Vintage Vampire Stories (20 page)

She had talked longer and more earnestly than usual, and the talking ended in a fit of coughing which shook the wasted frame. I promised that all should be as she wished. If solitude were more restful than even our quiet companionship, she should be sometimes alone. I would answer for her aunt, as for myself.

The nurses were two bright, capable young women, and were used to the caprices of the sick. I told them exactly what was wanted: a silent unobtrusive presence, a watchful care of the patient's physical comfort by day and night. And henceforth Lota's evenings were spent for the most part in solitude. She had her books, and her drawing-board, on which with light, weak hand she would sketch faint remembrances of the spots that had charmed us most in our drives or rambles. She had her basket overflowing with scraps of fancy work, beginnings of things that were to have no end.

“She doesn't read very long, or work for more than ten minutes at a time,” the nurse told me. “She just dozes away most of the evening, or walks about the room now and then, and stands to look at herself in that gloomy old glass. It's strange that she should be so fond of looking in the glass, poor dear, when she can scarcely fail to see the change in herself.”

“No, no, she must see, and it is breaking her heart. I wish we could do away with every looking-glass in the house,” said I, remembering how pretty she had been in the fresh bloom of her happy girlhood only six months before that dreary time.

“She is very fond of going over her grandfather's papers,” the nurse told me. “There is a book I see her reading very often—a manuscript book.”

“His diary, perhaps,” said I.

“It might be that; but it's strange that she should care to pore over an old gentleman's diary.”

Strange, yes; but all her fancies and likings were strange ever since I had entered that unlucky house. In her thought of her lover she was not as other girls. She was angry when I suggested that we should tell him of her illness, in order that he might get leave to come to her, if it were only for a few days.

“No, no, let him never look upon my face again,” she said. “It is bad enough for him to remember me as I was when we parted at the station. It is ever so much worse now—and it will be—oh, Helen, to think of what must come—at last!”

She hid her face in her hands, and the frail frame was convulsed with the vehemence of her sobbing. It was long before I could soothe her; and this violent grief seemed the more terrible because of the forced cheerfulness of her usual manner.

We kept early hours at the villa. We dined at seven, and at eight Lota withdrew to the room which she was pleased to call her den. At ten there was a procession of invalid, nurse, aunt, and friend to Lota's bedroom, where the night nurse, in her neat print gown and pretty white cap, was waiting to receive her. There were many kisses and tender good-nights, and a great show of cheerfulness on all sides, and then Miss Elderson and I crept slowly to our rooms—exchanging a few sad words, a few sympathetic sighs to cry ourselves to sleep, and to awake in the morning with the thought of the doom hanging over us.

I used to drop in upon Lota's solitude a little before bed-time, sometimes with her aunt, sometimes alone. She would look up from her book with a surprised air, or start out of her sleep.

“Bedtime already?”

Sometimes when I found her sleeping, I would seat myself beside her sofa, and wait in silence for her waking. How picturesque, how luxurious, the old room looked in the glaring light of the wood, which brightened even the grim tapestry, and glorified the bowls of red and purple anemones and other scentless flowers, and shining brown floor. It was a room that I too could have loved were it not for the shadow of fear that hung over all things at the Orange Grove.

I went to the library earlier than usual one evening. The clock had not long struck since when I left the drawing room. I had seen a change for the worse in Lota at dinner, though she had kept up her pretence of gaiety, and had refused to be treated as an invalid, insisting upon dining as we dined, scarcely toughing some things, eating ravenously of other dishes, the least wholesome, laughing to scorn all her doctor's advice about dietary. I endured the interval between eight and nine, stifling my anxieties, and indulging the mild old lady with a game of bezique, which my wretched play allowed her to win easily. Like most old people her sorrow was of a mild and modified quality, and she had, I believe, resigned herself to the inevitable. The careful doctor, the admirable nurses, had set her mind at ease about dear Lota, she told me. She felt that all was being done that love and care could do, and for the rest, well, she had her church services, her prayers, her morning and evening readings in the well-worn New Testament. I believe she was almost happy.

