‘Yea, good, my lord, the words are mine,’ she whimpered.
‘Is gut. Subscribe it.’ He tendered her a quill pen dipped in ink.
‘I cannot, Exzellenz; I have no schooling——’
‘Jawohl.’ The judge spread the parchment upon a table and wrote her name in a fair hand. ‘Make thou a cross mark here’—he pointed to a spot above the signature—‘we will bear witness to thy mark.’
Slowly, painfully, she drew the pen across the cracking parchment in a wavering X. Her hands were bandaged, and as she moved them a drop or two of blood oozed from the linen bands and fell upon the document. The justice nodded to the leather-aproned executioner who stood in readiness and at the signal dropped upon his knees beside the girl and held a bowl of meat soup with an egg in it to her lips. ‘Drink, mädchen,’ he whispered, ‘’twill give thee strength.’
The judges put their heads together, reading through the statement she had signed. They made little deprecating noises with their tongues against their teeth as they perused the document, for in it she admitted that she was a witch and the consort of witches; that she had enchanted the Junker Gustav by devilish arts; that her story of their marriage was a monstrous lie; that she, in concert with the self-accused witch Margaretta, had connived by prayers and supplications to the Evil One to bring about the death of Johann Georg Ulric Mathias von Hohenneitschütz und von Ketlar.
When they had first arrested her she told her story with an artless fearlessness. Gustav was her lord and adored husband, they had been wed according to the rites of Holy Church, she loved him better than her life, and only sought old Margaretta’s help because she thought he was bewitched. No, she knew nothing of the witch’s spells and magic. What should she, a Christian, know of such things?
They set her hands in the thumbscrews.
‘Thou didst bewitch the Junker Gustav by thy wicked arts—thy story of thy marriage to him is a monstrous lie, is’t not?’
‘Nay, lords, it is the very Gospel truth. We loved each other from the moment that our eyes first met. He wed me out of love and nothing else, for I had nothing I could bring him as a dowry save my love and devotion——’
The judge signed to the executioner, who tightened the thumbkin, and she shrieked and writhed and tried to draw away.
‘This story of thy marriage is a wanton’s lie, is’t not?’
‘Nay, Exzellenz, it is the truth—O gracious heaven, mercy! Mercy on me, my lords!’ as the thumbscrews bit with sudden crushing pressure on her hands again.
Little Else was not made of Spartan stuff. Old Margaretta stood the torment for a day and night, and even then the rack and boot and molten lead were necessary. Less than an hour’s screwing in the thumbkins dragged from Else sobbing assents to their accusations. So, at last, we find her signing a confession in which she admits crimes she never heard or knew of till the magistrates informed her she was guilty of them.
It was a pompous, awe-inspiring scene when they brought her before the court to hear her doom. The judges in their robes of office sat at a long table of age-darkened oak raised three steps from the courtroom floor. Behind them and before the doors and windows stood the halberdiers in leather jerkins and steel helmets, sunlight glinting on the polished heads of their weapons. The Emperor’s justicer—the executioner—stood by the steps that led up to the judges’ table, and he was in full regalia, habited in red from neck to heels, coiffed and masked in red, and holding on his shoulder his great ax with its red handle and red blade, the gleaming white of whose edge never had been wet save with the blood of men and women.
A crowd of boors had gathered in the hall of justice, and at sight of Else they broke into a murmurous outcry, but the clamor of the halberd butts on the stone floor brought instant silence, for the halberdiers were not slow to rap for order on the heads of the rabble if their first admonition went unheeded.
She halted before the long table, and the president of the court rose facing her, a parchment scroll in his hands. Before him on the table lay a light wand of dried willow, and her face went paler at the sight, for well she knew what it portended.
A pause ensued which seemed as long to her as an eternity, then she heard her sentence pronounced: ‘That the self-confessed witch and murderess be dragged by the hair of her head to the gallows in the public square and there flogged with knotted ropes until she die, and afterward that her body be burned to ashes.’
