Delphi Complete Works of Sheridan Le Fanu

by J. Sheridan le Fanu

  “Send Euphan here,” said the gipsy matron, stooping, and speaking through the tent-door.

  “And now I’ll tell your fortune, please, ma’am,” said this grave polite matron, with the large dark eyes of her race. His wife smiled over her shoulder as she submitted her hand to the soothsayer, and in a minute more the low measured talk began, and in another minute Euphan was in the tent. A chill passed over William, as if he would have fainted. He saw her plainly as she saw him. Ten years had passed, and yet she was as beautiful, he thought, as ever, except for the sadness in her face — that was a change.

  He felt that she knew him, but she showed no sign — not the least — of recognition. This perfect self-command and presence of mind, in a people by nature so fiery and impetuous, is a strange evidence of the dangers through which the race has passed. She came, and said some words he did not hear, and took his hand, and in her low sweet voice told his fortune thus: —

  “You have married a very good lady, that is highborn and beautiful, and loves you well. You are very honorable, and you will be always true to her, and love er to the end of your life. You have one little child, and it will be beautiful, and good to you. And you have had sorrow, and you have passed it by, and it is over now. And you are kind to the poor, and would like to make them happy; and there’s many a one that likes you, and wishes you well. And though you are so kind, you are very brave, and would fight for them you like, and spare none, nor your own blood. And there’s some that were ungrateful, and some you thought ungrateful that never were so, but loved you well; for the good you do is not lost, though you may forget it. And there once was one that you thought ungrateful, and that person is single still, and will die single; and she thinks still of that one that Was best to her of all the world, and so will to the end of her years, though she’ll never see you more, nor you her.”

  And gently she let go his hand, and she laid hers caressingly on the head of the child, and looked on the golden locks, that resembled her father’s in his earlier youth, and in the true deep-blue eyes, that also were like his — and die smiled. He saw the even little teeth, as in the old times at Haworth.

  “And will ye keep this, darling, from the gipsy girl?” And very gently she placed a curious little oldfashioned locket, that she took from her breast, tied with a red ribbon, in the child’s hand.

  And the little girl turns up her large blue gentle eyes wonderingly, and with some awe, looking into the wild and tender smile of the gipsy.

  And Euphan caught her up softly, and folded the child in her arms, and kissed it over and over again, smiling; and as she sat it down, a voice called to William, and a gentle hand touched him, and he turned to his smiling wife.

  “Yes, darling,” he said, laying his hand upon her arm, as people do who want a moment’s pause; and when he turned again, Euphan was gone, and he never heard her voice again, and never saw her more.

  The last beams of the setting sun lighted them on their returning path, and William Haworth rode slowly home, and in the twilight, communing with his own thoughts, wept bitterly.

  THE END

  IN A GLASS DARKLY

  This collection of five supernatural stories is widely regarded as Le Fanu’s masterpiece and a classic of Victorian fiction. The five stories are linked by a framing device that presents them as papers from the casebook of Dr Martin Hesselius, a scholar of paranormal phenomena and probably the first ‘occult detective’ in supernatural literature. It was published in three volumes by Richard Bentley in 1872. The title deliberately misquotes 1 Corinthians 13, which describes the human capacity to see the world not as it really is but only ‘through a glass darkly’.

  ‘Green Tea’, originally published in the journal All the Year Round in 1869, is a powerful story of a scholar’s fateful encounter with a spectral monkey. The tale maintains an ambiguity as to whether the creature is real or a product of the protagonist’s overfondness for the eponymous tea. ‘The Familiar’ tells the story of a sea captain who is haunted by ghostly footsteps and is a revised version of Le Fanu’s earlier story ‘The Watcher’. ‘Mr Justice Harbottle’ is also a revision of an earlier story, namely ‘An Account of Some Strange Disturbances in Aungier Street’, in which a callous eighteenth century judge receives a terrifying comeuppance. The novella ‘The Room at the Dragon Volant’ is a Gothic romance which contains no supernatural elements but does contain a decidedly nasty twist.

  The most enduring tale in the collection however is ‘Carmilla’, a vampire novella with lesbian overtones set in rural Austria, which was originally serialised in Dark Blue between December 1871 and March 1872. Profoundly influencing the writing of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), it has spawned many literary and cinematic imitations and is an undisputed classic of vampire fiction.

  Title page of the first edition

  Illustration for the magazine publication of ‘Carmilla’, by D.H. Friston

  Illustration for the magazine publication of ‘Carmilla’, by Michael Fitzgerald

  Illustration for the magazine publication of ‘Carmilla’, by Michael Fitzgerald

  CONTENTS

  VOLUME I.

  GREEN TEA.

  THE FAMILIAR.

  MR. JUSTICE HARBOTTLE.

  VOLUME II.

  THE ROOM IN THE DRAGON VOLANT.

  VOLUME III.

  CARMILLA.

  Carl Theodor Dreyor’s Vampyr (1932) is a loose adaptation of ‘Carmilla’

  A still from Roger Vadim’s Et mourir de plaisir (And Die of Pleasure; 1960), an acclaimed cinematic adaptation of ‘Carmilla’

  This 1964 Italian production by Thomas Miller is a fairly faithful adaptation of ‘Carmilla’. The title translates as ‘Crypt of the Vampire’.

