November Night Tales

by Henry Chapman Mercer

  But by the time he had neared the celebrated defile by which the great river breaks through the Carpathians, he realized that he had misjudged the situation. Disappointing stories, told him by the monks, of robberies, fires, books given away or sold, gross carelessness, dull indifference, met him everywhere, until, disgusted with his summer’s work, he had concluded to end it. Then, at the eleventh hour, Fortune smiled upon him at the Monastery of Jollok.

  Overlooking an enchanting valley where, through grain-fields and vineyards, the River L—— takes its great bend to the southward and peasants wash its sands for gold, the historic Jollok might well have roused his hopes earlier in the summer. But he saw nothing to cheer his dampened spirits in the bulbed steeples and century-marking shifts of roof and turret when, on the morning of a hot summer’s day, after a night spent in the neighboring village, he rode up under the limetrees to the great door and rang the bell.

  His letters of introduction soon brought the usual welcome from the hospitable monks, ending in an interview with the abbot, a small, stooping, white-bearded priest, with glittering black eyes, who met him in the fragrant garden. After listening politely to the traveler’s brief explanation, and protesting that the library upstairs was not worth seeing, the polite old man led his visitor by way of several vaulted staircases to the end of a whitewashed flagged corridor in one of the upper gables. There he stopped before a large unpainted door, chalk-marked with fading symbols, unlocked it with difficulty, and pushed it open.

  “I am ashamed to show you such a place,” said he.

  The dilapidated room, commanding a vast view over the great bend of the river, was lighted by two very high broken windows, through which the protruding boughs of an ash tree scratched and rattled in the wind. Save for a few cheap-looking modern books, the rotting doorless cupboards were all empty. Withered leaves of past autumns scattered the floor and half buried a lot of dark leather rolls stacked in one corner.

  The professor stepped forward.

  “Here is something,” he remarked as, leaning down, he brushed away some of the leaves. The priest laughed contemptuously.

  “Only our old farm ledgers,” said he, approaching the rubbish and stirring it with his foot; “for you utterly uninteresting, and for us,—not worth shelf-room.”

  He pulled out one of the cylinders, undid the thongs, and unrolled it about a foot, pointing out rough blocks of coarse manuscript, with here and there a large floriated initial letter in black. Then he tied it up again and tossed it back upon the leaves.

  “Farm ledgers, without the farms,” said he sadly. “Our lands are gone, and so are our books. You should have come here a hundred years ago, before they were stolen.”

  Rather out of politeness than interest in the kind of tale he had listened to so often, the professor asked for particulars.

  “It came of a lawsuit,” explained the priest, “ending in an outrage. You have no doubt heard of the celebrated Baron Trenck,—Trenck the Pandour.”

  “Yes.”

  “A terrible man. History tells us, you know, that the law meant nothing to him. Yet, his lawsuit with us, which began with his grandfather, was decided against us. There was a delay in the matter, and the story goes that Trenck, who in spite of his well known avarice was said to be highly educated, agreed to take a certain book out of the library, in part payment of his claim. If so, the book must have been, as they say, either bound with gems in gold, or very valuable. However that may be, during the proceedings, and before the matter was finally settled, our abbot died, and when Trenck came to claim his volume, it could not be found. The thing occurred a long time ago, and it seems almost incredible that a book like this could have been mislaid, or, if hidden, that anyone would have dared to thwart such a man. But so it happened. The result was what might have been expected. At first Trenck ordered his pandours to burn the monastery, but finally compromised by carrying off the whole library. Everything that we had was packed up in wagons, which he forced the peasants to supply, and off it went.”

  “Had you no redress?” asked the professor.

  “The Empress Maria,” continued the priest, “on complaint by our patriarch, ordered Trenck to restore the books. Of course, he pretended to comply, but, of course, evaded the matter in his usual way. There is our redress,” he continued, kicking the roll tossed back upon the leaves. “All that ever came back. The rest, he might as well have devoured. No wonder they called him werwolf.”

