The circling halo of the Madonna in her sky-blue gown shone, patterned into a rose by the Byzantine cross, whose delicate red outline, melted in the reflection, darkened with a tincture of blood this orient gleaming in its pearls. From her childhood Vera had used to cast her great eyes of compassion on the pure and maternal features of the hereditary Madonna; her nature, alas! allowed her to consecrate only a superstitious love to the figure, but this she offered sometimes, naively and thoughtfully, when she passed in front of the lamp. At the sight of this the Count, touched in the most secret places of his soul, straightened himself, and quickly blew out the holy flame. Then, feeling with outstretched hand in the gloom for a bell-cord, he rang.
A servant appeared, an old man attired in black. In his hand was a lamp; he set it down before the portrait of the Countess. A shiver of superstitious terror ran through him as he turned and saw his master standing erect and smiling as if nothing had come to pass.
“Raymond,” said the Count in calm tones, “we are worn out with fatigue this evening, the Countess and I. You will serve supper about ten o’clock. And by the way, we have made up our minds that from tomorrow we shall isolate ourselves here more completely than ever. None of my servants, except yourself, must pass the night under this roof. You will send them three years’ wages, and they must go. Then you will close the bar of the gateway, and light the torches downstairs in the dining-room; you will be enough for our needs. For the future we shall receive nobody.”
The old man was trembling, watching him attentively.
The Count lit a cigar and went down into the gardens.
At first the servant imagined that grief, too crushing, too desperate, had unhinged his master’s mind. He had been familiar with him from his childhood, and instantly understood that the shock of too sudden an awakening could easily be fatal to this sleep-walker. His duty, to begin with, was respect for such a secret
He bowed his head. A devoted complicity in this religious phantasy…? To obey…? To continue to serve them without taking heed of Death? What a strange fancy! Would it endure for one night…? Tomorrow perhaps, alas…! Who could tell…? Maybe… But after all, a sacred project! What right had he to reflect like this…?
He left the chamber, carried out his orders to the letter, and that same evening the unwonted mode of life began.
A terrible mirage—this is what had to be brought into being!
The pain of the first days faded quickly away. Raymond, at first with stupefaction, afterwards from a sort of deference and fondness, had adapted himself so skillfully to a natural demeanour, that before three weeks had passed he felt at moments that he was himself the dupe of his good-will. The suppressed thought was fading! Sometimes, experiencing a kind of dizziness, he felt compelled to assure himself that the Countess was no more, positively was dead. He became adept in the melancholy pretence, and every moment he grew more forgetful of reality. Before long he needed to reflect more than once to convince himself and pull himself together. He realized clearly that in the end he would surrender utterly to the terrifying magnetism wherewith the Count, little by little, was infusing the atmosphere around them. A fear came over him, a quiet, uncertain fear.
D’Athol, in fact, was living in an absolute denial of the fact of his loved one’s death. So closely was the form of the young woman fused with his own that he could not but find her always with him. Now, on a garden seat on sunny days, he was reading aloud the poems that she loved. Now, in the evening, by the fireside, with two cups of tea on the little round table, he was chattering with the Illusion, who, for his eyes, sat smiling there in the other arm-chair.
Days, nights, weeks sped by. Neither one nor the other knew what they were bringing to pass. And strange happenings were now taking place, so that it became hard to distinguish how far the real and the imaginary coincided. A presence floated in the air. A form was struggling to become visible, to weave some pattern of its being upon the space no longer within its measure.
D’Athol lived a twofold life, like a visionary. The glimpse of a pale and gentle face, caught in a flash, within the twinkling of an eye; a faint chord struck on the piano, suddenly; a kiss that closed his lips at the instant of his speaking; the affinities of feminine thoughts which awoke within him in response to the words he uttered; a doubling of his own self which made him feel as if he were in some fluid mist; the perfume, the intoxicating, sweet perfume of his beloved by his side; and at night, betwixt waking and sleeping, words which he heard low-spoken—everything pointed to one thing: a negation of Death exalted finally into an unknown force!
Once d’Athol felt and saw her so clearly beside him that he took her in his arms. But with the movement she vanished.
“Poor child!” he murmured, smiling, and fell asleep again, like a lover repulsed by his smiling, drowsy mistress.
On her birthday, he placed in pleasantry some everlastings amid the bouquet of flowers which he laid on Vera’s pillow.
“Because she imagines that she’s dead!” said he.
In the end, by reason of the deep and all-compelling will of d’Athol, who thus from the strength of his love wrought the very life and presence of his wife into the lonely mansion, this mode of life acquired a gloomy and persuasive magic. Raymond himself no longer felt any alarm, having become gradually used to these impressions.
The glimpse of a black velvet robe at the bend of a pathway; the call of a laughing voice in the drawing-room; a bell rung when he awoke in the morning, just at it used to be—all this had become familiar to him: the dead woman, one might have thought, was playing with the invisible, as a child might. So well beloved did she feel herself! It was altogether natural.
A year had gone by.
On the evening of the Anniversary the Count was sitting by the fire in Vera’s room. He had just finished reading her the last verses of a Florentine tale, Callimachus, and he closed the book.
