye anything to say why this court should not pass sentence o’ death?”

She held tight of the rail before her, and spoke out loud and clear—

“My Lord and gentlemen all, I be a guilty woman; an’ I be ready to die at once for my sin. But if ye kill me now, ye kill the child in my body — an’ he is innocent.”

Well, ’twas found she spoke truth; and the hanging was put off till after the time of her delivery. She was led back to prison, and there, about the end of June, her child was born, and died before he was six hours old. But the mother recovered, and quietly abode the time of her hanging.

I can mind her execution very well; for father and mother had determined it would be an excellent thing for my rickets to take me into Bodmin that day, and get a touch of the dead woman’s hand, which in those times was considered an unfailing remedy. So we borrowed the parson’s manure-cart, and cleaned it thoroughly, and drove in together.

The place of the hangings, then, was a little door in the prison-wall, looking over the bank where the railway now goes, and a dismal piece of water called Jail-pool, where the townsfolk drowned most of the dogs and cats they’d no further use for. All the bank under the gallows was that thick with people you could almost walk upon their heads; and my ribs were squeezed by the crowd so that I couldn’t breathe freely for a month after. Back across the pool, the fields along the side of the valley were lined with booths and sweet-stalls and standings — a perfect Whitsun-fair; and a din going up that cracked your ears.

But there was the stillness of death when the woman came forth, with the sheriff and the chaplain reading in his book, and the unnamed man behind — all from the little door. She wore a strait black gown, and a white kerchief about her neck — a lovely woman, young and white and tearless.

She ran her eye over the crowd and stepped forward a pace, as if to speak; but lifted a finger and beckoned instead: and out of the people a man fought his way to the foot of the scaffold. ’Twas the dashing sergeant, that was here upon sick-leave. Sick he was, I believe. His face above his shining regimentals was grey as a slate; for he had committed perjury to save his skin, and on the face of the perjured no sun will ever shine.

“Have you got it?” the doomed woman said, many hearing the words.

He tried to reach, but the scaffold was too high, so he tossed up what was in his hand, and the woman caught it — a little screw of tissue-paper.

“I must see that, please!” said the sheriff, laying a hand upon her arm.

“’Tis but a weddin’-ring, sir” — and she slipped it over her finger. Then she kissed it once, under the beam, and, lookin’ into the dragoon’s eyes, spoke very slow—

“Husband, our child shall go wi’ you; an’ when I want you he shall fetch you.”

— and with that turned to the sheriff, saying:

“I be ready, sir.”

The sheriff wouldn’t give father and mother leave for me to touch the dead woman’s hand; so they drove back that evening grumbling a good bit. ’Tis a sixteen-mile drive, and the ostler in at Bodmin had swindled the poor old horse out of his feed, I believe; for he crawled like a slug. But they were so taken up with discussing the day’s doings, and what a mort of people had been present, and how the sheriff might have used milder language in refusing my father, that they forgot to use the whip. The moon was up before we got halfway home, and a star to be seen here and there; and still we never mended our pace.

’Twas in the middle of the lane leading down to Hendra Bottom, where for more than a mile two carts can’t pass each other, that my father pricks up his ears and looks back.

“Hullo!” says he; “there’s somebody gallopin’ behind us.”

Far back in the night we heard the noise of a horse’s hoofs, pounding furiously on the road and drawing nearer and nearer.

“Save us!” cries father; “whoever ’tis, he’s comin’ down th’ lane!” And in a minute’s time the clatter was close on us and someone shouting behind.

“Hurry that crawlin’ worm o’ yourn — or draw aside in God’s name, an’ let me by!” the rider yelled.

“What’s up?” asked my father, quartering as well as he could. “Why! Hullo! Farmer Hugo, be that you?”

“There’s a mad devil o’ a man behind, ridin’ down all he comes across. A’s blazin’ drunk, I reckon — but ’tisn’ that — ’tis the horrible voice that goes wi’ en-Hark! Lord protect us, he’s turn’d into the lane!”

Sure enough, the clatter of a second horse was coming down upon us, out of the night — and with it the most ghastly sounds that ever creamed a man’s flesh. Farmer Hugo pushed past us and sent a shower of mud in our faces as his horse leapt off again, and ’way-to-go down the hill. My father stood up and lashed our old grey with the reins, and down we went too, bumpity-bump for our lives, the poor beast being taken suddenly like one possessed. For the screaming behind was like nothing on earth but the wailing and sobbing of a little child — only tenfold louder. ’Twas just as you’d fancy a baby might wail if his little limbs was being twisted to death.

At the hill’s foot, as you know, a stream crosses the lane — that widens out there a bit, and narrows again as it goes up t’other side of the valley. Knowing we must be overtaken further on — for the screams and clatter seemed at our very backs by this — father jumped out here into the stream and backed the cart well to one side; and not a second too soon.

The next moment, like a wind, this thing went by us in the moonlight — a man upon a black horse that splashed the stream all over us as he dashed through it and up the hill. ’Twas the scarlet dragoon with his ashen face; and behind him, holding to his cross-belt, rode a little shape that tugged and wailed and raved. As I stand here, sir, ’twas the shape of a naked babe!

Well, I won’t go on to tell how my father dropped upon his knees in the water, or how my mother fainted off. The thing was gone, and from that moment for eight years nothing was seen or heard of Sergeant Basket. The fright killed my mother. Before next spring she fell into a decline, and early next fall the old man — for he was an old man now — had to delve her grave. After this he went feebly about his work, but held on, being wishful for me to step into his shoon, which I began to do as soon as I was fourteen, having outgrown the rickets by that time.

But one cool evening in September month, father was up digging in the yard alone: for ’twas a small child’s grave, and in the loosest soil, and I was off on a day’s work, thatching Farmer Tresidder’s stacks. He was digging away slowly when he heard a rattle at the lych-gate, and looking over the edge of the grave, saw in the dusk a man hitching his horse there by the bridle.

’Twas a coal-black horse, and the man wore a scarlet coat all powdered with pilm; and as he opened the gate and came over the graves, father saw that ’twas the dashing dragoon. His face was still a slaty-grey, and clammy with sweat; and when he spoke, his voice was all of a whisper, with a shiver therein.

“Bedman,” says he, “go to the hedge and look down the road, and tell me what you see.”

My father went, with his knees shaking, and came back again.

“I see a woman,” says he, “not fifty yards down the road. She is dressed in black, an’ has a veil over her face; an’ she’s comin’ this way.”

“Bedman,” answers the dragoon, “go to the gate an’ look back along the Plymouth road, an’ tell me what you see.”

“I see,” says my father, coming back with his teeth chattering, “I see, twenty yards back, a naked child comin’. He looks to be callin’, but he makes no sound.”

“Because his voice is wearied out,” says the dragoon. And with that he faced about, and walked to the gate slowly.

“Bedman, come wi’ me an’ see the rest,” he says, over his shoulder.

He opened the gate, unhitched the bridle and swung himself heavily up in the saddle.

Now from the gate the bank goes down pretty steep into the road, and at the foot of the bank my father saw two figures waiting. ’Twas the woman and the child, hand in hand; and their eyes burned up like coals: and the woman’s veil was lifted, and her throat bare.

As the horse went down the bank towards these two, they reached out and took each a stirrup and climbed upon his back, the child before the dragoon and the woman behind. The man’s face was set like a stone. Not a word did either speak, and in this fashion they rode down the hill towards Ruan sands. All that my father could mind, beyond, was that the woman’s hands were passed round the man’s neck, where the rope had passed round her own.

No more could he tell, being a stricken man from that hour. But Aunt Polgrain, the housekeeper up to Constantine, saw them, an hour later, go along the road below the town-place; and Jacobs, the smith, saw them pass his forge towards Bodmin about midnight. So the tale’s true enough. But since that night no man has set eyes on horse or riders.

“The Illustrated London News”, Christmas 1891

UNCLE ABRAHAM’S ROMANCE

Edith Nesbit

1893

“No, my dear,” my Uncle Abraham answered me, “no — nothing romantic ever happened to me — unless — but no: that wasn’t romantic either—”

It was. To me, I being eighteen, romance was the world. My Uncle Abraham was old and lame. I followed the gaze of his faded eyes, and my own rested on a miniature that hung at his elbow-chair’s right hand, a portrait of a woman, whose loveliness even the miniature-painter’s art had been powerless to disguise — a woman with large lustrous eyes and perfect oval face.

I rose to look at it. I had looked at it a hundred times. Often enough in my baby days I had asked, “Who’s that, uncle?” always receiving the same answer: “A lady who died long ago, my dear.”

As I looked again at the picture, I asked, “Was she like this?”

“Who?”

“Your — your romance!”

Uncle Abraham looked hard at me. “Yes,” he said at last. “Very — very like.”

I sat down on the floor by him. “Won’t you tell me about her?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” he said. “I think it was fancy, mostly, and folly; but it’s the realest thing in my long life, my dear.”

A long pause. I kept silence. “Hurry no man’s cattle” is a good motto, especially with old people.

•   •   •

I remember, he said in the dreamy tone always promising so well to the ear that a story delighteth — I remember, when I was a young man, I was very lonely indeed. I never had a sweetheart. I was always lame, my dear, from quite a boy; and the girls used to laugh at me.

He sighed. Presently he went on—

And so I got into the way of mooning off by myself in lonely places, and one of my favourite walks was up through our churchyard, which was set high on a hill in the middle of the marsh country. I liked that because I never met anyone there. It’s all over, years ago. I was a silly lad; but I couldn’t bear of a summer evening to hear a rustle and a whisper from the other side of the hedge, or maybe a kiss as I went by.

Well, I used to go and sit all by myself in the churchyard, which was always sweet with thyme, and quite light (on account of its being so high) long after the marshes were dark. I used to watch the bats flitting about in the red light, and wonder why God didn’t make everyone’s legs straight and strong, and wicked follies like that. But by the time the light was gone I had always worked it off, so to speak, and could go home quietly and say my prayers without any bitterness.

Well, one hot night in August, when I had watched the sunset fade and the crescent moon grow golden, I was just stepping over the low stone wall of the churchyard when I heard a rustle behind me. I turned round, expecting it to be a rabbit or a bird. It was a woman.

•   •   •

He looked at the portrait. So did I.

Yes, he said, that was her very face. I was a bit scared and said something — I don’t know what — and she laughed and said, “Did I think she was a ghost?” and I answered back, and I stayed talking to her over the churchyard wall till ’twas quite dark, and the glowworms were out in the wet grass all along the way home.

Next night I saw her again; and the next night and the next. Always at twilight time; and if I passed any lovers leaning on the stiles in the marshes it was nothing to me now.

•   •   •

Again my uncle paused. “It’s very long ago,” he said slowly, “and I’m an old man; but I know what youth means, and happiness, though I was always lame, and the girls used to laugh at me. I don’t know how long it went on — you don’t measure time in dreams — but at last your grandfather said I looked as if I had one foot in the grave, and he would be sending me to stay with our kin at Bath and take the waters. I had to go. I could not tell my father why I would rather had died than go.”

“What was her name, uncle?” I asked.

•   •   •

She never would tell me her name, and why should she? I had names enough in my heart to call her by. Marriage? My dear, even then I knew marriage was not for me. But I met her night after night, always in our churchyard where the yew-trees were and the lichened gravestones. It was there we always met and always parted. The last time was the night before I went away. She was very sad, and dearer than life itself. And she said—

“If you come back before the new moon I shall meet you here just as usual. But if the new moon shines on this grave and you are not here — you will never see me again any more.”

She laid her hand on the yellow-lichened tomb against which we had been leaning. It was an old weather-worn stone, and bore on it the inscription—

Susannah Kingsnorth,
Ob. 1713.

“I shall be here.” I said.

“I mean it,” she said, with deep and sudden seriousness, “it is no fancy. You will be here when the new moon shines?”

I promised, and after a while we parted.

I had been with my kinsfolk at Bath nearly a month. I was to go home on the next day, when, turning over a case in the parlour, I came upon that miniature. I could not speak for a minute. At last I said, with dry tongue, and heart beating to the tune of heaven and hell—

“Who is this?”

“That?” said my aunt. “Oh! she was betrothed to one of our family many years ago, but she died before the wedding. They say she was a bit of a witch. A handsome one, wasn’t she?”

I looked again at the face, the lips, the eyes of my dear and lovely love, whom I was to meet tomorrow night when the new moon shone on that tomb in our churchyard.

“Did you say she was dead?” I asked, and I hardly knew my own voice.

“Years and years ago! Her name’s on the back and her date—”

I took the portrait from its faded red-velvet bed, and read on the back — “Susannah Kingsnorth, Ob. 1713.”

That was in 1813.

•   •   •  •  •  •

My uncle stopped short.

“What happened?” I asked breathlessly.

“I believe I had a fit,” my uncle answered slowly; “at any rate, I was very ill.”

“And you missed the new moon on the grave?”

“I missed the new moon on the grave.”

“And you never saw her again?”

“I never saw her again—”

“But, uncle, do you really believe — ? Can the dead — ? was she — did you—”

My uncle took out his pipe and filled it.

“It’s a long time ago,” he said, “a many, many years. Old man’s tales, my dear! Old man’s tales! Don’t you take any notice of them.”

He lighted the pipe, puffed silently a moment or two, and then added: “But I know what youth means, and happiness, though I was lame, and the girls used to laugh at me.”

Grim Tales (1893).

THE GRAY CAT

Barry Pain

1901

I heard this story from Archdeacon M———. I should imagine that it would not be very difficult, by trimming it a little and altering the facts here and there, to make it capable of some simple explanation; but I have preferred to tell it as it was told to me.

