“’Pon my word,” he said, “I’m delighted to see you all right again so soon.”
“All right again so soon?” was the reply. “What in mercy’s name do you mean?”
“Oh, my dear old fellow,” began Everdell, fumbling with his watch-chain, “it was pretty bad, you know, yesterday.”
“Pretty—bad—yesterday?”
“I saw you in the morning, and for an hour or so in the afternoon. Perhaps no one would have noticed it if you hadn’t stayed here all day, and poured those confidences into people’s ears about De Pommereul. You didn’t appear to have drank a drop in the club; there’s the funny part of it. You went out several times, though, and came back again. All that you had to drink (except some wine here at dinner, you remember) you must have got outside. I wasn’t here at ten o’clock when De Pommereul came in. I’m glad I wasn’t. You must have been dreadful. If Summerson and Joyce hadn’t rushed in between you and the Count, heaven knows what would have happened. As it is—”
At this point Dalrymple broke in with cold harshness: “Look here, Everdell, I always disliked practical jokes, and I’ve known for a number of years that you’re given to them. You’ve never attempted to make me your butt before, however, and you’ll have the kindness to discontinue any such proceeding now.”
Everdell drew back for a moment, frowned, shrugged his shoulders, and then muttering, “Oh, if you’re going to put it in that way,” strode quickly out of the dining-room.
Dalrymple scarcely ate a morsel of breakfast. After he had gulped down some hot coffee he repaired to the reading-room. As he re-entered it a waiter handed him several letters. One, which he opened first, was marked “immediate,” and had been sent him from his own house by an intelligent and devoted woman servant there, who had been for a long period in his employ. This letter made poor Dalrymple’s head swim as he read it. Written and signed by Mr. Summerson himself, as chairman of the house committee of the club, it ordered him to appear that same evening before a meeting of the governors and answer to a charge of disorderly conduct on the previous night. Then it went on to state that he (Dalrymple) had been seen throughout the previous day at the club in a state of evident intoxication, and had, finally, between the hours of 10 and 11 P. M., accosted and grossly insulted the Count de Pommereul in the main drawing-room of the Gramercy.
“Disorderly conduct,” “evident intoxication,” “grossly insulted the Count de Pommereul.” These words were trembling on Dalrymple’s lips as he presently approached Summerson himself, the very gentleman who had signed the letter, and who stood in the hall, arrayed for the street.
“What—what does it all mean?” gasped Dalrymple. “I—I never was intoxicated in my life, Lawrence Summerson; you ought to know that! I played euchre last night, up in the card-room, from nine o’clock till twelve, with Ogden and Folsom and yourself. If there’s any practical joke being got up against me, for God’s sake—”
“Wait a minute, please,” said Summerson. He went back into the coat-room, disarrayed himself of his street wraps, and finally joined Dalrymple. His first words, low and grave, ran thus: “Can it be possible you don’t recollect that our game of euchre was played the night before last and not last night?” Then he went with Dalrymple into a corner of the reading room, and they talked together for a good while.
Dalrymple went back to his home that day in a mental whirl. It still wanted a number of hours before the Governing Committee would meet. He had lost a day out of his life—there could be no doubt of that. If he had moved about the Club at all yesterday with a drunken manner, reviling De Pommereul to everybody who would lend him an ear—if he had afterward met De Pommereul in the Club and directed toward him in loud and furious tones a perfect torrent of accusation—he himself was completely, blankly ignorant.
For a good while he sat quite still and thought. Then he summoned Ann, the elderly and very trustworthy Ann, who had been his dear mother’s maid, and was now his housekeeper. He questioned Ann, and after dismissing her he pondered her answers. Three times yesterday she had seen him, and regarding his appearance Ann had her distinct opinions.
Suddenly a light flashed upon Dalrymple while he sat alone and brooded. He sprang up and a cry, half of awe, half of gladness, left his lips. The baffling problem had been solved!