As he finished the judge took up the willow wand and beckoned to someone waiting in the shadow of the arras. Dressed all in black, with falls of white lace at his throat and wrists, the Junker—now the Count—Gustav Hohenneitschütz stepped up to the bench, took the light stick from the judge, and crossed the little space that separated him from Else. She raised her bandaged hands imploringly to him. ‘Gustav—husband, lord—adored lover——’
He looked full in her tear-brimmed loving eyes and nothing moved in his face. It was as if he looked at a stone thing that had no power to look back. Holding the wand by each end he raised it over her head, snapped it in two and flung the pieces on the floor at her feet. This was to signify that as the wood was broken in two parts so should her soul and body be severed in the furtherance of justice. As Count of the Mark Gustav had the right to perform this ceremony, for Else had been his serf, and he was giving her up to the Kaiser for execution.
He turned upon his heel, but as he moved away she pointed at him with one maimed hand and spoke the first unkind words she had ever uttered in her sixteen years of life:
‘False! False to thy pledged word and plighted troth art thou, Gustav von Hohenneitschütz. Flogged I may be till I die, but I shall last to scourge thee for thy perfidy, and never shalt thou call another wife——’ Then the jeering of the rabble drowned her words and she was led back to her cell to wait the morning and her death.
Despite the sentence passed upon her, it seems she did not suffer greatly. More merciful than judge or priest or husband, the executioner, whose business was to kill and torture, struck her on the head with a club ere he dragged her to the gallows, so what hung swinging by bound wrists beneath the flailing of the flogging-ropes was nothing but a corpse.
The bride and bridegroom stood before the altar, and Brother Josef waited to unite them. Young Count Gustav was smiling as he took his cousin’s slim white hand in his. All was well, exceedingly well, with him. His father, for whom he had never had much real affection, was dead and one might hope well on his way to heaven by this time; he was about to wed the Gräfin Elnora von Hernsdorf, one of the richest heiresses in all the Rhineland, and an orphan with no brothers or sisters. He had escaped the toils of a romantic mistake; Else—and the child—were ashes now.
All that stood in his way had been burned with them. The past was really nothing to him. He could just open his hands and let it slip away. He was striding ahead into the future——
The priest’s low, droning admonition broke through his pleasant musings: ‘—if any man can show just cause why these two should not be wedded——’ What was the matter with Brother Josef? His face was drawn, his eyes were staring, there was a horrid moisture on his brow.
He looked from the priest to his bride. She was staring past him, face fright-frozen, lurking terror wakening to life in her wide eyes. Herr Gott, was everybody gone stark, staring mad? He swung about to see what they looked at.
Stark panic clutched him by the throat; terror hammered at his will, for, near enough to touch him, Else stood at his elbow, bandaged hands held out imploringly, as she had held them out to him before he broke the wand of doom above her head.
There was no anger in her glance, but oh! her lovely eyes were tragic in her white set face. Hope was dead and sorrow mourned in them.
‘Mein Gott, Du—thou?’ he gasped. ‘Back from the grave—the fire—to haunt me with——’ The broken words died on his lips, for she had taken the hemp girdle from her waist and swung it like a lash against his face.
He felt the stinging bite of it,
but greater than the pain the horror of it struck him, overwhelmed him. ‘I shall last to scourge thee for thy perfidy,’ she’d said, and now—O, gracious heaven!—she was doing it.
He staggered from the altar steps, ran stumbling toward the chapel door—ah, but he could not run! His feet seemed cased in leaden boots, he could not make them do his bidding. Slowly, like a man who wades breast-high in water, he moved toward the doorway, and step by step the spectral shape kept pace with him, lashing, beating, scourging——
He woke at last as from a nightmare. He was in bed and Brother Josef was attending him. Elnora? She had left the castle, gone back to her home, they told him.
