“Jack Caillion,” said Nathan Pilger, “was washed overboard from the Suzanne in a storm off Hatteras in ’11—him and Dunc Cook and Ba’tist’ Roux.”
“The old church of Our Lady of the Gulf,” the young man continued, “was just a stone’s-throw this side of where the new one was built; back a little is our cottage, and your father’s, Silvain; and in the hollow beyond Justin Roux has his blacksmith’s forge.”
He paused, his voice dying away almost to a whisper. The waves were beating more noisily against the bluff, filling the silence with a sort of hoarse plaint; the fog—gray, soft, impenetrable—rested on them like a cloud. The moisture fell in an audible drip-drop from the leaves and the long, pendent moss of the live-oaks. A mare, with her colt beside her, came trotting around the bend of the road. She approached within a few feet of the girl, reared violently, snorting, and dashed away, followed by the whinnying colt. The clatter of their feet echoed on the muffled air. The girl, in her white dress, sat rigidly motionless, with her face turned seaward.
André lifted his head and went on, dreamily: “I mind me, most of all, of one day when all the girls and boys of the village walked over to Bayou Galère to gather water-lilies. Margot Caillion, with ’Tit-Pierre in her hand, came along to mind the girls. You had but just come back from France in your priest’s frock, Silvain. You were in the church door when we passed, with your book in your hand.” A smothered groan escaped the priest, and he threw up his arm as if to ward off a blow. “And you were there when we came back at sunset. The smell of the pines that day was like balm. The lilies were white on the dark breast of the winding bayou. Rose Dédé’s arms were heaped so full of lilies that you could only see her laughing black eyes above them. But Lorance would only take a few buds. She said it was a kind of sin to take them away from the water where they grew. Lorance was ever——”
The girl had dropped her hands in her lap, and was listening. At the sound of her own name she turned her face towards the speaker.
“Lorance!” gasped André. “Is it truly you, Lorance?”
“Yes, it is I, André Dieudonné,” she replied, quietly. Her pale girlish face, with its delicate outlines, was crowned with an aureole of bright hair, which hung in two thick braids to her waist; her soft brown eyes were a little sunken, as if she had wept overmuch. But her voice was strangely cold and passionless.
“But … when did you … come, Lorance?” André demanded, breathlessly.
“I came,” she said, in the same calm, measured tone, “but a little after you, André Dieudonné. First ’Tit-Pierre, then you, and then myself.”
“Why, then——” he began. He rose abruptly, gathering his mantle about him, and leaned over the marble slab where he had been sitting. “‘Sacred to the memory of André Antoine Marie Dieudonné,’” he read, slowly, slipping his finger along the mouldy French lettering, “‘who died at this place August 20th, 1809. In the 22d year of his age.’ Eighty years and more ago I came!” he cried. “And you have been here all these years, Lorance, and I have not known! Why, then, did you never come up?”
She did not answer at once. “I was tired,” she said, presently, “and I rested well down there in the cool, dark silence. And I was not lonely … at first, for I heard Margot Caillion passing about, putting flowers above ’Tit-Pierre and you and me. My mother and yours often came and wept with her for us all—and my father, and your little brothers. The sound of their weeping comforted me. Then … after a while … no one seemed to remember us any more.”
“Margot Caillion,” said Nathan Pilger, “went back, when her man was drownded, to the place in France where she was born. The others be all layin’ in the old church-yard yander on the hill … all but Silvann Leebaw an’ me.”
She looked at the old man and smiled gravely. “A long time passed,” she went on, slowly. “I could sometimes hear you speak to ’Tit-Pierre, André Dieudonné; … and at last some men came and dug quite near me; and as they pushed their spades through the moist turf they talked about the good Père Lebas; and then I knew that Silvain was coming.” The priest’s head fell upon his breast; he covered his face with his hands and rocked to and fro on his low seat. “Not long after, Nathan Pilger came. Down there in my narrow chamber I have heard above me, year after year, the murmur of your voices on St. John’s eve, and ever the feet of ’Tit-Pierre, as he goes back and forth seeking his mother. But I cared not to leave my place. For why should I wish to look upon your face, André Dieudonné, and mark there the memory of your love for Rose Dédé?”
