The Gothic Terror MEGAPACK™: 17 Classic Tales (19 page)

“Well, sir, if you want to know the fact, I have; and if you choose to cultivate old Poquelin’s society you can have one, too.”

“White,” called a facetious member, but White did not notice. “White,” he called again.

“What?” demanded White, with a scowl.

“Did you see the ghost?”

“Yes, sir; I did,” cried White, hitting the table, and handing the President a paper which brought the Board to other business.

The story got among the gossips that somebody (they were afraid to say little White) had been to the Poquelin mansion by night and beheld something appalling. The rumor was but a shadow of the truth, magnified and distorted as is the manner of shadows. He had seen skeletons walking, and had barely escaped the clutches of one by making the sign of the cross.

Some madcap boys with an appetite for the horrible plucked up courage to venture through the dried marsh by the cattle-path, and come before the house at a spectral hour when the air was full of bats. Something which they but half saw—half a sight was enough—sent them tearing back through the willow-brakes and acacia bushes to their homes, where they fairly dropped down, and cried:

“Was it white?”

“No—yes—nearly so—we can’t tell—but we saw it.” And one could hardly doubt, to look at their ashen faces, that they had, whatever it was.

“If that old rascal lived in the country we come from,” said certain Americains, “he’d have been tarred and feathered before now, wouldn’t he, Sanders?”

“Well, now he just would.”

“And we’d have rid him on a rail, wouldn’t we?”

“That’s what I allow.”

“Tell you what you
could
do.” They were talking to some rollicking Creoles who had assumed an absolute necessity for doing
something
. “What is it you call this thing where an old man marries a young girl, and you come out with horns and—”

“
Charivari
?” asked the Creoles.

“Yes, that’s it. Why don’t you shivaree him?” Felicitous suggestion.

Little White, with his wife beside him, was sitting on their doorsteps on the sidewalk, as Creole custom had taught them, looking toward the sunset. They had moved into the lately-opened street. The view was not attractive on the score of beauty. The houses were small and scattered, and across the flat commons, spite of the lofty tangle of weeds and bushes, and spite of the thickets of acacia, they needs must see the dismal old Poquelin mansion, tilted awry and shutting out the declining sun. The moon, white and slender, was hanging the tip of its horn over one of the chimneys.

“And you say,” said the Secretary, “the old black man has been going by here alone? Patty, suppose old Poquelin should be concocting some mischief; he don’t lack provocation; the way that clod hit him the other day was enough to have killed him. Why, Patty, he dropped as quick as
that
! No wonder you haven’t seen him. I wonder if they haven’t heard something about him up at the drug-store. Suppose I go and see.”

“Do,” said his wife.

She sat alone for half an hour, watching that sudden going out of the day peculiar to the latitude.

“That moon is ghost enough for one house,” she said, as her husband returned. “It has gone right down the chimney.”

“Patty,” said little White, “the drug-clerk says the boys are going to shivaree old Poquelin to-night. I’m going to try to stop it.”

“Why, White,” said his wife, “you’d better not. You’ll get hurt.”

“No, I’ll not.”

“Yes, you will.”

“I’m going to sit out here until they come along. They’re compelled to pass right by here.”

“Why, White, it may be midnight before they start; you’re not going to sit out here till then.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Well, you’re very foolish,” said Mrs. White in an undertone, looking anxious, and tapping one of the steps with her foot.

They sat a very long time talking over little family matters.

“What’s that?” at last said Mrs. White.

“That’s the nine-o’clock gun,” said White, and they relapsed into a long-sustained, drowsy silence.

“Patty, you’d better go in and go to bed,” said he at last.

“I’m not sleepy.”

“Well, you’re very foolish,” quietly remarked little White, and again silence fell upon them.

“Patty, suppose I walk out to the old house and see if I can find out any thing.”

“Suppose,” said she, “you don’t do any such—listen!”

Down the street arose a great hubbub. Dogs and boys were howling and barking; men were laughing, shouting, groaning, and blowing horns, whooping, and clanking cow-bells, whinnying, and howling, and rattling pots and pans.

“They are coming this way,” said little White. “You had better go into the house, Patty.”

