‘The matter is that I choose to spend the night in this room,’ I shouted in reply.
‘It is a public room—you have no right to shut the doors!’ he said, with a thundering blow upon the lock.
‘Right or no right,’ I answered, ‘I shoot dead the first man who forces his way in!’
There was a momentary silence, and I heard them muttering together outside.
I had by this time found, at the back of one of the drawers, a handful of small shot screwed up in a bit of newspaper, and a battered old powder-flask containing about three charges of powder. Little as it was, it helped to give me confidence.
Then the parleying began afresh.
‘Once more, accursed Englishman, will you open the door?’
‘No.’
A torrent of savage oaths—then a pause.
‘Force us to break it open, and it will be the worse for you!’
‘Try.’
All this time I had been wrenching out the hooks from the dresser, and the nails, wherever I could find any, from the walls. Already I had enough to reload the blunderbuss three times, with my three charges of powder. If only Bergheim were himself now!
I still heard the murmuring of the brothers’ voices outside—then the sound of their retreating footsteps—then an outburst of barking and yelping at the back, which showed they had let loose the dogs. Then all was silent.
Where were they gone? How would they begin the attack? In what way would it all end? I glanced at my watch. It was just twenty minutes past one. In two hours and a half, or three hours, it would be dawn. Three hours! Great heavens! what an eternity!
I looked round to see if there was anything I could still do for defence; but it seemed to me that I had already done what little it was possible to do with the material at hand. I could only wait.
All at once I heard their footsteps in the house again. They were going rapidly to and fro overhead; then up and down the stairs; then overhead again; and presently I heard a couple of bolts shot, and apparently a heavy wooden bar put up, on the other side of the inner kitchen-door which I had just been at so much pains to barricade. This done, they seemed to go away. A distant door banged heavily; and again there was silence.
Five minutes, ten minutes, went by. Bergheim still slept heavily; but his breathing, I fancied, was less stertorous, and his countenance less rigid, than when I first discovered his condition. I had no water with which to bathe his head; but I rubbed his forehead and the palms of his hands with beer, and did what I could to keep his body upright.
Then I heard the enemy coming back to the front, slowly, and with heavy footfalls. They paused for a moment at the front door, seemed to set something down, and then retreated quickly. After an interval of about three minutes, they returned in the same way; stopped at the same place; and hurried off as before. This they did several times in succession. Listening with suspended breath and my ear against the keyhole, I distinctly heard them deposit some kind of burden each time—evidently a weighty burden, from the way in which they carried it; and yet, strange to say, one that, despite its weight, made scarcely any noise in the setting down.
Just at this moment, when all my senses were concentrated in the one act of listening, Bergheim stirred for the first time, and began muttering.
‘The man!’ he said, in a low, suppressed tone. ‘The man under the hearth!’
I flew to him at the first sound of his voice. He was recovering. Heaven be thanked, he was recovering! In a few minutes we should be two—two against two—right and might on our side—both ready for the defence of our lives!
‘One man under the hearth,’ he went on, in the same unnatural tone. ‘Four men at the bottom of the pond—all murdered—foully murdered!’
I had scarcely heeded his first words; but now, as their sense broke upon me, that great rush of exultation and thankfulness was suddenly arrested. My heart stood still; I trembled; I turned cold with horror.
Then the veins swelled on his forehead; his face became purple; and he struck out blindly, as one oppressed with some horrible nightmare.
‘Blood!’ he gasped. ‘Everywhere blood—don’t touch it. God’s vengeance—help!——’
And so, struggling violently in my arms, he opened his eyes, stared wildly round, and made an effort to get upon his feet.
‘What is the matter?’ he said, sinking back again, and trembling from head to foot. ‘Was I asleep?’
I rubbed his hand and forehead again with beer. I tasted it, and finding no ill flavour upon it, put a tiny drop to his lips.
‘You are all right now,’ I said. ‘You were very tired, and you fell asleep after supper. Don’t you remember?’