  “I have heard him accused of almost everything,” remarked the professor incredulously, “but never of that.”

  “It was suppressed in print through family influence. Nevertheless, it is a fact. He was brought to trial for it at Temesvar, in 1753. What they proved I never heard. As for the superstition, it is one of those horrible survivals of the Middle Ages, which, it seems, cannot be rooted out. No matter. I mention it as showing the popular opinion of the man, if he was a man and not a monster.”

  The professor took a final look at the book-pile, then, commenting on the form rather than the contents of the ledgers, which as extended rolls, Kulandri, and not foliated volumes, had survived into comparatively recent times, asked to buy one as a curiosity.

  “Buy them all!” exclaimed the priest. “They are of no use here.”

  The disappointed visitor pulled the spurned roll out of the leaves and dusted it off with his handkerchief.

  “This will do,” said he. Whereupon, after paying the moderate sum demanded, he followed his venerable guide out of the room and upon a brief tour of inspection through the great building. But before they reached the lower floor he regretted his purchase. The clumsy bundle, nearly two feet long, about eight inches thick, and very heavy, seemed a useless encumbrance, and he was several times on the point of leaving it behind him; but at last, when the horses were brought up, managed to make it portable by tying it to the back of the saddle. Then, after a grateful farewell to the monks and their obliging superior, and without waiting for the midday meal, he rode off with his peasant guide.

  Jollok was the last monastery in the professor’s itinerary. But the more he reflected upon his visit there, the more disgusted he became with his summer’s search for treasures that had existed only in his imagination. Jollok again proved the fact. For if Trenck had taken all the books, in the days of its glory, why had no scholars heard of valuable manuscripts in the inventories made during his celebrated law suit with the Crown? Above all, a book of immense value, bound in gold, coveted by the great marauder, and hidden by the Monks. What had become of it after Trenck’s death?

  The abbot’s story was probably a myth, which the professor might well banish from his mind, and with it his plan of pushing his fruitless search down the river, into Bulgaria. The evening breeze failed to refresh him. In gloomy meditation he watched the pink of ending day fade from the eastern sky, while the meadows gave up their golden green to long, stalking shadows from the swaying acacia trees.

  The thoroughbred horses hurried their riders northward, but the sun was setting by the time the professor had reached Semendria, paid off his mounted guide at the hotel, and found his way to the houseboat.

  ii

  His servant, a powerful, sunburned, flaxen-haired young fellow, with eyes as blue as his fresh shirt, had been taking down the deck-awning for the night, when the dejected scholar crossed the floor of a dilapidated boat-house and stepped on board.

  “Everything went all right, I hope, sir, while you were gone,” remarked the young man, as he took his master’s dusty coat.

  “About as usual,” answered the latter gloomily. “I found nothing.”

  “Well enough, sir, if it’s no worse,—but I’ve had a very queer dream about you.”

  The professor tried to smile. “Nothing very cheerful, I suppose,” said he.

  “I can’t say that it was, that is, the last part of it. I
dreamed that one night you had caught a very beautiful kind of insect, like a glowworm,—the brightest I ever saw. While you were studying it a woman dressed in red came to look at it. All at once she snatched it from your hands. Then, when you tried to get it back, she turned into a wolf, and began to eat you up. The dream came back a second time.”

  “I am glad I escaped the woman, or the wolf, whichever it was,” remarked the professor. “The glowworm, I always miss. This good-for-nothing book,” laying his hand on the bundle he had brought with him, “is what they call a farm ledger. It ends my list of failures. I have had enough of them. Sell the boat at once. We will take our passage on the next up-going river steamer.”

  He tossed the despised bundle upon the cabin roof and was about to give further directions for packing, when the young man surprised him with the news that, owing to proposed blastings in the channel below them, river navigation had been suspended during his absence and the last steamer had left that afternoon.

