The Gothic Terror MEGAPACK™: 17 Classic Tales (33 page)

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“This
striding place is called the ‘Strid,’

  A name which it took of yore;

  A thousand years hath it borne the name,

  And it shall a thousand more.”

THE DEAD SMILE, by F. Marion Crawford

Chapter I

Sir Hugh Ockram smiled as he sat by the open window of his study, in the late August afternoon; and just then a curiously yellow cloud obscured the low sun, and the clear summer light turned lurid, as if it had been suddenly poisoned and polluted by the foul vapours of a plague. Sir Hugh’s face seemed, at best, to be made of fine parchment drawn skin-tight over a wooden mask, in which two eyes were sunk out of sight, and peered from far withing through crevices under slanting, wrinkled lids, alive and watchful like two toads in their holes, side by side and exactly alike. But as the light changed, then a little yellow glare flashed in each. Nurse Macdonald said once that when Sir Hugh smiled he saw the faces of two women in hell—two dead women he had betrayed. (Nurse Macdonald was a hundred years old.) And the smile widened, stretching pale lips across discoloured teeth in an expression of profound self-satisfaction, blended with the most unforgiving hatred and contempt for the human doll. The hideous disease of which he was dying had touched his brain.

His son stood beside him, tall, white and delicate as an angel in a primitive picture; and though there was deep distress in his violet eyes as he looked at his father’s face, he felt the shadow of that sickening smile stealing across his own lips and parting them and drawing them against his will. And it was like a bad dream, for he tried not to smile and smiled the more. Beside him, strangely like him in her wan, angelic beauty, with the same shadowy golden hair, the same sad violet eyes, the same luminously pale face, Evelyn Warburton rested one hand upon his arm. And as she looked into her uncle’s eyes, and could not turn her own away, she knew that the deathly smile was hovering on her own red lips, drawing them tightly across her little teeth, while two bright tears ran down her cheeks to her mouth, and dropped from the upper to the lower lip, while she smiled—and the smile was like the shadow of death and the seal of damnation upon her pure, young face.

“Of course,” said Sir Hugh very slowly, and still looking out at the trees, “if you have made your mind up to be married, I cannot hinder you, and I don’t suppose you attach the smallest importance to my consent—”

“Father!” exclaimed Gabriel reproachfully.

“No; I do not deceive myself,” continued the old man, smiling terribly. “You will marry when I am dead, though there is a very good reason why you had better not—why you had better not,” he repeated very emphatically, and he slowly turned his toad eyes upon the lovers.

“What reason?” asked Evelyn in a frightened voice.

“Never mind the reason, my dear. You will marry just as if it did not exist.” There was a long pause. “Two gone,” he said, his voice lowering strangely, “and two more will be four—all together—forever and ever, burning, burning, burning bright.”

At the last words his head sank slowly back, and the little glare of his toad eyes disappeared under the swollen lids; and the lurid clouds passed from the westering sun, so that the earth was green again and the light pure. Sir Hugh had fallen asleep, as he often did in his illness, even while speaking.

Gabriel Ockram drew Evelyn away, and from the study they went out into the dim hall, softly closing the door behind them, and each audibly drew breath, as though some sudden danger had been passed. They laid their hands each in the other’s, and their strangely-like eyes met in a long look, in which love and perfect understanding were darkened by the secret terror of an unknown thing. Their pale faces reflected each other’s fear.

“It is his secret,” said Evelyn at last. “He will never tell us what it is.”

“If he dies with it,” answered Gabriel, “let it be on his own head!”

“On his head!” echoed the dim hall. It was a strange echo, and some were frightened by it, for they said that if it were a real echo it should repeat everything and not give back a phrase here and there, now speaking, now silent. But Nurse Macdonald said that the great hall would never echo a prayer when an Ockram was to die, though it would give back curses ten for one.

“On his head!” it repeated quite softly, and Evelyn started and looked round.

“It is only the echo,” said Gabriel, leading her away.

They went out into the late afternoon light, and sat upon a stone seat behind the chapel, which was built across the end of the east wing. It was very still, not a breath stirred, and there was no sound near them. Only far off in the park a song-bird was whistling the high prelude to the evening chorus.

“It is very lonely here,” said Evelyn, taking Gabriel’s hand nervously, and speaking as if she dreaded to disturb the silence. “If it were dark, I should be afraid.”

“Of what? Of me?” Gabriel’s sad eyes turned to her.

“Oh no! Never of you! But of the old Ockrams—they say they are just under our feet here in the north vault outside the chapel, all in their shrouds, with no coffins, as they used to bury them.”