“Douschka,” he said, pouring himself out some tea,” do you remember the Vallée-des-Roses, and the banks of the Lahn, and the castle of Quatre-Tours? Do you? Didn’t that story bring them back to you?”
He rose, and in the bluish glass he saw himself paler than his wont. He took up a bracelet of pearls in a goblet and gazed at them attentively. Vera had taken the pearls from her arm (had she not?) just a little time ago, before disrobing, and the pearls were still warm, and their water softened, as by the warmth of her flesh. And here was the opal of that Siberian necklace; so well did it love Vera’s fair bosom that, when sometimes she forgot it for awhile, it would grow pale in its golden network, as if sick and languishing. (For that, in days gone by, the Countess used to love her devoted trinket!) And now this evening, the opal was gleaming as if it had just been left off, as if it were still infused with the rare magnetism of the dead beauty. As he set down the necklace and the precious stone, the count touched accidentally the cambric handkerchief: the drops of blood upon it were damp and red, like carnations on snow! And there, on the piano—who had turned the last page of that melody out of the past? Why, the sacred lamp had relit itself, there in the reliquary! Yes, its gilded flame threw a mystic light upon the face of the Madonna and on her closed eyes! And those eastern flowers, new-gathered, opening and blooming in those old Saxony vases—whose hand had just placed them there? The whole room seemed to be happy, seemed to be gifted with life, in some fashion more significant, more intense than usual. But nothing could surprise the Count! So normal did all appear to him, that he did not so much as notice the hour striking on that clock which through the whole long year had stood still.
That evening one would have said that, from out of the depths of the darkness, the Countess Vera was striving (and striving how adorably!) to come back to this room, whose every corner was impregnate with her own self! She had left behind so much of herself there! Everything that had gone to make up her existence was drawing her back thither. H
er charm hung suspended in its air. The prolonged force sprung from her husband’s impassioned will must have loosened the vague bonds of the Invisible about her…
She was necessitated there. All that she loved was there.
She must have longed, surely, to come and smile to herself in that mysterious mirror wherein so often she had admired the lilies of her countenance. Yes, down there amid the violets, there beneath the cold and darkened lamps in the vault, in her loneliness, she had started, the lovely one, the dead one; she had shuddered, the divine one, shuddered as she gazed on the silver key flung upon the slabs. She longed to come to him, she in her turn! And her will vanished in the idea of the incense and the isolation. Death is a final and binding term only for those who cherish hopes from the heavens; but for her was not the final term the embrace of Death and the Heavens and Life? And there, in the gloom, the solitary kiss of her husband was drawing forth her own lips. And the vanished sound of the melodies, the intoxicating words of days gone by, the stuffs which had covered her body and still held its perfume, those magical jewels which still in their obscure sympathy longed for her, and above all the overwhelming and absolute impression of her presence, a feeling shared in the end even by the things themselves—everything had been calling, had been drawing her thither for so long now, and by such insensible degrees, that, cured at last of somnolent Death, there was lacking nothing, save only Her alone.
Ah, Ideas are living beings! The Count had hollowed out in the air the shape of his love, and necessity demanded that into this void should pour the only being that was homogeneous to it, for otherwise the Universe would have crashed into chaos. And at that instant the impression came, final, simple, absolute, that She must be there, there in the room! Of this he was as calmly certain as of his own existence, and all the objects about him were saturated with this conviction. One saw it there! And now, since nothing was lacking save only Vera herself, outwardly and tangibly there, it was inevitably ordained that there she should be, and that for an instant the great Dream of Life and Death should set its infinite gates ajar! By faith the pathway of resurrection had been driven right to her! Joyfully a clear burst of musical laughter lit up the nuptial bed. The Count turned round. And there, before his eyes, creature of memory and of will, ethereal, an elbow leaning on the lace of the pillow, one hand buried in her thick black hair, her lips deliciously parted in a smile that held a paradise of rare delights, lovely with the beauty that breaks the heart, there at last the Countess Vera was gazing on him, and sleep still lingering within her eyes.
“Roger!” spoke the distant voice.
He came over to her side. In joy, in divine, oblivious, deathless joy, their lips were united!
And then they perceived, then, that they were in reality but one single being.
The hours flew by in their strange flight, brushing with the tips of their wings this ecstasy wherein heaven and earth for the first time were mingled.
Suddenly, as if struck by some fatal memory, the Count d’Athol started.
“Ah, I remember!” he cried.” I remember now! What am I doing? You, you are dead!”
And at that moment, when that word was spoken, the mystic lamp before the ikon was extinguished. The pale, thin light of morning—a dreary, grey, raining morning—filtered through the gaps of the curtain into the room. The candles grew pale and went out, and there was only the acrid smoke from their glowing wicks; beneath a layer of chilling ashes the fire disappeared; within a few minutes the flowers faded and shrivelled up; and little by little the pendulum of the clock slowed down once more into immobility. The certitude of all the objects took sudden flight. The opal stone, turned dead, gleamed no longer; the stains of blood upon the cambric by her side had faded likewise; and the vision, in all its ardent whiteness, effacing itself between those despairing arms which sought in vain to clasp it still, returned into thin air. It was lost. One far faint sigh of farewell, distinct, reached even to the soul of the Count. He rose. He had just perceived that he was alone. His dream had melted away at one single touch. With one single word he had snapped the magnetic thread of his glittering pattern. And the atmosphere now was that of the dead.
