A Bottomless Grave

  ‘She seemed to me like an answer to an appeal from my soul, to this vague and continuous appeal which forces us towards Hope throughout the whole course of our lives.

  ‘When I became a little better acquainted with her, the mere thought of seeing her again filled me with a deep and exquisite agitation; the touch of her hand in mine was such a joy to me that I had never imagined the like before; her smile made my eyes shine with joy, and made me feel like running about, dancing, rolling on the ground.

  ‘Then she became my mistress.

  ‘She was more than that to me, she was my life itself. I hoped for nothing more on earth, I wished for nothing more, I longed for nothing more.

  ‘Well, one evening, as we were taking a rather long walk by the bank of the stream, we were caught by the rain. She felt cold.

  ‘The next day she had inflammation of the lungs. Eight days later she died.

  ‘During those dying hours, astonishment and fear prevented me from understanding or thinking.

  ‘When she was dead, I was so stunned by brutal despair that I was unable to think. I wept.

  ‘During all the horrible phases of interment my wild, excessive grief was the sorrow of a man beside himself, a sort of sensual physical grief.

  ‘Then when she was gone, when she was under the ground, my mind suddenly became clear, and I passed through a train of mental suffering so terrible that even the love she had given me was dear at such a price.

  ‘Then I was seized with an obsession.

  ‘I shall never see her again.

  ‘After reflecting on that for a whole day, it maddens you.

  ‘Think of it! A being is there, one whom you adore, a unique being, for in the whole wide world there is no one who resembles her. This being has given herself to you, with you she creates this mysterious union called love. Her glance seems to you vaster than space, more charming than the world, her bright glance full of tender smiles. This being loves you. When she speaks to you her voice overwhelms you with happiness.

  ‘And suddenly she disappears! Think of it! She disappears not only from your sight, but from everybody’s. She is dead. Do you understand what that word means? Never, never, never more, nowhere, will this being exist. Those eyes will never see again. Never will this voice, never will any voice like this, among human voices, pronounce one word in the same way that she pronounced it.

  ‘There will never be another face born like hers. Never, never! The cast of statues is kept; the stamp that reproduces objects with the same outlines and the same colours is preserved. But this body and this face will never be seen again on this earth. And still there will be born thousands of beings, millions, thousands of millions, and even more, and among all these women there will never be found one like her. Can that be possible? It makes one mad to think of it !

  ‘She lived twenty years, no more, and she has disappeared forever, forever, forever! She thought, she smiled, she loved me. Now there is nothing more. The flies which die in the autumn are of as much importance as we in creation. Nothing more! And I thought how her body, her fresh, warm body, so soft, so white, so beautiful, was rotting away in the depths of a box under the ground. And her soul, her mind, her love—where were they?

  ‘Never to see her again! Never again! My mind was haunted by the thought of that decomposing body, which I, however, might still recognise!

  ‘I set out with a shovel, a lantern and a hammer. I climbed over the cemetery wall. I found the hole where her grave was. It had not yet been entirely filled up. I uncovered the coffin, and raised one of the planks. An awful odour, the abominable breath of putrefaction, arose in my face. Oh, her bed, perfumed with iris !

  ‘However, I opened the coffin and thrust in my lighted lantern, and saw her. Her face was blue, swollen, horrible ! Black liquid had flowed from her mouth.

  ‘She ! It was she! I was seized with horror. But I put out my arm and caught her hair to pull this monstrous face towards me ! It was at that moment I was arrested.

  ‘All night I carried with me, as one retains the perfume of a woman after a sexual embrace, the filthy smell of this putrefaction, the odour of my beloved!

  ‘Do what you like with me.’

  A strange silence seemed to hang over the hall. People appeared to be awaiting something more. The Jury withdrew to deliberate. When they returned after a few minutes, the accused did not seem to have any fears, nor even any thoughts. In the traditional formula the Judge informed him that his peers had found him not guilty.

  He did not make a movement, but the public applauded.

