The Macabre Megapack

by Various Writers

  THE OLD WOMAN’S STORY

  “Many, many years ago there was a fair peasant—so fair, that from her childhood all her friends prophesied that it would lead to no good. When she came to sixteen, the Count Ludolf thought it was a pity such beauty should be wasted, and therefore took possession of it: better that the lovely should pine in a castle than flourish in a cottage. Her mother died broken-hearted; and her father left the neighborhood, with a curse on the disobedient girl who had brought desolation to his hearth, and shame to his old age. It needs little to tell that such a passion grew cold—it were a long tale that accounted for the fancies of a young, rich, and reckless Cavalier; and, after all, nothing changes so soon as love.”

  “Love,” murmured Lucy, in a low voice, as if unconscious of the interruption: “Love, which is our fate, like Fate must be immutable: how can the heart forget his young religion?”

  “Many,” pursued the sibyl, “can forget, and do and will forget. As for the Count, his heart was cruel with prosperity, and selfish with good fortune: he had never known sickness, which softens; sorrow, which brings all to its own level; poverty, which, however it may at last harden the heart, first teaches us our helplessness. What was it to him that Bertha had left the home which could never receive her again? What, that for his sake, she had submitted to the appearance of disgrace which was not in reality her?—for the peasant-girl was as proud as the Baron; and when she stepped over her father’s threshold, it was as his wife.

  “Well, well, he wearied, as men ever weary, of women’s complaining, however bitter may be the injury which has wrung reproach from the unwilling lip. Many a sad hour did she spend weeping in the lonely tower, which had once seemed to her like a palace; for then the radiance of love was around it—and love, forsooth, is something like the fairies in our own land; for a time it can make all that is base and worthless seem most glittering and precious. Once, every night brought the ringing horn and eager step of the noble hunter; now the nights passed away too often in dreary and unbroken splendor. Yet the shining shield in the hall, and the fair current of the mountain spring, showed that her face was lovely as ever.

  “One evening, he came to visit her, and his manner was soft and his voice was low, as in the days of old. Alas! of late she had been accustomed to the unkind look and the harsh word.

  “‘It is a lovely twilight, my Bertha,’ said he; ‘help me to unmoor our little bark, and we will sail down the river.’

  “With a light step and yet lighter heart, she descended the rocky stairs, and reached the boat before her companion. The white sail was soon spread; they sprang in; and the slight vessel went rapidly through the stream. At first the waves were crimson, as if freighted with rubies, the last love-gifts of the dying Sun; for they were sailing on direct to the west, which was one flush, like a sea of blushing wine. Gradually the tints became paler; shades of soft pink just tinged the far-off clouds, and a delicate lilac fell on the waters. A star or two shone pure and bright in the sky, and the only shadows were flung by a few wild rose-trees that sprang from the clefts of the rocks. By degrees the drooping flowers disappeared; the stream grew narrower, and the sky became darker; a few soft clouds soon gathered into a storm: but Bertha heeded them not; she was too earnestly engaged in entreating her husband that he should acknowledge their secret marriage. She spoke of the dreary solitude to which she was condemned; of her wasted youth, worn by the fever of continual anxiety. Suddenly she stopped in fear; it was so gloomy around; the steep banks nearly closed overhead, and the boughs of the old pines which stood in some of the tempest-cleft hollows met in the air, and cast a darkness like that of night upon the rapid waters, which hurried on as if they distrusted their gloomy passage.