  This 1970 Hammer Films production is based on ‘Carmilla’ and is notorious for its exaggeration of Le Fanu’s homoerotic subtext.

  TO

  BRINSLEY HOMAN, ESQ.

  THESE VOLUMES ARE INSCRIBED,

  WITH MUCH AFFECTION,

  BY HIS OLD FRIEND

  THE AUTHOR.

  VOLUME I.

  GREEN TEA.

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE.

  CHAPTER I.

  CHAPTER II.

  CHAPTER III.

  CHAPTER IV.

  CHAPTER V.

  CHAPTER VI.

  CHAPTER VII.

  CHAPTER VIII.

  CHAPTER IX.

  CHAPTER X.

  CONCLUSION.

  PROLOGUE.

  MARTIN HESSELIUS, THE GERMAN PHYSICIAN.

  Though carefully educated in medicine and surgery, I have never practised either. The study of each continues, nevertheless, to interest me profoundly. Neither idleness nor caprice caused my secession from the honourable calling which I had just entered. The cause was a very trifling scratch inflicted by a dissecting knife. This trifle cost me the loss of two fingers, amputated promptly, and the more painful loss of my health, for I have never been quite well since, and have seldom been twelve months together in the same place.

  In my wanderings I became acquainted with Dr. Martin Hesselius, a wanderer like myself, like me a physician, and like me an enthusiast in his profession. Unlike me in this, that his wanderings were voluntary, and he a man, if not of fortune, as we estimate fortune in England, at least in what our forefathers used to term “easy circumstances.” He was an old man when I first saw him; nearly five-and-thirty years my senior.

  In Dr. Martin Hesselius, I found my master. His knowledge was immense, his grasp of a case was an intuition. He was the very man to inspire a young enthusiast, like me, with awe and delight. My admiration has stood the test of time and survived the separation of death. I am sure it was well-founded.

  For nearly twenty years I acted as his medical secretary. His immense collection of papers he has left in my care, to be arranged, indexed and bound. His treatment of some of these cases is curious. He writes in two distinct characters. He describes what he saw and heard as an intelligent layman mig
ht, and when in this style of narrative he had seen the patient either through his own hall-door, to the light of day, or through the gates of darkness to the caverns of the dead, he returns upon the narrative, and in the terms of his art, and with all the force and originality of genius, proceeds to the work of analysis, diagnosis and illustration.

  Here and there a case strikes me as of a kind to amuse or horrify a lay reader with an interest quite different from the peculiar one which it may possess for an expert. With slight modifications, chiefly of language, and of course a change of names, I copy the following. The narrator is Dr. Martin Hesselius. I find it among the voluminous notes of cases which he made during a tour in England about sixty-four years ago.

  It is related in a series of letters to his friend Professor Van Loo of Leyden. The professor was not a physician, but a chemist, and a man who read history and metaphysics and medicine, and had, in his day, written a play.

  The narrative is therefore, if somewhat less valuable as a medical record, necessarily written in a manner more likely to interest an unlearned reader.

  These letters, from a memorandum attached, appear to have been returned on the death of the professor, in 1819, to Dr. Hesselius. They are written, some in English, some in French, but the greater part in German. I am a faithful, though I am conscious, by no means a graceful translator, and although here and there, I omit some passages, and shorten others and disguise names, I have interpolated nothing.

  CHAPTER I.

  DR. HESSELIUS RELATES HOW HE MET THE REV. MR. JENNINGS.

  The Rev. Mr. Jennings is tall and thin. He is middle-aged, and dresses with a natty, oldfashioned, high-church precision. He is naturally a little stately, but not at all stiff. His features, without being handsome, are well formed, and their expression extremely kind, but also shy.

  I met him one evening at Lady Mary Heyduke’s. The modesty and benevolence of his countenance are extremely prepossessing. We were but a small party, and he joined agreeably enough in the conversation. He seems to enjoy listening very much more than contributing to the talk; but what he says is always to the purpose and well said. He is a great favourite of Lady Mary’s, who it seems, consults him upon many things, and thinks him the most happy and blessed person on earth. Little knows she about him.

  The Rev. Mr. Jennings is a bachelor, and has, they say, sixty thousand pounds in the funds. He is a charitable man. He is most anxious to be actively employed in his sacred profession, and yet though always tolerably well elsewhere, when he goes down to his vicarage in Warwickshire, to engage in the actual duties of his sacred calling his health soon fails him, and in a very strange way. So says Lady Mary.

  There is no doubt that Mr. Jennings’ health does break down in, generally a sudden and mysterious way, sometimes in the very act of officiating in his old and pretty church at Kenlis. It may be his heart, it may be his brain. But so it has happened three or four times, or oftener, that after proceeding a certain way in the service, he has on a sudden stopped short, and after a silence, apparently quite unable to resume, he has fallen into solitary, inaudible prayer, his hands and eyes uplifted, and then pale as death, and in the agitation of a strange shame and horror, descended trembling, and got into the vestry-room, leaving his congregation, without explanation, to themselves. This occurred when his curate was absent. When he goes down to Kenlis, now, he always takes care to provide a clergyman to share his duty, and to supply his place on the instant should he become thus suddenly incapacitated.

