by Graeme Davis
Naturally kind-hearted, Madame Cabanel went much about the village, offering help of various kinds to the sick. But no one among them all, not the very poorest—indeed, the very poorest the least—received her civilly or accepted her aid. If she attempted to touch one of the dying children, the mother, shuddering, withdrew it hastily to her own arms; if she spoke to the adult sick, the wan eyes would look at her with a strange horror and the feeble voice would mutter words in a patois she could not understand. But always came the same word, “broucolaque!”
“How these people hate the English!” she used to think as she turned away, perhaps just a little depressed, but too phlegmatic to let herself be uncomfortable or troubled deeply.
It was the same at home. If she wanted to do any little act of kindness to the child, Adèle passionately refused her. Once she snatched him rudely from her arms, saying as she did so: “infamous broucolaque! before my very eyes?” And once, when Fanny was troubled about her husband and proposed to make him a cup of beef-tea à l’Anglaise, the doctor looked at her as if he would have looked through her; and Adèle upset the saucepan; saying insolently—but yet hot tears were in her eyes—“Is it not fast enough for you, madame? Not faster, unless you kill me first!”
To all of which Fanny replied nothing; thinking only that the doctor was very rude to stare so fixedly at her and that Adèle was horribly cross; and what an ill-tempered creature she was; and how unlike an English housekeeper!
But Monsieur Cabanel, when he was told of the little scene, called Fanny to him and said in a more caressing voice than he had used to her of late: “Thou wouldst not hurt me, little wife? it was love and kindness, not wrong, that thou wouldst do?”
“Wrong? What wrong could I do?” answered Fanny, opening her blue eyes wide. “What wrong should I do to my best and only friend?”
“And I am thy friend? thy lover? thy husband? Thou lovest me dear?” said Monsieur Cabanel.
“Dear Jules, who is so dear; who so near?” she said kissing him, while he said fervently: “God bless thee!”
The next day Monsieur Cabanel was called away on urgent business. He might be absent for two days, he said, but he would try to lessen the time; and the young wife was left alone in the midst of her enemies, without even such slight guard as his presence might prove.
Adèle was out. It was a dark, hot summer’s night, and the little Adolphe had been more feverish and restless than usual all the day. Towards evening he grew worse; and though Jeannette, the goose-girl, had strict commands not to allow madame to touch him, she grew frightened at the condition of the boy; and when madame came into the small parlour to offer her assistance, Jeannette gladly abandoned a charge that was too heavy for her and let the lady take him from her arms.
Sitting there with the child in her lap, cooing to him, soothing him by a low, soft nursery song, the paroxysm of his pain seemed to her to pass and it was as if he slept. But in that paroxysm he had bitten both his lip and tongue; and the blood was now oozing from his mouth. He was a pretty boy; and his mortal sickness made him at this moment pathetically lovely. Fanny bent her head and kissed the pale still face;—and the blood that was on his lips was transferred to hers.
While she still bent over him—her woman’s heart touched with a mysterious force and prevision of her own future motherhood—Adèle, followed by old Martin and some others of the village, rushed into the room.
“Behold her!” she cried, seizing Fanny by the arm and forcing her face upwards by the chin—“behold her in the act! Friends, look at my child—dead, dead in her arms; and she with his blood on her lips! Do you want more proofs? Vampire that she is, can you deny the evidence of your own senses?”
“No! no!” roared the crowd hoarsely. “She is a vampire—a creature cursed by God and the enemy of man; away with her to the pit. She must die as she has made others to die!”
“Die, as she has made my boy to die!” said Adèle; and more than one who had lost a relative or child during the epidemic echoed her words, “Die, as she has made mine to die!”
“What is the meaning of all this?” said Madame Cabanel, rising and facing the crowd with the true courage of an Englishwoman. “What harm have I done to any of you that you should come about me, in the absence of my husband, with these angry looks and insolent words?”