  The Man with the Nose

  by RHODA BROUGHTON

  If there was one thing that Victorian authoresses loved, it was a ghost story. Both the famous and the not so famous, they all tried their hand at tales of terror, with varying degrees of success. Those who succeeded included Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs Oliphant, Mary Molesworth, Mrs J. H. Riddell, Mrs Gaskell and Rhoda Broughton.

  It was on the cards that Rhoda Broughton (1840—1920) would succeed at this type of writing, for she was the niece of the famous J. Sheridan le Fanu. Born in Denbigh, North Wales, Rhoda Broughton never married and lived with her parents until they died, when she moved to Headington, Oxford.

  Her novels were extremely successful in the late 1880s (le Fanu himself bought her first novel, Not Wisely But Too Well, as a serial in his Dublin University Magazine) and her success enabled her to turn to short story writing for her own convenience.

  In 1879 she published Twilight Stories, her only volume of ghostly tales, from which comes ‘The Man with the Nose’. It is a chilling story and the first to utilise a theme later taken up by E. F. Benson in his famous tale ‘The Face’.

  (The details of this story are, of course, imaginary, but the main incidents are, to the best of my belief, fact.)

  I

  ‘Do you like the seaside?’ asks Elizabeth, lifting her little brown head and her small happy face from the map of English sea-coast along which her forefinger is slowly travelling.

  ‘Since you ask me, distinctly no,’ reply I, for once venturing to have a decided opinion of my own, which during the last few weeks of imbecility I can be hardly said to have had. ‘I broke my last wooden spade five and twenty years ago. I have but a poor opinion of cockles—sandy red-nosed things, are not they? and the air always makes me bilious.’

  ‘Then we certainly will not go there,’ says Elizabeth, laughing. ‘A bilious bridegroom! alliterative but horrible! None of our friends show the least eagerness to lend us their country house. It is evident, therefore, that we must go somewhere,’ she says, making her forefinger resume its employment, and reaching Torquay.

  ‘I suppose so,’ say I, with a sort of sigh; ‘for once in our lives we must resign ourselves to having the finger of derision pointed at us by waiters and landlords.

  ‘You shall leave your new portmanteau at home, and I will leave all my best clothes, and nobody will guess that we are bride and bride-broom; they will think that we have been married—oh, ever since the world began’ (opening her eyes very wide).

  I shake my head. ‘With an old portmanteau and in rags we shall still have the mark of the beast upon us.’

  ‘Do you mind much? do you hate being ridiculous?’ asks Elizabeth, meekly, rather depressed by my view of the case; ‘because if so, let us go somewhere out of the way, where there will be very few people to laugh at us.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ return I, stoutly, ‘we will betake ourselves to some spot where such as we do chiefly congregate—where we shall be swallowed up and lost in the multitude of our fellow-sinners.’ A pause devoted to reflection. ‘What do you say to the Lakes?’ My arm is round her, and I feel her supple body shiver though it is mid July and the bees are booming about in the still and sleepy noon garden outside.

  ‘Oh—no—no—not there!’

  ‘Why such emphasis?’ I ask gaily.

  ‘Something dreadful happened to me there,’ she says, with another shudder. ‘But indeed
I did not think there was any harm in it—I never thought anything would come of it.’

  ‘What the devil was it? cry I, in a jealous heat and hurry; ‘what the mischief did you do, and why have not you told me about it before?’

  ‘I did not do much,’ she answers meekly, seeking for my hand, ‘but I was ill—very ill—there; I had a nervous fever. I was in a bed hung with a chintz with a red and green fern-leaf pattern on it. I have always hated red and green fern-leaf chintzes ever since.’

  ‘It would be possible to avoid the obnoxious bed, would not it?’ say I, laughing a little. ‘Where does it lie? Windermere? Ulleswater? Wastwater? Where?’

  ‘We were at Ulleswater,’ she says, speaking rapidly, while a hot colour grows on her small white cheeks—‘Papa, mamma, and I; and there came a mesmeriser to Penrith, and we went to see him—everybody did—and he asked leave to mesmerise me—he said I should be such a good medium—and—and—I did not know what it was like. I thought it would be quite good fun—and—and—I let him.’

