The Big Book of Classic Fantasy

by The Big Book of Classic Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  But he had recovered his hold upon her hand, and by imperceptible degrees was leading her toward the shining steps which descended to the valley.

  “Come, O my soul’s soul,” he passionately implored; “why delay a moment? Surely you feel, as I do, that eternity itself is too short to hold such bliss as ours. It seems to me that I can see our home already. Have I not always seen it in my dreams? It is white, love, is it not, with polished columns, and a sculptured cornice against the blue? Groves of laurel and oleander and thickets of roses surround it; but from the terrace where we walk at sunset, the eye looks out over woodlands and cool meadows where, deep-bowered under ancient boughs, a stream goes delicately toward the river. Indoors our favorite pictures hang upon the walls and the rooms are lined with books. Think, dear, at last we shall have time to read them all. With which shall we begin? Come, help me to choose. Shall it be ‘Faust’ or the ‘Vita Nuova,’ the ‘Tempest’ or ‘Les Caprices de Marianne,’ or the thirty-first canto of the ‘Paradise,’ or ‘Epipsychidion’ or “Lycidas’? Tell me, dear, which one?”

  As he spoke he saw the answer trembling joyously upon her lips; but it died in the ensuing silence, and she stood motionless, resisting the persuasion of his hand.

  “What is it?” he entreated.

  “Wait a moment,” she said, with a strange hesitation in her voice. “Tell me first, are you quite sure of yourself? Is there no one on earth whom you sometimes remember?”

  “Not since I have seen you,” he replied; for, being a man, he had indeed forgotten.

  Still she stood motionless, and he saw that the shadow deepened on her soul.

  “Surely, love,” he rebuked her, “it was not that which troubled you? For my part I have walked through Lethe. The past has melted like a cloud before the moon. I never lived until I saw you.”

  She made no answer to his pleadings, but at length, rousing herself with a visible effort, she turned away from him and moved toward the Spirit of Life, who still stood near the threshold.

  “I want to ask you a question,” she said, in a troubled voice.

  “Ask,” said the Spirit.

  “A little while ago,” she began, slowly, “you told me that every soul which has not found a kindred soul on earth is destined to find one here.”

  “And have you not found one?” asked the Spirit.

  “Yes; but will it be so with my husband’s soul also?”

  “No,” answered the Spirit of Life, “for your husband imagined that he had found his soul’s mate on earth in you; and for such delusions eternity itself contains no cure.”

  She gave a little cry. Was it of disappointment or triumph?

  “Then—then what will happen to him when he comes here?”

  “That I cannot tell you. Some field of activity and happiness he will doubtless find, in due measure to his capacity for being active and happy.”

  She interrupted, almost angrily: “He will never be happy without me.”

  “Do not be too sure of that,” said the Spirit.

  She took no notice of this, and the Spirit continued: “He will not understand you here any better than he did on earth.”

  “No matter,” she said; “I shall be the only sufferer, for he always thought that he understood me.”

  “His boots will creak just as much as ever—”

  “No matter.”

  “And he will slam the door—”

  “Very likely.”

  “And continue to read railway novels—”

  She interposed, impatiently: “Many men do worse than that.”

  “But you said just now,” said the Spirit, “that you did not love him.”

  “True,” she answered, simply; “but don’t you understand that I shouldn’t feel at home without him? It is all very well for a week or two—but for eternity! After all, I never minded the creaking of his boots, except when my head ached, and I don’t suppose it will ache here; and he was always so sorry when he had slammed the door, only he never could remember not to. Besides, no one else would know how to look after him, he is so helpless. His inkstand would never be filled, and he would always be out of stamps and visiting-cards. He would never remember to have his umbrella re-covered, or to ask the price of anything before he bought it. Why, he wouldn’t even know what novels to read. I always had to choose the kind he liked, with a murder or a forgery and a successful detective.”

  She turned abruptly to her kindred soul, who stood listening with a mien of wonder and dismay.

  “Don’t you see,” she said, “that I can’t possibly go with you?”