Had he been ill? Yes, very ill, and he was still too weak to rise. He must rest quietly—— ‘Father,’ he asked feebly of the priest, ‘is there forgiveness for me?’
‘Was sagst Du, mein sohn—what has thou done?’
‘She—it was true, Father. Else did not lie when she declared I was her wedded husband. I married her and then repented of my bargain. I thought that I could face her down—who would believe a peasant woman’s word——’ Half sobbing, half raving in delirium, he told the sordid story of their pitiful, brief romance while the little priest stood by with horror mounting in his eyes. At last: ‘Can I find absolution, Father?’ he besought.
‘I—I do not know, my son. The girl was condemned for a witch and murderess, and though she pleaded for the last rites of the church they were denied her. She died unshriven. It may be that thy fate is linked with hers throughout eternity, that not until she finds release canst thou look for redemption.’
Gustav groaned and turned his face to the wall. He did not answer when the priest spoke to him. Later, when they came to rouse him to take nourishment, they found that he was dead.
He must have been a man of parts, this Brother Josef. Certainly he was a skilled sculptor, as the Calvary he carved and set up at the crossroads testifies. It was he who carved the legend ‘Pray for Them’ upon the shrine, thinking in the simple goodness of his heart that those who knelt and said a prayer by it might offer a petition not alone for Gustav, but for the wife he had renounced and betrayed to her death. And on the tomb where they laid Gustav with the pomp and circumstances befitting his high rank good Brother Josef carved a goose to nestle at the dead knight’s feet. He could not put an effigy of Else on her husband’s sepulchre, but—she had been a goose-girl—let the symbol stand for her.
Brother Ambrose had attached a letter to the manuscript:
My very good, kind friend: From what you told me you had witnessed, and what we learn from reading these accounts of the old days, it seems that Gustav Hohenneitschütz is earthbound and doomed to suffer flagellation every Saint John’s Eve until the wife whom he renounced and sent to cruel death finds peace within the quiet of the grave. They would not let her be absolved before she died, but she had the desire and intention. Tomorrow I shall exorcize the Hohenneitschütz chapel, and grant her plenary absolution. Thereafter, every Saint John’s Eve I shall say Masses for the rest of their unquiet souls. We cannot know if this will win them rest eternal—all things are with God, my son—but we can try. Will not you come with me and help me in the rite of exorcism?
Nothing could have pleased me more, but next morning a field clerk handed me an order typed in triplicate stating that I would proceed to Saint Nazaire. There was, of course, no telephone by which I could reach Brother Ambrose, nor could I stop to call on him. I sent an orderly with a note—and another tin of tobacco—but could not wait for his answer.
My letters to him all came back. Perhaps they moved him to another convent, maybe the postmen didn’t try to deliver them.
Things were pretty chaotic in the last days of the Weimar Republic.
Did he bring peace and rest to those two troubled shades, or does poor little Else still come to the Hohenneitschütz chapel every Saint John’s Eve and lash her faithless lover through the long night from sunset to cock-crow? Does she still weep soft, compassionate tears as she lays on the scourge, and does she heal him with the kiss she gives him when they part at last, he to go back to his tomb-sleep for another year, she to go—who knows where?
The Phantom Farm House1
I HAD BEEN at the new Briarcliff Sanitarium nearly three weeks before I actually saw the house.
Every morning as I lay abed after the nurse had taken my temperature, I wondered what was beyond the copse of fir and spruce at the turn of the road. The picture seemed incomplete without chimneys rising among the evergreens. I thought about it so much I finally convinced myself there really was a house in the wood—a house where people lived and worked and were happy.
All during the long, trying days when I was learning to navigate a wheel-chair, I used to picture the house and the people who lived in it. There would be a father, I was sure; a stout, good-natured father, somewhat bald, who sat on the porch and smoked a cob pipe in the evening. And there was a mother, too—a waistless, plaid-skirted mother with hair smoothly parted over her forehead, who sat beside the father as he rocked and smoked, and who had a brown work-basket in her lap. She spread the stocking feet over her outstretched fingers and her vigilant needle spied out and closed every hole with a cunning no mechanical loom could rival.