After all, there is some explanation possible, even if there is not one definite and simple explanation clearly indicated. It must rest with the reader whether he will prefer to believe that some of the so-called uncivilized races may possess occult powers transcending anything of which the so-called civilized are capable, or whether he will consider that a series of coincidences is sufficient to account for the extraordinary incidents which, in a plain brief way, I am about to relate. It does not seem to me essential to state which view I hold myself, or if I hold neither, and have reasons for not stating a third possible explanation.

I must add a word or two with regard to Archdeacon M———. At the time of this story he was in his fiftieth year. He was a fine scholar, a man of considerable learning. His religious views were remarkably broad; his enemies said remarkably thin. In his younger days he had been something of an athlete, but owing to age, sedentary habits, and some amount of self-indulgence, he had grown stout, and no longer took exercise in any form. He had no nervous trouble of any kind. His death, from heart disease, took place about three years ago. He told me the story twice, at my request; there was an interval of about six weeks between the two narrations; some of the details were elicited by questions of my own. With this preliminary note, we may proceed to the story.

•   •   •

In January, 1881, Archdeacon M———, who was a great admirer of Tennyson’s poetry, came up to London for a few days, chiefly in order to witness the performance of “The Cup,” at the Lyceum. He was not present on the first night (Monday, January 3), but on a later night in the same week. At that time, of course, the poet had not received his peerage, nor the actor his knighthood.

On leaving the theatre, less satisfied with the play than with the magnificence of the setting, the Archdeacon found some slight difficulty in getting a cab. He walked a little way down the Strand to find one, when he encountered unexpectedly his old friend, Guy Breddon.

Breddon (that was not his real name) was a man of considerable fortune, a member of the learned societies, and devoted to Central African exploration. He was two or three years younger than the Archdeacon, and a man of tremendous physique.

Breddon was surprised to find the Archdeacon in London, and the Archdeacon was equally surprised to find Breddon in England at all. Breddon carried off the Archdeacon with him to his rooms, and sent a servant in a cab to the Langham to pay the Archdeacon’s bill and fetch his luggage. The Archdeacon protested, but faintly, and Breddon would not hear of his hospitality being refused.

Breddon’s rooms were an expensive suite immediately over a ruinous upholsterer’s in a street off Berkeley Square. There was a private street-door, and from it a private staircase to the first and second floors.

The suite of rooms on the first floor, occupied by Breddon, was entirely shut off from the staircase by a door. The second floor suite, tenanted by an Irish M. P., was similarly shut off, and at that time was unoccupied.

Breddon and the Archdeacon passed through the street-door and up the stairs to the first landing, from whence, by the staircase-door, they entered the flat. Breddon had only recently taken the flat, and the Archdeacon had never been there before. It consisted of a broad L-shaped passage with rooms opening into it. There were many trophies on the walls. Horned heads glared at them; stealthy but stuffed beasts watched them furtively from under tables. There was a perfect arsenal of murderous weapons gleaming brightly under the shaded gaslights.

Breddon’s servant prepared supper for them before leaving for the Langham, and soon the two men were discussing Mr. Tennyson, Mr. Irving, and a parody of the “Queen of the May” which had recently appeared in Punch, and doing justice to some oysters, a cold pheasant with an excellent salad, and a bottle of ’74 Pommery. It was characteristic of the Archdeacon that he remembered exactly the items of the supper, and that Breddon rather neglected the wine.

After supper they passed into the library, where a bright fire was burning. The Archdeacon walked towards the fire, rubbing his plump hands together. As he did so, a portion of the great rug of gray fur on which he was standing seemed to rise up. It was a gray cat of enormous size, larger than any that the Archdeacon had ever seen before, and of the same colour as the rug on which it had been sleeping. It rubbed itself affectionately against the Archdeacon’s leg, and purred as he bent down to stroke it.

“What an extraordinary animal!” said the Archdeacon. “I had no idea cats could grow to this size. Its head’s queer, too — so much too small for the body.”

“Yes,” said Breddon, “and his feet are just as much too big.”

The gray cat stretched himself voluptuously under the Archdeacon’s caressing hand, and the feet could be seen plainly. They were very broad, and the claws, which shot out, seemed unusually powerful and well developed. The beast’s coat was short, thick, and wiry.

“Most extraordinary!” the Archdeacon repeated.

He lowered himself into a comfortable chair by the fire. He was still bending over the cat and playing with it when a slight chink made him look up. Breddon was putting something down on the table behind the liquor decanters.

“Any particular breed?” the Archdeacon asked.

“Not that I know of. Freakish, I should say. We found him on board the boat when I left for home — may have come there after mice. He’d have been thrown overboard but for me. I got rather interested in him. Smoke?”

“Oh, thank you.”

Outside a cold north wind screamed in quick gusts. Within came the sharp scratch of the match on the ribbed glass as the Archdeacon lit his cigar, the bubble of the rose-water in Breddon’s hookah, the soft step of Breddon’s man carrying the Archdeacon’s luggage into the bedroom at the end of the L-shaped passage, and the constant purring of the big gray cat.

“And what’s the cat’s name?” the Archdeacon asked.

Breddon laughed.

“Well, if you must have the plain truth, he’s called Gray Devil — or, more frequently. Devil tout court.”

“Really, now, really, you can’t expect an Archdeacon to use such abominable language. I shall call him Gray — or perhaps Mr. Gray would be more respectful, seeing the shortness of our acquaintance. Do you object to the smell of smoke, Mr. Gray? The intelligent beast does not object. Probably you’ve accustomed him to it.”

“Well, seeing what his name is he could hardly object to smoke, could he?”

Breddon’s servant entered. As the door opened and shut, one heard for a moment the crackle of the newly-lit fire in the room that awaited the Archdeacon. The servant swept up the hearth, and, under Archidiaconal direction, mixed a lengthy brandy-and-soda. He retired with the information that he would not be wanted again that night.

“Did you notice,” asked the Archdeacon, “the way Mr. Gray followed your man about? I never saw a more affectionate cat.”

“Think so?” said Breddon. “Watch this time.”

For the first time he approached the gray cat, and stretched out his hand as if to pet him. In an instant the cat seemed to have gone mad. Its claws shot out, its back hooped, its coat bristled, its tail stood erect; it cursed and spat, and its small green eyes glared. But a close observer would have noticed that all the time it watched not only Breddon, but also that object which had chinked as Breddon had put it down behind the decanters.

The Archdeacon lay back in his chair and laughed heartily.

“What funny creatures they are, and never so funny as when they lose their tempers! Really, Mr. Gray, out of respect to my cloth, you might have refrained from swearing like that. Poor Mr. Gray! Poor puss!”

Breddon resumed his seat with a grim smile. The gray cat slowly subsided, and then thrust its head, as though demanding sympathy, into the fat palm of the Archdeacon’s dependent hand.

Suddenly the Archdeacon’s eye lighted on the object which the cat had been watching, visible now that the servant had displaced the decanters.

“Goodness me!” he exclaimed, “you’ve got a revolver there.”

“That is so,” said Breddon.

“Not loaded, I trust?”

“Oh yes, fully loaded.”

“But isn’t that very dangerous?”

“Well, no; I’m used to these things, and I’m not careless with them. I should have thought it more dangerous to have introduced Gray Devil to you without it. He’s much more powerful than an ordinary cat, and I fancy there’s something beside cat in his pedigree. When I bring a stranger to see him I keep the cat covered with the revolver until I see how the land lies. To do the brute justice, he has always been most friendly with everybody except myself. I’m his only antipathy. He’d have gone for me just now but that he’s smart enough to be afraid of this.”

He tapped the revolver.

“I see,” said the Archdeacon seriously, “and can guess how it happened. You scared him one day by firing the revolver for joke; the report frightened him, and he’s never forgiven you or forgotten the revolver. Wonderful memory some of these animals have!”

“Yes,” said Breddon, “but that guess won’t do. I have never, intentionally or by chance, given the ‘Devil’ any reason for his enmity. So far as I know he has never heard a firearm, and certainly he has never heard one since I made his acquaintance. Somebody may have scared him before, and I’m inclined to think that somebody did, for there can be no doubt that the brute knows all that a cat need know about a revolver, and that he’s scared of it.

“The first time we met was almost in darkness. I’d got some cases that I was particular about, and the captain had said I could go down to look after them. Well, this beast suddenly came out of a lump of black and flew at me. I didn’t even recognise that it was a cat, because he’s so mighty big. I fetched him a clip on the side of the head that knocked him off, and whipped out my iron. He was away in a streak. He knew. And I’ve had plenty of proof since that he knows. He’d bite me now if he had the chance, but he understands that he hasn’t got the chance. I’m often half inclined to take him on plain — shooting barred — and to feel my own hands breaking his damned neck!”

“Really, old man, really!” said the Archdeacon in perfunctory protest, as he rose and mixed himself another drink.

“Sorry to use strong language, but I don’t love that cat, you know.”

The Archdeacon expressed his surprise that in that case Breddon did not get rid of the brute.

“You come across him on board ship and he flies at you. You save his life, give him board and lodging, and he still hates you so much that he won’t let you touch him, and you are no fonder of him than he is of you. Why don’t you part company?”

“As for his board, I’ve known him to eat anything except his own kill. He goes out hunting every night. I keep him simply and solely because I’m afraid of him. As long as I can keep him I know my nerves are all right. If I let my funk of him make any difference — well, I shouldn’t be much good in a Central African forest. At first I had some idea of taming him — and, besides, there was a queer coincidence.”

He rose and opened the window, and Gray Devil slowly slunk up to it. He paused a few moments on the windowsill and then suddenly sprang and vanished.

“What was the coincidence?”

“What do you think of that?”

Breddon handed the Archdeacon a figure of a cat which he had taken from the mantelpiece. It was a little thing about three inches high. In colour, in the small head, enormous feet, and curiously human eyes, it seemed an exact reproduction of Gray Devil.

“A perfect likeness. How did you get it made?”

“I got the likeness before I got the original. A little Jew dealer sold it me the night before I left for England. He thought it was Egyptian, and described it as an idol. Anyhow, it was a niceish piece of jade.”

“I always thought jade was bright green.”

“It may be — or white — or brown. It varies. I don’t think there can be any doubt that this little figure is old, though I doubt if it’s Egyptian.”

Breddon put it back in its place.

“By the way, that same night the little Jew came to try and buy it back again. He offered me twice what I had given for it. I said he must have found somebody who was pretty keen on it. I asked if it was a collector. The Jew thought not; said it was a coloured gentleman. Well, that finished it. I wasn’t going to do anything to oblige a nigger. The Jew pleaded that it was a particularly fine buck-nigger, with mountains of money, who’d been tracking the thing for years, and hinted at all manner of mumbo-jumbo business — to scare me, I suppose. However, I wouldn’t listen, and kicked him out. Then came the coincidence. Having bought the likeness, next day I found the living original. Rum, wasn’t it?”

At this moment the clock struck, and the Archdeacon recognised with horror that it was very, very much past the time when respectable Archdeacons should be in bed and asleep. He rose and said good-night, observing that he’d like to hear more about it on the morrow.

This was extremely unfortunate, for it will be seen it is just at this part of the story that one wants full details, and on the morrow it became impossible to elicit them.

Before leaving the library Breddon closed the window, and the Archdeacon asked how “Mr. Gray,” as he called him, would get back.

“Very likely he’s back already. He’s got a special window in the kitchen, made on purpose, just big enough to let him get in and out as he likes.”

“But don’t other cats get in, too?”

“No,” said Breddon. “Other cats avoid Gray Devil.”

The Archdeacon found himself unaccountably nervous when he got to his room. He owned to me that he had to satisfy himself that there was no one concealed under the bed or in the wardrobe. However, he got into bed, and after a little while fell into a deep sleep; his fire was burning brightly, and the room was quite light.

Shortly after four he was awakened by a loud scream. Still sleepy, he did not for the moment locate the sound, thinking that it must have come from the street outside. But almost immediately afterwards he heard the report of a revolver fired twice in quick succession, and then, after a short pause, a third time.

The Archdeacon was terribly frightened. He did not know what had happened, and thought of armed burglars. For a time — he did not think it could have been more than a minute — fear held him motionless. Then with an effort he rose, lit the gas, and hurried on his clothes. As he was dressing, he heard a step down the passage and a knock at his door.

He opened it, and found Breddon’s servant. The man had put on a blue overcoat over his night-things, and wore slippers. He was shivering with cold and terror.

“Oh, my God, sir!” he exclaimed, “Mr. Breddon’s shot himself. Would you come, sir?”

The Archdeacon followed the man to Breddon’s bedroom. The smoke still hung thickly in the room. A mirror had been smashed, and lay in fragments on the floor. On the bed, with his back to the Archdeacon, lay Breddon, dead. His right hand still grasped the revolver, and there was a blackened wound behind the right ear.

When the Archdeacon came round to look at the face he turned faint, and the servant took him out into the library and gave him brandy, the glasses and decanters still standing there. Breddon’s face certainly had looked very ghastly; it had been scratched, torn and bitten; one eye was gone, and the whole face was covered with blood.

“Do you think it was that brute did it?”

“Sure of it, sir; sprang on his face while he was asleep. I knew it would happen one of these nights. He knew it too; always slept with the revolver by his side. He fired twice at the brute, but couldn’t see for the blood. Then he killed himself.”

It seemed likely enough, with his eyesight gone, horribly mauled, in an agony of pain, possibly believing that he was saving himself from a death still more horrible, Breddon might very well have turned the weapon on himself.

“What do we do now?” the man asked.