  “At this moment Bertha’s eye caught the ghastly paleness of her husband’s face, terribly distinct: she thought he feared the rough torrent, and for her sake: tenderly she leant towards him—his arm grasped her waist, but not in love; he seized the wretched girl and flung her overboard, with the very name of God on her lips, and appealing, too, for his sake! Twice her bright head—Bertha had ever gloried in her sunny curls, which now fell in wild profusion upon her shoulders—twice did it emerge from the wave; her faint hands were spread abroad for help; he shrunk from the last glare of her despairing eyes; then a low moan; a few bubbles of foam rose off the stream; and all was still—but it was the stillness of death. An instant after, the thunder-clouds burst above, the peal reverberated from cliff to cliff, the lightning clave the black depths of the stream, the billows rose in tumultuous eddies; but Count Ludolf’s boat cut its way through, and the vessel arrived at the open river. No trace was there of storm; the dewy wild flowers filled the air with their fragrance; and the Moon shone over them pure and clear, as if her light had no sympathy with human sorrow, and shuddered not at human crime. And why should she? We might judge her by ourselves; what care we for crime when we are not involved, and for suffering in which we have no part?

  “The red wine-cup was drained deep and long in Count Ludolf’s castle that night; and soon after, its master traveled afar into other lands: there was not pleasure enough for him at home. He found that bright eyes could gladden even the ruins of Rome; but Venice became his chosen city. It was as if the revelry delighted in the contrast which the dark robe, the gloomy canal, and the death-black gondola, offered to the orgies which made joyous her midnights.”

  “And did he feel no remorse?” asked Lucy.

  “Remorse!” said the crone, with a scornful laugh; “remorse is the word for a child, or for a fool: the unpunished crime is never regretted. WE weep over the consequences, not over the fault. Count Ludolf soon found another love. This time his passion was kindled by a picture, but one of a most strange and thrilling beauty; a portrait, the only unfaded one in a deserted palace situate in the eastern lagune. Day after day he went to gaze on the exquisite face and the large black eyes, till they seemed to answer to his own. But the festival of San Marco was no time for idle fantasies; and the Count was amongst the gayest of the revelers. Amid the many masks which he followed, was one that finally riveted his attention. Her light step seemed scarcely to touch the ground, and every now and then a dark curl or two of raven softness escaped the veil; at last the mask itself slipped aside, and he saw the countenance of his beautiful incognita. He addressed her; and her answers, if brief, were at least encouraging; he followed her to a gondola, which they entered together. It stopped at the steps of the palace he had supposed deserted.

  “‘Will you come with me?’ said she, in a voice whose melancholy was as the lute when the night-wind wakens its music; and as she stood by the sculptured lions which kept the entrance, the moonlight fell on her lovely face—lovely as if Titian had painted it.

  “‘Could you doubt?’ said Ludolf, as he caught the extended hand; ‘neither heaven nor hell should keep me from your side!’

  “And here I cannot choose but laugh at the exaggerated phrases of lovers: why, a stone wall or a steel chain might have kept him away at that very moment! They passed through many a gloomy room, dimly seen in the moonshine, till they came to the picture-gallery, which was splendidly illuminated—and, strange contrast to its usual desolation, there was spread a magnificent banquet. The waxen tapers burned in their golden candlesticks, the lamps were fed with perfumed oil, and many a crystal vase was filled with rare flowers, till the atmosphere was heavy with fragrance. Piled up, in mother-of-pearl baskets, the purple grapes had yet the morning dew upon them; and the carved pine reared its emerald crest beside peaches, like topazes in a sunset. The Count and the lady seated themselves on a crimson ottoman; one white arm, leant negligently, contrasted with the warm color of the velvet; but extending the other towards the table, she took a glass; at her sign the Count filled it with wine.

  “‘Will you pledge with me?’ said she, touching the cup with her lips, and passing it to him. He drank it—for wine and air seemed alike freighted with the odor of her sigh.

  “‘My beauty!’ excla
imed Ludolf, detaining the ivory hand.

  “‘Nay, Count,’ returned the stranger, in that sweet and peculiar voice, more like music than language—‘I know how lightly you hold the lover’s vow!’

  “‘I never loved till now!’ exclaimed he, impatiently; ‘name, rank, fortune, life, soul, are your own.’

  She drew a ring from her hand, and placed it on his, leaving hers in his clasp. ‘What will you give me in exchange—this?’—and she took the diamond cross of an order which he wore.

  “‘Ay, and by my knightly faith will I, and redeem it at your pleasure.’