  She is trembling exceedingly; even the loving pressure of my arms cannot abate her shivering.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘And after that I do not remember anything—I believe I did all sorts of extraordinary things that he told me—sang and danced, and made a fool of myself—but when I came home I was very ill, very—I lay in bed for five whole weeks, and—and was off my head, and said odd and wicked things that you would not have expected me to say—that dreadful bed! shall I ever forget it?’

  ‘We will not go to the Lakes,’ I say, decisively, ‘and we will not talk any more about mesmerism.’

  ‘That is right,’ she says, with a sigh of relief, ‘I try to think about it as little as possible; but sometimes, in the dead black of the night, when God seems a long way off, and the devil near, it comes back to me so strongly—I feel, do not you know, as if he were there somewhere in the room, and I must get up and follow him.’

  ‘Why should not we go abroad?’ suggest I, abruptly turning the conversation.

  ‘Do you fancy the Rhine?’ says Elizabeth, with a rather timid suggestion; ‘I know it is the fashion to run it down nowadays, and call it a cocktail river; but—but—after all it cannot be so very contemptible, or Byron could not have said such noble things about it.’

  ‘“The castled crag of Drachenfels

  Frowns o’er the wide and winding Rhine,

  Whose breast of waters broadly swells

  Between the banks which bear the vine,” ’

  say I, spouting. ‘After all, that proves nothing, for Byron could have made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.’

  ‘The Rhine will not do then?’ says she resignedly, suppressing a sigh.

  ‘On the contrary, it will do admirably: it is a cocktail river, and I do not care who says it is not,’ reply I, with illiberal positiveness; ‘but everybody should be able to say so from their own experience, and not from hearsay: the Rhine let it be, by all means.’

  So the Rhine it is.

  II

  I have got over it; we have both got over it, tolerably, creditably; but after all, it is a much severer ordeal for a man than a woman, who, with a bouquet to occupy her hands, and a veil to gently shroud her features, need merely be prettily passive. I am alluding, I need hardly say, to the religious ceremony of marriage, which I flatter myself I have gone through with a stiff sheepishness not unworthy of my country. It is a three-days-old event now, and we are getting used to belonging to one another, though Elizabeth still takes off her ring twenty times a day to admire its bright thickness; still laughs when she hears herself called ‘Madame.’

  Now we are at Brussels, she and I, feeling oddly, joyfully free from any chaperone. We had been mildly sight-seeing—very mildly most people would say, but we have resolved not to take our pleasure with the railway speed of Americans, or the hasty sadness of our fellow Britons. Slowly and gaily we have been taking ours. To-day we have been to visit Wiertz’s pictures. Have you ever seen them, oh reader? They are known to comparatively few people, but if you have a taste for the unearthly terrible—if you wish to sup full of horrors, hasten thither. We have been peering through the appointed peep-hole at the horrible cholera picture—the man buried alive by mistake, pushing up the lid of his coffin, and stretching a ghastly face and livid hands out of his winding sheet towards you, while awful grey-blue coffins are piled around, and noisome toads and giant spiders crawl damply about. On first seeing it, I have reproached myself for bringing one of so nervous a temperament as Elizabeth to see so haunting and hideous a spectacle; but she is less impressed than I expected—less impressed than I myself am.

  ‘He is very lucky to be able to get his lid up,’ she says, with a half-laugh; ‘we should find it hard work to burst our brass nails, should not we? When you bury me, dear, fasten me down very slightly, in case there may be some mistake.’

  And now all the long and quiet July evening we have been prowling together about the streets, flattening our noses against the shop windows, and making each other imaginary presents. Elizabeth has not confined herself to imagination, however; she has made me buy her a little bonnet with feathers—‘in order to look married,’ as she says, and the result is such a delicious picture of a child playing at being grown up, having practised a theft on its mother’s wardrobe, that for the last two hours I have been in a foolish ecstacy of love and laughter over her and it. We are at the ‘Bellevue’, and have a fine suite of rooms, au premier, evidently specially devoted to the English, to the gratification of whose well-known loyalty the Prince and Princess of Wales are simpering from the walls. Is there any one in the three kingdoms who knows his own face as well as he knows the faces of Albert Victor and Alexandra?