“We must all die, my dear Helen,” she said, plaintively.

Die, yes. Die when one had reached that humdrum stage on the road of life where this poor old thing was plodding, past barren fields and flowerless hedges—the stage of grey hairs, and toothless gums, and failing sight, and dull hearing—and an old fashioned, one dead intellect. But to die like Lota, in the pride of youth, with beauty and wealth and love all one's own! To lay all this down in the grave! That seemed hard, too hard for my understanding or my patience.

I found her asleep on the sofa by the hearth, the nurse sitting quietly on guard in her armchair, knitting the stocking which was never out of her hands unless they were occupied in the patient's service. To-night's sleep was sounder than usual, for the sleeper did not stir at my approach, and I seated myself in the low chair by the foot of the sofa without waking her.

A book had slipped from her hand, and lay on the silken coverlet open. The pages caught my eye, for they were in manuscript, and I remembered what the nurse had said about Lota's fancy for this volume. I stole my hand across the coverlet, and possessed myself of the book, so softly that the sleeper's sensitive frame had no consciousness of my touch.

A manuscript volume of about two hundred pages in the neat firm hand, very small, yet easy to read, so perfectly were the letters formed and so evenly were the lines spaced.

I turned the leaves eagerly. A diary, a business man's diary, recording in commonplace phraseology the transactions of each day, Stock Exchange, Stock Exchange—railways—mines—loans—banks—money, money, money, made or lost. That was all the neat penmanship told me, as I turned leaf after leaf, and ran my eye over page after page.

The social life of the writer was indicated in a few brief sentences. “Dined with the Parkers: dinner execrable; company stupid; talked to Lendon, who has made half a million in Mexican copper; a dull man.”

“Came to Brighton for Easter; clear turtle at the Ship good; they have given me my old rooms; asked Smith (Suez Smith, not Turkish Smith) to dinner.”

What interest could Lota possibly find in such a journal—a prosy commonplace record of losses and gains, bristling with figures?

This was what I asked myself as I turned leaf after leaf, and saw only everlasting repetition of financial notes, strange names of loans and mines and railways, with contractions that reduced them to a cipher. Slowly, my hand softly turning the pages of the thick volume, I had gone through about three-fourths of the book when I came to the heading, “Orange Grove,” and the brief entries of the financier gave place to the detailed ideas and experiences of the man of leisure, an exile from familiar scenes and old faces, driven back upon self-commune for the amusement of his lonely hours.

This doubtless was where Lota's interest in the book began, and here I began to read every word of the diary with closest attention. I did not stop to think whether I justified in reading the pages which the dead man had penned in his retirement, whether a license which his grand-daughter allowed herself might be taken by me. My one thought was to discover the reason of Lota's interest in the book, and whether its influence upon her mind and spirits was as harmful as I feared.

I slipped from the chair to the rug beside the sofa, and, sitting there on the ground, with the full light of the shaded reading-lamp upon the book, I forgot everything but the pages before me.

The first few pages after the old man's installation in his villa were full of cheerfulness. He wrote of this land of the South, new to his narrow experience, as an earthly paradise. He was almost as sentimental in his enthusiasms as a girl, as if it had not been for the old-fashioned style in which his raptures expressed themselves these pages might have been written by a youthful pen.

He was particularly interested in the old monkish rooms at the back of the villa, but he fully recognized the danger of occupying them.

“I have put my books in the long room which was used as a refectory,” he wrote, “but as I now rarely look at them there is no fear of my being tempted to spend more than an occasional hour in the room.”

Then after an interval of nearly a month—

“I have arranged my books, as I find the library the most interesting room in the house. My doctor objects to the gloomy aspect, but I find a pleasing melancholy in the shadow of the steep olive-clad hill. I begin to think that this life of retirement, with no companions but my books, suits me better than the pursuit of money making, which has occupied so large a portion of my later years.”