Her voice shook with a sudden passion as she uttered the last words. The hands lying in her lap were twisted together convulsively; a flush leaped into her pale cheeks.
“Rose Dédé!” echoed André, amazedly. “Nay, Lorance, but I never loved Rose Dédé! If she perchance cared for me——”
“Silence, fool!” cried the priest, sternly. He had thrown back his cowl; his eyes glowed like coals in his white face; he lifted his hand menacingly. “Thou wert ever a vain puppet, André Dieudonné. It was not for such as thou that Rose Dédé sinned away her soul! Was it thou she came at midnight to meet in the lone shadows of these very live-oaks? Hast thou ever worn the garments of a priest? … They shunned Rose Dédé in the village … but the priest said mass at the altar of Our Lady of the Gulf … and the wail of the babe was sharp in the hut under the pines … and it ceased to breathe … and the mother turned her face to the wall and died … and my heart was cold in my breast as I looked on the dead faces of the mother and the child.… They lie under the pine-trees by Bayou Galère. But the priest lived to old age; … and when he died, he durst not sleep in consecrated ground, but fain would lie in the shadows of the live-oaks, where the dark eyes of Rose Dédé looked love into his.”
His wild talk fell upon unheeding ears. ’Tit-Pierre had come out of the house. He was nestling against Nathan Pilger’s knee. He held a lily-bud in one hand, and with the other he caressed the sailor’s weather-beaten cheek.
“’Tit-Pierre,” whispered the old man, “that is Lorance Baudrot. Do you remember her, ’Tit-Pierre?” The child smiled intelligently. “Lorance was but a slip of a girl when I come down here from Cape Cod—cabin-boy aboard the Mary Ann. She was the pretties’ lass on all the bay shore. An’ I—I loved her, ’Tit-Pierre. But I wa’n’t no match agin Andry Dewdonny; an’ I know’d it from the fust. Andry was the likelies’ lad hereabout, an’ the harnsomes’. I see that Lorance loved him. An’ when the yaller fever took him, I see her a-droopin’ an’ a-droopin’ tell she died, an’ she never even know’d I loved her. Her an’ Andry was laid here young, ’Tit-Pierre, ’longside o’ you. I lived ter be pretty tol’able old; but when I hed made my last vige, an’ was about fetchin’ my las’ breath, I give orders ter be laid in this here old buryin’-groun’ some’er’s clost ter the grave o’ Lorance Baudrot.”
His voice was overborne by André’s exultant tones. “Lorance!” he cried, “did you indeed love me?—me!”
Her dark eyes met his frankly, and she smiled.
“Ah, if I had only known!” he sighed—“if had only known, Lorance, I would surely have lived! We would have walked one morning to Our Lady of the Gulf, with all the village-folk about us, and Silvain—the good Père Lebas—would have joined our hands.… My father would have given us a little plot of ground; … you would have planted flowers about the door of our cottage; … our children would have played in the sand under the bluff.…”
A sudden gust of wind blew the fog aside, and a zigzag of flame tore the wedge-shaped cloud in two. A greenish light played for an instant over the weed-grown spot. The mocking-bird, long silent in the heart of the live-oak, began to sing.
“All these years you have been near me,” he murmured, reproachfully, “and I did not know.” Then, as if struck by a breathless thought, he stretched out his arms imploringly. “I love you, Lorance,” he said.
“I have always loved you. Will you not be my wife now? Silvain will say the words, and ’Tit-Pierre, who can go back and forth, will put this ring, which was my mother’s, upon your finger, and he will bring me a curl of your soft hair to twist about mine. I cannot come to you, Lorance; I cannot even touch your hand. But when I go down into my dark place I can be content dreaming of you. And on the blessed St. John’s eves I will know you are mine, as you sit there in your white gown.”