“As they always will—as they will bury my father, and me. They say an Ockram will not lie in a coffin.”

“But it cannot be true—these are fairy tales—ghost stories!” Evelyn nestled nearer to her companion, grasping his hand more tightly, and the sun began to go down.

“Of course. But there is the story of old Sir Vernon, who was beheaded for treason under James II. The family brought his body back from the scaffold in an iron coffin with heavy locks, and they put it in the north vault. But ever afterwards, whenever the vault was opened to bury another of the family, they found the coffin wide open, and the body standing upright against the wall, and the head rolled away in a corner, smiling at it.”

“As Uncle Hugh smiles?” Evelyn shivered.

“Yes, I suppose so,” answered Gabriel, thoughtfully. “Of course I never saw it, and the vault has not been opened for thirty years—none of us has died since then.”

“And if—if Uncle Hugh dies—shall you—?” Evelyn stopped. Her beautiful thin face was quite white.

“Yes. I shall see him laid there too—with his secret, whatever it is.” Gabriel sighed and pressed the girl’s little hand.

“I do not like to think of it,” she said unsteadily. “O Gabriel, what can the secret be? He said we had better not marry—not that he forbade it—but he said it so strangely, and he smiled—ugh!” Her small white teeth chattered with fear, and she looked over her shoulder while drawing still closer to Gabriel. “And, somehow, I felt it in my own face—”

“So did I,” answered Gabriel in a low, nervous voice. “Nurse Macdonald—” He stopped abruptly.

“What? What did she say?”

“Oh—nothing. She has told me things—they would frighten you, dear. Come, it is growing chilly.” He rose, but Evelyn held his hand in both of hers, still sitting and looking up into his face.

“But we shall be married just the same—Gabriel! Say that we shall!”

“Of course, darling—of course. But while my father is so very ill, it is impossible—”

“O Gabriel, Gabriel, dear! I wish we were married now!” Evelyn cried in sudden distress. “I know that something will prevent it and keep us apart.”

“Nothing shall!”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing human,” said Gabriel Ockram, as she drew him down to her.

And their faces, that were so strangely alike, met and touched—and Gabriel knew that the kiss had a marvellous savour of evil, but on Evelyn’s lips were like the cool breath of a sweet and mortal fear. And neither of them understood, for they were innocent and young. Yet she drew him to her by her lightest touch, as a sensitive plant shivers and waves its thin leaves, and bends and closes softly upon what it wants; and he let himself be drawn to her willingly, as he would if her touch had been deadly and poisonous; for she strangely loved that half voluptuous breath of fear, and he passionately desired the nameless evil something that lurked in her maiden lips.

“It is as if we loved in a strange dream,” she said.

“I fear the waking,” he murmured.

“We shall not wake, dear—when the dream is over it will have already turned into death, so softly that we shall not know it. But until then—”

She paused, and her eyes sought his, and their faces slowly came nearer. It was as if they had thoughts in their red lips that foresaw and foreknew the deep kiss of each other.

“Until then—” she said again, very low, and her mouth was nearer to his.

“Dream—till then,” murmured his breath.

Chapter II

Nurse Macdonald slept sitting all bent together in a great old leathern arm-chair with wings—many warm blankets wrapped about her, even in summer. She would rest her feet in a bag footstool lined with sheepskin while beside her, on a wooden table, there was a little lamp that burned at night, and an old silver cup, in which there was always something to drink.

Her face was very wrinkled, but the wrinkles were so small and fine and close together that they made shadows instead of lines. Two thin locks of hair, that were turning from white to a smoky yellow, fell over her temples from under her starched white cap. Every now and then she would wake from her slumber, her eyelids drawn up in tiny folds like little pink silk curtains, and her strange blue eyes would look straight ahead through doors and walls and worlds to a far place beyond. Then she’d sleep again with her hands one upon the other on the edge of the blanket, her thumbs grown longer than the fingers with age.

It was nearly one o’clock in the night, and the summer breeze was blowing the ivy branch against the panes of the window with a hushing caress. In the small room beyond, with the door ajar, the young maid who took care of Nurse Macdonald was fast asleep. All was very quiet. The old woman breathed regularly, and her drawn lips trembled each time the breath went out.

But outside the closed window there was a face, and violet eyes were looking steadily at the ancient sleeper. Strange, as there were eighty feet from the sill of the window to the foot of the tower. It was like the face of Evelyn Warburton, yet the cheeks were thinner than Evelyn’s and as white as a gleam. The eyes stared and the lips were red with life. They were dead lips painted with new blood.

Slowly Nurse Macdonald’s wrinkled eyelids folded back, and she looked straight at the face at the window.