That evening he presented himself before the Governing Committee. All assembled were sorry for him. Of course, punishment must be dealt, but for an old and popular member like Dalrymple it must not be expulsion. The general feeling of the Club had indeed already been gauged, and it was in favor of suspension for six months or a year at the farthest.
Dalrymple, however, was determined that he should be visited with no punishment at all. And he meant to state why.
The judges, as he faced them, all looked politely grim. The President, after a few suave preliminaries, asked Dalrymple if he had anything to say concerning the charges preferred against him. Dalrymple then proceeded to speak with a clear voice and composed demeanor.
His first sentences electrified his hearers. “I have no possible recollection of yesterday,” he began, “and it is precisely as much of a lost day to me as though I had lain chloroformed for twenty-four hours. On Wednesday night I returned home from this club and went to rest. I never really woke until Friday, possibly a little while after midnight, and then within my own bed. On Thursday morning I must have risen in a state of somnambulism, hypnotism, mental aberration, whatever you please, and not come to myself until Thursday had passed, and I had once more retired. Of what yesterday occurred I therefore claim to have been the irresponsible agent, and to have become so through no fault of my own. I am completely innocent of the misdemeanors charged against me, and I now solemnly swear this, on my word of honor as a gentleman.”
Here Dalrymple paused. The members of the committee interchanged glances amid profound silence. On some faces doubt could be read, but on others its veriest opposite. The intense stillness had become painful when Dalrymple spoke again.
“I had hoped that I should escape throughout my own lifetime all visitations of this distressing kind. My grandfather and two of my uncles not only walked in their sleep to an alarming degree, but were each subject to strange conditions of mind, in which acts were performed by them that they could not possibly remember afterward.” Here the speaker paused, soon continuing, however, in a lower and more reflective tone:
“Yes, my family have had the strange failing (that is, nearly all of them except myself, on the paternal side) of—”
But he said no more. The tension was loosened, and a great roar of laughter rose from the whole committee. How often every man there had joked him about that marvelous budget of stories which he infallibly began one way and one way only! And when the familiar formula sounded forth, it was all the funnier to those who heard it because of the solemn, judicial circumstances in which it again met their hearing.
The plaintiff was honorably acquitted. As for De Pommereul, as every word that Dalrymple had said concerning his past life in France happened to be perfectly true, the Count never reappeared at the Gramercy. His engagement with Mrs. Carrington was soon afterward broken off by the lady herself, and for a good while it was rumored that this lady had repentantly made it optional with Dalrymple whether he should once more become her accepted sweetheart.
But Dalrymple remained a bachelor. He is quite an old man now, yet he may be found in the card-room of the Gramercy nearly every evening. He is very willing to tell you the story of his “lost day” if you ask him courteously for it, and not in any strain of fun-poking; but he attempts no more voluntary recitals on the subject of his “family’s” maladies or mishaps.
METZENGERSTEIN, by Edgar Allan Poe
Pestis eram vivus—moriens tua mors ero.
—Martin Luther
Horror and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages. Why then give a date to this story I have to tell? Let it suffice to say, that at the period of which I speak, there existed, in the int
erior of Hungary, a settled although hidden belief in the doctrines of the Metempsychosis. Of the doctrines themselves—that is, of their falsity, or of their probability—I say nothing. I assert, however, that much of our incredulity—as La Bruyère says of all our unhappiness—“vient de ne pouvoir être seuls.”
But there are some points in the Hungarian superstition which were fast verging to absurdity. They—the Hungarians—differed very essentially from their Eastern authorities. For example, “The soul,” said the former—I give the words of an acute and intelligent Parisian—“ne demeure qu’un seul fois dans un corps sensible: au reste—un cheval, un chien, un homme même, n’est que la ressemblance peu tangible de ces animaux.”
The families of Berlifitzing and Metzengerstein had been at variance for centuries. Never before were two houses so illustrious, mutually embittered by hostility so deadly. The origin of this enmity seems to be found in the words of an ancient prophecy—“A lofty name shall have a fearful fall when, as the rider over his horse, the mortality of Metzengerstein shall triumph over the immortality of Berlifitzing.”