  “But what do you intend to do?” asked the Spirit of Life.

  “What do I intend to do?” she returned, indignantly. “Why, I mean to wait for my husband, of course. If he had come here first he would have waited for me for years and years; and it would break his heart not to find me here when he comes.” She pointed with a contemptuous gesture to the magic vision of hill and vale sloping away to the translucent mountains. “He wouldn’t give a fig for all that,” she said, “if he didn’t find me here.”

  “But consider,” warned the Spirit, “that you are now choosing for eternity. It is a solemn moment.”

  “Choosing!” she said, with a half-sad smile. “Do you still keep up here that old fiction about choosing? I should have thought that you knew better than that. How can I help myself? He will expect to find me here when he comes, and he would never believe you if you told him that I had gone away with someone else—never, never.”

  “So be it,” said the Spirit. “Here, as on earth, each one must decide for himself.”

  She turned to her kindred soul and looked at him gently, almost wistfully. “I am sorry,” she said. “I should have liked to talk with you again; but you will understand, I know, and I dare say you will find someone else a great deal cleverer—”

  And without pausing to hear his answer she waved him a swift farewell and turned back toward the threshold.

  “Will my husband come soon?” she asked the Spirit of Life.

  “That you are not destined to know,” the Spirit replied.

  “No matter,” she said, cheerfully; “I have all eternity to wait in.”

  And still seated alone on the threshold, she listens for the creaking of his boots.

  Violet Paget (1856–1935) was a prolific British essayist and novelist who used the pseudonym of Vernon Lee in order to be taken more seriously. She began using the name personally as well as professionally and was known as Vernon Lee by writers such as Henry James. Lee often wrote strange fictions that included haunting scenery and supernatural activities such as possession. Although known for her speculative fiction, she also wrote essays, plays, and poetry. Her essays, collected in Belcaro (1881) and Euphorion (1884), display imaginative wit and scholarship and often call for social change and activism. Many of her stories, including “Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady” (1895) appeared in the literary magazine the Yellow Book. “Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady” can be described as a macabre fairy tale that explores desire, youth, and beauty. It also allows for delightful ambiguity as to the darkly fantastical.

  Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady

  Vernon Lee

  TO H. H. THE RANEE BROOKE OF SARAWAK

  IN THE YEAR 1701, the Duchy of Luna became united to the Italian dominions of the Holy Roman Empire, owing to the extinction of its famous ducal house in the persons of Duke Balthasar Maria and of his grandson Alberic, who should have been third of the name. Under this dry historical fact lies hidden the strange story of Prince Alberic and the Snake Lady.