“We must get a doctor and fetch the police at once. Come on.”

As they turned the corner of the passage, they saw that the door communicating with the staircase was open.

“Did you open that door?” asked the Archdeacon.

“No,” said the man, aghast.

“Then who did?”

“Don’t know, sir. Looks as if we weren’t at the end of this yet.”

They passed down the stairs together, and found the street-door also ajar. On the pavement outside lay a policeman slowly recovering consciousness. Breddon’s man took the policeman’s whistle and blew it. A passing hansom, going back to the mews, slowed up; the cab was sent to fetch a doctor, and communication with the police-station rapidly followed.

The injured policeman told a curious story. He was passing the house when he heard shots fired. Almost immediately afterwards he heard the bolts of the front-door being drawn, and stepped back into the neighbouring doorway. The front-door opened, and a negro emerged clad in a gray tweed suit with a gray overcoat. The policeman jumped out, and without a second’s hesitation the black man felled him. “It was all done before you could think,” was the policeman’s phrase.

“What kind of negro?” asked the Archdeacon.

“A big man — stood over six foot, and black as coal. He never waited to be challenged; the moment he knew that he was seen he hit out.”

The policeman was not a very intelligent fellow, and there was little more to be got out of him. He had heard the shots, seen the street-door open and the man in gray appear, and had been felled by a lightning blow before he had time to do anything.

The doctor, a plain, matter-of-fact little man, had no hesitation in saying that Breddon was dead, and must have died almost immediately. After the injuries received, respiration and heart-action must have ceased at once. He was explaining something which oozed from the dead man’s ear, when the Archdeacon could stand it no longer, and staggered out into the library. There he found Breddon’s servant, still in the blue overcoat, explaining to a policeman with a notebook that as far as he knew nothing was missing except a jade image or idol of a cat which formerly stood on the mantelpiece.

The cat known as “Gray Devil” was also missing, and, although a description of it was circulated in the public press, nothing was ever heard of it again. But gray fur was found in the clenched left hand of the dead man.

The inquest resulted in the customary verdict, and brought to light no new facts. But it may be as well to give what the police theory of the case was. According to the police the suicide took place much as Breddon’s servant had supposed. Mad with pain and unable to bear the thought of his awful mutilation, Breddon had shot himself.

The story of the jade image, as far as it was known, was told at the inquest. The police held that this image was an idol, that some uncivilized tribe was much perturbed by the theft of it, and was ready to pay an enormously high price for its recovery. The negro was assumed to be aware of this, and to have determined to obtain possession of the idol by fair means or foul. Fair means failing, it was suggested that the negro followed Breddon to England, tracked him out, and on the night in question found some means to conceal himself in Breddon’s flat. There it was assumed that he fell asleep, was awakened by the screams and the sound of the firing, and, being scared, caught up the jade image and made off. Realizing that the shots would have been heard outside, and that his departure at that moment would be considered extremely suspicious, he was ready as he opened the street-door to fell the first man that he saw. The temporary unconsciousness of the policeman gave him time to get away.

The theory sounds at first sight like the only possible theory. When the Archdeacon first told me the story, I tried to find out indirectly whether he accepted it. Finding him rather disposed to fence with my hints and suggestions, I put the question to him plainly and bluntly:

“Do you believe in the police theory?”

He hesitated, and then answered with complete frankness:

“No, most emphatically not.”

“Why?” I asked; and he went over the evidence with me.

“In the first place, I do not believe that Breddon, in the ordinary sense, committed suicide. No amount of physical pain would have made him even think of it. He had unending pluck. He would have taken the facial disfigurement and loss of sight as the chances of war, and would have done the best that could be done by a man with such awful disabilities. One must admit that he fired the fatal shot — the medical evidence on that point is too strong to be gainsaid — but he fired it under circumstances of supernatural horror of which we, thank God! know nothing.”

“I’m naturally slow to admit supernatural explanation.”

“Well, let’s go on. What’s this mysterious tribe the police talk about? I want to know where it lives and what its name is. It’s wealthy enough to offer a huge reward; it must be of some importance. The negro managed to get in and secrete himself. How? Where? I know the flat, and that theory won’t do. We don’t even know that it was the negro who took that little image, though I believe it was. Anyhow, how did the negro get away at that hour of the morning absolutely unobserved? Negroes are not so common in London that they can walk about without being noticed; yet not one trace of him was ever found, and equally mysterious is the disappearance of the Gray Cat. It was such an extraordinary brute, and the description of it was so widely circulated that it would have seemed almost certain we should hear of it again. Well, we’ve not heard.”

We discussed the police theory for some little time, and something which he happened to say led me to exclaim:

“Really! Do you mean to say that the Gray Cat actually was the negro?”

“No,” he replied, “not exactly that, but something near it. Cats are strange animals, anyhow, needn’t remind you of their connection with certain old religions or with that witchcraft in which even in England today some still believe, and not so long ago almost all believed. I have never, by the way, seen a good explanation of the fact that there are people who cannot bear to be in a room with a cat, and are aware of its presence as if by some mysterious extra sense. Let me remind you of the belief which undoubtedly exists both in China and Japan, that evil spirits may enter into certain of the lower animals, the fox and badger especially. Every student of demonology knows about these things.”

“But that idea of evil spirits taking possession of cats or foxes is surely a heathen superstition which you cannot hold.”

“Well, I have read of the evil spirits that entered into the swine. Think it over, and keep an open mind.”

Stories in the Dark (1901)

A TROPICAL HORROR

William Hope Hodgson

1905

We are a hundred and thirty days out from Melbourne, and for three weeks we have lain in this sweltering calm.

It is midnight, and our watch on deck until four A.M. I go out and sit on the hatch. A minute later, Joky, our youngest ’prentice, joins me for a chatter. Many are the hours we have sat thus and talked in the night watches; though, to be sure, it is Joky who does the talking. I am content to smoke and listen, giving an occasional grunt at seasons to show that I am attentive.

Joky has been silent for some time, his head bent in meditation. Suddenly he looks up, evidently with the intention of making some remark. As he does so, I see his face stiffen with a nameless horror. He crouches back, his eyes staring past me at some unseen fear. Then his mouth opens. He gives forth a strangulated cry and topples backwards off the hatch, striking his head against the deck. Fearing I know not what, I turn to look.

Great Heavens! Rising above the bulwarks, seen plainly in the bright moonlight, is a vast slobbering mouth a fathom across. From the huge dripping lips hang great tentacles. As I look the Thing comes further over the rail. It is rising, rising, higher and higher. There are no eyes visible; only that fearful slobbering mouth set on the tremendous trunk-like neck; which, even as I watch, is curling inboard with the stealthy celerity of an enormous eel. Over it comes in vast heaving folds. Will it never end? The ship gives a slow, sullen roll to starboard as she feels the weight. Then the tail, a broad, flat-shaped mass, slips over the teak rail and falls with a loud slump on to the deck.

For a few seconds the hideous creature lies heaped in writhing, slimy coils. Then, with quick, darting movements, the monstrous head travels along the deck. Close by the mainmast stand the harness casks, and alongside of these a freshly opened cask of salt beef with the top loosely replaced. The smell of the meat seems to attract the monster, and I can hear it sniffing with a vast indrawing breath. Then those lips open, displaying four huge fangs; there is a quick forward motion of the head, a sudden crashing, crunching sound, and beef and barrel have disappeared. The noise brings one of the ordinary seamen out of the fo’cas’le. Coming into the night, he can see nothing for a moment. Then, as he gets further aft, he sees, and with horrified cries rushes forward. Too late! From the mouth of the Thing there flashes forth a long, broad blade of glistening white, set with fierce teeth. I avert my eyes, but cannot shut out the sickening “Glut! Glut!” that follows.

The man on the “look-out,” attracted by the disturbance, has witnessed the tragedy, and flies for refuge into the fo’cas’le, flinging to the heavy iron door after him.

The carpenter and sailmaker come running out from the half-deck in their drawers. Seeing the awful Thing, they rush aft to the cabin with shouts of fear. The second mate, after one glance over the break of the poop, runs down the companion-way with the helmsman after him. I can hear them barring the scuttle, and abruptly I realise that I am on the main deck alone.

So far I have forgotten my own danger. The past few minutes seem like a portion of an awful dream. Now, however, I comprehend my position and, shaking off the horror that has held me, turn to seek safety. As I do so my eyes fall upon Joky, lying huddled and senseless with fright where he has fallen. I cannot leave him there. Close by stands the empty half-deck — a little steel-built house with iron doors. The lee one is hooked open. Once inside I am safe.

Up to the present the Thing has seemed to be unconscious of my presence. Now, however, the huge barrel-like head sways in my direction; then comes a muffled bellow, and the great tongue flickers in and out as the brute turns and swirls aft to meet me. I know there is not a moment to lose, and, picking up the helpless lad, I make a run for the open door. It is only distant a few yards, but that awful shape is coming down the deck to me in great wreathing coils. I reach the house and tumble in with my burden; then out on deck again to unhook and close the door. Even as I do so something white curls round the end of the house. With a bound I am inside and the door is shut and bolted. Through the thick glass of the ports I see the Thing sweep round the house, in vain search for me.

Joky has not moved yet; so, kneeling down, I loosen his shirt collar and sprinkle some water from the breaker over his face. While I am doing this I hear Morgan shout something; then comes a great shriek of terror, and again that sickening “Glut! Glut!”

Joky stirs uneasily, rubs his eyes, and sits up suddenly.

“Was that Morgan shouting — ?” He breaks off with a cry. “Where are we? I have had such awful dreams!”

At this instant there is a sound of running footsteps on the deck and I hear Morgan’s voice at the door.

“Tom, open — !”

He stops abruptly and gives an awful cry of despair. Then I hear him rush forward. Through the porthole, I see him spring into the fore rigging and scramble madly aloft. Something steals up after him. It shows white in the moonlight. It wraps itself around his right ankle. Morgan stops dead, plucks out his sheath-knife, and hacks fiercely at the fiendish thing. It lets go, and in a second he is over the top and running for dear life up the t’gallant rigging.

A time of quietness follows, and presently I see that the day is breaking. Not a sound can be heard save the heavy gasping breathing of the Thing. As the sun rises higher the creature stretches itself out along the deck and seems to enjoy the warmth. Still no sound, either from the men forward or the officers aft. I can only suppose that they are afraid of attracting its attention. Yet, a little later, I hear the report of a pistol away aft, and looking out I see the serpent raise its huge head as though listening. As it does so I get a good view of the fore part, and in the daylight see what the night has hidden.

There, right about the mouth, is a pair of little pig-eyes, that seem to twinkle with a diabolical intelligence. It is swaying its head slowly from side to side; then, without warning, it turns quickly and looks right in through the port. I dodge out of sight; but not soon enough. It has seen me, and brings its great mouth up against the glass.

I hold my breath. My God! If it breaks the glass! I cower, horrified. From the direction of the port there comes a loud, harsh, scraping sound. I shiver. Then I remember that there are little iron doors to shut over the ports in bad weather. Without a moment’s waste of time I rise to my feet and slam to the door over the port. Then I go round to the others and do the same. We are now in darkness, and I tell Joky in a whisper to light the lamp, which, after some fumbling, he does.

About an hour before midnight I fall asleep. I am awakened suddenly some hours later by a scream of agony and the rattle of a water-dipper. There is a slight scuffling sound; then that soul-revolting “Glut! Glut!”

I guess what has happened. One of the men forrad has slipped out of the fo’cas’le to try and get a little water. Evidently he has trusted to the darkness to hide his movements. Poor beggar! He has paid for his attempt with his life!

After this I cannot sleep, though the rest of the night passes quietly enough. Towards morning I doze a bit, but wake every few minutes with a start. Joky is sleeping peacefully; indeed, he seems worn out with the terrible strain of the past twenty-four hours. About eight A.M. I call him, and we make a light breakfast off the dry ship’s biscuit and water. Of the latter happily we have a good supply. Joky seems more himself, and starts to talk a little — possibly somewhat louder than is safe; for, as he chatters on, wondering how it will end, there comes a tremendous blow against the side of the house, making it ring again. After this Joky is very silent. As we sit there I cannot but wonder what all the rest are doing, and how the poor beggars forrad are faring, cooped up without water, as the tragedy of the night has proved.

Towards noon, I hear a loud bang, followed by a terrific bellowing. Then comes a great smashing of woodwork, and the cries of men in pain. Vainly I ask myself what has happened. I begin to reason. By the sound of the report it was evidently something much heavier than a rifle or pistol, and judging from the mad roaring of the Thing, the shot must have done some execution. On thinking it over further, I become convinced that, by some means, those aft have got hold of the small signal cannon we carry, and though I know that some have been hurt, perhaps killed, yet a feeling of exultation seizes me as I listen to the roars of the Thing, and realise that it is badly wounded, perhaps mortally. After a while, however, the bellowing dies away, and only an occasional roar, denoting more of anger than aught else, is heard.

Presently I become aware, by the ship’s canting over to starboard, that the creature has gone over to that side, and a great hope springs up within me that possibly it has had enough of us and is going over the rail into the sea. For a time all is silent and my hope grows stronger. I lean across and nudge Joky, who is sleeping with his head on the table. He starts up sharply with a loud cry.

“Hush!” I whisper hoarsely. “I’m not certain, but I do believe it’s gone.”

