‘AARON TAYLOR.
‘August 30th, 1761.’
I will not try to describe what I felt on reading this simple and straightforward narrative; or with what bitter remorse and helpless wonder I looked back upon the evil my obstinacy had wrought. But for me, and my insatiate thirst for wealth, these men would now have been living and happy. I felt as if I had been their murderer, and raved and wept miserably as I dug a third trench, and laid in it the remains of my brave and honest mate.
Besides all this, there was a heavy mystery hanging upon me, which I tried to fathom, and could not comprehend. Taylor’s narrative was dated just eight months after I left the ship, and to me it seemed that scarcely three had gone by. Nor was that all. His body had had time to decay to a mere skeleton—the ship had had time to become a mere wreck—my own head had had time to grow grey! What had happened to me? I asked myself that weary question again, and again, and again, till my head and my heart ached, and I could only kneel down and pray to God that my wits were not taken from me.
I found the watch with difficulty, and, taking it and the paper with me, went back, sadly and wearily, to my cavern by the sea. I had now no hope or object left but to escape from the island if I could, and this thought haunted me all the way home, and possessed me day and night. For more than a week I deliberated as to what means were best for my purpose, and hesitated whether to build me a raft of the ship’s timbers, or try to fit the long-boat for sea. I decided at last upon the latter. I spent many weeks in piecing, caulking and trimming her to the best of my ability, and thought myself quite a skilful ship’s carpenter when I had fitted her with a mast, and a sail, and a new rudder, and got her ready for the voyage. This done, I hauled her down, with infinite labour and difficulty, as far as the tide mark on the beach; ballasted her with provisions and fresh water, shoved her off at high tide, and put to sea. So eager was I to escape, that I had all but forgotten my bundle of jewels, and had to run for them at the last moment, at the risk of seeing my boat floated off before I could get back. As to venturing once again to the city of treasures, it had never crossed my mind for an instant since the morning when I came down through the palm forests and found the Mary-Jane a ruin on the beach. Nothing would now have induced me to return there. I believed the place to be accursed, and could not think of it without a shudder. As for the captain of the Adventure, I believed him to be the Evil One in person, and his store of gold an infernal bait to lure men to destruction! I believed it then, and I believe it now, solemnly.
The rest of my story may be told very briefly. After running before the wind for eleven days and nights, in a northeasterly direction, I was picked up by a Plymouth merchantman, about forty-five miles west of Marignana. The captain and crew treated me with kindness, but evidently looked upon me as a harmless madman. No one believed my story. When I described the islands, they laughed; when I opened my store of jewels, they shook their heads, and gravely assured me that they were only lumps of spar and sandstone; when I described the condition of my ship, and related the misfortunes of my crew, they told me the schooner Mary-Jane had been lost at sea twenty years ago, with every hand on board. Unfortunately, I found that I had left my mate’s narrative behind me in the cavern, or perhaps my story would have found more credit. When I swore that to me it seemed less than six months since I had put off in the small boat with Joshua Dunn, and was capsized among the breakers, they brought the ship’s log to prove that instead of its being the 25th of December A.D. 1760, when I came back to the beach, and saw the Mary-Jane lying high and dry between the rocks, it must have been nearer the 25th of December, 1780, the twentieth Christmas, namely, of the glorious and happy reign of our most gracious sovereign, King George the Third.
Was this true? I know not. Everyone says so but I cannot bring myself to believe that twenty years could have passed over my head like one long summer day. Yet the world is strangely changed, and I with it, and the mystery is still unexplained as ever to my bewildered brain.
I went back to England with the merchantman, and to my native place among the Mendip Hills. My mother had been dead twelve years. Bessie Robinson was married, and the mother of four children. My youngest brother was gone to America; and my old friends had all forgotten me. I came among them like a ghost, and for a long time they could hardly believe that I was indeed the same William Barlow who had sailed away in the Mary-Jane, young and full of hope twenty years before.
