Then after an interval of nearly a month—
“I have arranged my books, as I find the library the most interesting room in the house. My doctor objects to the gloomy aspect, but I find a pleasing melancholy in the shadow of the steep olive-clad hill. I begin to think that this life of retirement, with no companions but my books, suits me better than the pursuit of money making, which has occupied so large a portion of my later years.”
Then followed pages of criticism upon the books he read—history, travels, poetry—books which he had been collecting for many years, but which he was now only beginning to enjoy.
“I see before me a studious old age,” he wrote, “and I hope I may live as long as the head of my old college, Martin Routh. I have made more than enough money to satisfy myself, and to provide ample wealth for the dear girl who will inherit the greater part of my fortune. I can afford to fold my hands, and enjoy the long quiet years of old age in the companionship of the master spirits who have gone before. How near, how living they seem as I steep myself in their thoughts, dream their dreams, see life as they saw it! Virgil, Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, and all those later lights that have shone upon the dullest lives and made them beautiful—how they live with us, and fill our thoughts, and make up the brightest part of our daily existence.”
I read many pages of comment and reverie in the neat, clear penmanship of a man who wrote for his own pleasure, in the restful solitude of his own fire-side.
Suddenly there came a change—the shadow of the cloud that hung over that house.
“I am living too much alone. I did not think I was of the stuff which is subject to delusions and marbled fancies—but I was wrong. I suppose no man’s mind can retain its strength of fibre without the friction of intercourse with other minds of its own calibre I have been living alone with the minds of the dead, and waited upon by foreign servants, with whom I hardly exchange half a dozen sentences in a day. And the result is what no doubt any brain-doctor would have foretold.
“I have begun to see ghosts.
“The thing I have seen is so evidently an emanation of my own mind—so palpably a materialization of my own self-consciousness, brooding upon myself and my chances of long life—that it is a weakness even to record the appearance that has haunted me during the last few evenings. No shadow of dying monk has stolen between me and the lamplight; no presence from the vanished years, revisiting places.The thing which I have seen is myself—not myself as I am—but myself as I am to be in the coming years, many or few.
“The vision—purely self-induced as I know it to be—has not the less given a shock to the placid contentment of my mind, and the long hopes which, in spite of the Venusian’s warning, I had of late been cherishing.
“Looking up from my book in yesterday’s twilight my casual glance rested on the old Venetian mirror in front of my desk; and gradually, out of the blurred darkness, I saw a face looking at me.
“My own face as it might be after the wasting of disease, or the slow decay of advancing years—a face at least ten years older that the face I had seen in my glass a few hours before—hollow cheeks, haggard eyes, the loose under-lip drooping weakly—a bent figure in an invalid chair, an aspect of utter helplessness. And it was myself. Of that fact I had no shadow of doubt.
“Hypochondria, of course—a common form of the malady,—perhaps this shaping of the imagination into visions.Yet, the thing was strange—for I had been troubled by no apprehensions of illness or premature old age. I had never even thought of myself as a old man. In the pride bred of long immunity from illness I had considered myself exempt for the ailments that are wont to attend declining years. I had pictured myself living to the extremity of human life, and dropping peacefully into the centenarian’s grave.
“I was angry with myself for being affected by the vision and I locked the door of the library when I went to dress for dinner, determined not to re-enter the room till I had done something—by out-door exercise and change of scene—to restore the balance of my brain.Yet when I had dined there came upon me so feverish a desire to know whether the glass would again show me the same figure and face I have the key to my major-domo, and told him to light the lamps and make up the fire in the library.
“Yes, the thing lived in the blotched and blurred old glass. The dusky surface, which was too dull to reflect the realities of life, gave back that vision of age and decay with unalterable fidelity. The face and figure came and went, and the glass was often black—but whenever the thing appeared it was the same—the same in every dismal particular, in all the signs of senility and fading life.
“‘This is what I am to be twenty years hence,’ I told myself; ‘a man of eighty might look like that.’
“Yet I had hoped to escape that bitter lot of gradual decay which I had seen and pitied in other men. I had promised myself that the reward of a temperate life—a life free from all consuming fires of dissipation, all tempestuous passions—would be a vigorous and prolonged old age. So surely as I had toiled to amass fortune so surely also had I striven to save up for myself long years of health and activity, a life prolonged to the utmost span.”
There was a break of ten days in the journal, and when the record was resumed the change in the writing shocked me. The neat firm penmanship gave place to weak and straggling characters, which, but for marked peculiarities in the formation of certain letters, I should have taken for the writing of a stranger.
“The thing is always there in the black depths of that damnable glass—and I spend the greater part of m life watching for it. I have struggled in vain against the bitter curiosity to know the worst which hthe vision of the future can show me. Three days ago I flung the key of this detestable room into the deepest well on the premises; but an hour afterwards I sent to Taggia for a blacksmith, and had the lock picked, and ordered a new key, and a duplicate, lest in some future fit of spleen I should throw away a second key, and suffer agonies before the door could be opened.
“‘ Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas—’
“Vainly the poet’s warning buzzes and booms in my vexed ear—repeating itself perpetually, like the beating of a pulse in my brain or like the ticking of a clock that will not let a man sleep.