Joky’s face brightens wonderfully, and he questions me eagerly. We wait another hour or so, with hope ever rising. Our confidence is returning fast. Not a sound can we hear, not even the breathing of the Beast. I get out some biscuits, and Joky, after rummaging in the locker, produces a small piece of pork and a bottle of ship’s vinegar. We fall to with a relish. After our long abstinence from food the meal acts on us like wine, and what must Joky do but insist on opening the door, to make sure the Thing has gone. This I will not allow, telling him that at least it will be safer to open the iron port-covers first and have a look out. Joky argues, but I am immovable. He becomes excited. I believe the youngster is light-headed. Then, as I turn to unscrew one of the after-covers, Joky makes a dash at the door. Before he can undo the bolts I have him, and after a short struggle lead him back to the table. Even as I endeavour to quieten him there comes at the starboard door — the door that Joky has tried to open — a sharp, loud sniff, sniff, followed immediately by a thunderous grunting howl and a foul stench of putrid breath sweeps in under the door. A great trembling takes me, and were it not for the carpenter’s toolbox I should fall. Joky turns very white and is violently sick, after which he is seized by a hopeless fit of sobbing.

Hour after hour passes, and, weary to death, I lie down on the chest upon which I have been sitting, and try to rest.

It must be about half past two in the morning, after a somewhat longer doze, that I am suddenly awakened by a most tremendous uproar away forrad — men’s voices shrieking, cursing, praying; but in spite of the terror expressed, so weak and feeble; while in the midst, and at times broken off short with that hellishly suggestive “Glut! Glut!”, is the unearthly bellowing of the Thing. Fear incarnate seizes me, and I can only fall on my knees and pray. Too well I know what is happening.

Joky has slept through it all, and I am thankful.

Presently, under the door there steals a narrow ribbon of light, and I know that the day has broken on the second morning of our imprisonment. I let Joky sleep on. I will let him have peace while he may. Time passes, but I take little notice. The Thing is quiet, probably sleeping. About midday I eat a little biscuit and drink some of the water. Joky still sleeps. It is best so.

A sound breaks the stillness. The ship gives a slight heave, and I know that once more the Thing is awake. Round the deck it moves, causing the ship to roll perceptibly. Once it goes forrad — I fancy to again explore the fo’cas’le. Evidently it finds nothing, for it returns almost immediately. It pauses a moment at the house, then goes on further aft. Up aloft, somewhere in the fore-rigging, there rings out a peal of wild laughter, though sounding very faint and far away. The Horror stops suddenly. I listen intently, but hear nothing save a sharp creaking beyond the after end of the house, as though a strain had come upon the rigging.

A minute later I hear a cry aloft, followed almost instantly by a loud crash on deck that seems to shake the ship. I wait in anxious fear. What is happening? The minutes pass slowly. Then comes another frightened shout. It ceases suddenly. The suspense has become terrible, and I am no longer able to bear it. Very cautiously I open one of the after port-covers, and peep out to see a fearful sight. There, with its tail upon the deck and its vast body curled round the mainmast, is the monster, its head above the topsail yard, and its great claw-armed tentacle waving in the air. It is the first proper sight that I have had of the Thing. Good Heavens! It must weigh a hundred tons! Knowing that I shall have time, I open the port itself, then crane my head out and look up. There on the extreme end of the lower topsail yard I see one of the able seamen. Even down here I note the staring horror of his face. At this moment he sees me and gives a weak, hoarse cry for help. I can do nothing for him. As I look the great tongue shoots out and licks him off the yard, much as might a dog a fly off the windowpane.

Higher still, but happily out of reach, are two more of the men. As far as I can judge they are lashed to the mast above the royal yard. The Thing attempts to reach them, but after a futile effort it ceases, and starts to slide down, coil on coil, to the deck. While doing this I notice a great gaping wound on its body some twenty feet above the tail.

I drop my gaze from aloft and look aft. The cabin door is torn from its hinges, and the bulkhead — which, unlike the half-deck, is of teak wood — is partly broken down. With a shudder I realise the cause of those cries after the cannon-shot. Turning I screw my head round and try to see the foremast, but cannot. The sun, I notice, is low, and the night is near. Then I draw in my head and fasten up both port and cover.

How will it end? Oh! how will it end?

After a while Joky wakes up. He is very restless, yet though he has eaten nothing during the day I cannot get him to touch anything.

Night draws on. We are too weary — too dispirited to talk. I lie down, but not to sleep ... Time passes.

•   •   •

A ventilator rattles violently somewhere on the main deck, and there sounds constantly that slurring, gritty noise. Later I hear a cat’s agonised howl, and then again all is quiet. Some time after comes a great splash alongside. Then, for some hours, all is silent as the grave. Occasionally I sit up on the chest and listen, yet never a whisper of noise comes to me. There is an absolute silence, even the monotonous creak of the gear has died away entirely, and at last a real hope is springing up within me. That splash, this silence — surely I am justified in hoping. I do not wake Joky this time. I will prove first for myself that all is safe. Still I wait. I will run no unnecessary risks. After a time I creep to the after-port and will listen; but there is no sound. I put up my hand and feel at the screw, then again I hesitate, yet not for long. Noiselessly I begin to unscrew the fastening of the heavy shield. It swings loose on its hinge, and I pull it back and peer out. My heart is beating madly. Everything seems strangely dark outside. Perhaps the moon has gone behind a cloud. Suddenly a beam of moonlight enters through the port, and goes as quickly. I stare out. Something moves. Again the light streams in, and now I seem to be looking into a great cavern, at the bottom of which quivers and curls something palely white.

My heart seems to stand still! It is the Horror! I start back and seize the iron port-flap to slam it to. As I do so, something strikes the glass like a steam ram, shatters it to atoms, and flicks past me into the berth. I scream and spring away. The port is quite filled with it. The lamp shows it dimly. It is curling and twisting here and there. It is as thick as a tree, and covered with a smooth slimy skin. At the end is a great claw, like a lobster’s, only a thousand times larger. I cower down into the farthest corner.... It has broken the tool-chest to pieces with one click of those frightful mandibles. Joky has crawled under a bunk. The Thing sweeps round in my direction. I feel a drop of sweat trickle slowly down my face — it tastes salty. Nearer comes that awful death ... Crash! I roll over backwards. It has crushed the water breaker against which I leant, and I am rolling in the water across the floor. The claw drives up, then down, with a quick uncertain movement, striking the deck a dull, heavy blow, a foot from my head. Joky gives a little gasp of horror. Slowly the Thing rises and starts feeling its way round the berth. It plunges into a bunk and pulls out a bolster, nips it in half and drops it, then moves on. It is feeling along the deck. As it does so it comes across a half of the bolster. It seems to toy with it, then picks it up and takes it out through the port....

A wave of putrid air fills the berth. There is a grating sound, and something enters the port again — something white and tapering and set with teeth. Hither and thither it curls, rasping over the bunks, ceiling, and deck, with a noise like that of a great saw at work. Twice it flickers above my head, and I close my eyes. Then off it goes again. It sounds now on the opposite side of the berth and nearer to Joky. Suddenly the harsh, raspy noise becomes muffled, as though the teeth were passing across some soft substance. Joky gives a horrid little scream, that breaks off into a bubbling, whistling sound. I open my eyes. The tip of the vast tongue is curled tightly round something that drips, then is quickly withdrawn, allowing the moonbeams to steal again into the berth. I rise to my feet. Looking round, I note in a mechanical sort of way the wrecked state of the berth — the shattered chests, dismantled bunks, and something else—

“Joky!” I cry, and tingle all over.

There is that awful Thing again at the port. I glance round for a weapon. I will revenge Joky. Ah! there, right under the lamp, where the wreck of the carpenter’s chest strews the floor, lies a small hatchet. I spring forward and seize it. It is small, but so keen — so keen! I feel its razor edge lovingly. Then I am back at the port. I stand to one side and raise my weapon. The great tongue is feeling its way to those fearsome remains. It reaches them. As it does so, with a scream of “Joky! Joky!” I strike savagely again and again and again, gasping as I strike; once more, and the monstrous mass falls to the deck, writhing like a hideous eel. A vast, warm flood rushes in through the porthole. There is a sound of breaking steel and an enormous bellowing. A singing comes in my ears and grows louder — louder. Then the berth grows indistinct and suddenly dark.

•   •   •

Extract from the log of the steamship Hispaniola.

June 24. — Lat. — N. Long. — W.   11 A.M. — Sighted four-masted barque about four points on the port bow, flying signal of distress. Ran down to her and sent a boat aboard. She proved to be the Glen Doon, homeward bound from Melbourne to London. Found things in a terrible state. Decks covered with blood and slime. Steel deck-house stove in. Broke open door, and discovered youth of about nineteen in last stage of inanition, also part remains of boy about fourteen years of age. There was a great quantity of blood in the place, and a huge curled-up mass of whitish flesh, weighing about half a ton, one end of which appeared to have been hacked through with a sharp instrument. Found forecastle door open and hanging from one hinge. Doorway bulged, as though something had been forced through. Went inside. Terrible state of affairs, blood everywhere, broken chests, smashed bunks, but no men nor remains. Went aft again and found youth showing signs of recovery. When he came round, gave the name of Thompson. Said they had been attacked by a huge serpent — thought it must have been sea-serpent. He was too weak to say much, but told us there were some men up the mainmast. Sent a hand aloft, who reported them lashed to the royal mast, and quite dead. Went aft to the cabin. Here we found the bulkhead smashed to pieces, and the cabin-door lying on the deck near the after-hatch. Found body of captain down lazarette, but no officers. Noticed amongst the wreckage part of the carriage of a small cannon. Came aboard again.

Have sent the second mate with six men to work her into port. Thompson is with us. He has written out his version of the affair. We certainly consider that the state of the ship, as we found her, bears out in every respect his story.

(Signed)

William Norton (Master).
Tom Briggs (1st Mate).

“The Grand Magazine”, June 1905

KERFOL

Edith Wharton

1916

I

“You ought to buy it,” said my host; “it’s just the place for a solitary-minded devil like you. And it would be rather worthwhile to own the most romantic house in Brittany. The present people are dead broke, and it’s going for a song – you ought to buy it.”

It was not with the least idea of living up to the character my friend Lanrivain ascribed to me (as a matter of fact, under my unsociable exterior I have always had secret yearnings for domesticity) that I took his hint one autumn afternoon and went to Kerfol. My friend was motoring over to Quimper on business: he dropped me on the way, at a crossroad on a heath, and said: “First turn to the right and second to the left. Then straight ahead till you see an avenue. If you meet any peasants, don’t ask your way. They don’t understand French, and they would pretend they did and mix you up. I’ll be back for you here by sunset – and don’t forget the tombs in the chapel.”

I followed Lanrivain’s directions with the hesitation occasioned by the usual difficulty of remembering whether he had said the first turn to the right and second to the left, or the contrary. If I had met a peasant I should certainly have asked, and probably been sent astray; but I had the desert landscape to myself, and so stumbled on the right turn and walked across the heath till I came to an avenue. It was so unlike any other avenue I have ever seen that I instantly knew it must be the avenue. The grey-trunked trees sprang up straight to a great height and then interwove their pale-grey branches in a long tunnel through which the autumn light fell faintly. I know most trees by name, but I haven’t to this day been able to decide what those trees were. They had the tall curve of elms, the tenuity of poplars, the ashen colour of olives under a rainy sky; and they stretched ahead of me for half a mile or more without a break in their arch. If ever I saw an avenue that unmistakably led to something, it was the avenue at Kerfol. My heart beat a little as I began to walk down it.

Presently the trees ended and I came to a fortified gate in a long wall. Between me and the wall was an open space of grass, with other grey avenues radiating from it. Behind the wall were tall slate roofs mossed with silver, a chapel belfry, the top of a keep. A moat filled with wild shrubs and brambles surrounded the place; the drawbridge had been replaced by a stone arch, and the portcullis by an iron gate. I stood for a long time on the hither side of the moat, gazing about me, and letting the influence of the place sink in. I said to myself: “If I wait long enough, the guardian will turn up and show me the tombs—” and I rather hoped he wouldn’t turn up too soon.

I sat down on a stone and lit a cigarette. As soon as I had done it, it struck me as a puerile and portentous thing to do, with that great blind house looking down at me, and all the empty avenues converging on me. It may have been the depth of the silence that made me so conscious of my gesture. The squeak of my match sounded as loud as the scraping of a brake, and I almost fancied I heard it fall when I tossed it onto the grass. But there was more than that: a sense of irrelevance, of littleness, of futile bravado, in sitting there puffing my cigarette-smoke into the face of such a past.

I knew nothing of the history of Kerfol – I was new to Brittany, and Lanrivain had never mentioned the name to me till the day before – but one couldn’t as much as glance at that pile without feeling in it a long accumulation of history. What kind of history I was not prepared to guess: perhaps only that sheer weight of many associated lives and deaths which gives a majesty to all old houses. But the aspect of Kerfol suggested something more – a perspective of stern and cruel memories stretching away, like its own grey avenues, into a blur of darkness.

Certainly no house had ever more completely and finally broken with the present. As it stood there, lifting its proud roofs and gables to the sky, it might have been its own funeral monument. “Tombs in the chapel? The whole place is a tomb!” I reflected. I hoped more and more that the guardian would not come. The details of the place, however striking, would seem trivial compared with its collective impressiveness; and I wanted only to sit there and be penetrated by the weight of its silence.