Since my return home, I have tried to sell my jewels again and again; but in vain. No merchant will buy them. I have sent charts of the Treasure Isles over and over again to the Board of Admiralty, but receive no replies to my letters. My dream of wealth has faded year by year, with my strength and my hopes. I am poor, and I am declining into old age. Everyone is kind to me, but their kindness is mixed with pity; and I feel strange and bewildered at times, not knowing what to think of the past, and seeing nothing to live for in the future. Kind people who read this true statement, pray for me.
(Signed) WILLIAM BARLOW
Discoverer of the Treasure Isles, and formerly Captain of the Schooner Mary-Jane.
* From a MS found on a bookstall.
* The writer alludes, evidently, to King George III, who was proclaimed throughout the kingdom on the 26th October, 1760; King George II having died suddenly, at Kensington, on the 25th.
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THE WOLVES OF
CERNOGRATZ
‘Saki’
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An unusual tale by the celebrated short story writer ‘Saki’ (Hector Hugh Munro, 1870–1916).
His tales of Beasts and Super-Beasts and The Chronicles of Clovis are perennial favourites, being regularly dramatised on radio. A weaver of ‘fairy-tales grimmer than Grimm’, he was a master of satire and the uncanny.
‘Are there any old legends attached to the castle?’ asked Conrad of his sister. Conrad was a prosperous Hamburg merchant, but he was the one poetically-dispositioned member of an eminently practical family.
The Baroness Gruebel shrugged her plump shoulders.
‘There are always legends hanging about these old places. They are not difficult to invent and they cost nothing. In this case there is a story that when anyone dies in the castle all the dogs in the village and the wild beasts in the forest howl the night long. It would not be pleasant to listen to, would it?’
‘It would be weird and romantic,’ said the Hamburg merchant.
‘Anyhow, it isn’t true,’ said the Baroness complacently; ‘since we bought the place we have had proof that nothing of the sort happens. When the old mother-in-law died last springtime we all listened, but there was no howling. It is just a story that lends dignity to the place without costing anything.’
‘The story is not as you have told it,’ said Amalie, the grey old governess. Everyone turned and looked at her in astonishment. She was wont to sit silent and prim and faded in her place at table, never speaking unless someone spoke to her, and there were few who troubled themselves to make conversation with her. Today a sudden volubility had descended on her; she continued to talk, rapidly and nervously, looking straight in front of her and seeming to address no one in particular.
‘It is not when anyone does in the castle that the howling is heard. It was when one of the Cernogratz family died here that the wolves came from far and near and howled at the edge of the forest just before the death hour. There were only a few couple of wolves that had their lairs in this part of the forest, but at such a time the keepers say there would be scores of them, gliding about in the shadows and howling in chorus, and the dogs of the castle and the village and all the farms round would bay and howl in fear and anger at the wolf chorus, and as the soul of the dying one left its body a tree would crash down in the park. That is what happened when a Cernogratz died in his family castle. But for a stranger dying here, of course no wolf would howl and no tree would fall. Oh, no.’
There was a n
ote of defiance, almost of contempt, in her voice as she said the last words. The well-fed, much-too-well-dressed Baroness stared angrily at the dowdy old woman who had come forth from her usual and seemly position of effacement to speak so disrespectfully.
‘You seem to know quite a lot about the von Cernogratz legends, Fräulein Schmidt,’ she said sharply; ‘I did not know that family histories were among the subjects you are supposed to be proficient in.’
The answer to her taunt was even more unexpected and astonishing than the conversational outbreak which had provoked it.
‘I am a von Cemogratz myself,’ said the old woman, ‘that is why I know the family history.’
‘You a von Cernogratz? You!’ came in an incredulous chorus.
‘When we became very poor,’ she explained, ‘and I had to go out and give teaching lessons, I took another name; I thought it would be more in keeping. But my grandfather spent much of his time as a boy in this castle, and my father used to tell me many stories about it, and, of course, I knew all the family legends and stories. When one has nothing left to one but memories, one guards and dusts them with especial care. I little thought when I took service with you that I should one day come with you to the old home of my family. I could wish it had been anywhere else.’