“So had you.”

“No. I’m going to see if I can’t stop them.”

“Why, White!”

“I’ll be back in a minute,” said White, and went toward the noise.

In a few moments the little Secretary met the mob. The pen hesitates on the word, for there is a respectable difference, measurable only on the scale of the half century, between a mob and a
charivari
. Little White lifted his ineffectual voice. He faced the head of the disorderly column, and cast himself about as if he were made of wood and moved by the jerk of a string. He rushed to one who seemed, from the size and clatter of his tin pan, to be a leader. “
Stop these fellows, Bienvenu, stop them just a minute, till I tell them something
.” Bienvenu turned and brandished his instruments of discord in an imploring way to the crowd. They slackened their pace, two or three hushed their horns and joined the prayer of little White and Bienvenu for silence. The throng halted. The hush was delicious.

“Bienvenu,” said little White, “don’t shivaree old Poquelin to-night; he’s—”

“My fwang,” said the swaying Bienvenu, “who tail you I goin’ to chahivahi somebody, eh? Yon sink bickause I make a little playfool wiz zis tin pan zat I am
dhonk
?”

“Oh, no, Bienvenu, old fellow, you’re all right. I was afraid you might not know that old Poquelin was sick, you know, but you’re not going there, are you?”

“My fwang, I vay soy to tail you zat you ah dhonk as de dev’. I am
shem
of you. I ham ze servan’ of ze
publique
. Zese
citoyens
goin’ to wickwest Jean Poquelin to give to the Ursuline’ two hondred fifty dolla’—”

“
He quoi
!” cried a listener, “
Cinq cent piastres, oui
!”

“
Oui
!” said Bienvenu, “and if he wiffuse we make him some lit’
musique
; ta-ra ta!” He hoisted a merry hand and foot, then frowning, added: “Old Poquelin got no bizniz dhink s’much w’isky.”

“But, gentlemen,” said little White, around whom a circle had gathered, “the old man is very sick.”

“My faith!” cried a tiny Creole, “we did not make him to be sick. W’en we have say we going make
le charivari
, do you want that we hall tell a lie? My faith! ’sfools!”

“But you can shivaree somebody else,” said desperate little White.

“
Oui
” cried Bienvenu, “
et chahivahi
Jean-ah Poquelin tomo’w!”

“Let us go to Madame Schneider!” cried two or three, and amid huzzas and confused cries, among which was heard a stentorian Celtic call for drinks, the crowd again began to move.

“
Cent piastres pour l’hopital de charite
!”

“Hurrah!”

“One hongred dolla’ for Charity Hospital!”

“Hurrah!”

“Whang!” went a tin pan, the crowd yelled, and Pandemonium gaped again. They were off at a right angle.

Nodding, Mrs. White looked at the mantle-clock.

“Well, if it isn’t away after midnight.”

The hideous noise down street was passing beyond earshot. She raised a sash and listened. For a moment there was silence. Some one came to the door.

“Is that you, White?”

“Yes.” He entered. “I succeeded, Patty.”

“Did you?” said Patty, joyfully.

“Yes. They’ve gone down to shivaree the old Dutchwoman who married her step-daughter’s sweetheart. They say she has got to pay a hundred dollars to the hospital before they stop.”

The couple retired, and Mrs. White slumbered. She was awakened by her husband snapping the lid of his watch.

“What time?” she asked.

“Half-past three. Patty, I haven’t slept a wink. Those fellows are out yet. Don’t you hear them?”

“Why, White, they’re coming this way!”

“I know they are,” said White, sliding out of bed and drawing on his clothes, “and they’re coming fast. You’d better go away from that window, Patty. My! what a clatter!”

“Here they are,” said Mrs. White, but her husband was gone. Two or three hundred men and boys pass the place at a rapid walk straight down the broad, new street, toward the hated house of ghosts. The din was terrific. She saw little White at the head of the rabble brandishing his arms and trying in vain to make himself heard; but they only shook their heads laughing and hooting the louder, and so passed, bearing him on before them.

