November Night Tales

by Henry Chapman Mercer

  “Do you recognize it?” he asked, smiling.

  A quick glance identified a piece of my own handiwork,—a mountainous landscape with a castle, copied from an old wood cut, given him on leaving college.

  “Good Heavens, my boy!” I exclaimed, surprised, and flattered by the associations evoked. “Is it Auld Lang Syne, or is it Art?”

  Under the glitter of his heavy-rimmed glasses, I saw a well remembered glow in the restless grey eyes.

  “Both,” said he. “The picture affects me strangely. That castle, and those white mountains under the cloud, seem to suggest something that I can’t account for, or that I may have dreamt of. Besides, mediæval fortification is my subject just now. Of course you remember the castle.”

  “Every line of it,” said I, “particularly as my first sketch was condemned, and I had to copy the picture twice.”

  I recalled facts which he might have known, that our college instructor had photographed an unnamed print, ordered the art-class to copy the scissored-out background, and then, as a clever means of furthering his instruction, expected us to find the original worked from in the library print-room. On taking my degree at the time, I had failed to do this, hence I had never been able to account for the origin of my drawing.

  “My friend, Doctor Lysander, has identified it as a Durer,” said Barron. “He has a theory that the castle still exists.”

  “Where?” I asked with surprise.

  “Somewhere in Switzerland. He connects it with his Durer letters, which you may have heard of.”

  I was familiar with some of Lysander’s researches, notably his sumptuous folios on the mediæval discoveries at Burg Sonnenburg, but as I knew nothing of the letters in question, Barron told me that the versatile scholar, a few months before, had found in one of the Ducal libraries, a correspondence of the great painter, which was making an unfortunate sensation at the time. In a copy he had seen of one of the letters, an improbable adventure was described or suggested, which together with the authenticity of the documents, had stirred up a bitter controversy. Several noted critics had attacked the Doctor’s judgment, if not his morals.

  “You mean that they accuse him of fabricating the manuscripts?”

  “Sh! Sh!” said Barron. “I think I hear him coming.”

  The famous scholar, he hastily told me, who was spending the summer in the Taurus, had been passing the day with him, and, when I called, had just gone out to inspect some newly dug cellars, exposing traces of a Roman road.

  A moment later a noise of footsteps in the corridor outside was followed by the entrance of a very erect heavily built man in a close-buttoned yellow, double-breasted coat, with huge globular forehead, beetling face, and dagger like beard, balanced by a monkish back-shelf of tonsured hair. He had come to take leave of his host. On being introduced to me, while I politely avoided staring at his grotesque profile, he picked up a cloak thrown over the back of one of the chairs, and had turned to the door, when Barron stopped him.

  “Wait,” said our host. “I have been telling my friend here about this castle that you say still exists.” He lifted my sketch from its hook, brought it to the table, and stood it up against a pile of books.

  The Doctor laid down his heavily-felted, broad-brimmed hat and a pair of silver plated field glasses, to listen to Barron’s hurried account of my association with the print, then fixed his frog-like browless eyes upon me.

  “You have cut out the background of Durer’s Visitation,” said he, in a deep resonant voice. “Quite a coincidence considering its bearing on my discovery of a batch of Durer’s letters, in which this castle is not named, but so well described, that I have been able to trace it.”

  “To Switzerland, I understand,” said I.

  “Yes,” returned the Doctor sternly. “But I prefer not to name the place.”

  “My friend speaks of an adventure connected with it,” I remarked.

  The Doctor frowned. “All in the letters,” said he. “There are certain details that should be proved first, and talked about afterward. Still, I will tell you that Durer, while sketching the castle with a friend, whose name is not mentioned, is attacked by robbers. They escape. He throws a valuable church relic or treasure for safety into a well, the castle well, of course.”

  “Does he describe the relic?” I asked.

  “Unfortunately there is a break in the manuscript just there; several pages have been torn away, but enough remains to make certain that his castaway, whatever it was, had been rescued from a church burned by the Hussites, and was said to have belonged to Saint John the Baptist. A Church myth, no doubt, but judging from Durer’s allusions, it must have been a remarkable thing, a very remarkable thing.”

  “He recovers it, of course,” said I.

  “No, according to the letters, he never gets back to the place. Therefore, the chances are a hundred to one that it still exists.”

  He paused and glared triumphantly at me, while as I noticed an angry twitching of the cavernous nostrils, Barron nudged me with his foot.

  “I expect to prove the fact in a way that will end this scandalous controversy, which you have no doubt heard of. Winters and his friends will have to apologize. If not——”

  He rose excitedly from his chair, picked up his hat and field glasses, and without listening to Barron, who again tried to stop him, strode to the door.

  “Let the dogs bark,” he cried, turning upon us with a contemptuous sweep of the powerful arm. “The caravan moves on.”

  Barron smiled, and then shook his head. “Too bad,” said he, after the resounding footsteps had died away outside. “A man you can’t advise, much less contradict. This is the third or fourth of his notorious wrangles, all the more deplorable when they end in reversions to his old duelling habits at Jena. Did you notice the face-scars?”