  When Mr. Jennings breaks down quite, and beats a retreat from the vicarage, and returns to London, where, in a dark street off Piccadilly, he inhabits a very narrow house, Lady Mary says that he is always perfectly well. I have my own opinion about that. There are degrees of course. We shall see.

  Mr. Jennings is a perfectly gentlemanlike man. People, however, remark something odd. There is an impression a little ambiguous. One thing which certainly contributes to it, people I think don’t remember; or, perhaps, distinctly remark. But I did, almost immediately. Mr. Jennings has a way of looking sidelong upon the carpet, as if his eye followed the movements of something there. This, of course, is not always. It occurs only now and then. But often enough to give a certain oddity, as I have said to his manner, and in this glance travelling along the floor there is something both shy and anxious.

  A medical philosopher, as you are good enough to call me, elaborating theories by the aid of cases sought out by himself, and by him watched and scrutinised with more time at command, and consequently infinitely more minuteness than the ordinary practitioner can afford, falls insensibly into habits of observation, which accompany him everywhere, and are exercised, as some people would say, impertinently, upon every subject that presents itself with the least likelihood of rewarding inquiry.

  There was a promise of this kind in the slight, timid, kindly, but reserved gentleman, whom I met for the first time at this agreeable little evening gathering. I observed, of course, more than I here set down; but I reserve all that borders on the technical for a strictly scientific paper.

  I may remark, that when I here speak of medical science, I do so, as I hope some day to see it more generally understood, in a much more comprehensive sense than its generally material treatment would warrant. I believe the entire natural world is but the ultimate expression of that spiritual world from which, and in which alone, it has its life. I believe that the essential man is a spirit, that the spirit is an organised substance, but as different in point of material from what we ordinarily understand by matter, as light or electricity is; that the material body is, in the most literal sense, a vesture, and death consequently no interruption of the living man’s existence, but simply his extrication from the natural body — a process which commences at the moment of what we term death, and the completion of which, at furthest a few days later, is the resurrection “in power.”

  The person who weighs the consequences of these positions will probably see their practical bearing upon medical science. This is, however, by no means the proper place for displaying the proofs and discussing the consequences of this too generally unrecognised state of facts.

  In pursuance of my habit, I was covertly observing Mr. Jennings, with all my caution — I think he perceived it — and I saw plainly that he was as cautiously observing me. Lady Mary happening to address me by my name, as Dr. Hesselius, I saw that he glanced at me more sharply, and then became thoughtful for a few minutes.

  After this, as I conversed with a gentleman at the other end of the room, I saw him look at me more steadily, and with an interest which I thought I understood. I then saw him take an opportunity of chatting with Lady Mary, and was, as one always is, perfectly aware of being the subject of a distant inquiry and answer.

  This tall clergyman approached me by-and-by: and in a little time we had got into conversation. When two people, who like reading, and know books and places, having travelled, wish to converse, it is very strange if they can’t find topics. It was not accident that brought him near me, and led him into conversation. He knew German, and had read my Essays on Metaphysical Medicine which suggest more than they actually say.

  This courteous man, gentle, shy, plainly a man of thought and reading, who moving and talking among us, was not altogether of us, and whom I already suspected of leading a life whose transactions and alarms were carefully concealed, with an impenetrable reserve from, not only the world, but his best beloved friends — was cautiously weighing in his own mind the idea of taking a certain step with regard to me.

  I penetrated his thoughts without his being aware of it, and was careful to say nothing which could betray to his sensitive vigilance my suspicions respecting his position, or my surmises about his plans respecting myself.

  We chatted upon indifferent subjects for a time; but at last he said:

  “I was very much interested by some papers of yours, Dr. Hesselius, upon what you term Metaphysical Medicine — I read them in German, ten or twelve years ago — hav
e they been translated?”

  “No, I’m sure they have not — I should have heard. They would have asked my leave, I think.”

  “I asked the publishers here, a few months ago, to get the book for me in the original German; but they tell me it is out of print.”

  “So it is, and has been for some years; but it flatters me as an author to find that you have not forgotten my little book, although,” I added, laughing, “ten or twelve years is a considerable time to have managed without it; but I suppose you have been turning the subject over again in your mind, or something has happened lately to revive your interest in it.”

  At this remark, accompanied by a glance of inquiry, a sudden embarrassment disturbed Mr. Jennings, analogous to that which makes a young lady blush and look foolish. He dropped his eyes, and folded his hands together uneasily, and looked oddly, and you would have said, guiltily for a moment.

  I helped him out of his awkwardness in the best way, by appearing not to observe it, and going straight on, I said: “Those revivals of interest in a subject happen to me often; one book suggests another, and often sends me back a wild-goose chase over an interval of twenty years. But if you still care to possess a copy, I shall be only too happy to provide you; I have still got two or three by me — and if you allow me to present one I shall be very much honoured.”