Swiftly they pass out from among the houses, away from the dim oil lamps of the street, out into the broad starlit commons, and enter the willowy jungles of the haunted ground. Some hearts fail and their owners lag behind and turn back, suddenly remembering how near morning it is. But the most part push on, tearing the air with their clamor.

Down ahead of them in the long, thicket-darkened way there is—singularly enough—a faint, dancing light. It must be very near the old house; it is. It has stopped now. It is a lantern, and is under a well-known sapling which has grown up on the wayside since the canal was filled. Now it swings mysteriously to and fro. A goodly number of the more ghost-fearing give up the sport; but a full hundred move forward at a run, doubling their devilish howling and banging.

Yes; it is a lantern, and there are two persons under the tree. The crowd draws near—drops into a walk; one of the two is the old African mute; he lifts the lantern up so that it shines on the other; the crowd recoils; there is a hush of all clangor, and all at once, with a cry of mingled fright and horror from every throat, the whole throng rushes back, dropping every thing, sweeping past little White and hurrying on, never stopping until the jungle is left behind, and then to find that not one in ten has seen the cause of the stampede, and not one of the tenth is certain what it was.

There is one huge fellow among them who looks capable of any villany. He finds something to mount on, and, in the Creole
patois
, calls a general halt. Bienvenu sinks down, and, vainly trying to recline gracefully, resigns the leadership. The herd gather round the speaker; he assures them that they have been outraged. Their right peaceably to traverse the public streets has been trampled upon. Shall such encroachments be endured? It is now daybreak. Let them go now by the open light of day and force a free passage of the public highway!

A scattering consent was the response, and the crowd, thinned now and drowsy, straggled quietly down toward the old house. Some drifted ahead, others sauntered behind, but every one, as he again neared the tree, came to a stand-still. Little White sat upon a bank of turf on the opposite side of the way looking very stern and sad. To each new-comer he put the same question:

“Did you come here to go to old Poquelin’s?”

“Yes.”

“He’s dead.” And if the shocked hearer started away he would say: “Don’t go away.”

“Why not?”

“I want you to go to the funeral presently.”

If some Louisianian, too loyal to dear France or Spain to understand English, looked bewildered, some one would interpret for him; and presently they went. Little White led the van, the crowd trooping after him down the middle of the way. The gate, that had never been seen before unchained, was open. Stern little White stopped a short distance from it; the rabble stopped behind him. Something was moving out from under the veranda. The many whisperers stretched upward to see. The African mute came very slowly toward the gate, leading by a cord in the nose a small brown bull, which was harnessed to a rude cart. On the flat body of the cart, under a black cloth, were seen the outlines of a long box.

“Hats off, gentlemen,” said little White, as the box came in view, and the crowd silently uncovered.

“Gentlemen,” said little White, “here come the last remains of Jean Marie Poquelin, a better man, I’m afraid, with all his sins,—yes a better—a kinder man to his blood—a man of more self-forgetful goodness—than all of you put together will ever dare to be.”

There was a profound hush as the vehicle came creaking through the gate; but when it turned away from them toward the forest, those in front started suddenly. There was a backward rush, then all stood still again staring one way; for there, behind the bier, with eyes cast down and labored step, walked the living remains—all that was left—of little Jacques Poquelin, the long-hidden brother—a leper, as white as snow.

Dumb with horror, the cringing crowd gazed upon the walking death. They watched, in silent awe, the slow
cortege
creep down the long, straight road and lessen on the view, until by and by it stopped where a wild, unfrequented path branched off into the undergrowth toward the rear of the ancient city.

“They are going to the
Terre aux Lepreux
,” said one in the crowd. The rest watched them in silence.

The little bull was set free; the mute, with the strength of an ape, lifted the long box to his shoulder. For a moment more the mute and the leper stood in sight, while the former adjusted his heavy burden; then, without one backward glance upon the unkind human world, turning their faces toward the ridge in the depths of the swamp known as the Leper’s Land, they stepped into the jungle, disappeared, and were never seen again.