As he ceased speaking, Père Lebas, with his head upon his breast, began murmuring, as if mechanically, the words which preface the holy sacrament of marriage. His voice faltered, he raised his head, and a cry of wonder burst from his lips. For André had moved away from the mouldy gravestone and stood just in front of him. Lorance, as if upborne on invisible wings, was floating lightly across the intervening space. Her shroud enveloped her like a cloud, her arms were extended, her lips were parted in a rapt smile. Nathan Pilger, with ’Tit-Pierre in his arms, had limped forward. He halted beside André, and as the young man folded the girl to his breast, the child reached over and laid an open lily on her down-drooped head.
The priest stared wildly at them, and struggled to rise, but could not. As he sank panting back upon the crumbling tomb, his anguish overcame him. “My God!” he groaned hoarsely, “I, only I, cannot move from my place. The soul of Rose Dédé hangs like a millstone about my neck!”
Even as he spoke, the cloud broke with a roar. The storm—black, heavy, thunderous—came rushing across the bay. It blotted out, in a lightning’s flash, the mansion which stands on the site of Jacques Caillion’s hut, and the weed-grown, ancient, forgotten graveyard in its shadow.
… And a bell in the steeple of Our Lady of the Gulf rang out the hour.
THE HOUSE OF THE NIGHTMARE, by Edward Lucas White
I first caught sight of the house from the brow of the mountain as I cleared the woods and looked across the broad valley several hundred feet below me, to the low sun sinking toward the far blue hills. From that momentary viewpoint I had an exaggerated sense of looking almost vertically down. I seemed to be hanging over the checkerboard of roads and fields, dotted with farm buildings, and felt the familiar deception that I could almost throw a stone upon the house. I barely glimpsed its slate roof.
What caught my eyes was the bit of road in front of it, between the mass of dark-green shade trees about the house and the orchard opposite. Perfectly straight it was, bordered by an even row of trees, through which I made out a cinder side path and a low stone wall.
Conspicuous on the orchard side between two of the flanking trees was a white object, which I took to be a tall stone, a vertical splinter of one of the tilted limestone reefs with which the fields of the region are scarred.
The road itself I saw plain as a boxwood ruler on a green baize table. It gave me a pleasurable anticipation of a chance for a burst of speed. I had been painfully traversing closely forested, semi-mountainous hills. Not a farmhouse had I passed, only wretched cabins by the road, more than twenty miles of which I had found very bad and hindering. Now, when I was not many miles from my expected stopping-place, I looked forward to better going, and to that straight, level bit in particular.
As I sped cautiously down the sharp beginning of the long descent, the trees engulfed me again, and I lost sight of the valley. I dipped into a hollow, rose on the crest of the next hill, and again saw the house, nearer, and not so far below.
The tall stone caught my eye with a shock of surprise. Had I not thought it was opposite the house next the orchard? Clearly it was on the left-hand side of the road toward the house. My self-questioning lasted only the moment as I passed the crest. Then the outlook was cut off again; but I found myself gazing ahead, watching for the next chance at the same view.
At the end of the second hill I only saw the bit of road obliquely and could not be sure, but, as at first, the tall stone seemed on the right of the road.
At the top of the third and last hill I looked down the stretch of road under the overarching trees, almost as one would look through a tube. There was a line of whiteness which I took for the tall stone. It was on the right.
I dipped into the last hollow. As I mounted the farther slope, I kept my eyes on the top of the road ahead of me. When my line of sight surmounted the rise I marked the tall stone on my right hand among the serried maples. I leaned over, first on one side, then on the other, to inspect my tires, then I threw the lever.
As I flew forward, I looked ahead. There was the tall stone—on the left of the road! I was really scared and almost dazed. I meant to stop dead, take a good look at the stone, and make up my mind beyond peradventure whether it was on the right or the left—if not, indeed, in the middle of the road.
In my bewilderment, I put on the highest speed. The machine leaped forward; everything I touched went wrong; I steered wildly, slewed to the left, and crashed into a big maple.
