The Black Reaper

by Bernard Capes

  ‘It was long before I grasped the meaning of this; but, in a flash, it came upon me. The great lens formed the object glass, the small, the eyeglass, of a natural telescope of tremendous power, that drew the high summer clouds down within seeming touch and opened out the heavens before my staring eyes.

  ‘Monsieur, when this dawned upon me I was wild. That so astonishing a discovery should have been reserved for a poor ignorant Swiss peasant filled me with pride wicked in proportion with its absence of gratitude to the mighty dispenser of good. I came even to think my individuality part of the wonder and necessary to its existence. “Were it not for my courage and enterprise,” I cried, “this phenomenon would have remained a secret of the Nature that gave birth to it. She yields her treasures to such only as fear not.”

  ‘I had read in a book of Huyghens, Guinand, Newton, Herschel – the great high-priests of science who had striven through patient years to read the hieroglyphics of the heavens. “The wise imbeciles,” I thought. “They toiled and died, and Nature held no mirror up to them. For me, the poor Camille, she has worked in secret while they grew old and passed unsatisfied.”

  ‘Brilliant projects of astronomy whirled in my brain. The evening of my last discovery I remained out on the hills, and entered the cave as it grew dusk. A feeling of awe surged in me as dark fell over the valley, and the first stars glistened faintly. I dipped under the fan of water and took my stand in the hollow behind it. There was no moon, but my telescope was inclined, as it were, at a generous angle, and a section of the firmament was open before me. My heart beat fast as I looked through the lens.

  ‘Shall I tell you what I saw then and many nights after? Rings and crosses in the heavens of golden mist, spangled, as it seemed, with jewels; stars as big as cartwheels, twinkling points no longer, but round, like great bosses of molten fire; things shadowy, luminous, of strange colours and stranger forms, that seemed to brush the waters as they passed, but were in reality vast distances away.

  ‘Sometimes the thrust of wind up the ravine would produce a tremulous motion in the image at the focus of the mirror; but this was seldom. For the most part the wonderful lenses presented a steady curvature, not flawless, but of magnificent capacity.

  ‘Now it flashed upon me that, when the moon was at the full, she would top the valley in the direct path of my telescope’s range of view. At the thought I grew exultant. I – I, little Camille, should first read aright the history of this strange satellite. The instrument that could give shape to the stars would interpret to me the composition of that lonely orb as clearly as though I stood upon her surface.

  ‘As the time of her fulness drew near I grew feverish with excitement. I was sickening, as it were, to my madness, for never more should I look upon her willingly, with eyes either speculative or insane.’

  At this point Camille broke off for a little space, and lay back on his pillow. When he spoke again it was out of the darkness, with his face turned to the wall.

  ‘Monsieur, I cannot dwell upon it – I must hasten. We have no right to peer beyond the boundary God has drawn for us. I saw His hell – I saw His hell, I tell you. It is peopled with the damned – silent, horrible, distorted in the midst of ashes and desolation. It was a memory that, like the snake of Aaron, devoured all others till yesterday – till yesterday, by Christ’s mercy.’

  It seemed to me, as the days wore on, that Camille had but recovered his reason at the expense of his life; that the long rest deemed necessary for him after his bitter period of brain exhaustion might in the end prove an everlasting one. Possibly the blow to his head had, in expelling the seven devils, wounded beyond cure the vital function that had fostered them. He lay white, patient, and sweet-tempered to all, but moved by no inclination to rise and re-assume the many-coloured garment of life.

  His description of the dreadful desert in the sky I looked upon, merely, as an abiding memory of the brain phantasm that had finally overthrown a reason, already tottering under the tremendous excitement induced by his discovery of the lenses, and the magnified images they had presented to him. That there was truth in the asserted fact of the existence of these, my own experience convinced me; and curiosity as to this alone impelled me to the determination of investigating further, when my hand should be sufficiently recovered to act as no hindrance to me in forcing my way once more through the dense woods that bounded the waterfall. Moreover, the dispassionate enquiry of a mind less sensitive to impressions might, in the result, do more towards restoring the warped imagination of my friend to its normal state than any amount of spoken scepticism.