OLALLA, by Robert Louis Stevenson

“Now,” said the doctor, “my part is done, and, I may say, with some vanity, well done. It remains only to get you out of this cold and poisonous city, and to give you two months of a pure air and an easy conscience. The last is your affair. To the first I think I can help you. It fells indeed rather oddly; it was but the other day the Padre came in from the country; and as he and I are old friends, although of contrary professions, he applied to me in a matter of distress among some of his parishioners. This was a family—but you are ignorant of Spain, and even the names of our grandees are hardly known to you; suffice it, then, that they were once great people, and are now fallen to the brink of destitution. Nothing now belongs to them but the residencia, and certain leagues of desert mountain, in the greater part of which not even a goat could support life. But the house is a fine old place, and stands at a great height among the hills, and most salubriously; and I had no sooner heard my friend’s tale, than I remembered you. I told him I had a wounded officer, wounded in the good cause, who was now able to make a change; and I proposed that his friends should take you for a lodger. Instantly the Padre’s face grew dark, as I had maliciously foreseen it would. It was out of the question, he said. Then let them starve, said I, for I have no sympathy with tatterdemalion pride. There-upon we separated, not very content with one another; but yesterday, to my wonder, the Padre returned and made a submission: the difficulty, he said, he had found upon enquiry to be less than he had feared; or, in other words, these proud people had put their pride in their pocket. I closed with the offer; and, subject to your approval, I have taken rooms for you in the residencia. The air of these mountains will renew your blood; and the quiet in which you will there live is worth all the medicines in the world.”

“Doctor,” said I, “you have been throughout my good angel, and your advice is a command. But tell me, if you please, something of the family with which I am to reside.”

“I am coming to that,” replied my friend; “and, indeed, there is a difficulty in the way. These beggars are, as I have said, of very high descent and swollen with the most baseless vanity; they have lived for some generations in a growing isolation, drawing away, on either hand, from the rich who had now become too high for them, and from the poor, whom they still regarded as too low; and even today, when poverty forces them to unfasten their door to a guest, they cannot do so without a most ungracious stipulation. You are to remain, they say, a stranger; they will give you attendance, but they refuse from the first the idea of the smallest intimacy.”

I will not deny that I was piqued, and perhaps the feeling strengthened my desire to go, for I was confident that I could break down that barrier if I desired. “There is nothing offensive in such a stipulation,” said I; “and I even sympathise with the feeling that inspired it.”

“It is true they have never seen you,” returned the doctor politely; “and if they knew you were the handsomest and the most pleasant man that ever came from England (where I am told that handsome men are common, but pleasant ones not so much so), they would doubtless make you welcome with a better grace. But since you take the thing so well, it matters not. To me, indeed, it seems discourteous. But you will find yourself the gainer. The family will not much tempt you. A mother, a son, and a daughter; an old woman said to be halfwitted, a country lout, and a country girl, who stands very high with her confessor, and is, therefore,” chuckled the physician, “most likely plain; there is not much in that to attract the fancy of a dashing officer.”

“And yet you say they are high-born,” I objected.

“Well, as to that, I should distinguish,” returned the doctor. “The mother is; not so the children. The mother was the last representative of a princely stock, degenerate both in parts and fortune. Her father was not only poor, he was mad: and the girl ran wild about the residencia till his death. Then, much of the fortune having died with him, and the family being quite extinct, the girl ran wilder than ever, until at last she married, Heaven knows whom, a muleteer some say, others a smuggler; while there are some who uphold there was no marriage at all, and that Felipe and Olalla are bastards. The union, such as it was, was tragically dissolved some years ago; but they live in such seclusion, and the country at that time was in so much disorder, that the precise manner of the man’s end is known only to the priest—if even to him.”

“I begin to think I shall have strange experiences,” said I.

“I would not romance, if I were you,” replied the doctor; “you will find, I fear, a very grovelling and commonplace reality. Felipe, for instance, I have seen. And what am I to say? He is very rustic, very cunning, very loutish, and, I should say, an innocent; the others are probably to match. No, no, senor commandante, you must seek congenial society among the great sights of our mountains; and in these at least, if you are at all a lover of the works of nature, I promise you will not be disappointed.”