  As no railway existed in those days, the information, which completely cut off his easy return home, confounded and provoked him. He waited a while to hear the man confirm it; then picked up his package, crossed the roof, descended into his cabin and lay down on the berth, determined to dismiss the disagreeable subject from his mind until after supper. But, tired and hungry as he was, his vagrant thoughts, contending with the new difficulty, had half mastered him; when, by way of a possible diversion, after glancing contemptuously at the bundle on the chair, he got up and unwrapped it. No last flicker of sunlight lit the shadows in the cabin. No sound broke the stillness as he laid it on the bed and began slowly unrolling it.

  The scroll, owing to the stiffness of the leather, opened with difficulty. Holding it down on the coverlet, the scholar rolled and unrolled the ends until he had reached about the fifth or sixth revolution, when a long waxed bundle, exposing a deep-cut cavity in the interior, slipped out on the bed and fell on the floor. He picked it up. It was heavy, compact, and tightly bound with what seemed to be a sheet of linen covered with beeswax. Carefully inserting the point of his knife through the envelope, he slowly removed this; when, to his astonishment, a second cylindrical manuscript, or Kulandros, rolled like the first, appeared. It was tied together with two thongs, wrapped upon ornamented buttons or discs, apparently made of gold. The well-preserved leather, light gray in color, was richly embossed on its outside, and opened easily, until after about two revolutions the professor’s eyes caught the unfolding characters of a closely-written text. Opposite this, the outer side of the roll showed a yellow surface of gilded felt or wool, under a magnificent fretwork of gold beads embroidered with blue and sparkling stones that seemed to glow with a self-contained light.

  Trembling with excitement, he lifted the thing from the bed, and was about to carry it outside for better inspection when he heard voices and a shuffling of feet, followed by the familiar tramp over head.

  “What shall we do, Herr Professor?” whispered Karl a moment later, leaning forward into the cabin; “the customs officers are here,—two of them.”

  Hastily rolling up his manuscript, the startled traveler thrust it under the mattress, pulled out his purse, and handed several Austrian bank notes to his servant.

  “Get rid of them,” he ordered. “I have found something here that they must not see.”

  And when with a wink and significant squirm of thumb and fingers the young man had climbed up the ladder, the scholar sat down on the berth and listened to the sound of voices that followed. By the time the disquieting murmur ceased, it had grown dark,—too dark to see his treasure-trove as he pulled it from under the mattress. He got up and stepped across the cabin. When the boat was built he had taken advantage of its doubled partitions to insert a closet behind a small cupboard, in the interval. He turned a clothes-hook, which released the cupboard, placed the manuscript upon the hidden shelf, and had closed the opening, when the bell rang, and he went to supper.

  But he had lost his appetite for Vienna coffee and kümmelbrot. Amazed, thrilled, confounded, by the events of the last few moments he hurried through the meal in silence, scarcely hearing the details of Karl’s mercenary transaction. At length, he suddenly realized the danger of a second visit from the officers, and rose from the table.

  “I have found your glowworm,” said he.

  Mounting the ladder, he hurried off to his cabin, to return presently with the new treasure tied up in paper.

  “We can’t afford to run any risks with this thing,” he declared, holding out the bundle in the twilight, while with suppressed emotion he astonished his servant with an account of his astounding discovery. “It must be soldered up in a tin, watertight case, and we must leave here tonight.”

  He walked down the gang-plank and jumped ashore. The man followed him, and they went up the bank together, after which, with a few more words of explanation, he hurried away.

  The lights of Semendria were brightening, and the din of its night life waking on the river breeze, as the excited professor jostled the crowd among its torch-lit booths and tunnel-like shops till the clang of a hammer and anvil brought him to the place looked for,—a smoky labyrinth, lighted with several hanging oil lamps, where a half-naked tinsmith, working at a furnace, laid down his hammer to listen to the uncommon requirement. A promise of extra pay hurried the job, and within an hour the manuscript was safely enclosed in a water-tight cylinder, soldered under a close-fitting lid. Hanging it, as a satchel, over his shoulder, by a strap run through two attached rings, he thanked the man, paid his bill, and hastened back to the boat.