  To Camille I said nothing of my resolve; but waited on, chafing at the slow healing of my wounds. In the meantime the period of the full moon approached, and I decided, at whatever cost, to make the venture on the evening she topped her orbit, if circumstances at the worst should prevent my doing so sooner – and thus it turned out.

  On the eve of my enterprise, the first fair spring of rain in a drought of two months fell, to my disappointment, among the hills; for I feared an increase of the torrent and the effacement of the mighty lens. I set off, however, on the afternoon of the following day, in hot sunshine, mentally prognosticating a favourable termination to my expedition, and telling Madame Barbière not to expect me back till late.

  In leisurely fashion I made my way along the track we had previously traversed, risking no divergence through overhaste, and carefully examining all landmarks before deciding on any direction. Thus slowly proceeding, I had the good fortune to come within sound of the cataract as the sun was sinking behind the mountain ridges to my front; and presently emerged from the woods at the very spot we had struck in our former journey together.

  A chilly twilight reigned in the ravine, and the noise that came up from the ruin of the torrent seemed doubly accented by reason of it. The sound of water moving in darkness has always conveyed to me an impression of something horrible and deadly, be it nothing of more moment than the drip and hollow tinkle of a gutter pipe. But the crash in this echoing gorge was appalling indeed.

  For some moments I stood on the brink of the slope, looking across at the great knife of the fall, with a little shiver of fear. Then I shook myself, laughed, and without further ado took my courage in hand, and scrambled down the declivity and up again towards the cleft in the rocks.

  Here the chill of heart gripped me again – the watery sliding tunnel looked so evil in the contracting gloom. A false step in that humid chamber, and my bones would pound and crackle on the rocks forty feet below. It must be gone through with now, however; and, taking a long breath, I set foot in the passage under the curving downpour that seemed taut as an arched muscle.

  Reaching the burnt recess, a few moments sufficed to restore my self-confidence; and without further hesitation I dived under the inner little fan-shaped fall – which was there, indeed, as Camille had described it – and recovered my balance with pulses drumming thicker than I could have desired.

  In a moment I became conscious that some great power was before me. Across a vast, irregular disc filled with the ashy whiteness of the outer twilight, strange, unaccountable forms misty and undefined, passed, and repassed, and vanished. Cirrus they might have been, or the shadows flung by homing flights of birds; but of this I could not be certain. As the dusk deepened they showed no more, and presently I gazed only into a violet fathomless darkness.

  My own excitement now was great; and I found some difficulty in keeping it under control. But for the moment, it seemed to me, I pined greatly for free commune with the liberal atmosphere of earth. Therefore, I dipped under the little fall and made my cautious way to the margin of the cataract.

  I was surprised to find for how long a time the phenomenon had absorbed me. The moon was already high in the heavens, and making towards the ravine with rapid steps. Far below, the tumbling waters flashed in her rays, and on all sides great tiers of solemn trees stood up at attention to salute her.

  When her disc silvered the inner rim o
f the slope I had descended, I returned to my post of observation with tingling nerves. The field of the great object lens was already suffused with the radiance of her approach.

  Suddenly my pupils shrank before the apparition of a ghastly grey light, and all in a moment I was face to face with a segment of desolation more horrible than any desert. Monstrous growths of leprosy that had bubbled up and stiffened; fields of ashen slime – the sloughing of a world of corruption; hills of demon fungus swollen with the fatness of putrefaction; and, in the midst of all, dim, convulsed shapes wallowing, protruding, or stumbling aimlessly onwards, till they sank and disappeared.

  Madame Barbière threw up her hands when she let me in at the door. My appearance, no doubt, was ghastly. I knew not the hour nor the lapse of time covered by my wanderings about the hills, my face hidden in my palms, a drawn feeling about my heart, my lips muttering – muttering fragments of prayers, and my throat jerking with horrible laughter.

  For hours I lay face downwards on my bed.

  ‘Monsieur has seen it?’

  ‘I have seen it.’