“Is it time?” she asked in her little old, faraway voice.

While she looked the face at the window changed, the eyes opened wider and wider till the white glared all round the bright violet and the bloody lips opened over gleaming teeth. The shadowy golden hair surrounding the face rose and streamed against the window in the night breeze and in answer to Nurse Macdonald’s question came a sound that froze the living flesh.

It was a low-moaning voice, one that rose suddenly, like the scream of storm. Then it went from a moan to a wail, from a wail to a howl, and from a howl to the shriek of the tortured dead. He who has heard it before knows, and he can bear witness that the cry of the banshee is an evil cry to hear alone in the deep night.

When it was over and the face was gone, Nurse Macdonald shook a little in her great chair. She looked at the black square of the window, but there was nothing more there, nothing but the night and the whispering ivy branch. She turned her head to the door that was ajar, and there stood the young maid in her white gown, her teeth chattering with fright.

“It is time, child,” said Nurse Macdonald. “I must go to him, for it is the end.”

She rose slowly, leaning her withered hands upon the arms of the chair as the girl brought her a woollen gown, a great mantle and her crutch-stick. But very often the girl looked at the window and was unjointed with fear, and often Nurse Macdonald shook her head and said words which the maid could not understand.

“It was like the face of Miss Evelyn,” said the girl, trembling.

But the ancient woman looked up sharply and angrily. Her blue eyes glared. She held herself up by the arm of the great chair with her left hand, and lifted up her crutch-stick to strike the maid with all her might. But she did not.

“You are a good girl,” she said, “but you are a fool. Pray for wit, child. Pray for wit—or else find service in a house other than Ockram Hall. Bring the lamp and help me under my left arm.”

The crutch-stick clacked on the wooden floor, and the low heels of the woman’s slippers clappered after her in slow triplets, as Nurse Macdonald got toward the door. And down the stairs each step she took was a labour in itself, and by the clacking noise the waking servants knew that she was coming, very long before they saw her.

No one was sleeping now, and there were lights, and whisperings, and pale faces in the corridors near Sir Hugh’s bedroom, and now some one went in, and now some one came out, but every one made way for Nurse Macdonald, who had nursed Sir Hugh’s father more than eighty years ago.

The light was soft and clear in the room. There stood Gabriel Ockram by his father’s bedside, and there knelt Evelyn Warburton, her hair lying like a golden shadow down her shoulder, and her hands clasped nervously together. Opposite Gabriel, a nurse was trying to make Sir Hugh drink. But he would not, and though his lips were parted, his teeth were set. He was very, very thin and yellow now, and his eyes caught the light sideways and were as yellow coals.

“Do not torment him,” said Nurse Macdonald to the woman who held the cup. “Let me speak to him, for his hour is come.”

“Let her speak to him,” said Gabriel in a dull voice.

So the ancient nurse leaned to the pillow and laid the feather-weight of her withered hand, that was like a brown moth, upon Sir Hugh’s yellow fingers, and she spoke to him earnestly, while only Gabriel and Evelyn were left in the room to hear.

“Hugh Ockram,” she said, “this is the end of your life; and as I saw you born, and saw your father born before you, I come to see you die. Hugh Ockram, will you tell me the truth?”

The dying man recognized the little faraway voice he had known all his life and he very slowly turned his yellow face to Nurse Macdonald; but he said nothing. Then she spoke again.

“Hugh Ockram, you will never see the daylight again. Will you tell the truth?”

His toad-like eyes were not yet dull. They fastened themselves on her face.

“What do you want of me?” he asked, and each word struck hollow upon the last. “I have no secrets. I have lived a good life.”

Nurse Macdonald laughed—a tiny, cracked laugh, that made her old head bob and tremble a little, as if her neck were on a steel spring. But Sir Hugh’s eyes grew red, and his pale lips began to twist.

“Let me die in peace,” he said slowly.

But Nurse Macdonald shook her head, and her brown, moth-like hand left his and fluttered to his forehead.

“By the mother that bore you and died of grief for the sins you did, tell me the truth!”

Sir Hugh’s lips tightened on his discoloured teeth.

“Not on earth,” he answered slowly.

“By the wife who bore your son and died heartbroken, tell me the truth!”

“Neither to you in life, nor to her in eternal death.”

His lips writhed, as if the words were coals between them, and a great drop of sweat rolled across the parchment of his forehead. Gabriel Ockram bit his hand as he watched his father die. But Nurse Macdonald spoke a third time.

“By the woman whom you betrayed, and who waits for you this night, Hugh Ockram, tell me the truth!”

“It is too late. Let me die in peace.”