* * * *
When I came to my senses, I was flat on my back in the dry ditch. The last rays of the sun sent shafts of golden green light through the maple boughs overhead. My first thought was an odd mixture of appreciation of the beauties of nature and disapproval of my own conduct in touring without a companion—a fact I had regretted more than once. Then my mind cleared, and I sat up. I felt myself from the head down. I was not bleeding; no bones were broken; and, while much shaken, I had suffered no serious bruises.
Then I saw the boy. He was standing at the edge of the cinder-path, near the ditch. He was stocky and solidly built; barefoot, with his trousers rolled up to his knees; wore a sort of butternut shirt, open at the throat; and was coatless and hatless. He was tow-headed, with a shock of tousled hair; was much freckled, and had a hideous harelip. He shifted from one foot to the other, twiddled his toes, and said nothing whatever, though he stared at me intently.
I scrambled to my feet and proceeded to survey the wreck. It seemed distressingly complete. It had not blown up, nor even caught fire; but otherwise the ruin appeared hopelessly thorough. Everything I examined seemed worse smashed than the rest. My two hampers alone, by one of those cynical jokes of chance, had escaped—both had pitched clear of the wreckage and were unhurt, not even a bottle broken.
During my investigations, the boy’s faded eyes followed me continuously, but he uttered no word. When I had convinced myself of my helplessness I straightened up and addressed him:
“How far is it to a blacksmith shop?”
“Eight mile,” he answered. He had a distressing case of cleft palate and was scarcely intelligible.
“Can you drive me there?” I inquired.
“Nary team on the place,” he replied; “nary horse, nary cow.”
“How far to the next house?” I continued.
“Six mile,” he responded.
I glanced at the sky. The sun had set already. I looked at my watch: it was going seven thirty-six.
“May I sleep in your house tonight?” I asked.
“You can come in, if you want to,” he said, “and sleep if you can. House all messy; ma’s been dead three year, and dad’s away. Nothin’ to eat but buckwheat flour and rusty bacon.”
“I’ve plenty to eat,” I answered, picking up a hamper. “Just take that hamper, will you?”
“You can come in if you’re a mind to,” he said, “but you got to carry your own stuff.” He did not speak gruffly or rudely, but appeared mildly stating an inoffensive fact.
“All right,” I said, picking up the other hamper; “lead the way.”
The yard in front of the house was dark under a dozen or more immense ailanthus trees. Below them, many smaller trees had grown up, and beneath these a dank underwood of tall, rank suckers out of the deep, shaggy, matted grass. What had once been, apparently, a carriage-drive left a narrow, curved track, disused and grass-grown, leading to the house. Even here were some shoots of th
e ailanthus, and the air was unpleasant with the vile smell of the roots and suckers and the insistent odor of their flowers.
The house was of gray stone, with green shutters faded almost as gray as the stone. Along its front was a veranda, not much raised from the ground, and with no balustrade or railing. On it were several hickory splint rockers. There were eight shuttered windows toward the porch, and midway of them a wide door, with small violet panes on either side of it and a fanlight above.
“Open the door,” I said to the boy.
“Open it yourself,” he replied, not unpleasantly nor disagreeably, but in such a tone that one could not but take the suggestion as a matter of course.
I put down the two hampers and tried the door. It was latched, but not locked, and opened with a rusty grind of its hinges, on which it sagged crazily, scraping the floor as it turned. The passage smelt moldy and damp. There were several doors on either side; the boy pointed to the first on the right.
“You can have that room,” he said.
I opened the door. What with the dusk, the interlacing trees outside, the piazza roof, and the closed shutters, I could make out little.
“Better get a lamp,” I said to the boy.
“Nary lamp,” he declared cheerfully. “Nary candle. Mostly I get abed before dark.”
I returned to the remains of my conveyance. All four of my lamps were merely scrap metal and splintered glass. My lantern was mashed flat. I always, however, carried candles in my valise. This I found split and crushed, but still holding together. I carried it to the porch, opened it, and took out three candles.
Entering the room, where I found the boy standing just where I had left him, I lit the candle. The walls were whitewashed, the floor bare. There was a mildewed, chilly smell, but the bed looked freshly made up and clean, although it felt clammy.
The Ghost Story Megapack Page 41