“What harm hast thou done?” cried old Martin, coming close to her. “Sorceress as thou art, thou hast bewitched our good master; and vampire as thou art, thou nourishest thyself on our blood! Have we not proof of that at this very moment? Look at thy mouth—cursed broucolaque; and here lies thy victim, who accuses thee in his death!”
Fanny laughed scornfully, “I cannot condescend to answer such folly,” she said lifting her head. “Are you men or children?”
“We are men, madame,” said Legros the miller; “and being men we must protect our weak ones. We have all had our doubts—and who more cause than I, with three little ones taken to heaven before their time?—and now we are convinced.”
“Because I have nursed a dying child and done my best to soothe him!” said Madame Cabanel with unconscious pathos.
“No more words!” cried Adèle, dragging her by the arm from which she had never loosed her hold. “To the pit with her, my friends, if you would not see all your children die as mine has died—as our good Legros’ have died!”
A kind of shudder shook the crowd; and a groan that sounded in itself a curse burst from them. “To the pit!” they cried. “Let the demons take their own!”
Quick as thought Adèle pinioned the strong white arms whose shape and beauty had so often maddened her with jealous pain; and before the poor girl could utter more than one cry Legros had placed his brawny hand over her mouth. Though this destruction of a monster was not the murder of a human being in his mind, or in the mind of any there, still they did not care to have their nerves disturbed by cries that sounded so human as Madame Cabanel’s. Silent then, and gloomy, that dreadful cortege took its way to the forest, carrying its living load; gagged and helpless as if it had been a corpse among them. Save with Adèle and old Martin, it was not so much personal animosity as the instinctive self-defence of fear that animated them. They were executioners, not enemies; and the executioners of a more righteous law than that allowed by the national code. But one by one they all dropped off, till their numbers were reduced to six; of whom Legros was one, and Lesouëf, who had lost his only sister, was also one.
The pit was not more than an English mile from the Maison Cabanel. It was a dark and lonesome spot, where not the bravest man of all that assembly would have dared to go alone after nightfall, not even if the curé had been with him; but a multitude gives courage, said old Martin Briolic; and half a dozen stalwart men, led by such a woman as Adèle, were not afraid of even lutins or the White Ladies.
As swiftly as they could for the burden they bore, and all in utter silence, the cortege strode over the moor; one or two of them carrying rude torches; for the night was black and the way was not without its physical dangers. Nearer and nearer they came to the fatal bourn; and heavier grew the weight of their victim. She had long ceased to struggle; and now lay as if dead in the hands of her bearers. But no one spoke of this or of aught else. Not a word was exchanged between them; and more than one, even of those left, began to doubt whether they had done wisely, and whether they had not better have trusted to the law. Adèle and Martin alone remained firm to the task they had undertaken; and Legros too was sure; but he was weakly and humanly sorrowful for the thing he felt obliged to do. As for Adèle, the woman’s jealousy, the mother’s anguish and the terror of superstition, had all wrought in her so that she would not have raised a finger to have lightened her victim of one of her pains, or have found her a woman like herself and no vampire after all.
The way got darker; the distance between them and their place of execution shorter; and at last they reached the border of the pit where this fearful monster, this vampire—poor innocent Fanny Cabanel—was to b
e thrown. As they lowered her, the light of their torches fell on her face.
“Grand Dieu!” cried Legros, taking off his cap; “she is dead!”
“A vampire cannot die,” said Adèle, “It is only an appearance. Ask Father Martin.”
“A vampire cannot die unless the evil spirits take her, or she is buried with a stake thrust through her body,” said Martin Briolic sententiously. “I don’t like the look of it,” said Legros; and so said some others. They had taken the bandage from the mouth of the poor girl; and as she lay in the flickering light, her blue eyes half open; and her pale face white with the whiteness of death, a little return of human feeling among them shook them as if the wind had passed over them.