  “It was her hand which now grasped his; a change passed over her face; ‘I thank you, my sister-in-death, for your likeness,’ said she, turning to where the portrait had hung. For the first time, the Count observed that the frame was empty. Her grasp tightened upon him; it was the bony hand of a skeleton. The beauty vanished; the face grew a familiar one—it was that of Bertha! The floor became unstable, like water; he felt himself sinking rapidly; again he rose to the surface—he knew the gloomy pine-trees overhead; the grasp on his hand loosened; he saw the fair head of Bertha gasp in its death-agony amid the waters; the blue eyes met his; the stream flung her towards him; her arms closed round his neck with a deadly weight; down they sank beneath the dark river together—and to eternity.”

  THE HAUNTED HOMESTEAD, by Henry William Herbert

  (1840)

  THE MURDER

  There are few wilder spots on earth, than the deep wooded gorge through which the waters of the mad Ashuelot rush southward from the pellucid lakelets, embosomed in the eastern spurs of the great Alleghany chain, whence it starts rash and rapid—meet emblem of ambitious man—upon its brief career of foam and fury. The hills—mountains, in bold abruptness, if not by actual height entitled to the name—sinking precipitous and sheer, to the bed of the chafing river, which, in the course of ages, has scarped and channelled their rude sides, and cleft the living granite a hundred fathom down, have left scant space below for a wild road, here hewn or blasted through strata of the eternal rock, there reared upon abutments of rough logs, and traversing some five times in each mile of distance, the devious torrent, as it wheels off in arrowy angles from side to side of its stern channel. Above, so perpendicularly do the cliffs ascend, that the huge pines, which shoot out from each rift and crevice of their seamed flanks, far overhang the path, dropping their scaly cones into the boiling cauldron of the stream, and almost interlacing their black boughs; so that mid-summers’ noon scarce pours a wintry twilight into the damp and cavernous ravine, while a November’s eve lowers darker than a starless midnight. Even now, when the hand of enterprise has dotted the whole circumjacent region with prosperous farms and thriving villages, it is a desolate and gloomy pass; but in the years immediately preceding the war of independence—when, for unnumbered miles, the land around was clothed in its primeval garniture of forest—when but two tiny hamlets, Keene and Fitzwilliam, had been late-founded on the mountain track, at that time the sole thoroughfare between the young states of New Hampshire and Vermont, with scarce a human habitation in all the dreary miles that intervened between those infant settlements, it was indeed as fearful, ay, as perilous a route as ever struck dismay into the bosom of lone traveller. Those were rude days and stern! those were days that, in truth, and in more modes than one, tried—shrewdly tried—men’s souls! War had, indeed, passed over—but many of its worst attributes and adjuncts still harassed the unsettled land. Traffic had been well nigh abolished—the culture of the earth neglected—want, bitter want, pervaded the whole country—the minds of men, long used to violence and strife and rapine, slowly resumed their calm and governed tenor—disbanded soldiers, the outcasts of patriotic forces, broken and desperate characters, roamed singly or in bands, without resources or employment, through every state of the new union; nor had the Indian, undismayed by the weak government of the scarce-formed republic, ceased from his late-indulged career of massacre and havoc. Such was the period—such the nature of the times—when on a lowering and fitful evening toward the last days of October, a mounted traveller was seen to pass the sandhills, which form the jaws of the gorge on the southern side, on his way northward, to Vermont; wherein large tracts of fertile land were offered by the government for sale, at rates which tempted many to become purchasers and settlers in that romantic district. The sun had set already when he rode past the door of the one lowly tavern which then, as for the most part is the case in all new settlements, was the chief building of Fitzwilliam. A heavy mass of dark grey clouds, surging up slowly from the west, had occupied, at least, one half of the fast-darkening firmament; broad gouts of rain fell one by one at distant intervals; and the deep melancholy sough of the west wind wailed through the dismal gorge of the Ashuelot in sure foreboding of the near tempest. The landlord of that humble hostelry stood in his lowly doorway, and warned the lated wayfarer to ‘light down for the night, and take the morning