Like those tear-shaped drops of glass, of chance formation, so solid that a hammer-blow on their thick part will not shatter them, yet such that they will crumble instantly into an impalpable dust if the narrow end, finer than a needle’s point, be broken—all had vanished.
“Oh!” he murmured, “then all is over! She is lost…and all alone! What path can bring me to you now? Show me the road that can lead me to you!”
Suddenly, as if in reply, a shining object fell with a metallic ring from off the nuptial bed, onto the black fur: a ray of that hateful, earthly day lit it up. Stooping down, the forsaken one seized it, and, as he recognized the object, his face was illumined with a sublime smile. It was the key of the tomb.
A LOST DAY, by Edgar Fawcett
“My Family,” John Dalrymple would say, “have the strange failing (that is, nearly all of them except myself, on the paternal side) of—”
And then somebody would always try to interrupt him. At the Gramercy, the small but charming club of which he had been for years an honored member, they made a point of interrupting him when he began on his family failing. Not a few of them held to the belief that it was a myth of Dalrymple’s imagination. Still, others argued, all of the clan except John himself had been a queer lot; there was no real certainty that they had not done extraordinary acts. Meanwhile, apart from his desire to delve among ancestral records and repeat tales which had been told many times before, he was a genuine favorite with his friends. But that series of family anecdotes remained a standing joke.
They all pitied him when it became known that his engagement to the pretty winsome widow, Mrs. Carrington, was definitely broken. He was past forty now, and had not been known to pay serious court to any woman before in at least ten years. Of course Mrs. Carrington was rich. But then her money could not have attracted Dalrymple, for he was rich himself, in spite of his plain way of living there in that small Twenty-second Street basement house.
But the widow’s money had doubtless lured to her side the gentleman who had cut poor Dalrymple out. A number of years ago, when this little occurrence which we are chronicling took place, it was not so easy as it is now to make sure of a foreigner’s credentials and antecedents. The Count de Pommereul, a reputed French nobleman of high position, had managed to get into the Gramercy as a six-months’ member, and had managed also to cross the thresholds of numerous select New York drawing-rooms. At the very period of his introduction to Mrs. Carrington her engagement with Dalrymple had already become publicly announced. Then, in a few weeks, society received a shock. Dalrymple was thrown over, and it transpired that the brilliant young widow was betrothed to the Count.
Dalrymple, calm and self-contained, had nothing to say on the subject of why he had received such shabby treatment, and nobody ventured to interrogate him. Some people believed in the Count, others thought that there was a ring of falsity about him, for all his frame was so elegantly slender and supple, for all his mustache was so glossily dark, and his eyes so richly lustrous. Dalrymple meanwhile hid his wound, met the Count constantly at the Club, though no longer even exchanging bows with him, and—worked at his revenge in secret as a beaver works at the building of his winter ranch. He succeeded, too, in getting superb materials for that revenge. They surprised even himself when a few relatives and friends in Paris mailed him appalling documentary evidence as to what sort of a character this Count really was. There is no doubt that he now held in his hand a thunderbolt, and had only to hurl it when he pleased.
He did not tell a single soul what he had learned. The thought of just how he should act haunted him for several days. One evening he went home from the club a little earlier than usual, and tossed restlessly for a good while after going to bed. When sleep came it foun
d him still irresolute as to what course he should take.
It seemed to him that he had now a succession of dreams, but he could recall none of them on awaking. And he awoke in a peculiar way. There was yet no hint of dawn in the room, and only the light from his gas, turned down to a very dim star. He was sitting bolt upright in bed, and feverish, fatigued sensations oppressed him. “What have I been dreaming?” he asked himself again and again. But as only a confused jumble of memories answered him, he sank back upon the pillows, and was soon buried in slumber.
It was past nine o’clock in the morning when he next awoke. He felt decidedly better. Both the feverishness and the fatigue had left him. He went to the club and breakfasted there. It was almost empty of members, as small clubs are apt to be at that hour of the morning. But in the hall he met his old friend Langworth and bowed to him. Langworth, who was rather near-sighted, gave a sudden start and a stare. “How odd,” thought Dalrymple, as he passed on into the reading-room, “I hope there’s nothing unexpected about my personal appearance.” Just at the doorway of the room he met another old friend, Summerson, a man extremely strict about all matters of propriety. Summerson saw him and then plainly made believe that he had not seen. As they moved by one another Dalrymple said lightly, “Good-morning, old chap. How’s your gout?”
Summerson, who was very tall and excessively dignified, gave a comic squirm. Then his eyelids fluttered and with the tips of his lips he murmured, “Better,” as he glided along.
The Third Macabre Megapack: 25 Classic Tales of Horror Page 3