“It’s the very place for you!” Lanrivain had said; and I was overcome by the almost blasphemous frivolity of suggesting to any living being that Kerfol was the place for him. “Is it possible that anyone could not see — ?” I wondered. I did not finish the thought: what I meant was undefinable. I stood up and wandered toward the gate. I was beginning to want to know more; not to see more – I was by now so sure it was not a question of seeing – but to feel more: feel all the place had to communicate. “But to get in one will have to rout out the keeper,” I thought reluctantly, and hesitated. Finally I crossed the bridge and tried the iron gate. It yielded, and I walked through the tunnel formed by the thickness of the chemin de ronde. At the farther end, a wooden barricade had been laid across the entrance, and beyond it was a court enclosed in noble architecture. The main building faced me; and I now saw that one half was a mere ruined front, with gaping windows through which the wild growths of the moat and the trees of the park were visible. The rest of the house was still in its robust beauty. One end abutted on the round tower, the other on the small traceried chapel, and in an angle of the building stood a graceful well-head crowned with mossy urns. A few roses grew against the walls, and on an upper windowsill I remember noticing a pot of fuchsias.

My sense of the pressure of the invisible began to yield to my architectural interest. The building was so fine that I felt a desire to explore it for its own sake. I looked about the court, wondering in which corner the guardian lodged. Then I pushed open the barrier and went in. As I did so, a dog barred my way. He was such a remarkably beautiful little dog that for a moment he made me forget the splendid place he was defending. I was not sure of his breed at the time, but have since learned that it was Chinese, and that he was of a rare variety called the “Sleeve-dog.” He was very small and golden brown, with large brown eyes and a ruffled throat: he looked like a large tawny chrysanthemum. I said to myself: “These little beasts always snap and scream, and somebody will be out in a minute.”

The little animal stood before me, forbidding, almost menacing: there was anger in his large brown eyes. But he made no sound, he came no nearer. Instead, as I advanced, he gradually fell back, and I noticed that another dog, a vague rough brindled thing, had limped up on a lame leg. “There’ll be a hubbub now,” I thought; for at the same moment a third dog, a long-haired white mongrel, slipped out of a doorway and joined the others. All three stood looking at me with grave eyes; but not a sound came from them. As I advanced they continued to fall back on muffled paws, still watching me. “At a given point, they’ll all charge at my ankles: it’s one of the jokes that dogs who live together put up on one,” I thought. I was not alarmed, for they were neither large nor formidable. But they let me wander about the court as I pleased, following me at a little distance – always the same distance – and always keeping their eyes on me. Presently I looked across at the ruined façade, and saw that in one of its empty window-frames another dog stood: a white pointer with one brown ear. He was an old grave dog, much more experienced than the others; and he seemed to be observing me with a deeper intentness.

“I’ll hear from him,” I said to myself; but he stood in the window-frame, against the trees of the park, and continued to watch me without moving. I stared back at him for a time, to see if the sense that he was being watched would not rouse him. Half the width of the court lay between us, and we gazed at each other silently across it. But he did not stir, and at last I turned away. Behind me I found the rest of the pack, with a newcomer added: a small black greyhound with pale agate-coloured eyes. He was shivering a little, and his expression was more timid than that of the others. I noticed that he kept a little behind them. And still there was not a sound.

I stood there for fully five minutes, the circle about me – waiting, as they seemed to be waiting. At last I went up to the little golden-brown dog and stooped to pat him. As I did so, I heard myself give a nervous laugh. The little dog did not start, or growl, or take his eyes from me – he simply slipped back about a yard, and then paused and continued to look at me. “Oh, hang it!” I exclaimed, and walked across the court toward the well.

As I advanced, the dogs separated and slid away into different corners of the court. I examined the urns on the well, tried a locked door or two, and looked up and down the dumb façade; then I faced about toward the chapel. When I turned I perceived that all the dogs had disappeared except the old pointer, who still watched me from the window. It was rather a relief to be rid of that cloud of witnesses; and I began to look about me for a way to the back of the house. “Perhaps there’ll be somebody in the garden,” I thought. I found a way across the moat, scrambled over a wall smothered in brambles, and got into the garden. A few lean hydrangeas and geraniums pined in the flowerbeds, and the ancient house looked down on them indifferently. Its garden side was plainer and severer than the other: the long granite front, with its few windows and steep roof, looked like a fortress-prison. I walked around the farther wing, went up some disjointed steps, and entered the deep twilight of a narrow and incredibly old box-walk. The walk was just wide enough for one person to slip through, and its branches met overhead. It was like the ghost of a box-walk, its lustrous green all turning to the shadowy greyness of the avenues. I walked on and on, the branches hitting me in the face and springing back with a dry rattle; and at length I came out on the grassy top of the chemin de ronde. I walked along it to the gate-tower, looking down into the court, which was just below me. Not a human being was in sight; and neither were the dogs. I found a flight of steps in the thickness of the wall and went down them; and when I emerged again into the court, there stood the circle of dogs, the golden-brown one a little ahead of the others, the black greyhound shivering in the rear.

“Oh, hang it – you uncomfortable beasts, you!” I exclaimed, my voice startling me with a sudden echo. The dogs stood motionless, watching me. I knew by this time that they would not try to prevent my approaching the house, and the knowledge left me free to examine them. I had a feeling that they must be horribly cowed to be so silent and inert. Yet they did not look hungry or ill-treated. Their coats were smooth and they were not thin, except the shivering greyhound. It was more as if they had lived a long time with people who never spoke to them or looked at them: as though the silence of the place had gradually benumbed their busy inquisitive natures. And this strange passivity, this almost human lassitude, seemed to me sadder than the misery of starved and beaten animals. I should have liked to rouse them for a minute, to coax them into a game or a scamper; but the longer I looked into their fixed and weary eyes the more preposterous the idea became. With the windows of that house looking down on us, how could I have imagined such a thing? The dogs knew better: they knew what the house would tolerate and what it would not. I even fancied that they knew what was passing through my mind, and pitied me for my frivolity. But even that feeling probably reached them through a thick fog of listlessness. I had an idea that their distance from me was as nothing to my remoteness from them. The impression they produced was that of having in common one memory so deep and dark that nothing that had happened since was worth either a growl or a wag.

“I say,” I broke out abruptly, addressing myself to the dumb circle, “do you know what you look like, the whole lot of you? You look as if you’d seen a ghost – that’s how you look! I wonder if there is a ghost here, and nobody but you left for it to appear to?” The dogs continued to gaze at me without moving….

•   •   •

It was dark when I saw Lanrivain’s motor lamps at the crossroads – and I wasn’t exactly sorry to see them. I had the sense of having escaped from the loneliest place in the whole world, and of not liking loneliness – to that degree – as much as I had imagined I should. My friend had brought his solicitor back from Quimper for the night, and seated beside a fat and affable stranger I felt no inclination to talk of Kerfol….

But that evening, when Lanrivain and the solicitor were closeted in the study, Madame de Lanrivain began to question me in the drawing-room.

“Well – are you going to buy Kerfol?” she asked, tilting up her gay chin from her embroidery.

“I haven’t decided yet. The fact is, I couldn’t get into the house,” I said, as if I had simply postponed my decision, and meant to go back for another look.

“You couldn’t get in? Why, what happened? The family are mad to sell the place, and the old guardian has orders—”

“Very likely. But the old guardian wasn’t there.”

“What a pity! He must have gone to market. But his daughter — ?”

“There was nobody about. At least I saw no one.”

“How extraordinary! Literally nobody?”

“Nobody but a lot of dogs – a whole pack of them – who seemed to have the place to themselves.”

Madame de Lanrivain let the embroidery slip to her knee and folded her hands on it. For several minutes she looked at me thoughtfully.

“A pack of dogs – you saw them?”

“Saw them? I saw nothing else!”

“How many?” She dropped her voice a little. “I’ve always wondered—”

I looked at her with surprise: I had supposed the place to be familiar to her. “Have you never been to Kerfol?” I asked.

“Oh, yes: often. But never on that day.”

“What day?”

“I’d quite forgotten – and so had Hervé, I’m sure. If we’d remembered, we never should have sent you today – but then, after all, one doesn’t half believe that sort of thing, does one?”

“What sort of thing?” I asked, involuntarily sinking my voice to the level of hers. Inwardly I was thinking: “I knew there was something….”

Madame de Lanrivain cleared her throat and produced a reassuring smile. “Didn’t Hervé tell you the story of Kerfol? An ancestor of his was mixed up in it. You know every Breton house has its ghost-story; and some of them are rather unpleasant.”

“Yes – but those dogs?”

“Well, those dogs are the ghosts of Kerfol. At least, the peasants say there’s one day in the year when a lot of dogs appear there; and that day the keeper and his daughter go off to Morlaix and get drunk. The women in Brittany drink dreadfully.” She stooped to match a silk; then she lifted her charming inquisitive Parisian face. “Did you really see a lot of dogs? There isn’t one at Kerfol,” she said.

II

Lanrivain, the next day, hunted out a shabby calf volume from the back of an upper shelf of his library.

“Yes – here it is. What does it call itself? A History of the Assizes of the Duchy of Brittany. Quimper, 1702. The book was written about a hundred years later than the Kerfol affair; but I believe the account is transcribed pretty literally from the judicial records. Anyhow, it’s queer reading. And there’s a Hervé de Lanrivain mixed up in it – not exactly my style, as you’ll see. But then he’s only a collateral. Here, take the book up to bed with you. I don’t exactly remember the details; but after you’ve read it I’ll bet anything you’ll leave your light burning all night!”

I left my light burning all night, as he had predicted; but it was chiefly because, till near dawn, I was absorbed in my reading. The account of the trial of Anne de Cornault, wife of the lord of Kerfol, was long and closely printed. It was, as my friend had said, probably an almost literal transcription of what took place in the courtroom; and the trial lasted nearly a month. Besides, the type of the book was very bad….

At first I thought of translating the old record. But it is full of wearisome repetitions, and the main lines of the story are forever straying off into side issues. So I have tried to disentangle it, and give it here in a simpler form. At times, however, I have reverted to the text because no other words could have conveyed so exactly the sense of what I felt at Kerfol; and nowhere have I added anything of my own.

III

It was in the year 16—— that Yves de Cornault, lord of the domain of Kerfol, went to the pardon of Locronan to perform his religious duties. He was a rich and powerful noble, then in his sixty-second year, but hale and sturdy, a great horseman and hunter and a pious man. So all his neighbours attested. In appearance he was short and broad, with a swarthy face, legs slightly bowed from the saddle, a hanging nose and broad hands with black hairs on them. He had married young and lost his wife and son soon after, and since then had lived alone at Kerfol. Twice a year he went to Morlaix, where he had a handsome house by the river, and spent a week or ten days there; and occasionally he rode to Rennes on business. Witnesses were found to declare that during these absences he led a life different from the one he was known to lead at Kerfol, where he busied himself with his estate, attended mass daily, and found his only amusement in hunting the wild boar and waterfowl. But these rumours are not particularly relevant, and it is certain that among people of his own class in the neighbourhood he passed for a stern and even austere man, observant of his religious obligations, and keeping strictly to himself. There was no talk of any familiarity with the women on his estate, though at that time the nobility were very free with their peasants. Some people said he had never looked at a woman since his wife’s death; but such things are hard to prove, and the evidence on this point was not worth much.

Well, in his sixty-second year, Yves de Cornault went to the pardon at Locronan, and saw there a young lady of Douarnenez, who had ridden over pillion behind her father to do her duty to the saint. Her name was Anne de Barrigan, and she came of good old Breton stock, but much less great and powerful than that of Yves de Cornault; and her father had squandered his fortune at cards, and lived almost like a peasant in his little granite manor on the moors…. I have said I would add nothing of my own to this bald statement of a strange case; but I must interrupt myself here to describe the young lady who rode up to the lych-gate of Locronan at the very moment when the Baron de Cornault was also dismounting there. I take my description from a faded drawing in red crayon, sober and truthful enough to be by a late pupil of the Clouets, which hangs in Lanrivain’s study, and is said to be a portrait of Anne de Barrigan. It is unsigned and has no mark of identity but the initials A. B., and the date 16——, the year after her marriage. It represents a young woman with a small oval face, almost pointed, yet wide enough for a full mouth with a tender depression at the corners. The nose is small, and the eyebrows are set rather high, far apart, and as lightly pencilled as the eyebrows in a Chinese painting. The forehead is high and serious, and the hair, which one feels to be fine and thick and fair, is drawn off it and lies close like a cap. The eyes are neither large nor small, hazel probably, with a look at once shy and steady. A pair of beautiful long hands are crossed below the lady’s breast….

The chaplain of Kerfol, and other witnesses, averred that when the Baron came back from Locronan he jumped from his horse, ordered another to be instantly saddled, called to a young page to come with him, and rode away that same evening to the south. His steward followed the next morning with coffers laden on a pair of pack mules. The following week Yves de Cornault rode back to Kerfol, sent for his vassals and tenants, and told them he was to be married at All Saints to Anne de Barrigan of Douarnenez. And on All Saints’ Day the marriage took place.