The next day Felipe came for me in a rough country cart, drawn by a mule; and a little before the stroke of noon, after I had said farewell to the doctor, the innkeeper, and different good souls who had befriended me during my sickness, we set forth out of the city by the Eastern gate, and began to ascend into the Sierra. I had been so long a prisoner, since I was left behind for dying after the loss of the convoy, that the mere smell of the earth set me smiling. The country through which we went was wild and rocky, partially covered with rough woods, now of the cork-tree, and now of the great Spanish chestnut, and frequently intersected by the beds of mountain torrents. The sun shone, the wind rustled joyously; and we had advanced some miles, and the city had already shrunk into an inconsiderable knoll upon the plain behind us, before my attention began to be diverted to the companion of my drive. To the eye, he seemed but a diminutive, loutish, well-made country lad, such as the doctor had described, mighty quick and active, but devoid of any culture; and this first impression was with most observers final. What began to strike me was his familiar, chattering talk; so strangely inconsistent with the terms on which I was to be received; and partly from his imperfect enunciation, partly from the sprightly incoherence of the matter, so very difficult to follow clearly without an effort of the mind. It is true I had before talked with persons of a similar mental constitution; persons who seemed to live (as he did) by the senses, taken and possessed by the visual object of the moment and unable to discharge their minds of that impression. His seemed to me (as I sat, distantly giving ear) a kind of conversation proper to drivers, who pass much of their time in a great vacancy of the intellect and threading the sights of a familiar country. But this was not the case of Felipe; by his own account, he was a home-keeper; “I wish I was there now,” he said; and then, spying a tree by the wayside, he broke off to tell me that he had once seen a crow among its branches.

“A crow?” I repeated, struck by the ineptitude of the remark, and thinking I had heard imperfectly.

But by this time he was already filled with a new idea; hearkening with a rapt intentness, his head on one side, his face puckered; and he struck me rudely, to make me hold my peace. Then he smiled and shook his head.

“What did you hear?” I asked.

“O, it is all right,” he said; and began encouraging his mule with cries that echoed unhumanly up the mountain walls.

I looked at him more closely. He was superlatively well-built, light, and lithe and strong; he was well-featured; his yellow eyes were very large, though, perhaps, not very expressive; take him altogether, he was a pleasant-looking lad, and I had no fault to find with him, beyond that he was of a dusky hue, and inclined to hairyness; two characteristics that I disliked. It was his mind that puzzled, and yet attracted me. The doctor’s phrase—an innocent—came back to me; and I was wondering if that were, after all, the true description, when the road began to go down into the narrow and naked chasm of a torrent. The waters thundered tumultuously in the bottom; and the ravine was filled full of the sound, the thin spray, and the claps of wind, that accompanied their descent. The scene was certainly impressive; but the road was in that part very securely walled in; the mule went steadily forward; and I was astonished to perceive the paleness of terror in the face of my companion. The voice of that wild river was inconstant, now sinking lower as if in weariness, now doubling its hoarse tones; momentary freshets seemed to swell its volume, sweeping down the gorge, raving and booming against the barrier walls; and I observed it was at each of these accessions to the clamour, that my driver more particularly winced and blanched. Some thoughts of Scottish superstition and the river Kelpie, passed across my mind; I wondered if perchance the like were prevalent in that part of Spain; and turning to Felipe, sought to draw him out.

“What is the matter?” I asked.

“O, I am afraid,” he replied.

“Of what are you afraid?” I returned. “This seems one of the safest places on this very dangerous road.”

“It makes a noise,” he said, with a simplicity of awe that set my doubts at rest.

The lad was but a child in intellect; his mind was like his body, active and swift, but stunted in development; and I began from that time forth to regard him with a measure of pity, and to listen at first with indulgence, and at last even with pleasure, to his disjointed babble.

By about four in the afternoon we had crossed the summit of the mountain line, said farewell to the western sunshine, and began to go down upon the other side, skirting the edge of many ravines and moving through the shadow of dusky woods. There rose upon all sides the voice of falling water, not condensed and formidable as in the gorge of the river, but scattered and sounding gaily and musically from glen to glen. Here, too, the spirits of my driver mended, and he began to sing aloud in a falsetto voice, and with a singular bluntness of musical perception, never true either to melody or key, but wandering at will, and yet somehow with an effect that was natural and pleasing, like that of the of birds. As the dusk increased, I fell more and more under the spell of this artless warbling, listening and waiting for some articulate air, and still disappointed; and when at last I asked him what it was he sang—“O,” cried he, “I am just singing!” Above all, I was taken with a trick he had of unweariedly repeating the same note at little intervals; it was not so monotonous as you would think, or, at least, not disagreeable; and it seemed to breathe a wonderful contentment with what is, such as we love to fancy in the attitude of trees, or the quiescence of a pool.