  “He doesn’t look like a man to be trifled with,” said I. “But do you believe all this?”

  “Not half of it,” laughed Barron. “The Doctor has exaggerated the meaning of his letters, which show that Durer has been impressed with a church legend, nothing more. Your castle in the air has nothing to do with it. Durer was not a realist. To my mind the whole landscape you have sketched is imaginary, as far off the earth as the cloud that floats over it.”

  But as we talked on of the career and appearance of his gigantic friend, Barron’s criticisms yielded to admiration. The Doctor’s discoveries, he declared, rescued texts of the Thousand and One Nights mislaid by Galland, decipherments of Hittite inscriptions, excavations at Carthage and Italica, far outweighed his mistakes.

  “Look there,” he continued, pointing down the flashing river. “Near that fringe of trees he has just unearthed one of the citadels of the 22d Roman Legion. Cartloads of bricks stamped ‘Primigenia Pia Fidelis,’ prove his theory of bridge construction in the time of Hadrian. Quite enough to offset his meddling with the Agram Manuscript.”

  As my knowledge of the Agram Manuscript was very indefinite, a criticism of the Doctor’s ill judged intrusion upon the great Museum controversy followed, until by the time I had listened to a witty description of the disputed Etruscan text, inscribed on the shroud of a mummy, the morning had gone, whereupon regretting my next day’s departure from Frankfort, I bade my old friend good-bye.

  ii

  During two succeeding months at Bonn, ending in a course of lectures on Roman Jurisprudence at Vienna, occasional rumors of the Durer controversy above mentioned, had reminded me of the Doctor and Barron, but I had supposed that the latter was too much absorbed in his researches, or distracted by the proximity of his rival, to write me the letter he had promised, when my next unexpected meeting with him occurred as follows:

  It was on a visit to the Albertina, one balmy afternoon. I had paused at the entrance, half tempted by breeze-blown waltz-strains from the neighboring Vol
ksgarten, to give up my proposed hour in the print room, when turning aside to avoid a departing throng of sightseers, I almost ran into my friend at the foot of one of the gallery staircases.

  “Upon my word,” he exclaimed, with a characteristic cane-flourish. “This is very curious. Come back here, I have something to show you.”

  Without explaining himself, he sprang up the marble stairs, and I followed him wonderingly into the long cross-lit narrow gallery, where an attendant, carrying a heavy portfolio, turned at his abrupt call, and placed the volume on one of the small tables near an open window. Barron stepped forward into the bright light. Pointing to the word Titian in gilt letters stamped upon the book cover, he began a hasty shuffle through its carefully mounted prints, to stop suddenly.

  “What do you think of that?” he asked, when one of the heavy cardboard pages fell open and my eye caught the familiar outline of my castle sketch. It had a confused look. Apart from its novel foreground, the familiar hillside trees had shifted their position. The details of the castle had been multiplied. The drawing was coarse. But the mountains though turned wrong way about, and the great white cloud were unmistakable. I glanced at the margin to find that the title, if it ever had one, had been cut away.

  “My woodcut turned inside out,” I exclaimed. “Durer never could have done this.”

  “No. They ascribe it to Titian. But no matter. Look! here.”

  He hurried to a neighboring table, where, on following him, I saw in another open portfolio, my version of the landscape just seen, clearly showing one of Durer’s monogram labels lying in the foreground. Picking up the heavy volume, Barron carried it back to the table we had just left, and placed the two open books side by side.

  Puzzled, but too familiar with the impressive details to be mistaken, I examined both prints closely, to see that the foregrounds, in the Titian, a strangely composed “Flight into Egypt,” in the Durer, a prominent group of figures near the doorway of a high building, differed entirely, but that the portentous background, allowing for variations in treatment, had been undoubtedly reproduced.

  “The Doctor must see this,” I exclaimed. “It throws a new light on his Durer letters. Durer, as he told us, had an unnamed companion. Why not Titian? This landscape is not in the air, as you thought. If Durer and Titian both sketched it, it must have existed. If so, the Doctor may find the castle.”

  “I hope he may,” said Barron. “But wait, here comes an authority on the subject.”

  While I stood looking at the volumes, Barron went to the desk, and a few moments later, the keeper, who had just come in, a very polite, slender, spectacled man, in a green-faced tyrolese jacket, was leaning over the prints with his magnifying glass.

  “Strange,” said he. “Very strange, indeed. I am quite familiar with the Durer, but this other print has escaped me. Some vandal has cut away its title. Nevertheless, one of my predecessors has ascribed it to Titian. Or rather, as Titian never made woodcuts, to some engraver who has reproduced one of Titian’s sketches. Marc Antonio Raimondi perhaps. But no! Here we have it.” He paused to place his forefinger on the engraver’s monogram. “F D,” said he, “with a little cross stands for Francesco Denanto, one of Titian’s scholars, and interpreters in wood. No matter, if Titian produced the original, the duplication of background proves either that he has copied Durer, or vice versa, more probably that both artists have sketched the same landscape.”

  “From different points of view,” I remarked.

  “But at the same time,” added Barron, “while the cloud retained its shape.”