As to the next few years, the evidence on both sides seems to show that they passed happily for the couple. No one was found to say that Yves de Cornault had been unkind to his wife, and it was plain to all that he was content with his bargain. Indeed, it was admitted by the chaplain and other witnesses for the prosecution that the young lady had a softening influence on her husband, and that he became less exacting with his tenants, less harsh to peasants and dependents, and less subject to the fits of gloomy silence which had darkened his widowhood. As to his wife, the only grievance her champions could call up in her behalf was that Kerfol was a lonely place, and that when her husband was away on business at Rennes or Morlaix – whither she was never taken – she was not allowed so much as to walk in the park unaccompanied. But no one asserted that she was unhappy, though one servant-woman said she had surprised her crying, and had heard her say that she was a woman accursed to have no child, and nothing in life to call her own. But that was a natural enough feeling in a wife attached to her husband; and certainly it must have been a great grief to Yves de Cornault that she bore no son. Yet he never made her feel her childlessness as a reproach – she admits this in her evidence – but seemed to try to make her forget it by showering gifts and favours on her. Rich though he was, he had never been open-handed; but nothing was too fine for his wife, in the way of silks or gems or linen, or whatever else she fancied. Every wandering merchant was welcome at Kerfol, and when the master was called away he never came back without bringing his wife a handsome present – something curious and particular – from Morlaix or Rennes or Quimper. One of the waiting-women gave, in cross-examination, an interesting list of one year’s gifts, which I copy. From Morlaix, a carved ivory junk, with Chinamen at the oars, that a strange sailor had brought back as a votive offering for Notre Dame de la Clarté, above Ploumanac’h; from Quimper, an embroidered gown, worked by the nuns of the Assumption; from Rennes, a silver rose that opened and showed an amber Virgin with a crown of garnets; from Morlaix, again, a length of Damascus velvet shot with gold, bought of a Jew from Syria; and for Michaelmas that same year, from Rennes, a necklet or bracelet of round stones – emeralds and pearls and rubies – strung like beads on a fine gold chain. This was the present that pleased the lady best, the woman said. Later on, as it happened, it was produced at the trial, and appears to have struck the Judges and the public as a curious and valuable jewel.

The very same winter, the Baron absented himself again, this time as far as Bordeaux, and on his return he brought his wife something even odder and prettier than the bracelet. It was a winter evening when he rode up to Kerfol and, walking into the hall, found her sitting by the hearth, her chin on her hand, looking into the fire. He carried a velvet box in his hand and, setting it down, lifted the lid and let out a little golden-brown dog.

Anne de Cornault exclaimed with pleasure as the little creature bounded toward her. “Oh, it looks like a bird or a butterfly!” she cried as she picked it up; and the dog put its paws on her shoulders and looked at her with eyes “like a Christian’s.” After that she would never have it out of her sight, and petted and talked to it as if it had been a child – as indeed it was the nearest thing to a child she was to know. Yves de Cornault was much pleased with his purchase. The dog had been brought to him by a sailor from an East India merchantman, and the sailor had bought it of a pilgrim in a bazaar at Jaffa, who had stolen it from a nobleman’s wife in China: a perfectly permissible thing to do, since the pilgrim was a Christian and the nobleman a heathen doomed to hell-fire. Yves de Cornault had paid a long price for the dog, for they were beginning to be in demand at the French court, and the sailor knew he had got hold of a good thing; but Anne’s pleasure was so great that, to see her laugh and play with the little animal, her husband would doubtless have given twice the sum.

•   •   •

So far, all the evidence is at one, and the narrative plain sailing; but now the steering becomes difficult. I will try to keep as nearly as possible to Anne’s own statements; though toward the end, poor thing….

Well, to go back. The very year after the little brown dog was brought to Kerfol, Yves de Cornault, one winter night, was found dead at the head of a narrow flight of stairs leading down from his wife’s rooms to a door opening on the court. It was his wife who found him and gave the alarm, so distracted, poor wretch, with fear and horror – for his blood was all over her – that at first the roused household could not make out what she was saying, and thought she had suddenly gone mad. But there, sure enough, at the top of the stairs lay her husband, stone dead, and head foremost, the blood from his wounds dripping down to the steps below him. He had been dreadfully scratched and gashed about the face and throat, as if with curious pointed weapons; and one of his legs had a deep tear in it which had cut an artery, and probably caused his death. But how did he come there, and who had murdered him?

His wife declared that she had been asleep in her bed, and hearing his cry, had rushed out to find him lying on the stairs; but this was immediately questioned. In the first place, it was proved that from her room she could not have heard the struggle on the stairs, owing to the thickness of the walls and the length of the intervening passage; then it was evident that she had not been in bed and asleep, since she was dressed when she roused the house, and her bed had not been slept in. Moreover, the door at the bottom of the stairs was ajar, and it was noticed by the chaplain (an observant man) that the dress she wore was stained with blood about the knees, and that there were traces of small bloodstained hands low down on the staircase walls, so that it was conjectured that she had really been at the postern-door when her husband fell and, feeling her way up to him in the darkness on her hands and knees, had been stained by his blood dripping down on her. Of course it was argued on the other side that the blood-marks on her dress might have been caused by her kneeling down by her husband when she rushed out of her room; but there was the open door below, and the fact that the fingermarks in the staircase all pointed upward.

The accused held to her statement for the first two days, in spite of its improbability; but on the third day word was brought to her that Hervé de Lanrivain, a young nobleman of the neighbourhood, had been arrested for complicity in the crime. Two or three witnesses thereupon came forward to say that it was known throughout the country that Lanrivain had formerly been on good terms with the lady of Cornault; but that he had been absent from Brittany for over a year, and people had ceased to associate their names. The witnesses who made this statement were not of a very reputable sort. One was an old herb-gatherer suspected of witchcraft, another a drunken clerk from a neighbouring parish, the third a half-witted shepherd who could be made to say anything; and it was clear that the prosecution was not satisfied with its case, and would have liked to find more definite proof of Lanrivain’s complicity than the statement of the herb-gatherer, who swore to having seen him climbing the wall of the park on the night of the murder. One way of patching out incomplete proofs in those days was to put some sort of pressure, moral or physical, on the accused person. It is not clear what pressure was put on Anne de Cornault; but on the third day, when she was brought in court, she “appeared weak and wandering,” and after being encouraged to collect herself and speak the truth, on her honour and the wounds of her Blessed Redeemer, she confessed that she had in fact gone down the stairs to speak with Hervé de Lanrivain (who denied everything), and had been surprised there by the sound of her husband’s fall. That was better; and the prosecution rubbed its hands with satisfaction. The satisfaction increased when various dependents living at Kerfol were induced to say – with apparent sincerity – that during the year or two preceding his death their master had once more grown uncertain and irascible, and subject to the fits of brooding silence which his household had learned to dread before his second marriage. This seemed to show that things had not been going well at Kerfol; though no one could be found to say that there had been any signs of open disagreement between husband and wife.

Anne de Cornault, when questioned as to her reason for going down at night to open the door to Hervé de Lanrivain, made an answer which must have sent a smile around the court. She said it was because she was lonely and wanted to talk with the young man. Was this the only reason? she was asked; and replied: “Yes, by the Cross over your Lordships’ heads.” “But why at midnight?” the court asked. “Because I could see him in no other way.” I can see the exchange of glances across the ermine collars under the Crucifix.

Anne de Cornault, further questioned, said that her married life had been extremely lonely: “desolate” was the word she used. It was true that her husband seldom spoke harshly to her; but there were days when he did not speak at all. It was true that he had never struck or threatened her; but he kept her like a prisoner at Kerfol, and when he rode away to Morlaix or Quimper or Rennes he set so close a watch on her that she could not pick a flower in the garden without having a waiting-woman at her heels. “I am no Queen, to need such honours,” she once said to him; and he had answered that a man who has a treasure does not leave the key in the lock when he goes out. “Then take me with you,” she urged; but to this he said that towns were pernicious places, and young wives better off at their own firesides.

“But what did you want to say to Hervé de Lanrivain?” the court asked; and she answered: “To ask him to take me away.”

“Ah – you confess that you went down to him with adulterous thoughts?”

“No.”

“Then why did you want him to take you away?”

“Because I was afraid for my life.”

“Of whom were you afraid?”

“Of my husband.”

“Why were you afraid of your husband?”

“Because he had strangled my little dog.”

Another smile must have passed around the courtroom: in days when any nobleman had a right to hang his peasants – and most of them exercised it – pinching a pet animal’s windpipe was nothing to make a fuss about.

At this point one of the Judges, who appears to have had a certain sympathy for the accused, suggested that she should be allowed to explain herself in her own way; and she thereupon made the following statement.

The first years of her marriage had been lonely; but her husband had not been unkind to her. If she had had a child she would not have been unhappy; but the days were long, and it rained too much.

It was true that her husband, whenever he went away and left her, brought her a handsome present on his return; but this did not make up for the loneliness. At least nothing had, till he brought her the little brown dog from the East: after that she was much less unhappy. Her husband seemed pleased that she was so fond of the dog; he gave her leave to put her jewelled bracelet around its neck, and to keep it always with her.

One day she had fallen asleep in her room, with the dog at her feet, as his habit was. Her feet were bare and resting on his back. Suddenly she was waked by her husband: he stood beside her, smiling not unkindly.

“You look like my great-grandmother, Juliane de Cornault, lying in the chapel with her feet on a little dog,” he said.

The analogy sent a chill through her, but she laughed and answered: “Well, when I am dead you must put me beside her, carved in marble, with my dog at my feet.”

“Oho – we’ll wait and see,” he said, laughing also, but with his black brows close together. “The dog is the emblem of fidelity.”

“And do you doubt my right to lie with mine at my feet?”

“When I’m in doubt I find out,” he answered. “I am an old man,” he added, “and people say I make you lead a lonely life. But I swear you shall have your monument if you earn it.”

“And I swear to be faithful,” she returned, “if only for the sake of having my little dog at my feet.”

Not long afterward he went on business to the Quimper Assizes; and while he was away his aunt, the widow of a great nobleman of the duchy, came to spend a night at Kerfol on her way to the pardon of Ste. Barbe. She was a woman of piety and consequence, and much respected by Yves de Cornault, and when she proposed to Anne to go with her to Ste. Barbe no one could object, and even the chaplain declared himself in favour of the pilgrimage. So Anne set out for Ste. Barbe, and there for the first time she talked with Hervé de Lanrivain. He had come once or twice to Kerfol with his father, but she had never before exchanged a dozen words with him. They did not talk for more than five minutes now: it was under the chestnuts, as the procession was coming out of the chapel. He said: “I pity you,” and she was surprised, for she had not supposed that anyone thought her an object of pity. He added: “Call for me when you need me,” and she smiled a little, but was glad afterward, and thought often of the meeting.

She confessed to having seen him three times afterward: not more. How or where she would not say – one had the impression that she feared to implicate someone. Their meetings had been rare and brief; and at the last he had told her that he was starting the next day for a foreign country, on a mission which was not without peril and might keep him for many months absent. He asked her for a remembrance, and she had none to give him but the collar about the little dog’s neck. She was sorry afterward that she had given it, but he was so unhappy at going that she had not had the courage to refuse.

Her husband was away at the time. When he returned a few days later he picked up the animal to pet it, and noticed that its collar was missing. His wife told him that the dog had lost it in the undergrowth of the park, and that she and her maids had hunted a whole day for it. It was true, she explained to the court, that she had made the maids search for the necklet – they all believed the dog had lost it in the park….

Her husband made no comment, and that evening at supper he was in his usual mood, between good and bad: you could never tell which. He talked a good deal, describing what he had seen and done at Rennes; but now and then he stopped and looked hard at her, and when she went to bed she found her little dog strangled on her pillow. The little thing was dead, but still warm; she stooped to lift it, and her distress turned to horror when she discovered that it had been strangled by twisting twice round its throat the necklet she had given to Lanrivain.

The next morning at dawn she buried the dog in the garden, and hid the necklet in her breast. She said nothing to her husband, then or later, and he said nothing to her; but that day he had a peasant hanged for stealing a faggot in the park, and the next day he nearly beat to death a young horse he was breaking.

Winter set in, and the short days passed, and the long nights, one by one; and she heard nothing of Hervé de Lanrivain. It might be that her husband had killed him; or merely that he had been robbed of the necklet. Day after day by the hearth among the spinning maids, night after night alone on her bed, she wondered and trembled. Sometimes at table her husband looked across at her and smiled; and then she felt sure that Lanrivain was dead. She dared not try to get news of him, for she was sure her husband would find out if she did: she had an idea that he could find out anything. Even when a witch-woman who was a noted seer, and could show you the whole world in her crystal, came to the castle for a night’s shelter, and the maids flocked to her, Anne held back.

The winter was long and black and rainy. One day, in Yves de Cornault’s absence, some gypsies came to Kerfol with a troop of performing dogs. Anne bought the smallest and cleverest, a white dog with a feathery coat and one blue and one brown eye. It seemed to have been ill-treated by the gypsies, and clung to her plaintively when she took it from them. That evening her husband came back, and when she went to bed she found the dog strangled on her pillow.

After that she said to herself that she would never have another dog; but one bitter cold evening a poor lean greyhound was found whining at the castle-gate, and she took him in and forbade the maids to speak of him to her husband. She hid him in a room that no one went to, smuggled food to him from her own plate, made him a warm bed to lie on and petted him like a child.

Yves de Cornault came home, and the next day she found the greyhound strangled on her pillow. She wept in secret, but said nothing, and resolved that even if she met a dog dying of hunger she would never bring him into the castle; but one day she found a young sheepdog, a brindled puppy with good blue eyes, lying with a broken leg in the snow of the park. Yves de Cornault was at Rennes, and she brought the dog in, warmed and fed it, tied up its leg and hid it in the castle till her husband’s return. The day before, she gave it to a peasant woman who lived a long way off, and paid her handsomely to care for it and say nothing; but that night she heard a whining and scratching at her door, and when she opened it the lame puppy, drenched and shivering, jumped up on her with little sobbing barks. She hid him in her bed, and the next morning was about to have him taken back to the peasant woman when she heard her husband ride into the court. She shut the dog in a chest, and went down to receive him. An hour or two later, when she returned to her room, the puppy lay strangled on her pillow….

After that she dared not make a pet of any other dog; and her loneliness became almost unendurable. Sometimes, when she crossed the court of the castle, and thought no one was looking, she stopped to pat the old pointer at the gate. But one day as she was caressing him her husband came out of the chapel; and the next day the old dog was gone….