  I

  The first act of hostility of old Duke Balthasar towards the Snake Lady, in whose existence he did not, of course, believe, was connected with the arrival at Luna of certain tapestries after the designs of
the famous Monsieur Le Brun, a present from his most Christian Majesty King Lewis the XIV. These Gobelins, which represented the marriage of Alexander and Roxana, were placed in the throne room, and in the most gallant suit of chambers overlooking the great rockery garden, all of which had been completed by Duke Balthasar Maria in 1680; and, as a consequence, the already existing tapestries, silk hangings and mirrors painted by Marius of the Flowers, were transferred into other apartments, thus occasioning a general re-hanging of the Red Palace at Luna. These magnificent operations, in which, as the court poets sang, Apollo and the Graces lent their services to their beloved patron, aroused in Duke Balthasar’s mind a sudden curiosity to see what might be made of the rooms occupied by his grandson and heir, and which he had not entered since Prince Alberic’s christening. He found the apartments in a shocking state of neglect, and the youthful prince unspeakably shy and rustic; and he determined to give him at once an establishment befitting his age, to look out presently for a princess worthy to be his wife, and, somewhat earlier, for a less illustrious but more agreeable lady to fashion his manners. Meanwhile, Duke Balthasar Maria gave orders to change the tapestry in Prince Alberic’s chamber. This tapestry was of old and Gothic taste, extremely worn, and represented Alberic the Blond and the Snake Lady Oriana, alluded to in the poems of Boiardo and the chronicles of the Crusaders. Duke Balthasar Maria was a prince of enlightened mind and delicate taste; the literature as well as the art of the dark ages found no grace in his sight; he reproved the folly of feeding the thoughts of youth on improbable events; besides, he disliked snakes and was afraid of the devil. So he ordered the tapestry to be removed and another, representing Susanna and the Elders, to be put in its stead. But when Prince Alberic discovered the change, he cut Susanna and the Elders into strips with a knife he had stolen out of the ducal kitchens (no dangerous instruments being allowed to young princes before they were of an age to learn to fence) and refused to touch his food for three days. The tapestry over which little Prince Alberic mourned so greatly had indeed been both tattered and Gothic. But for the boy it possessed an inexhaustible charm. It was quite full of things, and they were all delightful. The sorely frayed borders consisted of wonderful garlands of leaves, and fruits, and flowers, tied at intervals with ribbons, although they seemed all to grow, like tall, narrow bushes, each from a big vase in the bottom corner; and made of all manner of different plants. There were bunches of spiky bays, and of acorned oakleaves, sheaves of lilies and heads of poppies, gourds, and apples and pears, and hazelnuts and mulberries, wheat ears, and beans, and pine tufts. And in each of these plants, of which those above named are only a very few, there were curious live creatures of some sort, various birds, big and little, butterflies on the lilies, snails, squirrels, and mice, and rabbits, and even a hare, with such pointed ears, darting among the spruce fir. Alberic learned the names of most of these plants and creatures from his nurse, who had been a peasant, and spent much ingenuity seeking for them in the palace gardens and terraces; but there were no live creatures there, except snails and toads, which the gardeners killed, and carp swimming about in the big tank, whom Alberic did not like, and who were not in the tapestry; and he had to supplement his nurse’s information by that of the grooms and scullions, when he could visit them secretly. He was even promised a sight, one day, of a dead rabbit. The rabbit was the most fascinating of the inhabitants of the tapestry border but he came to the kitchen too late, and saw it with its pretty fur pulled off, and looking so sad and naked that it made him cry. But Alberic had grown so accustomed to never quitting the Red Palace and its gardens, that he was usually satisfied with seeing the plants and animals in the tapestry, and looked forward to seeing the real things when he should be grown up. “When I am a man,” he would say to himself for his nurse scolded him for saying it to her, “I will have a live rabbit of my own.”

  The border of the tapestry interested Prince Alberic most when he was very little indeed, his remembrance of it was older than that of the Red Palace, its terraces and gardens but gradually he began to care more and more for the pictures in the middle.

  There were mountains, and the sea with ships; and these first made him care to go on to the topmost palace terrace and look at the real mountains and the sea beyond the roofs and gardens; and there were woods of all manner of tall trees, with clover and wild strawberries growing beneath them, and roads, and paths, and rivers, in and out these were rather confused with the places where the tapestry was worn out, and with the patches and mendings thereof, but Alberic, in the course of time, contrived to make them all out, and knew exactly whence the river came which turned the big mill wheel, and how many bends it made before coming to the fishing nets; and how the horsemen must cross over the bridge, then wind behind the cliff with the chapel, and pass through the wood of firs in order to get from the castle in the left hand corner nearest the bottom to the town, over which the sun was shining with all its beams, and a wind blowing with inflated cheeks on the right hand close to the top.