Night had fallen dark before we came out upon a plateau, and drew up a little after, before a certain lump of superior blackness which I could only conjecture to be the residencia. Here, my guide, getting down from the cart, hooted and whistled for a long time in vain; until at last an old peasant man came towards us from somewhere in the surrounding dark, carrying a candle in his hand. By the light of this I was able to perceive a great arched doorway of a Moorish character: it was closed by iron-studded gates, in one of the leaves of which Felipe opened a wicket. The peasant carried off the cart to some out-building; but my guide and I passed through the wicket, which was closed again behind us; and by the glimmer of the candle, passed through a court, up a stone stair, along a section of an open gallery, and up more stairs again, until we came at last to the door of a great and somewhat bare apartment. This room, which I understood was to be mine, was pierced by three windows, lined with some lustrous wood disposed in panels, and carpeted with the skins of many savage animals. A bright fire burned in the chimney, and shed abroad a changeful flicker; close up to the blaze there was drawn a table, laid for supper; and in the far end a bed stood ready. I was pleased by these preparations, and said so to Felipe; and he, with the same simplicity of disposition that I held already remarked in him, warmly re-echoed my praises. “A fine room,” he said; “a very fine room. And fire, too; fire is good; it melts out the pleasure in your bones. And the bed,” he continued, carrying over the candle in that direction—“see what fine sheets—how soft, how smooth, smooth;” and he passed his hand again and again over their texture, and then laid down his head and rubbed his cheeks among them with a grossness of content that somehow offended me. I took the candle from his hand (for I feared he would set the bed on fire) and walked back to the supper-table, where, perceiving a measure of wine, I poured out a cup and called to him to come and drink of it. He started to his feet at once and ran to me with a strong expression of hope; but when he saw the wine, he visibly shuddered.

“Oh, no,” he said, “not that; that is for you. I hate it.”

“Very well, Senor,” said I; “then I will drink to your good health, and to the prosperity of your house and family. Speaking of which,” I added, after I had drunk, “shall I not have the pleasure of laying my salutations in person at the feet of the Senora, your mother?”

But at these words all the childishness passed out of his face, and was succeeded by a look of indescribable cunning and secrecy. He backed away from me at the same time, as though I were an animal about to leap or some dangerous fellow with a weapon, and when he had got near the door, glowered at me sullenly with contracted pupils. “No,” he said at last, and the next moment was gone noiselessly out of the room; and I heard his footing die away downstairs as light as rainfall, and silence closed over the house.

After I had supped I drew up the table nearer to the bed and began to prepare for rest; but in the new position of the light, I was struck by a picture on the wall. It represented a woman, still young. To judge by her costume and the mellow unity which reigned over the canvas, she had long been dead; to judge by the vivacity of the attitude, the eyes and the features, I might have been beholding in a mirror the image of life. Her figure was very slim and strong, and of a just proportion; red tresses lay like a crown over her brow; her eyes, of a very golden brown, held mine with a look; and her face, which was perfectly shaped, was yet marred by a cruel, sullen, and sensual expression. Something in both face and figure, something exquisitely intangible, like the echo of an echo, suggested the features and bearing of my guide; and I stood awhile, unpleasantly attracted and wondering at the oddity of the resemblance. The common, carnal stock of that race, which had been originally designed for such high dames as the one now looking on me from the canvas, had fallen to baser uses, wearing country clothes, sitting on the shaft and holding the reins of a mule cart, to bring home a lodger. Perhaps an actual link subsisted; perhaps some scruple of the delicate flesh that was once clothed upon with the satin and brocade of the dead lady, now winced at the rude contact of Felipe’s frieze.