This curious narrative was not told in one sitting of the court, or received without impatience and incredulous comment. It was plain that the Judges were surprised by its puerility, and that it did not help the accused in the eyes of the public. It was an odd tale, certainly; but what did it prove? That Yves de Cornault disliked dogs, and that his wife, to gratify her own fancy, persistently ignored this dislike. As for pleading this trivial disagreement as an excuse for her relations – whatever their nature – with her supposed accomplice, the argument was so absurd that her own lawyer manifestly regretted having let her make use of it, and tried several times to cut short her story. But she went on to the end, with a kind of hypnotized insistence, as though the scenes she evoked were so real to her that she had forgotten where she was and imagined herself to be re-living them.

At length the Judge who had previously shown a certain kindness to her said (leaning forward a little, one may suppose, from his row of dozing colleagues): “Then you would have us believe that you murdered your husband because he would not let you keep a pet dog?”

“I did not murder my husband.”

“Who did, then? Hervé de Lanrivain?”

“No.”

“Who then? Can you tell us?”

“Yes, I can tell you. The dogs—” At that point she was carried out of the court in a swoon.

•   •   •

It was evident that her lawyer tried to get her to abandon this line of defense. Possibly her explanation, whatever it was, had seemed convincing when she poured it out to him in the heat of their first private colloquy; but now that it was exposed to the cold daylight of judicial scrutiny, and the banter of the town, he was thoroughly ashamed of it, and would have sacrificed her without a scruple to save his professional reputation. But the obstinate Judge – who perhaps, after all, was more inquisitive than kindly – evidently wanted to hear the story out, and she was ordered, the next day, to continue her deposition.

She said that after the disappearance of the old watchdog nothing particular happened for a month or two. Her husband was much as usual: she did not remember any special incident. But one evening a pedlar woman came to the castle and was selling trinkets to the maids. She had no heart for trinkets, but she stood looking on while the women made their choice. And then, she did not know how, but the pedlar coaxed her into buying for herself a pear-shaped pomander with a strong scent in it – she had once seen something of the kind on a gypsy woman. She had no desire for the pomander, and did not know why she had bought it. The pedlar said that whoever wore it had the power to read the future; but she did not really believe that, or care much either. However, she bought the thing and took it up to her room, where she sat turning it about in her hand. Then the strange scent attracted her and she began to wonder what kind of spice was in the box. She opened it and found a grey bean rolled in a strip of paper; and on the paper she saw a sign she knew, and a message from Hervé de Lanrivain, saying that he was at home again and would be at the door in the court that night after the moon had set….

She burned the paper and sat down to think. It was nightfall, and her husband was at home…. She had no way of warning Lanrivain, and there was nothing to do but to wait….

At this point I fancy the drowsy courtroom beginning to wake up. Even to the oldest hand on the bench there must have been a certain relish in picturing the feelings of a woman on receiving such a message at nightfall from a man living twenty miles away, to whom she had no means of sending a warning….

She was not a clever woman, I imagine; and as the first result of her cogitation she appears to have made the mistake of being, that evening, too kind to her husband. She could not ply him with wine, according to the traditional expedient, for though he drank heavily at times he had a strong head; and when he drank beyond its strength it was because he chose to, and not because a woman coaxed him. Not his wife, at any rate – she was an old story by now. As I read the case, I fancy there was no feeling for her left in him but the hatred occasioned by his supposed dishonour.

At any rate, she tried to call up her old graces; but early in the evening he complained of pains and fever, and left the hall to go up to the closet where he sometimes slept. His servant carried him a cup of hot wine, and brought back word that he was sleeping and not to be disturbed; and an hour later, when Anne lifted the tapestry and listened at his door, she heard his loud regular breathing. She thought it might be a feint, and stayed a long time barefooted in the passage, her ear to the crack; but the breathing went on too steadily and naturally to be other than that of a man in a sound sleep. She crept back to her room reassured, and stood in the window watching the moon set through the trees of the park. The sky was misty and starless, and after the moon went down the night was black as pitch. She knew the time had come, and stole along the passage, past her husband’s door – where she stopped again to listen to his breathing – to the top of the stairs. There she paused a moment, and assured herself that no one was following her; then she began to go down the stairs in the darkness. They were so steep and winding that she had to go very slowly, for fear of stumbling. Her one thought was to get the door unbolted, tell Lanrivain to make his escape, and hasten back to her room. She had tried the bolt earlier in the evening, and managed to put a little grease on it; but nevertheless, when she drew it, it gave a squeak … not loud, but it made her heart stop; and the next minute, overhead, she heard a noise….

“What noise?” the prosecution interposed.

“My husband’s voice calling out my name and cursing me.”

“What did you hear after that?”

“A terrible scream and a fall.”

“Where was Hervé de Lanrivain at this time?”

“He was standing outside in the court. I just made him out in the darkness. I told him for God’s sake to go, and then I pushed the door shut.”

“What did you do next?”

“I stood at the foot of the stairs and listened.”

“What did you hear?”

“I heard dogs snarling and panting.” (Visible discouragement of the bench, boredom of the public, and exasperation of the lawyer for the defense. Dogs again — ! But the inquisitive Judge insisted.)

“What dogs?”

She bent her head and spoke so low that she had to be told to repeat her answer: “I don’t know.”

“How do you mean – you don’t know?”

“I don’t know what dogs….”

The Judge again intervened: “Try to tell us exactly what happened. How long did you remain at the foot of the stairs?”

“Only a few minutes.”

“And what was going on meanwhile overhead?”

“The dogs kept on snarling and panting. Once or twice he cried out. I think he moaned once. Then he was quiet.”

“Then what happened?”

“Then I heard a sound like the noise of a pack when the wolf is thrown to them – gulping and lapping.”

(There was a groan of disgust and repulsion through the court, and another attempted intervention by the distracted lawyer. But the inquisitive Judge was still inquisitive.)

“And all the while you did not go up?”

“Yes – I went up then – to drive them off.”

“The dogs?”

“Yes.”

“Well — ?”

“When I got there it was quite dark. I found my husband’s flint and steel and struck a spark. I saw him lying there. He was dead.”

“And the dogs?”

“The dogs were gone.”

“Gone – where to?”

“I don’t know. There was no way out – and there were no dogs at Kerfol.”

She straightened herself to her full height, threw her arms above her head, and fell down on the stone floor with a long scream. There was a moment of confusion in the courtroom. Someone on the bench was heard to say: “This is clearly a case for the ecclesiastical authorities” – and the prisoner’s lawyer doubtless jumped at the suggestion.

After this, the trial loses itself in a maze of cross-questioning and squabbling. Every witness who was called corroborated Anne de Cornault’s statement that there were no dogs at Kerfol: had been none for several months. The master of the house had taken a dislike to dogs, there was no denying it. But, on the other hand, at the inquest, there had been long and bitter discussions as to the nature of the dead man’s wounds. One of the surgeons called in had spoken of marks that looked like bites. The suggestion of witchcraft was revived, and the opposing lawyers hurled tomes of necromancy at each other.

At last Anne de Cornault was brought back into court – at the instance of the same Judge – and asked if she knew where the dogs she spoke of could have come from. On the body of her Redeemer she swore that she did not. Then the Judge put his final question: “If the dogs you think you heard had been known to you, do you think you would have recognized them by their barking?”

“Yes.”

“Did you recognize them?”

“Yes.”

“What dogs do you take them to have been?”

“My dead dogs,” she said in a whisper…. She was taken out of court, not to reappear there again. There was some kind of ecclesiastical investigation, and the end of the business was that the Judges disagreed with each other, and with the ecclesiastical committee, and that Anne de Cornault was finally handed over to the keeping of her husband’s family, who shut her up in the keep of Kerfol, where she is said to have died many years later, a harmless madwoman.

So ends her story. As for that of Hervé de Lanrivain, I had only to apply to his collateral descendant for its subsequent details. The evidence against the young man being insufficient, and his family influence in the duchy considerable, he was set free, and left soon afterward for Paris. He was probably in no mood for a worldly life, and he appears to have come almost immediately under the influence of the famous M. Arnauld d’Andilly and the gentlemen of Port Royal. A year or two later he was received into their Order, and without achieving any particular distinction he followed its good and evil fortunes till his death some twenty years later. Lanrivain showed me a portrait of him by a pupil of Philippe de Champaigne: sad eyes, an impulsive mouth and a narrow brow. Poor Hervé de Lanrivain: it was a grey ending. Yet as I looked at his stiff and sallow effigy, in the dark dress of the Jansenists, I almost found myself envying his fate. After all, in the course of his life two great things had happened to him: he had loved romantically, and he must have talked with Pascal….

“Scribner’s Magazine”, March 1916

H. P. Lovecraft

1922

In relating the circumstances which have led to my confinement within this refuge for the demented, I am aware that my present position will create a natural doubt of the authenticity of my narrative. It is an unfortunate fact that the bulk of humanity is too limited in its mental vision to weigh with patience and intelligence those isolated phenomena, seen and felt only by a psychologically sensitive few, which lie outside its common experience. Men of broader intellect know that there is no sharp distinction betwixt the real and the unreal; that all things appear as they do only by virtue of the delicate individual physical and mental media through which we are made conscious of them; but the prosaic materialism of the majority condemns as madness the flashes of super-sight which penetrate the common veil of obvious empiricism.

My name is Jervas Dudley, and from earliest childhood I have been a dreamer and a visionary. Wealthy beyond the necessity of a commercial life, and temperamentally unfitted for the formal studies and social recreations of my acquaintances, I have dwelt ever in realms apart from the visible world; spending my youth and adolescence in ancient and little-known books, and in roaming the fields and groves of the region near my ancestral home. I do not think that what I read in these books or saw in these fields and groves was exactly what other boys read and saw there; but of this I must say little, since detailed speech would but confirm those cruel slanders upon my intellect which I sometimes overhear from the whispers of the stealthy attendants around me. It is sufficient for me to relate events without analysing causes.

I have said that I dwelt apart from the visible world, but I have not said that I dwelt alone. This no human creature may do; for lacking the fellowship of the living, he inevitably draws upon the companionship of things that are not, or are no longer, living. Close by my home there lies a singular wooded hollow, in whose twilight deeps I spent most of my time; reading, thinking, and dreaming. Down its moss-covered slopes my first steps of infancy were taken, and around its grotesquely gnarled oak trees my first fancies of boyhood were woven. Well did I come to know the presiding dryads of those trees, and often have I watched their wild dances in the struggling beams of a waning moon — but of these things I must not now speak. I will tell only of the lone tomb in the darkest of the hillside thickets; the deserted tomb of the Hydes, an old and exalted family whose last direct descendant had been laid within its black recesses many decades before my birth.

The vault to which I refer is of ancient granite, weathered and discoloured by the mists and dampness of generations. Excavated back into the hillside, the structure is visible only at the entrance. The door, a ponderous and forbidding slab of stone, hangs upon rusted iron hinges, and is fastened ajar in a queerly sinister way by means of heavy iron chains and padlocks, according to a gruesome fashion of half a century ago. The abode of the race whose scions are here inured had once crowned the declivity which holds the tomb, but had long since fallen victim to the flames which sprang up from a disastrous stroke of lightning. Of the midnight storm which destroyed this gloomy mansion, the older inhabitants of the region sometimes speak in hushed and uneasy voices; alluding to what they call “divine wrath” in a manner that in later years vaguely increased the always strong fascination which I felt for the forest-darkened sepulchre. One man only had perished in the fire. When the last of the Hydes was buried in this place of shade and stillness, the sad urnful of ashes had come from a distant land; to which the family had repaired when the mansion burned down. No one remains to lay flowers before the granite portal, and few care to brave the depressing shadows which seem to linger strangely about the water-worn stones.

I shall never forget the afternoon when first I stumbled upon the half-hidden house of death. It was in midsummer, when the alchemy of Nature transmutes the sylvan landscape to one vivid and almost homogeneous mass of green; when the senses are well-nigh intoxicated with the surging seas of moist verdure and the subtly indefinable odours of the soil and the vegetation. In such surroundings the mind loses its perspective; time and space become trivial and unreal, and echoes of a forgotten prehistoric past beat insistently upon the enthralled consciousness. All day I had been wandering through the mystic groves of the hollow; thinking thoughts I need not discuss, and conversing with things I need not name. In years a child of ten, I had seen and heard many wonders unknown to the throng; and was oddly aged in certain respects. When, upon forcing my way between two savage clumps of briers, I suddenly encountered the entrance of the vault, I had no knowledge of what I had discovered. The dark blocks of granite, the door so curiously ajar, and the funereal carvings above the arch, aroused in me no associations of mournful or terrible character. Of graves and tombs I knew and imagined much, but had on account of my peculiar temperament been kept from all personal contact with churchyards and cemeteries. The strange stone house on the woodland slope was to me only a source of interest and speculation; and its cold, damp interior, into which I vainly peered through the aperture so tantalisingly left, contained for me no hint of death or decay. But in that instant of curiosity was born the madly unreasoning desire which has brought me to this hell of confinement. Spurred on by a voice which must have come from the hideous soul of the forest, I resolved to enter the beckoning gloom in spite of the ponderous chains which barred my passage. In the waning light of day I alternately rattled the rusty impediments with a view to throwing wide the stone door, and essayed to squeeze my slight form through the space already provided; but neither plan met with success. At first curious, I was now frantic; and when in the thickening twilight I returned to my home, I had sworn to the hundred gods of the grove that at any cost I would some day force an entrance to the black, chilly depths that seemed calling out to me. The physician with the iron-grey beard who comes each day to my room once told a visitor that this decision marked the beginning of a pitiful monomania; but I will leave final judgment to my readers when they shall have learnt all.