“‘Scire nefas—scire nefas,’
“The desire to know more is no stranger than reason.
“Well, I am at least prepared for what is to come. I live no longer in a fool’s paradise. The thing which I see daily and hourly is no hallucination, no materialization of my self-consciousness, as I thought in the beginning. It is a warning and a prophesy. So shalt though be. Soon, soon, shalt thou resemble this form which it shocks thee now to look upon.
“Since first the shadow of myself looked at me from the darker shadows of the glass I have felt every indication of the approaching doom. The doctor tries to laugh away my fears, but he owns that I am below par—meaningless phrase—talks of nervine decay, and suggests my going to St. Moritz. He doubts if this place suits me, and confesses that I have changed for the worse since I came here.”
Again an interval, and then in writing that was only just legible.
“It is a month since I wrote in this book—a month which has realized all that the Venetian glass showed me when first I began to read its secret.
“I am a helpless old man, carried about in an invalid chair. Gone my pleasant prospect of long tranquil years; gone my selfish scheme of enjoyment, the fruition of a life of money-getting. The old Eastern fable has been realized once again. My gold has turned to withered leaves, so far as any pleasure that it can buy for me. I hope that my grand-daughter may get some good out of the wealth I have toiled to win.”
Again a break, longer this time, and again the handwriting showed signs of increasing weakness. I had to pore over it closely in order to decipher the broken, crooked lines penciled casually over the pages.
“The weather is insufferably hot; but too ill to be moved. In library—coolest room—doctor no objection. I have see
n the last picture in glass—Death—corruption—the cavern of Lazarus, and no Redeemer’s hand to raise the dead. Horrible! Horrible! Myself as I must be—soon, soon! How Soon?”
And then scrawled in a corner of the page, I found the date—June 24, 1889.
I knew that Mr. Hammond died early in the July of that year.
Seated on the floor, with my head bent over the pages, and reading more by the light of the blazing logs than by the lamp on the table above me, I was unaware that Lota had awoke, and had raised herself from her reclining position of the sofa. I was still absorbed in my study of those last horrible lines when a pale hand came suddenly down upon the open book, and a laugh which was almost a shriek ran thought the silent spaces around us. The nurse started up and ran to her patient, who was struggling to her feet and staring wildly into the long narrow glass in the recess opposite her sofa.
“Look, look!” she shrieked.“It has come—the vision of Death! The dreadful face—the shroud—the coffin. Look, Helen, look!”
My gaze followed the direction of those wild eyes, and I know not whether my excited brain conjured up the image that appalled me. This alone I know, that in the depths of that dark glass, indistinct as a form seen through turbid water, a ghastly face, a shrouded figure, looked out a me—
“As one dead in the bottom of a tomb.”
A sudden cry from the nurse called me from the horror of that vision to stern reality, to see the life-blood ebbing from the lips I had kissed so often with all a sister’s love. My poor friend never spoke again. A severe attack of hemorrhage hastened the inevitable end; and before her heart-broken lover could come to clasp the hand and gaze into her fading eyes,Violetta Hammond passed away.
Prof. P. Jones: The Priest and His Cook (1895)
“The Priest and His Cook” is excerpted from Prof. P. Jones’ The Probatim: A Slav Novel (London: H. S. Nichols, 1895) which contains a number of Slavic folktales. In “The Story of Jella and the Macic” (pages 11-22), the villains are punished by a cemetery full of vampires.
The following story, which is taken from Chapter 16, “The Vampire,” is preceded by the phrase:
“The old man complied willingly, above all as Vranic had brought a bukara of wine with him, so he at once began the story of ... ”
In the village of Steino there lived an old priest who was exceedingly wealthy, but who was, withal, as miserly as he was rich. Although he had fields which stretched farther than the eyes could reach, fat pastures, herds and flocks; although his cellars were filled with mellow wine, his barns were bursting with the grace of God; although abundance reigned in his house, still he was never known to have given a crust of bread to a beggar or a glass of wine to a weary old man.
He lived all alone with a skinflint of an old cook, as stingy as himself, who would rather by far have seen an apple rot than give it to a hungry child whose mouth watered for it.
Those two grim old fogeys, birds of one feather, cared for no one else in this world except for each other, and, in fact, the people in Steino said—, but people in villages have bad tongues, so it’s useless to repeat what was said about them.
The priest had a nephew, a smith, a good-hearted, bright-eyed, burly kind of a fellow, beloved by all the village, except by his uncle, whom he had greatly displeased because he had married a bonny lass of the neighbouring village of Smarje, instead of take as a wife the—,well, the cook’s niece, though, between us and the wall, the cook was never known to have had a sister or a brother either, and the people—, but, as I said before, the people were apt to say nasty things about their priest.
The smith, who was quite a pauper, had several children, for the poorer a man is the more babies his wife presents him with—women everywhere are such unreasonable creatures—and whenever he applied to his uncle for a trifle, the uncle would spout the Scriptures in Latin, saying something about the unfitness of casting pearls before pigs, and that he would rather see him hanged than help him.