He put his hand to his head. ‘Ah, yes,’ he said, ‘I remember. I have been dreaming——’
He looked round the room in a bewildered way; then, struck all at once by the strange disorder of the furniture, asked what was the matter.
I told him in the least alarming way, and with the fewest words I could muster, but before I could get to the end of my explanation he was up, ready for resistance, and apparently himself again.
‘Where are they?’ he said. ‘What are they doing now? Outside, do you say? Why, good heavens! man, they’re blocking us in. Listen!—don’t you hear?—it is the rustling of straw. Bring the blunderbuss! quick!—to the window—— God grant we may not be too late!’
We both rushed to the window; Bergheim to undo the shutter, and I to shoot down the first man in sight.
‘Look there!’ he said, and pointed to the door.
A thin stream of smoke was oozing under the threshold and stealing upward in a filmy cloud that already dimmed the atmosphere of the room.
‘They are going to burn us out!’ I exclaimed.
‘No, they are going to burn us alive,’ replied Bergheim, between his clenched teeth. ‘We know too much, and they are determined to silence us at all costs, though they burn the house down over our heads. Now hold your breath, for I am going to open the window, and the smoke will rush in like a torrent.’
He opened it, but very little came in—for this reason, that the outside was densely blocked with straw, which had not yet ignited.
In a moment we had dragged the table under the window—put our weapons aside ready for use—and set to work to cut our way out.
Bergheim, standing on the table, wrenched away the straw in great armfuls. I caught it, and hurled it into the middle of the room. We laboured at the work like giants. In a few moments the pile had mounted to the height of the table.
Then Bergheim cried out that the straw under his hands was taking fire, and that he dared throw it back into the room no longer!
I sprang to his aid with the two hatchets. I gave him one—I fell to work with the other. The smoke and flame rushed in our faces, as we hewed down the burning straw.
Meanwhile, the room behind us was full of smoke, and above the noise of our own frantic labour we heard a mighty crackling and hissing, as of a great conflagration.
‘Take the blunderbuss—quick!’ cried Bergheim, hoarsely. ‘There is nothing but smoke outside now, and burning straw below. Follow me! Jump as far out as you can, and shoot the first you see!’
And with this, he leaped out into the smoke, and was gone!
I only waited to grope out the blunderbuss; then, holding it high above my head, I shut my eyes and sprang after him, clearing the worst of the fire, and falling on my hands and knees among a heap of smouldering straw and ashes beyond. At the same instant that I touched the ground, I heard the sharp crack of a rifle, and saw two figures rush past me.
To dash out in pursuit without casting one backward glance at the burning house behind me—to see a tall figure vanishing among the trees, and two others in full chase—to cover the foremost of these two and bring him down as one would bring down a wolf in the open, was for me but the work of a second.
I saw him fall. I saw the other hesitate, look, throw up his hands with a wild gesture, and fly tow
ards the hills.
The rest of my story is soon told. The one I had shot was Friedrich, the younger brother. He died in about half-an-hour, and never spoke again. The elder escaped into the forest, and there succeeded in hiding himself for several weeks among the charcoal-burners. Being hunted down, however, at last, he was tried at Heilbronn, and there executed.
The pair, it seemed, were practised murderers. The pond, when dragged, was found to contain four of their victims; and when the crumbling ruins of the homestead were cleared for the purpose, the mortal remains of a fifth were discovered under the hearth, in that kitchen which had so nearly proved our grave. A store of money, clothes, and two or three watches, was also found secreted in a granary near the house; and these things served to identify three out of the five corpses thus providentially brought to light.
My friend, Gustav Bergheim (now the friend of seventeen years) is well and prosperous; married to his ‘Mädchen’; and the happy father of a numerous family. He often tells the tale of our terrible night on the borders of the Black Forest, and avers that in that awful dream in which his senses came back to him, he distinctly saw, as in a vision, the mouldering form beneath the hearth, and the others under the sluggish waters of the pond.