To be sure the words themselves had little or no meaning. But more trivial causes have given rise—and that no long while ago—to consequences equally eventful. Besides, the estates, which were contiguous, had long exercised a rival influence in the affairs of a busy government. Moreover, near neighbors are seldom friends; and the inhabitants of the Castle Berlifitzing might look, from their lofty buttresses, into the very windows of the palace Metzengerstein. Least of all had the more than feudal magnificence, thus discovered, a tendency to allay the irritable feelings of the less ancient and less wealthy Berlifitzings. What wonder then, that the words, however silly, of that prediction, should have succeeded in setting and keeping at variance two families already predisposed to quarrel by every instigation of hereditary jealousy? The prophecy seemed to imply—if it implied anything—a final triumph on the part of the already more powerful house; and was of course remembered with the more bitter animosity by the weaker and less influential.
Wilhelm, Count Berlifitzing, although loftily descended, was, at the epoch of this narrative, an infirm and doting old man, remarkable for nothing but an inordinate and inveterate personal antipathy to the family of his rival, and so passionate a love of horses, and of hunting, that neither bodily infirmity, great age, nor mental incapacity, prevented his daily participation in the dangers of the chase.
Frederick, Baron Metzengerstein, was, on the other hand, not yet of age. His father, the Minister G—, died young. His mother, the Lady Mary, followed him quickly after. Frederick was, at that time, in his fifteenth year. In a city, fifteen years are no long period—a child may be still a child in his third lustrum: but in a wilderness—in so magnificent a wilderness as that old principality, fifteen years have a far deeper meaning.
From some peculiar circumstances attending the administration of his father, the young Baron, at the decease of the former, entered immediately upon his vast possessions. Such estates were seldom held before by a nobleman of Hungary. His castles were without number. The chief in point of splendor and extent was the “Château Metzengerstein.” The boundary line of his dominions was never clearly defined; but his principal park embraced a circuit of fifty miles.
Upon the succession of a proprietor so young, with a character so well known, to a fortune so unparalleled, little speculation was afloat in regard to his probable course of conduct. And, indeed, for the space of three days, the behavior of the heir out-heroded Herod, and fairly surpassed the expectations of his most enthusiastic admirers. Shameful debaucheries—flagrant treacheries—unheard-of atrocities—gave his trembling vassals quickly to understand that no servile submission on their part—no punctilios of conscience on his own—were thenceforward to prove any security against the remorseless fangs of a petty Caligula. On the night of the fourth day, the stables of the castle Berlifitzing were discovered to be on fire; and the unanimous opinion of the neighborhood added the crime of the incendiary to the already hideous list of the Baron’s misdemeanors and enormities.
But during the tumult occasioned by this occurrence, the young nobleman himself sat apparently buried in meditation, in a vast and desolate upper apartment of the family palace of Metzengerstein. The rich although faded tapestry hangings which swung gloomily upon the walls, represented the shadowy and majestic forms of a thousand illustrious ancestors. Here, rich-ermined priests, and pontifical dignitaries, familiarly seated with the autocrat and the sovereign, put a veto on the wishes of a temporal king, or restrained with the fiat of papal supremacy the rebellious sceptre of the Arch-enemy. There, the dark, tall statures of the Princes Metzengerstein—their muscular war-coursers plunging over the carcasses of fallen foes—startled the steadiest nerves with their vigorous expression; and here, again, the voluptuous and swan-like figures of the dames of days gone by, floated away in the mazes of an unreal dance to the strains of imaginary melody.
But as the Baron listened, or affected to listen, to the gradually increasing uproar in the stables of Berlifitzing—or perhaps pondered upon some more novel, some more decided act of audacity—his eyes became unwittingly rivetted to the figure of an enormous, and unnaturally colored horse, represented in the tapestry as belonging to a Saracen ancestor of the family of his rival. The horse itself, in the foreground of the design, stood motionless and statue-like—while farther back, its discomfited rider perished by the dagger of a Metzengerstein.