Once—it was in the middle of winter—the poor smith had been without any work for days and days. He had spent his last penny; then the baker would not give him any more bread on credit, and at last, on a cold, frosty night, the poor children had been obliged to go to bed supperless.
The smith, who had sworn a few days before never again to put his foot in the priest’s house, was, in his despair, obliged to humble himself, and go and beg for a load of bread, with which to satisfy his children on the morrow.
Before he knocked at the door, he went and peeped in through the half-closed shutters, and he saw his uncle and the cook seated by a roaring fire, with their feet on the fender, munching roasted chestnuts and drinking mulled wine. Their shining lips still seemed greasy from the fat sausages they had eaten for supper, and, as he sniffed the window, he fancied the air was redolent with the spices of black-pudding. The smell made his mouth water and his hungry stomach rumble.
The poor man knocked at the door with a trembling hand; his legs began to quake, he had not eaten the whole of that long day; but then he thought of his hungry children, and knocked with a steadier hand.
The priest, hearing the knock, thought it must be some pious parishioner bringing him a fat pullet or perhaps a sleek sucking-pig, the price of a mass to be said on the morrow; but when, instead, he saw his nephew, looking as mean and as sheepish as people usually do when they go a-begging, he was greatly disappointed.
“What do you want, bothering here at this time of the night?” asked the old priest, gruffly.
“Uncle,” said the poor man, dejectedly.
“I suppose you’ve been drinking, as usual; you stink of spirits.”
“Spirits, in sooth! When I haven’t a penny to bless me.”
“Oh, if it’s only a blessing you want, here, take one and go!”
And the priest lifted up his thumb and the two fingers, and uttered something like “Dominus vobiscum,” and then waved him off; whilst the old shrew skulking near him uttered a croaking kind of laugh, and said that a priest’s blessing was a priceless boon.
“Yes,” replied the smith, “upon a full stomach; but my children have gone to bed supperless, and I haven’t had a crust of bread the whole of the day.”
“‘Man shall not live by bread alone,’ the scriptures say, and you ought to know that if you are a Christian, sir.”
“Eh? I daresay the Scriptures are right, for priests surely do not live on bread alone; they fatten on plump pullets and crisp pork-pies.”
“Do you mean you bully me, you unbelieving beggar?”
“Bully you, uncle!” said the burly man in a piteous tone. “Only, think of my starving children.”
“He begrudges his uncle the grub he eats,” shrieked the old cat of a cook.
“I’d have given you something, but the proud man should be punished,” said the wrathful priest, growing purple in the face.
“Oh, uncle, my children!” sobbed the poor man.
“What business has a man to have a brood of brats when he can’t earn enough to buy bread for them?” said the cook, aloud, to herself.
“Will you hold your tongue, you cantankerous old cat?” said the smith to the cook.
The old vixen began to howl, and the priest, in his anger, cursed his nephew, telling him that he and his children could starve for all he cared.
The smith thereupon went home, looking at piteous as a tailless turkey-cock; and while his children slept and, perhaps, dreamt of kolaci, he told his wife the failure he had met with.
“Your uncle is a brute,” said she.
“He’s a priest, and all priests are brutes, you know.”
“Well, I don’t know about all of them, for I heard my great-grandmother say that once upon a time there lived—”
“Oh, there are casual exceptions to every rule!” said her husband. “But, now, what’s to be done?”
“Listen,” said the wife, who was a shrewd kind of woman, “we can’t let the children starve, can we?”
“No, indeed!”
“Then follow my advice. I know of a grass that, given to a horse, or an ox, or a sheep, or goat, makes the animal fall down, looking as if it were dead.”
“Well, but you don’t mean to feed the children with this grass, do you?” said the smith, not seeing the drift of what she meant.
“No; but you could secretly go and give some to your uncle’s fattest ox.”
“So,” said the husband, scratching his head.
“Once the animal falls down head, he’ll surely give it you, as no butcher’ll buy it; we’ll kill it and thus be provided with meat for a long time. Besides, you can sell the bones, the horns, the hide, and get a little money besides.”
“And for tomorrow?”
“I’ll manage to borrow a few potatoes and a cup of milk.”
On the next day the wife went and got the grass, and the smith, unseen, managed to go and give it to his uncle’s fattest ox. A few hours afterwards the animal was found dead.
On hearing that his finest ox was found in the stable lying stiff and stark the priest nearly had a fit; and his grief was still greater when he found out that not a man in the village would offer him a penny for it, so when his nephew came he was glad enough to give it to him to get rid of it.
The cook, who had prompted the priest to make a present of the ox to his nephew, hoped that the smith and all his family would be poisoned by feeding on carrion flesh.
“But,” said the uncle, “bring me back the bones, the horns, and the hide.”
To everyone’s surprise, and to the old cook’s rage, the smith and his children fed on the flesh of the dead ox, and throve on it. After the ox had all been eaten up, the priest lost a goat, and then a goose, in the same way, and the smith and his family ate them up with evident gusto.
After that, the old cook began to suspect foul play on the part of the smith, and she spoke of her suspicions to her master.
Vintage Vampire Stories Page 19