with him for his guide through the wild pass that lay before him; but he who was thus timely warned, shook his head only in reply, and asking, in his turn, the distance to Hartley’s Hawknest tavern, learned that six miles of dangerous wild road, yet intervened between him and his destined harbor. For half a minute it seemed as though he doubted, for he drew in his rein and gazed with an inquiring glance toward the threatening heavens; at all events, his hesitation, if such it were, soon ended, he doubled the cape of his short horseman’s cloak closer about his neck, touched his horse lightly with his spur, and cantered moderately onward. He was a tall and slight, though sinewy figure, with something in his air, and in the practiced grace wherewith he sat and wheeled his horse, that spoke of military service—nor did his dress, although not strictly martial, belie the supposition; the square-topped cap of otter-skin, the braided loops and frogs on his hussar-like cloak, the leathern breeches, and high boots, equipped with long brass spurs, were by no means dissimilar to the accoutrements of sundry among the regiments of continental horse, disbanded at the termination of the war, although divested of the lace and colored facings, which would have made them strictly uniform. The animal, moreover, which he rode, had evidently been subjected to the manege, for he was well upon his haunches, with the arched neck and light mouth, champing on the bit, that speak so certainly the well-trained charger—his saddle, too, equipped with holsters at the bow, and a small valise at the cantle, was covered with a handsome bear-skin; while the bridle, with its nosebag, its cavesson, and brass-scaled frontlet, had yet more certainly been decorated so for no pacific purpose. Darker, and darker yet, frowned the dim skies above him, as threading the black pass, with no guide save the chafing roar of the vexed waters, and the white glistening of their tortured spray, he hastened onwards; and now the wind, which had long sobbed and moaned among the giant pines, that lent a heavier gloom to the dark twilight road, raved out in savage gusts, whirling away the smaller branches, like straws, in their mad dalliance; the rain, at every lull, plashing upon the slippery rocks—the thunder crashing and roaring at the zenith, and the pale fires of heaven flashing in ghostly sheets across the narrow stripe of sky, which alone showed between the wood-fringed cliffs glooming on either hand, five hundred feet aloft. Yet not for rain or storm did the good charger flinch, or the bold rider curb him. With his head bowed upon his breast, his rein relaxed and free, and his foot firm in the stirrup, as confident of the high qualities of his generous steed, fleetly and fearlessly he galloped onward; turn after turn of the stern glen he doubled—bridge after bridge clattered beneath his thundering stride—mile after mile was won—and now, as he wheeled round the base of a huge rocky buttress—from which the stream, rebutted by its massy weight, swept off in a wide reach to the right hand, while on the left the hills receded somewhat from its brink, leaving a sylvan amphitheatre of a few acres circuit—the lights of the small wayside inn, known, in those days, to all who traversed the frontiers of neighbor states, as Hartley’s Hawknest, glanced cheerfully upon the traveller’s eyes. It was a long, low, l
og-built tenement, with several latticed windows looking toward the river it faced, the upper story projecting so far as to constitute a rugged sort of galleried piazza. A glorious weeping elm, that loveliest of forest trees, stood at the southern end; its drooping foliage, sere, now, and changed from its rich verdure, overshadowing many a yard of ground, and its gigantic trunk, garnished with rings and staples, whereto was fastened, as the stranger galloped up, two or three sorry-looking, ill-conditioned horses, meanly caparisoned with straw-stuffed pads and hempen halters, waiting the leisure of their masters, who were employed—as many a snatch of vulgar song, and many a burst of dissonant harsh laughter pealing into the bosom of the night, betokened—in rude debauchery within. A rudely-fashioned spout of timber discharged a stream of limpid water into a huge stone cistern, whence it leaped with a merry murmur, and ran gurgling down a pebbled channel to join the river in the bottom—and beyond this, a long range of sheds and stabling stood out at a right angle to the tavern. Pausing before the open shed, the stranger saw, with no small feeling of annoyance, that the whole length of its unplaned and sordid manger was occupied by a large drove of horses; while, by the stamp of hoofs within, and muzzling sounds as of beasts busy with their