  The long evening has at last slidden into night—night far advanced —night melting into earliest day. All Brussels is asleep. One moment ago I also was asleep, soundly as any log. What is it that has made me take this sudden, headlong plunge out of sleep into wakefulness? Who is it that is clutching at and calling upon me? What is it that is making me struggle mistily up into a sitting posture, and try to revive my sleep-numbed senses? A summer night is never wholly dark; by the half light that steals through the closed persiennes and open windows I see my wife standing beside my bed; the extremity of terror on her face, and her fingers digging themselves with painful tenacity into my arm.

  ‘Tighter, tighter!’ she is crying wildly. ‘What are you thinking of? You are letting me go!’

  ‘Good heavens!’ say I, rubbing my eyes, while my muddy brain grows a trifle clearer. ‘What is it? What has happened? Have you had a nightmare?’

  ‘You saw him,’ she says, with a sort of sobbing breathlessness; ‘you know you did! You saw him as well as I.’

  ‘I!’ cry I, incredulously—‘not I! Till this second I have been fast asleep. I saw nothing.’

  ‘You did!’ she cries, passionately. ‘You know you did. ‘Why do you deny it? You were as frightened as I.’

  ‘As I live,’ I answer, solemnly, ‘I know no more than the dead what you are talking about; till you woke me by calling and catching hold of me, I was as sound asleep as the seven sleepers.’

  ‘Is it possible that it can have been a dream?’ she says, with a long sigh, for a moment loosing my arm, and covering her face with her hands. ‘But no—in a dream I should have been somewhere else, but I was here—here—on that bed, and he stood there,’ pointing with her forefinger, ‘just there, between the foot of it and the window!’

  She stops panting.

  ‘It is all that brute Wiertz,’ say I, in a fury. ‘I wish I had been buried alive myself before I had been fool enough to take you to see his beastly daubs.’

  ‘Light a candle,’ she says, in the same breathless way, her teeth chattering with fright. ‘Let us make sure he is not hidden somewhere in the room.’

  ‘How could he be?’ say I, striking a match; ‘the door is locked.’

  ‘He might have got in by the balcony,’ she answers,
still trembling violently.

  ‘He would have had to have cut a very large hole in the persiennes,’ say I, half mockingly. ‘See, they are intact, and well fastened on the inside.’

  She sinks into an arm-chair, and pushes her loose soft hair from her white face.

  ‘It was a dream then, I suppose?’

  She is silent for a moment or two, while I bring her a glass of water, and throw a dressing-gown round her cold and shrinking form.

  ‘Now tell me, my little one,’ I say coaxingly, sitting down at her feet, ‘what it was—what you thought you saw?’

  ‘Thought I saw!’ echoes she, with indignant emphasis, sitting upright, while her eyes sparkle feverishly. ‘I am as certain that I saw him standing there as I am that I see that candle burning—that I see this chair—that I see you.’

  ‘Him ! but who is him?’

  She falls forward on my neck, and buries her face in my shoulder.

  ‘That—dreadful—man!’ she says, while her whole body is one tremor.

  ‘What dreadful man?’ cry I impatiently.

  She is silent.

  ‘Who was he?’

  ‘I do not know.’

  ‘Did you ever see him before?’

  ‘Oh, no—no, never! I hope to God I may never see him again!’

  ‘What was he like?’

  ‘Come closer to me,’ she says, laying hold of my hand with her small and chilly fingers; ‘stay quite near me, and I will tell you,’—after a pause—‘he had a nose !’

  ‘My dear soul,’ cry I, bursting out into a loud laugh in the silence of the night, ‘do not most people have noses? Would not he have been much more dreadful if he had had none?’