  A light in the kitchen, shining through its open door, showed Karl leaning forward upon the table, asleep upon his stool. The professor roused him and, with his help, pulled in the gang-plank and dragged the houseboat by its cable about twenty feet up stream. Then, on quickly lifting the anchor, a strong push with the boat-hook, and double-pull at the oars and rudder, swung the heavy craft out into the stream.

  No moon lit the great river as, swept out into the night, they watched the lights of the noisy city grow dim; and, guided only by star-gleams, the shifting of shadows, and the rustle of ripples upon forest wreckage, drifted on until about midnight. Then with the sweep of branches over the deck, came the rattle of boat-hook and anchor that brought them to rest under the bank of a wooded island.

  But for a long time the professor lay awake in his cool and comfortable cabin. The sinister figure of Trenck, cheating himself of his booty, appeared and reappeared in wakening dreams. Vain theories, at variance with the abbot’s tale, to account for the singular hiding-place of the manuscript, doubts as to its magnificent embellishment, so imperfectly seen, regrets that he had sealed up his treasure, impulses to get up and file off its lid, banished rest, until, exhausted nature at last asserted itself and he fell asleep.

  iii

  Through the trees the sunbeams glanced on the cabin roof-deck next morning as the professor sat by the breakfast-table smoking a cigar. Karl, who had finished clearing away the dishes, stopped and looked a moment at his master.

  “Do you believe in dreams, sir?” he asked.

  The scholar had been gazing up through the fluttering leaves at the sky, across which floated white summer clouds of the familiar shape often compared to the fleeces of sheep. “What kind of dreams?” he returned. “We all have dreams.”

  “That dream I told you about yesterday at Semendria. I have had it again, sir, and I don’t like it at all.”

  “About my finding a glowworm?”

  “Not so much the glowworm as the rest of it,—that red woman who turns into a wolf and tries to eat you up.”

  The professor laughed as the young man pushed the floating house out of its shadowed harbor. He rose from the table.

  “Here is your glowworm,” he cried, laying his hand on the tin satchel suspended from his shoulder.

  *
* * * * * * *

  Several days had passed. The Carpathians were rising to the eastward. The channel had narrowed to half its width as the current swept them toward the dangerous rapids that they purposed passing as usual, without pilot or chart. Seated on the gunwale one afternoon, with his hand upon his tin-sealed still-unopened treasure, the professor was looking anxiously down the river, listening for the warning roar of waters as yet inaudible.

  Island after island, village after village, had faded into the background, the grotesque Parrot rock had risen in mid-river and was disappearing, when, at sight of a vast ruin blending with the cliffs to the right, he seized the rudder, and hastily deciding to take advantage of its high skyline, as a viewpoint around the sharp bend just ahead, with the help of a few oar-strokes from Karl, brought the boat into slack water under the rocks.

  The castle of Golubacz had a bad name on account of an insect of obscure origin, known to naturalists as the murder fly, which in poisonous deadly swarms issued from it about mid summer. But the professor, in answer to Karl’s question, declared that they were a month ahead of the insect danger, and sprang ashore.

  Following the blasted wreckage of a once mighty wall, which skirted the rock for about a hundred yards and then turned up the hill, he found a breach and clambered into a stony waste, beyond which the bleak monument of race hatred and cruelty rose upon the rock.

  The drawbridge was gone, but the double-winged doors of wood, which still mounted the gateway ahead, stood open. Passing these, a very steep path over ramparts wrecked by the Turks and by way of several vaulted openings, which might have served as egresses for the murder fly, brought him at last to the top of the Great Keep, where the eagle’s view, with its flash of impetuous river, brighter than the clouds, broke upon him. He took up his field-glasses, swept them over the mountain panorama, and was about to focus them upon the doubtful waterway, when, to his disagreeable surprise, he saw that he was not alone.