On Frederick’s lip arose a fiendish expression, as he became aware of the direction which his glance had, without his consciousness, assumed. Yet he did not remove it. On the contrary, he could by no means account for the overwhelming anxiety which appeared falling like a pall upon his senses. It was with difficulty that he reconciled his dreamy and incoherent feelings with the certainty of being awake. The longer he gazed the more absorbing became the spell—the more impossible did it appear that he could ever withdraw his glance from the fascination of that tapestry. But the tumult without becoming suddenly more violent, with a compulsory exertion he diverted his attention to the glare of ruddy light thrown full by the flaming stables upon the windows of the apartment.
The action, however, was but momentary, his gaze returned mechanically to the wall. To his extreme horror and astonishment, the head of the gigantic steed had, in the meantime, altered its position. The neck of the animal, before arched, as if in compassion, over the prostrate body of its lord, was now extended, at full length, in the direction of the Baron. The eyes, before invisible, now wore an energetic and human expression, while they gleamed with a fiery and unusual red; and the distended lips of the apparently enraged horse left in full view his gigantic and disgusting teeth.
Stupified with terror, the young nobleman tottered to the door. As he threw it open, a flash of red light, streaming far into the chamber, flung his shadow with a clear outline against the quivering tapestry, and he shuddered to perceive that shadow—as he staggered awhile upon the threshold—assuming the exact position, and precisely filling up the contour, of the relentless and triumphant murderer of the Saracen Berlifitzing.
To lighten the depression of his spirits, the Baron hurried into the open air. At the principal gate of the palace he encountered three equerries. With much difficulty, and at the imminent peril of their lives, they were restraining the convulsive plunges of a gigantic and fiery-colored horse.
“Whose horse? Where did you get him?” demanded the youth, in a querulous and husky tone of voice, as he became instantly aware that the mysterious steed in the tapestried chamber was the very counterpart of the furious animal before his eyes.
“He is your own property, sire,” replied one of the equerries, “at least he is claimed by no other owner. We caught him flying, all smoking and foaming with rage, from the burning stables of the Castle Berlifitzing. Supposing him to have belonged to the old Count’s stud of foreign horses, we led him back as an estray. But the grooms there disclaim any title to the creature; whi
ch is strange, since he bears evident marks of having made a narrow escape from the flames.
“The letters W. V. B. are also branded very distinctly on his forehead,” interrupted a second equerry, “I supposed them, of course, to be the initials of Wilhelm Von Berlifitzing—but all at the castle are positive in denying any knowledge of the horse.”
“Extremely singular!” said the young Baron, with a musing air, and apparently unconscious of the meaning of his words. “He is, as you say, a remarkable horse—a prodigious horse! although, as you very justly observe, of a suspicious and untractable character, let him be mine, however,” he added, after a pause, “perhaps a rider like Frederick of Metzengerstein, may tame even the devil from the stables of Berlifitzing.”
“You are mistaken, my lord; the horse, as I think we mentioned, is not from the stables of the Count. If such had been the case, we know our duty better than to bring him into the presence of a noble of your family.”
“True!” observed the Baron, dryly, and at that instant a page of the bedchamber came from the palace with a heightened color, and a precipitate step. He whispered into his master’s ear an account of the sudden disappearance of a small portion of the tapestry, in an apartment which he designated; entering, at the same time, into particulars of a minute and circumstantial character; but from the low tone of voice in which these latter were communicated, nothing escaped to gratify the excited curiosity of the equerries.
The young Frederick, during the conference, seemed agitated by a variety of emotions. He soon, however, recovered his composure, and an expression of determined malignancy settled upon his countenance, as he gave peremptory orders that a certain chamber should be immediately locked up, and the key placed in his own possession.
The Third Macabre Megapack Page 4