Monsieur Maurice
Chapter I
Long Ago
THE EVENTS I AM ABOUT to relate took place more than fifty years ago. I am a white-haired old woman now, and I was then a little girl scarce ten years of age; but those times and the places and people associated with them, seem, in truth, to lie nearer my memory than the times and people of today. Trivial incidents which, if they had happened yesterday, would be forgotten, come back upon me sometimes with all the vivid detail of a photograph; and words unheeded many a year ago start out, like the handwriting on the wall, in sudden characters of fire.
But this is no new experience. As age creeps on, we all have the same tale to tell. The days of our youth are those we remember best and most fondly, and even the sorrows of that bygone time become pleasures in the retrospect. Of my own solitary childhood I retain the keenest recollection, as the following pages will show.
My father’s name was Bernhard—Johann Ludwig Bernhard; and he was a native of Coblentz on the Rhine. Having grown grey in the Prussian service, fought his way slowly and laboriously from the ranks upward, been seven times wounded and twice promoted on the field, he was made colonel of his regiment in 1814, when the Allies entered Paris. In 1819, being no longer fit for active service, he retired on a pension, and was appointed king’s steward of the Château of Augustenburg at Brühl—a sort of military curatorship to which few duties and certain contingent emoluments were attached. Of these last, a suite of rooms in the château, a couple of acres of private garden, and the revenue accruing from a small local impost, formed the most important part. It was towards the latter half of this year (1819) that, having now for the first time in his life a settled home in which to receive me, my father fetched me from Nuremberg, where I was living with my aunt, Martha Baur, and took me to reside with him at Brühl.
Now my aunt, Martha Baur, was an exemplary person in her way; a rigid Lutheran, a strict disciplinarian, and the widow of a wealthy wool-stapler. She lived in a gloomy old house near the Frauen-Kirche, where she received no society, and led a life as varied and lively on the whole as that of a Trappist. Every Wednesday afternoon we paid a visit to the grave of her ‘blessed man’ in the Protestant cemetery outside the walls, and on Sundays we went three times to the church. These were the only breaks in the long monotony of our daily life. On market-days we never went out of doors at all; and when the great annual fair-time came round we drew down all the front blinds and inhabited the rooms at the back.
As for the pleasures of childhood, I cannot say that I knew many of them in those old Nuremberg days. Still I was not unhappy, nor even very dull. It may be that, knowing nothing pleasanter, I was not even conscious of the dreariness of the atmosphere I breathed. There was, at all events, a big old-fashioned garden full of vegetables and cottage-flowers, at the back of the house, in which I almost lived in spring and summer-time, and from which I managed to extract a great deal of enjoyment; while for companions and playmates I had old Karl, my aunt’s gardener, a pigeon-house full of pigeons, three staid elderly cats, and a tortoise. In the way of education I fared scantily enough, learning just as little as it pleased my aunt to teach me, and having that little presented to me under its driest and most unattractive aspect.
Such was my life till I went away with my father in the autumn of 1819. I was then between nine and ten years of age—having lost my mother in earliest infancy, and lived with Aunt Martha Baur ever since I could remember.
The change from Nuremburg to Brühl was for me like the transition from Purgatory to Paradise. I enjoyed for the first time all the delights of liberty. I had no lessons to learn; no stern aunt to obey; but, which was infinitely pleasanter, a kind-hearted Rhenish Mädchen, with a silver arrow in her hair, to wait upon me; and an indulgent father whose only orders were that I should be allowed to have my own way in everything.
And my way was to revel in the air and the sunshine; to roam about the park and pleasure-grounds; to watch the soldiers at drill, and hear the band play every day, and wander at will about the deserted state apartments of the great empty château.