  “Quite possible,” said the curator. “I have seen these tremendous clouds hang overhead for hours, particularly in the mountains.”

  “The mountains suggest Switzerland,” said I.

  “Impossible,” objected the curator. “Nothing is more certain than that Titian never visited Switzerland. If the thing happened at all it happened in Italy.”

  “Have you any proof of that?” asked Barron, who had been listening intently.

  “During Durer’s visit to Venice in 1506, we can infer that he met Titian. They were rivals, no doubt. Still, according to Professor Winters, certain documents, just found at the Doges Palace Library, prove a temporary companionship.”

  Barron, who had turned away from us, as if distracted by some sudden thought, started to say something, and stopped. Then, as the chimes of a distant church struck five, he pulled out his watch. “Unfortunately I must go,” said he, whereupon, explaining that he was living in one of the southern suburbs, near Ober Sanct Veit, and had to catch a train, he hurriedly left us.

  Without waiting longer in the print room, the curator led me into a small bookcased cabinet built, like the study of Rembrandt’s Philosopher, under an overwhelming flight of newel stairs, where, following his interesting sketch of the famous collection in his charge, our talk returned to Barron’s singular discovery.

  “I am sorry,” said I, “that my friend got off without telling you a curious story about this castle. Did you ever hear that Durer while escaping there from some robbers, threw a church relic of some sort for safety into a well?”

  A politely repressed laugh met my question.

  “Doctor Lysander’s treasure story. A church legend foolishly mixed up with his Durer letters and passed on to your friend.” The curator paused, and then in a somewhat stern voice continued: “But we have heard too much of these letters. They have been discredited by half a dozen critics, notably by Professor Winters, the well known Durer scholar. I haven’t followed the controversy, but someone has paid dearly for a patchwork of genuine fragments and forgeries, with an authentic signature.”

  “You don’t suspect the Doctor, I hope,” said I.

  “There are whispers, of course. But no! No! I know him too well for that, a genius, exasperating, no doubt. But the soul of honour; his appearance is against him. Have you ever met him? A kind of modern Goliath.”

  He stopped to pull open the upper-wing of a large sealed plate glass window, and as echoes from the Volksgarten again caught my ear, we forgot our subject to listen a while to the magic strains of Strauss, which, according to the curator, had filled the city with visitors, and the Albertina with more print lovers than ever. “Some of them, oddly enough,” he added, “in search of this very picture of Durer’s, we are talking about. You may not know that a reproduction has appeared in ‘Ruskin’s Modern Painters,’ in which the English Professor sees fit to cut out the great cloud.”

  “How does he justify that?” I asked.

  “He doesn’t justify it, he simply saws off the block.”

  He walked to a bookcase, pulled out a volume, and by help of a previously inserted marker, opened it upon the illustration in question—“no doubt to suit one of his atmospheric theories,” he muttered.

  After examining the mutilated masterpiece for some time, while listening to the curator’s angry comments, it suddenly occurred to me that Titian had reversed the cloud. Whereupon, as the point seemed important, if both artists had worked together, we went back into the print room to satisfy our doubts on the subject, only to find the portfolio gone, whereupon, as the attendant was closing the gallery, I took leave of my polite guide.

  In the several days which followed this, I saw and heard nothing of Barron. I had forgotten to get his address, and as I could learn nothing of him at the hotels, and an afternoon search among the shady villas of Ober Sanct Veit brought no clue, I had to leave Vienna with no more news of him than that contained in a note found one morning in the hotel letter box.

  “You will be interested to learn,” it read, “that I have a surprise in store for Doctor Lysander. I have discovered his castle, not to mention his treasure. But of that, more later, when I prove my case. With apologies for leaving Vienna without seeing you,—Yours sincerely,

  Th. Barron.”


  For several days the laconic message, postmarked Venice, puzzled and provoked me, but at last tired of inventing groundless theories to explain it, I dismissed the subject from my thoughts.

  iii

  According to my holiday plans, I should have spent the rest of the summer in the Carpathians. But reports of floods blocking travel in Northern Hungary had turned me to Italy. Following the tourist beaten path to Innspruck via Munich and Salzburg, I had crossed the Brenner, and after several aimless halts, at last, lured by guide book eulogies of the Dolomites, had established myself, for a week’s stay, in one of the new hotels at the little village of Monte Corbo.

  As it was not then generally known that the mountain town had been the birthplace of Titian, the note I found in the guide book to that effect, was a pleasant surprise to me. It suggested, of course, my meeting with Barron, and his print discovery, but neither his letter, or anything that had occurred meanwhile, prepared me for what happened on the evening of my arrival. It was in the kitchen of the alleged birthplace of the great Venetian artist, where, just as I had finished an inspection of the overhanging hood and craned andirons of its altar-like fireplaces, I turned at the touch of his hand upon my shoulder.

  He looked pale and tired. His clothes were in bad condition, and his handsome face blotched by two disfiguring patches of black court-plaster.

  “You knew I was here, of course,” he said despondently, after our greeting.

  I waited until he spoke again.

  “I mean you must have heard of my doings up at the Ruins? Don’t laugh,” said he, “I have just cleaned out the castle well.”