  ‘I heard the rain on the hills. The lens will have been blurred. Monsieur has been spared much.’

  ‘God, in His mercy, pity thee! And me – oh, Camille, and me too!’

  ‘He has held out His white hand to me. I go, when I go, with a safe conduct.’

  He went before the week was out. The drought had broken and for five days the thunder crashed and the wild rain swept the mountains. On the morning of the sixth a drenched shepherd reported in the village that a landslip had choked the fall of Buet, and completely altered its shape. Madame Barbière broke into the room where I was sitting with Camille, big with the news. She little guessed how it affected her listeners.

  ‘The bon Dieu,’ said Camille, when she had gone, ‘has thundered His curse on Nature for revealing His secrets. I, who have penetrated into the forbidden, must perish.’

  ‘And I, Camille?’

  He turned to me with a melancholy sweet smile, and answered, paraphrasing the dying words of certain noble lips—

  ‘Be good, Monsieur; be good.’

  THE QUEER PICTURE

  It was standing with its face to the wall in a dark corner of the dingy old shop in Beak Street, whose miscellaneous litter had peered at me through a window so dirty as to make its owner appear rather to wish to baffle custom than to court it. Nor in that respect was its owner’s manner reassuring. His eyes peered dimly out of an unwashed face, like the pale blue oriental saucers through the window. He seemed to regard me with indifference and a little weariness, as if the profit of chaffering were hardly worth its trouble. ‘O, yes!’ he said, in a weak, hoarse voice, to my appreciations of this or that, as I edged my way through the labyrinth of Chippendale chairs, bureaux, coffin-stools, and gate-legged tables piled with Staffordshire figures, brass door-knockers, candlesticks, and ‘genuine antiques’ of every sort, description and plausibility.

  A little nettled by the creature’s apathy, I stooped, somewhat truculently, and turned the picture round for myself. It showed a landscape, pretty dark and mellow in tone, of, I fancied, the Crome or Nasmyth period. A woodland road, receding from the middle foreground of the canvas, presently took a curve round some palings to the left, and disappeared into greenery. Prominent over the near palings towered a huge oak; on the other side was a close medley of foliage gradually dimming into blue distances. The whole was feelingly painted and composed, the large oak tree, quite superbly rendered, forming its predominant feature. It all only suffered slightly to my mind as a composition from the white emptiness of the road and the absence of figures. I said so to the dealer. ‘O, yes!’ he answered, with a dry cough, and I shrugged my shoulders.

  I have had one or two ‘finds’ in my time – enough to stimulate my adventurous nerve. This thing seemed to me good: there was power in it, and knowledge. The time was evidently near twilight, still and darkling – a lonely, solemn place. The atmosphere was unmistakably suggested. Its canvas measurement was some 34 by 28 inches, and it possessed a frame, a little dingy and battered, but of the right sort. ‘Whom is it by?’ I said.

  The dealer made as if to bend, cleared his thin old throat and stood up again. ‘It’s unsigned,’ he said.

  ‘But don’t you know?’

  ‘If you were to ask me,’ he answered, ‘I should say – no more than that, mind you – that it was Urquhart’s work.’ Then, in response to my mute inquiry, ‘He was a follower of John Constable, you know.’

  I didn’t know; I knew nothing about the man; but, whoever he was, his capacity was plain. I decided to risk it. ‘Well, how much?’ I said.

  ‘Twenty pounds,’ said the dealer.

  As a matter of principle I protested – ‘Unsigned; of disputable origin; preposterous!’ ‘O, yes!’ he said, in his indifferent way. ‘Twenty pounds is the price. It’s a greatly admired piece. If you change your mind, I will take it back any time within a week, less ten per cent.’