Then followed pages of criticism upon the books he read—history, travels, poetry—books which he had been collecting for many years, but which he was now only beginning to enjoy.

“I see before me a studious old age,” he wrote, “and I hope I may live as long as the head of my old college, Martin Routh. I have made more than enough money to satisfy myself, and to provide ample wealth for the dear girl who will inherit the greater part of my fortune. I can afford to fold my hands, and enjoy the long quiet years of old age in the companionship of the master spirits who have gone before. How near, how living they seem as I steep myself in their thoughts, dream their dreams, see life as they saw it! Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and all those later lights that have shone upon the dullest lives and made them beautiful—how they live with us, and fill our thoughts, and make up the brightest part of our daily existence.”

I read many pages of comment and reverie in the neat, clear penmanship of a man who wrote for his own pleasure, in the restful solitude of his own fire-side.

Suddenly there came a change—the shadow of the cloud that hung over that house.

“I am living too much alone. I did not think I was of the stuff which is subject to delusions and marbled fancies—but I was wrong. I suppose no man's mind can retain its strength of fibre without the friction of intercourse with other minds of its own calibre I have been living alone with the minds of the dead, and waited upon by foreign servants, with whom I hardly exchange half a dozen sentences in a day. And the result is what no doubt any brain-doctor would have foretold.

“I have begun to see ghosts.

“The thing I have seen is so evidently an emanation of my own mind—so palpably a materialization of my own self-consciousness, brooding upon myself and my chances of long life—that it is a weakness even to record the appearance that has haunted me during the last few evenings. No shadow of dying monk has stolen between me and the lamplight; no presence from the vanished years, revisiting places.The thing which I have seen is myself—not myself as I am—but myself as I am to be in the coming years, many or few.

“The vision—purely self-induced as I know it to be—has not the less given a shock to the placid contentment of my mind, and the long hopes which, in spite of the Venusian's warning, I had of late been cherishing.

“Looking up from my book in yesterday's twilight my casual glance rested on the old Venetian mirror in front of my desk; and gradually, out of the blurred darkness, I saw a face looking at me.

“My own face as it might be after the wasting of disease, or the slow decay of advancing years—a face at least ten years older that the face I had seen in my glass a few hours before—hollow cheeks, haggard eyes, the loose under-lip drooping weakly—a bent figure in an invalid chair, an aspect of utter helplessness. And it was myself. Of that fact I had no shadow of doubt.

“Hypochondria, of course—a common form of the malady,—perhaps this shaping of the imagination into visions.Yet, the thing was strange—for I had been troubled by no apprehensions of illness or premature old age. I had never even thought of myself as a old man. In the pride bred of long immunity from illness I had considered myself exempt for the ailments that are wont to attend declining years. I had pictured myself living to the extremity of human life, and dropping peacefully into the centenarian's grave.

“I was angry with myself for being affected by the vision and I locked the door of the library when I went to dress for dinner, determined not to re-enter the room till I had done something—by out-door exercise and change of scene—to restore the balance of my brain.Yet when I had dined there came upon me so feverish a desire to know whether the glass would again show me the same figure and face I have the key to my major-domo, and told him to light the lamps and make up the fire in the library.

“Yes, the thing lived in the blotched and blurred old glass. The dusky surface, which was too dull to reflect the realities of life, gave back that vision of age and decay with unalterable fidelity. The face and figure came and went, and the glass was often black—but whenever the thing appeared it was the same—the same in every dismal particular, in all the signs of senility and fading life.

“‘This is what I am to be twenty years hence,' I told myself; ‘a man of eighty might look like that.'

“Yet I had hoped to escape that bitter lot of gradual decay which I had seen and pitied in other men. I had promised myself that the reward of a temperate life—a life free from all consuming fires of dissipation, all tempestuous passions—would be a vigorous and prolonged old age. So surely as I had toiled to amass fortune so surely also had I striven to save up for myself long years of health and activity, a life prolonged to the utmost span.”