Then there was a daughter. I was a little hazy in my conception of her; but I knew she was tall and slender as a hazel wand, and that her eyes were blue and wide and sympathetic.
Picturing the house and its people became a favorite pastime with me during the time I was acquiring the art of walking all over again. By the time I was able to trust my legs on the road I felt I knew my way to my vision-friends’ home as well as I knew the byways of my own parish; though I had as yet not set foot outside the sanitarium.
Oddly enough, I chose the evening for my first long stroll. It was unusually warm for September in Maine, and some of the sturdier of the convalescents had been playing tennis during the afternoon. After dinner they sat on the veranda, comparing notes on their respective cases of influenza, or matching experiences in appendicitis operations.
After building the house bit by bit from my imagination, as a child pieces together a picture puzzle, I should have been bitterly disappointed if the woods had proved empty; yet when I reached the turn of the road and found my dream house a reality, I was almost afraid. Bit for bit and part for part, it was as I had visualized it.
A long, rambling, comfortable-looking farmhouse it was, with a wide porch screened by vines, and a whitewashed picket fence about the little clearing before it. There was a tumbledown gate in the fence, one of the kind that is held shut with a weighted chain. Looking closely, I saw the weight was a disused plowshare. Leading from gate to porch was a path of flat stones, laid unevenly in the short grass, and bordered with a double row of clam shells. A lamp burned in the front room, sending out cheerful golden rays to meet the silver moonlight.
A strange, eerie sensation came over me as I stood there. Somehow, I felt I had seen that house before—many, many times before; yet I had never been in that part of Maine till I came to Briarcliff, nor had anyone ever described the place to me. Indeed, except for my idle dreams, I had had no intimation that there was a house in those pines at all.
‘Who lives in the house at the turn of the road?’ I asked the fat man who roomed next to me.
He looked at me as blankly as if I had addressed him in Choctaw, then countered, ‘What road?’
‘Why, the south road,’ I explained. ‘I mean the house in the pines—just beyond the curve, you know.’
If such a thing had not been obviously absurd, I should have thought he looked frightened at my answer. Certainly his already prominent eyes started a bit further from his face.
‘Nobody lives there,’ he assured me. ‘Nobody’s lived there for years. There isn’t any house there.’
I became angry. What right had this fellow to make my civil question the occasion for an ill-timed jest? ‘As you please,’ I replied. ‘Perhaps there isn’t any house
there for you; but I saw one there last night.’
‘My God!’ he ejaculated, and hurried away as if I’d just told him I was infected with smallpox.
Later in the day I overheard a snatch of conversation between him and one of his acquaintances in the lounge.
‘I tell you it’s so,’ he was saying with great earnestness. ‘I thought it was all a lot of poppycock, myself; but that clergyman saw it last night. I’m going to pack my traps and get back to the city, and not waste any time about it, either.’
‘Rats!’ his companion scoffed. ‘He must have been stringing you.’
Turning to light a cigar, he caught sight of me. ‘Say, Mr Weatherby,’ he called, ‘you didn’t mean to tell my friend here that you really saw a house down by those pines last night, did you?’
‘I certainly did,’ I answered, ‘and I tell you, too. There’s nothing unusual about it, is there?’
‘Is there?’ he repeated. ‘Is there? Say, what’d it look like?’
I described it to him as well as I could, and his eyes grew as wide as those of a child hearing a story of Bluebeard.
‘Well, I’ll be a Chinaman’s uncle!’ he declared as I finished. ‘I sure will!’
‘See here,’ I demanded. ‘What’s all the mystery about that farmhouse? Why shouldn’t I see it? It’s there to be seen, isn’t it?’
He gulped once or twice, as if there were something hot in his mouth, before he answered:
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