  That seemed a fair offer, and I ended by carrying the picture home with me in a cab. Alone, I cleared the mantelpiece of my sitting-room, and stood the treasure up on it. I thought it distinctly an admirable piece of work, and so far rejoiced in my bargain. It seemed to reflect the very spirit of the twilight which was even now creeping over my room, to assimilate and conform to it. As I gazed I grew penetrated, possessed, by what I gazed on. I was on the wide, white road, standing or crouching somewhere down here out of the picture, and staring into its diminishing distances. The great oak was motionlessly alive; there seemed ‘a listening fear in its regard’. An expectation, an indescribable awe, held me amazedly entranced. And then my breath caught in a quick gasp. Round by the bend of the road, far away, there occurred a minute stirring, and something came into the picture that was not there before. The thing came on, increasing in regular progression as it advanced – and it was the figure of a young man, in a bygone costume, swinging airily towards me. I sat petrified, dumb-stricken; and all in an instant there arose between me and the illusion, blotting it out, a vague, shadowy shape. That receded quickly, shrinking as it withdrew, until it also was the figure of a man going away from me along the road to meet the other. The two encountered, and had passed, when the second wheeled suddenly in his tracks, and struck the first on the neck, so that the young man fell into the road. I saw something – a running stain of red, and simultaneously broke, with a cry, from my stupefaction and, leaping to the mantelpiece, turned the horror with its face to the wall. As I did so I saw that the canvas was empty of figures.

  The old dealer made no demur whatever about my returning the picture. ‘It always comes back,’ he said impassively, as he paid me in cash eighteen pounds out of the twenty I had given for it. ‘It stands me in well, you see, as an investment. It’s a fine work. I dare say you’ll be the dozenth or more who’s been struck by it, and carried it away with the same result. Twilight’s the time, they say.’

  ‘Don’t you know it is?’ I responded warmly. ‘Haven’t you seen it yourself?’

  ‘No,’ he said, with a thin cough, ‘no.’ (He had returned the picture to its former place and position.) ‘I don’t bother to look. It wouldn’t be policy, and it wouldn’t be fair, you know, for me to sell it if I had. I’m not bound to go upon hearsay; and it doesn’t trouble me where it stands.’

  ‘But’ – I turned on my heel indignantly, and came back – ‘you said it was an Urquhart.’

  ‘On its intrinsic evidences,’ he responded; ‘not in the least because it happens that Urquhart was hanged for the murder of his wife’s paramour on a country road he was engaged in painting at the time. He stuck him in the neck with a palette-knife. That may have been the very picture – or it may not – before the figures were filled in. Urquhart generally used sheep and countrymen. But all that’s no concern of mine. I say it’s an Urquhart because of the style. No one but him, in my opinion, could have painted that oak.’

  DARK DIGNUM

  ‘I’d not go ni
gher, sir,’ said my landlady’s father.

  I made out his warning through the shrill piping of the wind; and stopped and took in the plunging seascape from where I stood. The boom of the waves came up from a vast distance beneath; sky and the horizon of running water seemed hurrying upon us over the lip of the rearing cliff.

  ‘It crumbles!’ he cried. ‘It crumbles near the edge like as frosted mortar. I’ve seen a noble sheep, sir, eighty pound of mutton, browsing here one moment, and seen it go down the next in a puff of white dust. Hark to that! Do you hear it?’

  Through the tumult of the wind in that high place came a liquid vibrant sound, like the muffled stroke of iron on an anvil. I thought it the gobble of water in clanging caves deep down below.

  ‘It might be a bell,’ I said.

  The old man chuckled joyously. He was my cicerone for the nonce; had come out of his chair by the inglenook to taste a little the salt of life. The north-easter flashed in the white cataracts of his eyes and woke a feeble activity in his scrannel limbs. When the wind blew loud, his daughter had told me, he was always restless, like an imprisoned sea-gull. He would be up and out. He would rise and flap his old draggled pinions, as if the great air fanned an expiring spark into flame.

  ‘It is a bell!’ he cried – ‘the bell of old St Dunstan’s, that was swallowed by the waters in the dark times.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘That is the legend hereabouts.’

  ‘No legend, sir – no legend. Where be the tombstones of drownded mariners to prove it such? Not one to forty that they has in other sea-board parishes. For why? Dunstan bell sounds its warning, and not a craft will put out.’

  ‘There is the storm cone,’ I suggested.

  He did not hear me. He was punching with his staff at one of a number of little green mounds that lay about us.