The months following my discovery were spent in futile attempts to force the complicated padlock of the slightly open vault, and in carefully guarded inquiries regarding the nature and history of the structure. With the traditionally receptive ears of the small boy, I learned much; though an habitual secretiveness caused me to tell no one of my information or my resolve. It is perhaps worth mentioning that I was not at all surprised or terrified on learning of the nature of the vault. My rather original ideas regarding life and death had caused me to associate the cold clay with the breathing body in a vague fashion; and I felt that the great and sinister family of the burned-down mansion was in some way represented within the stone space I sought to explore. Mumbled tales of the weird rites and godless revels of bygone years in the ancient hall gave to me a new and potent interest in the tomb, before whose door I would sit for hours at a time each day. Once I thrust a candle within the nearly closed entrance, but could see nothing save a flight of damp stone steps leading downward. The odour of the place repelled yet bewitched me. I felt I had known it before, in a past remote beyond all recollection; beyond even my tenancy of the body I now possess.

The year after I first beheld the tomb, I stumbled upon a worm-eaten translation of Plutarch’s Lives in the book-filled attic of my home. Reading the life of Theseus, I was much impressed by that passage telling of the great stone beneath which the boyish hero was to find his tokens of destiny whenever he should become old enough to lift its enormous weight. This legend had the effect of dispelling my keenest impatience to enter the vault, for it made me feel that the time was not yet ripe. Later, I told myself, I should grow to a strength and ingenuity which might enable me to unfasten the heavily chained door with ease; but until then I would do better by conforming to what seemed the will of Fate.

Accordingly my watches by the dank portal became less persistent, and much of my time was spent in other though equally strange pursuits. I would sometimes rise very quietly in the night, stealing out to walk in those churchyards and places of burial from which I had been kept by my parents. What I did there I may not say, for I am not now sure of the reality of certain things; but I know that on the day after such a nocturnal ramble I would often astonish those about me with my knowledge of topics almost forgotten for many generations. It was after a night like this that I shocked the community with a queer conceit about the burial of the rich and celebrated Squire Brewster, a maker of local history who was interred in 1711, and whose slate headstone, bearing a graven skull and crossbones, was slowly crumbling to powder. In a moment of childish imagination I vowed not only that the undertaker, Goodman Simpson, had stolen the silver-buckled shoes, silken hose, and satin small-clothes of the deceased before burial; but that the Squire himself, not fully inanimate, had turned twice in his mound-covered coffin on the day after interment.

But the idea of entering the tomb never left my thoughts; being indeed stimulated by the unexpected genealogical discovery that my own maternal ancestry possessed at least a slight link with the supposedly extinct family of the Hydes. Last of my paternal race, I was likewise the last of this older and more mysterious line. I began to feel that the tomb was mine, and to look forward with hot eagerness to the time when I might pass within that stone door and down those slimy stone steps in the dark. I now formed the habit of listening very intently at the slightly open portal, choosing my favourite hours of midnight stillness for the odd vigil. By the time I came of age, I had made a small clearing in the thicket before the mould-stained facade of the hillside, allowing the surrounding vegetation to encircle and overhang the space like the walls and roof of a sylvan bower. This bower was my temple, the fastened door my shrine, and here I would lie outstretched on the mossy ground, thinking strange thoughts and dreaming strange dreams.

The night of the first revelation was a sultry one. I must have fallen asleep from fatigue, for it was with a distinct sense of awakening that I heard the voices. Of those tones and accents I hesitate to speak; of their quality I will not speak; but I may say that they presented certain uncanny differences in vocabulary, pronunciation, and mode of utterance. Every shade of New England dialect, from the uncouth syllables of the Puritan colonists to the precise rhetoric of fifty years ago, seemed represented in that shadowy colloquy, though it was only later that I noticed the fact. At the time, indeed, my attention was distracted from this matter by another phenomenon; a phenomenon so fleeting that I could not take oath upon its reality. I barely fancied that as I awoke, a light had been hurriedly extinguished within the sunken sepulchre. I do not think I was either astounded or panic-stricken, but I know that I was greatly and permanently changed that night. Upon returning home I went with much directness to a rotting chest in the attic, wherein I found the key which next day unlocked with ease the barrier I had so long stormed in vain.

It was in the soft glow of late afternoon that I first entered the vault on the abandoned slope. A spell was upon me, and my heart leaped with an exultation I can but ill describe. As I closed the door behind me and descended the dripping steps by the light of my lone candle, I seemed to know the way; and though the candle sputtered with the stifling reek of the place, I felt singularly at home in the musty, charnel-house air. Looking about me, I beheld many marble slabs bearing coffins, or the remains of coffins. Some of these were sealed and intact, but others had nearly vanished, leaving the silver handles and plates isolated amidst certain curious heaps of whitish dust. Upon one plate I read the name of Sir Geoffrey Hyde, who had come from Sussex in 1640 and died here a few years later. In a conspicuous alcove was one fairly well-preserved and untenanted casket, adorned with a single name which brought to me both a smile and a shudder. An odd impulse caused me to climb upon the broad slab, extinguish my candle, and lie down within the vacant box.

In the grey light of dawn I staggered from the vault and locked the chain of the door behind me. I was no longer a young man, though but twenty-one winters had chilled my bodily frame. Early-rising villagers who observed my homeward progress looked at me strangely, and marvelled at the signs of ribald revelry which they saw in one whose life was known to be sober and solitary. I did not appear before my parents till after a long and refreshing sleep.

Henceforward I haunted the tomb each night; seeing, hearing, and doing things I must never reveal. My speech, always susceptible to environmental influences, was the first thing to succumb to the change; and my suddenly acquired archaism of diction was soon remarked upon. Later a queer boldness and recklessness came into my demeanour, till I unconsciously grew to possess the bearing of a man of the world despite my lifelong seclusion. My formerly silent tongue waxed voluble with the easy grace of a Chesterfield or the godless cynicism of a Rochester. I displayed a peculiar erudition utterly unlike the fantastic, monkish lore over which I had pored in youth; and covered the flyleaves of my books with facile impromptu epigrams which brought up suggestions of Gay, Prior, and the sprightliest of the Augustan wits and rhymesters. One morning at breakfast I came close to disaster by declaiming in palpably liquorish accents an effusion of eighteenth-century Bacchanalian mirth; a bit of Georgian playfulness never recorded in a book, which ran something like this:

Come hither, my lads, with your tankards of ale,

And drink to the present before it shall fail;

Pile each on your platter a mountain of beef,

For ’tis eating and drinking that bring us relief:

So fill up your glass,

For life will soon pass;

When you’re dead ye’ll ne’er drink to your king or your lass!

Anacreon had a red nose, so they say

But what’s a red nose if ye’re happy and gay?

Gad split me! I’d rather be red whilst I’m here,

Than white as a lily — and dead half a year!

So Betty, my miss,

Come give me a kiss;

In hell there’s no innkeeper’s daughter like this!

Young Harry, propp’d up just as straight as he’s able,

Will soon lose his wig and slip under the table;

But fill up your goblets and pass ’em around—

Better under the table than under the ground!

So revel and chaff

As ye thirstily quaff:

Under six feet of dirt ’tis less easy to laugh!

The fiend strike me blue! I’m scarce able to walk,

And damn me if I can stand upright or talk!

Here, landlord, bid Betty to summon a chair;

I’ll try home for a while, for my wife is not there!

So lend me a hand;

I’m not able to stand,

But I’m gay whilst I linger on top of the land!

About this time I conceived my present fear of fire and thunderstorms. Previously indifferent to such things, I had now an unspeakable horror of them; and would retire to the innermost recesses of the house whenever the heavens threatened an electrical display. A favourite haunt of mine during the day was the ruined cellar of the mansion that had burned down, and in fancy I would picture the structure as it had been in its prime. On one occasion I startled a villager by leading him confidently to a shallow sub-cellar, of whose existence I seemed to know in spite of the fact that it had been unseen and forgotten for many generations.

At last came that which I had long feared. My parents, alarmed at the altered manner and appearance of their only son, commenced to exert over my movements a kindly espionage which threatened to result in disaster. I had told no one of my visits to the tomb, having guarded my secret purpose with religious zeal since childhood; but now I was forced to exercise care in threading the mazes of the wooded hollow, that I might throw off a possible pursuer. My key to the vault I kept suspended from a cord about my neck, its presence known only to me. I never carried out of the sepulchre any of the things I came upon whilst within its walls.

One morning as I emerged from the damp tomb and fastened the chain of the portal with none too steady hand, I beheld in an adjacent thicket the dreaded face of a watcher. Surely the end was near; for my bower was discovered, and the objective of my nocturnal journeys revealed. The man did not accost me, so I hastened home in an effort to overhear what he might report to my careworn father. Were my sojourns beyond the chained door about to be proclaimed to the world? Imagine my delighted astonishment on hearing the spy inform my parent in a cautious whisper that I had spent the night in the bower outside the tomb; my sleep-filmed eyes fixed upon the crevice where the padlocked portal stood ajar! By what miracle had the watcher been thus deluded? I was now convinced that a supernatural agency protected me. Made bold by this heaven-sent circumstance, I began to resume perfect openness in going to the vault; confident that no one could witness my entrance. For a week I tasted to the full the joys of that charnel conviviality which I must not describe, when the thing happened, and I was borne away to this accursed abode of sorrow and monotony.

I should not have ventured out that night; for the taint of thunder was in the clouds, and a hellish phosphorescence rose from the rank swamp at the bottom of the hollow. The call of the dead, too, was different. Instead of the hillside tomb, it was the charred cellar on the crest of the slope whose presiding daemon beckoned to me with unseen fingers. As I emerged from an intervening grove upon the plain before the ruin, I beheld in the misty moonlight a thing I had always vaguely expected. The mansion, gone for a century, once more reared its stately height to the raptured vision; every window ablaze with the splendour of many candles. Up the long drive rolled the coaches of the Boston gentry, whilst on foot came a numerous assemblage of powdered exquisites from the neighbouring mansions. With this throng I mingled, though I knew I belonged with the hosts rather than with the guests. Inside the hall were music, laughter, and wine on every hand. Several faces I recognised; though I should have known them better had they been shrivelled or eaten away by death and decomposition. Amidst a wild and reckless throng I was the wildest and most abandoned. Gay blasphemy poured in torrents from my lips, and in my shocking sallies I heeded no law of God, Man, or Nature. Suddenly a peal of thunder, resonant even above the din of the swinish revelry, clave the very roof and laid a hush of fear upon the boisterous company. Red tongues of flame and searing gusts of heat engulfed the house; and the roysterers, struck with terror at the descent of a calamity which seemed to transcend the bounds of unguided Nature, fled shrieking into the night. I alone remained, riveted to my seat by a grovelling fear which I had never felt before. And then a second horror took possession of my soul. Burnt alive to ashes, my body dispersed by the four winds, I might never lie in the tomb of the Hydes! Was not my coffin prepared for me? Had I not a right to rest till eternity amongst the descendants of Sir Geoffrey Hyde? Aye! I would claim my heritage of death, even though my soul go seeking through the ages for another corporeal tenement to represent it on that vacant slab in the alcove of the vault. Jervas Hyde should never share the sad fate of Palinurus!

As the phantom of the burning house faded, I found myself screaming and struggling madly in the arms of two men, one of whom was the spy who had followed me to the tomb. Rain was pouring down in torrents, and upon the southern horizon were flashes of the lightning that had so lately passed over our heads. My father, his face lined with sorrow, stood by as I shouted my demands to be laid within the tomb; frequently admonishing my captors to treat me as gently as they could. A blackened circle on the floor of the ruined cellar told of a violent stroke from the heavens; and from this spot a group of curious villagers with lanterns were prying a small box of antique workmanship which the thunderbolt had brought to light. Ceasing my futile and now objectless writhing, I watched the spectators as they viewed the treasure-trove, and was permitted to share in their discoveries. The box, whose fastenings were broken by the stroke which had unearthed it, contained many papers and objects of value; but I had eyes for one thing alone. It was the porcelain miniature of a young man in a smartly curled bag-wig, and bore the initials “J. H.” The face was such that as I gazed, I might well have been studying my mirror.

On the following day I was brought to this room with the barred windows, but I have been kept informed of certain things through an aged and simple-minded servitor, for whom I bore a fondness in infancy, and who like me loves the churchyard. What I have dared relate of my experiences within the vault has brought me only pitying smiles. My father, who visits me frequently, declares that at no time did I pass the chained portal, and swears that the rusted padlock had not been touched for fifty years when he examined it. He even says that all the village knew of my journeys to the tomb, and that I was often watched as I slept in the bower outside the grim facade, my half-open eyes fixed on the crevice that leads to the interior. Against these assertions I have no tangible proof to offer, since my key to the padlock was lost in the struggle on that night of horrors. The strange things of the past which I learnt during those nocturnal meetings with the dead he dismisses as the fruits of my lifelong and omnivorous browsing amongst the ancient volumes of the family library. Had it not been for my old servant Hiram, I should have by this time become quite convinced of my madness.

But Hiram, loyal to the last, has held faith in me, and has done that which impels me to make public at least a part of my story. A week ago he burst open the lock which chains the door of the tomb perpetually ajar, and descended with a lantern into the murky depths. On a slab in an alcove he found an old but empty coffin whose tarnished plate bears the single word “Jervas”. In that coffin and in that vault, they have promised me I shall be buried.

“The Vagrant”, March 1922