Looking back upon it from this distance of time, I should pronounce the Electoral Residenz at Brühl to be a miracle of bad taste; but not Aladdin’s palace if planted amid the gardens of Armida could then have seemed lovelier in my eyes. The building, a heavy many-windowed pile in the worst style of the worst Renaissance period, stood, and still stands, in a fat, flat country about ten miles from Cologne, to which city it bears much the same relation that Hampton Court bears to London, or Versailles to Paris. Stucco and whitewash had been lavished upon it inside and out, and pallid scagliola did duty everywhere for marble. A grand staircase supported by agonised colossi, grinning and writhing in vain efforts to look as if they didn’t mind the weight, led from the great hall to the state apartments; and in these rooms the bad taste of the building may be said to have culminated. Here were mirrors framed in meaningless arabesques, cornices painted to represent bas-reliefs, consoles and pilasters of mock marble, and long generations of Electors in the tawdriest style of portraiture, all at full length, all in their robes of office, and all too evidently by one and the same hand. To me, however, they were all majestic and beautiful. I believed in themselves, their wigs, their armour, their ermine, their high-heeled shoes and their stereotyped smirk, from the earliest to the latest.
But the gardens and grounds were my chief delight, as indeed they were the main attraction of the place, making it the focus of a holiday resort for the townsfolk of Cologne and Bonn, and a point of interest for travellers. First came a great gravelled terrace upon which the ground-floor windows opened—a terrace where the sun shone more fiercely than elsewhere, and orange-trees in tubs bore golden fruit, and great green, yellow, and striped pumpkins, alternating with beds of brilliant white and scarlet geraniums, lay lazily sprawling in the sunshine as if they enjoyed it. Beyond this terrace came vast flats of rich green sward laid out in formal walks, flower-beds and fountains; and beyond these again stretched some two or three miles of finely wooded park, pierced by long avenues that radiated from a common centre and framed in exquisite little far-off views of Falkenlust and the blue hills of the Vorgebirge.
We were lodged at the back, where the private gardens and offices abutted on the village. Our own rooms looked upon our own garden, and upon the church and Franciscan convent beyond. In the warm dusk, when all was still, and my father used to sit smoking his meerschaum by the open window, we could hear the low pealing of the chapel-organ, and the monks chanting their evening litanies.
A happy time—a pleasant, peaceful place! Ah me! how long ago!
Chapter II
A State Prisoner
A whole delightful summer and autumn went by thus, and my new
home seemed more charming with every change of season. First came the gathering of the golden harvest; then the joyous vintage-time, when the wine-press creaked all day in every open cellar along the village street, and long files of country carts came down from the hills in the dusk evenings, laden with baskets and barrels full of white and purple grapes. And then the long avenues and all the woods of Brühl put on their autumn robes of crimson, and flame-colour, and golden brown; and the berries reddened in the hedges; and the autumn burned itself away like a gorgeous sunset; and November came in grey and cold, like the night-time of the year.
I was so happy, however, that I enjoyed even the dull November. I loved the bare avenues carpeted with dead and rustling leaves—the solitary gardens—the long, silent afternoons and evenings when the big logs crackled on the hearth, and my father smoked his pipe in the chimney corner. We had no such wood-fires at Aunt Martha Baur’s in those dreary old Nuremberg days, now almost forgotten; but then, to be sure, Aunt Martha Baur, who was a sparing woman and looked after every groschen, had to pay for her own logs, whereas ours were cut from the Crown Woods, and cost not a pfennig.
It was, as well as I can remember, just about this time, when the days were almost at their briefest, that my father received an official communication from Berlin desiring him to make ready a couple of rooms for the immediate reception of a state-prisoner, for whose safe-keeping he would be held responsible till further notice. The letter—I have it in my desk now—was folded square, sealed with five seals, and signed in the king’s name by the Minister of War; and it was brought, as I well remember, by a mounted orderly from Cologne.
So a couple of empty rooms were chosen on the second storey, just over one of the state apartments at the end of the east wing; and my father, who was by no means well pleased with his office, set to work to ransack the château for furniture.
THE PHANTOM COACH: Collected Ghost Stories Page 32