provender, he readily guessed that the stables, also, were completely crowded. Linking his panting charger, therefore, to one of the hooks in the elm-tree, and throwing his own cloak across its croupe, he stepped across the threshold into the thronged and smoky bar-room. The inn, as he had but too surely augered, was crowded to the utmost—a drove of horses, on their way southward from Vermont, had come in that same evening, their drivers having engaged every bed and pallet in the house—a dozen farmers of the neighborhood, scared from proceeding on their homeward routes by the terrific aspect of the night, had occupied the little parlor—the very bar-room was strewn with buffalo-skins and blankets, whereupon reposed a dozen sturdy forms, seemingly undisturbed by the obscene and stormy revelling of several of their comrades, who had preferred a night-long drinking bout to a hard couch and uncertain slumbers. There needed scarce a question to ascertain that not a spot remained where he could spread his cloak; nor, which weighed most with him, a shed, however lowly, wherein to stable his good horse. Nothing remained, then, but to procure a feed of oats for the worn animal, some slight refreshment for himself, and to proceed, as best he might, to Keene, still twelve miles distant, with the worst portions of the road yet to be overcome. No long space did it take the youth, for he was young and eminently handsome; and, as the lights displayed his lithe and active symmetry, set off by a close frock of forest green, edged in accordance with the fashion of the day, by a thin cord of gold, none who looked on him could fail to discover the gentleman of birth and breeding in every feature of his face, in every gesture of his active frame. And eagerly and keenly did many an eye of those who revelled around him, of those who seemed to slumber, scan his whole form, and dress, and bearing. Several gaunt, wolfish-looking men, muffled in belted blanket coats, bearded and grim and hideous, proffered him their revolting hospitality, and would fain, as it seemed, have entered into converse with him; but while offending none by anything of haughtiness or of direct avoidance, he yet withdrew himself from their company, and sat wrapped in his own meditations until the voice of the landlord summoned him to the scant meal, which he discussed in haste, and standing; this ended, he drew forth his purse to pay his reckoning; nor was it ‘till he noticed the quick and fiery glances which shot from many an eye, dwelt gloatingly upon the silken network, through which gleamed many a golden coin, that he became aware of his imprudence in drawing out so large a sum, as he had thus unwittingly displayed before so doubtful an assemblage. Nor did the consequences of his error fail to stand visibly before him, when sundry of the bystanders offered to yield their places to the stranger, should he prefer to tarry; and one, a tall, dark-visaged, gloomy-looking man, wearing a long and formidable butcher-knife in his buff belt, and holding a tall rifle in his hand, announced his intention to ride some three miles on the way toward Keene, forthwith, to the spot where his own homeward path branched off from the main road, tendered his services and company, as a guide well acquainted with the pass; and even offered him a night’s lodging in his own cabin. While thus addressed, the stranger was aware of a shrewd meaning look which the landlord cast toward him as he handed him his change; but seeing no mode whereby to avoid the man’s society, and feeling that he should more easily be able to defend himself if assailed, against a person by his side, than against one who might, unseen, waylay him, he was contented with declining the night’s lodging, and courteously accepted his assistance as a guide. The wind had quite sunk as he again mounted his recruited charger, and the storm had swept over; yet was the road as dark as a wolf’s mouth through the ravine, which narrowed more and more as they proceeded farther, and was even more obscured by the precipitous hills and overhanging foliage. Slowly they journeyed on, compelled to spare their speed by the deep channels and huge stones which broke the surface of the path; and close and various were the questionings to which the traveller was subjected by his acute, although untutored, guide. Acute, however, as he was, he had met, in the stranger, his full match; for, seemingly responding to each query with perfect and accommodating frankness, he yet contrived to say no word which should give any clue to his intentions or his destination; so that when they had reached the spot where their paths separated, the countryman knew nothing more than when they had set forth, of his companion’s views or business.