  The centre of the tapestry was the most worn and discoloured; and it was for this reason perhaps that little Alberic scarcely noticed it for some years, his eye and mind led away by the bright red and yellow of the border of fruit and flowers, and the still vivid green and orange of the background landscape. Red, yellow and orange, even green, had faded in the centre into pale blue and lilac; even the green had grown an odd dusky tint; and the figures seemed like ghosts, sometimes emerging and then receding again into vagueness. Indeed, it was only as he grew bigger that Alberic began to see any figures at all; and then, for a long time he would lose sight of them. But little by little, when the light was strong, he could see them always; and even in the dark make them out with a little attention. Among the spruce firs and pines, and against a hedge of roses, on which there still lingered a remnant of redness, a knight had reined in his big white horse, and was putting one arm round the shoulder of a lady, who was leaning against the horse’s flank. The knight was all dressed in armour—not at all like that of the equestrian statue of Duke Balthasar Maria in the square, but all made of plates, with plates also on the legs, instead of having them bare like Duke Balthasar’s statue; and on his head he had no wig, but a helmet with big plumes. It seemed a more reasonable dress than the other, but probably Duke Balthasar was right to go to battle with bare legs and a kilt and a wig, since he did so. The lady who was looking up into his face was dressed with a high collar and long sleeves, and on her head she wore a thick circular garland, from under which the hair fell about her shoulders. She was very lovely, Alberic got to think, particularly when, having climbed upon a chest of drawers, he saw that her hair was still full of threads of gold, some of them quite loose because the tapestry was so rubbed. The knight and his horse were of course very beautiful, and he liked the way in which the knight reined in the horse with one hand, and embraced the lady with the other arm. But Alberic got to love the lady most, although she was so very pale and faded, and almost the colour of the moonbeams through the palace windows in summer. Her dress also was so beautiful and unlike those of the ladies who got out of the coaches in the Court of Honour, and who had on hoops and no clothes at all on their upper part. This lady, on the contrary, had that collar like a lily, and a beautiful gold chain, and patterns in gold (Alberic made them out little by little) all over her bodice. He got to want so much to see her skirt; it was probably very beautiful too, but it so happened that the inlaid chest of drawers before mentioned stood against the wall in that place, and on it a large ebony and ivory crucifix, which covered the lower part of the lady’s body. Alberic often tried to lift off the crucifix, but it was a great deal too heavy, and there was not room on the chest of drawers to push it aside; so the lady’s skirt and feet remained invisible. But one day, when Alberic was eleven, his nurse suddenly took a fancy to having all the furniture shifted. It was time that the child should cease to sleep in her room, and plague her with his loud talking in his dreams. And she might as
well have the handsome inlaid chest of drawers, and that nice pious crucifix for herself next door, in place of Alberic’s little bed. So one morning there was a great shifting and dusting, and when Alberic came in from his walk on the terrace, there hung the tapestry entirely uncovered. He stood for a few minutes before it, riveted to the ground. Then he ran to his nurse, exclaiming, “Oh, nurse, dear nurse, look—the lady—!”

  For where the big crucifix had stood, the lower part of the beautiful pale lady with the gold thread hair was now exposed. But instead of a skirt, she ended off in a big snake’s tail, with scales of still most vivid (the tapestry not having faded there) green and gold.

  The nurse turned round.

  “Holy Virgin,” she cried, “why she’s a serpent!” Then noticing the boy’s violent excitement, she added, “You little ninny, it’s only Duke Alberic the Blond, who was your ancestor, and the Snake Lady.”

  Little Prince Alberic asked no questions, feeling that he must not. Very strange it was, but he loved the beautiful lady with the thread of gold hair only the more because she ended off in the long twisting body of a snake. And that, no doubt, was why the knight was so very good to her.

  II

  For want of that tapestry, poor Alberic, having cut its successor to pieces, began to pine away. It had been his whole world; and now it was gone he discovered that he had no other. No one had ever cared for him except his nurse, who was very cross. Nothing had ever been taught him except the Latin catechism; he had had nothing to make a pet of except the fat carp, supposed to be four hundred years old, in the tank; he had nothing to play with except a gala coral with bells by Benvenuto Cellini, which Duke Balthasar Maria had sent him on his eighth birthday. He had never had anything except a grandfather, and had never been outside the Red Palace.

  Now, after the loss of the tapestry, the disappearance of the plants and flowers and birds and beasts on its borders, and the departure of the kind knight on the horse and the dear golden- haired Snake Lady, Alberic became aware that he had always hated both his grandfather and the Red Palace.