There was silence when she finished speaking, and then the Baroness turned the conversation to a less embarrassing topic than family histories. But afterwards, when the old governess had slipped away quietly to her duties, there arose a clamour of derision and disbelief.
‘It was an impertinence,’ snapped out the Baron, his protruding eyes taking on a scandalized expression; ‘fancy the woman talking like that at our table. She almost told us we were nobodies, and I don’t believe a word of it. She is just Schmidt and nothing more. She has been talking to some of the peasants about the old Cernogratz family, and raked up their history and their stories.’
‘She wants to make herself out of some consequence,’ said the Baroness; ‘she knows she will soon be past work and she wants to appeal to our sympathies. Her grandfather, indeed!’
The Baroness had the usual number of grandfathers, but she never, never boasted about them.
‘I dare say her grandfather was a pantry boy or something of the sort in the castle,’ sniggered the Baron; ‘that part of the story maybe true.’
The merchant from Hamburg said nothing; he had seen tears in the old woman’s eyes when she spoke of guarding her memories—or, being of an imaginative disposition, he thought he had.
‘I shall give her notice to go as soon as the New Year festivities are over,’ said the Baroness; ‘till then I shall be too busy to manage without her.’
But she had to manage without her all the same, for in the cold biting weather after Christmas, the old governess fell ill and kept to her room.
‘It is most provoking,’ said the Baroness, as her guests sat round the fire on one of the last evenings of the dying year; ‘all the time that she has been with us I cannot remember that she was ever seriously ill, too ill to go about and do her work, I mean. And now, when I have the house full, and she could be useful in so many ways, she goes and breaks down. One is sorry for her, of course, she looks so withered and shrunken, but it is intensely annoying all the same.’
‘Most annoying,’ agreed the banker’s wife sympathetically; ‘it is the intense cold, I expect, it breaks the old people up. It has been unusually cold this year.’
‘The frost is the sharpest that has been known in December for many years,’ said the Baron.
‘And, of course, she is quite old,’ said the Baroness;‘I wish I had given her notice some weeks ago, then she would have left before this happened to her. Why, Wappi, what is the matter with you?’
The small, woolly lapdog had leapt suddenly down from its cushion and crept shivering under the sofa. At the same moment an outburst of angry barking came from the dogs in the castle-yard, and other dogs could be heard yapping and barking in the distance.
‘What is disturbing the animals?’ asked the Baron.
And then the humans, listening intently, heard the sound that had roused the dogs to their demonstrations of fear and rage; heard a long-drawn whining howl, rising and falling, seeming at one moment leagues away, at others sweeping across the snow until it appeared to come from the foot of the castle walls. All the starved, cold misery of a frozen world, all the relentless hunger-fury of the wild, blended with other forlorn and haunting melodies to which one could give no name, seemed concentrated in that wailing cry.
‘Wolves!’ cried the Baron.
Their music broke forth in one raging burst, seeming to come from everywhere.
‘Hundred of wolves,’ said the Hamburg merchant, who was a man of strong imagination.
Moved by some impulse which she could not have explained, the Baroness left her guests and made her way to the narrow, cheerless room where the old governess lay watching the hours of the dying year slip by. In spite of the biting cold of the winter night, the window stood open. With a scandalized exclamation on her lips, the Baroness rushed forward to close it.
‘Leave it open,’ said the old woman in a voice that for all its weakness carried an air of command such as the Baroness had never heard before from her lips.
‘But you will die of cold!’ she expostulated.
‘I am dying in any case,’ said the voice, ‘and I want to hear their music. They have come from far and wide to sing the death-music of my family. It is beautiful that they have come; I am the last von Cernogratz that will die in our old castle, and they have come to sing to me. Hark, how loud they are calling!’
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