Suddenly they heard the sound of horses’ hoofs thundering across the plain. They counted two, four, six; and they were now only four unarmed men, with Martin and Adèle to make up the number. Between the vengeance of man and the power and malice of the wood-demons, their courage faded and their presence of mind deserted them. Legros rushed frantically into the vague darkness of the forest; Lesouëf followed him; the other two fled over the plain while the horsemen came nearer and nearer. Only Adèle held the torch high above her head, to show more clearly both herself in her swarthy passion and revenge and the dead body of her victim. She wanted no concealment; she had done her work, and she gloried in it. Then the horsemen came plunging to them—Jules Cabanel the first, followed by the doctor and four gardes champêtres.
“Wretches! murderers!” was all he said, as he flung himself from his horse and raised the pale face to his lips.
“Master,” said Adèle; “she deserved to die. She is a vampire and she has killed our child.”
“Fool!” cried Jules Cabanel, flinging off her hand. “Oh, my loved wife! thou who did no harm to man or beast, to be murdered now by men who are worse than beasts!”
“She was killing thee,” said Adèle. “Ask monsieur le docteur. What ailed the master, monsieur?”
“Do not bring me into this infamy,” said the doctor, looking up from the dead. “Whatever ailed monsieur, she ought not to be here. You have made yourself her judge and executioner, Adèle, and you must answer for it to the law.”
“You say this too, master?” said Adèle.
“I say so too,” returned Monsieur Cabanel. “To the law you must answer for the innocent life you have so cruelly taken—you and all the fools and murderers you have joined to you.”
“And is there to be no vengeance for our child?”
“Would you revenge yourself on God, woman?” said Monsieur Cabanel sternly.
“And our past years of love, master?”
“Are memories of hate, Adèle,” said Monsieur Cabanel, as he turned again to the pale face of his dead wife.
“Then my place is vacant,” said Adèle, with a bitter cry. “Ah, my little Adolphe, it is well you went before!”
“Hold, Ma’am Adèle!” cried Martin.
But before a hand could be stretched out, with one bound, one shriek, she had flung herself into the pit where she had hoped to bury Madame Cabanel; and they heard her body strike the water at the bottom with a dull splash, as of something falling from a great distance.
“They can prove nothing against me, Jean,” said old Martin to the garde who held him. “I neither bandaged her mouth nor carried her on my shoulders. I am the gravedigger of Pieuvrot, and, ma foi, you would all do badly, you poor creatures, when you die, without me! I shall have the honour of digging madame’s grave, never doubt it; and, Jean,” he whispered, “they may talk as they like, those rich aristos who know nothing. She is a vampire, and she shall have a slatte through her body yet! Who knows better than I? If we do not tie her down like this, she will come out of her grave and suck our blood; it is a way these vampires have.”
“Silence there!” said the garde commanding the little escort. “To prison with the assassins; and keep their tongues from wagging.”
“To prison with martyrs and the public benefactors,” retorted old Martin. “So the world rewards its best!”
And in this faith he lived and died, as a forçat at Toulon, maintaining to the last that he had done the world a good service by ridding it of a monster who else would not have left one man in Pieuvrot to perpetuate his name and race. But Legros and also Lesouëf, his companion, doubted gravely of the righteousness of that act of theirs on that dark summer’s night in the forest; and though they always maintained that they should not have been punished, because of their good motives, yet they grew in time to disbelieve old Martin Briolic and his wisdom, and to wish that they had let the law take its own course unhelped by them—reserving their strength for the grinding of the hamlet’s flour and the mending of the hamlet’s sabots—and the leading of a good life according to the teaching of Monsieur le curé and the exhortations of their own wives.
FOREWARNED, FOREARMED
by Mrs. J. H. Riddell
1874
Charlotte Eliza Lawson Cowan was born in Carrickfergus, Ireland, the youngest daughter of James Cowan, high sheriff of county Antrim. She and her mother moved to London five years after her father’s death; her mother died the following year, and a year later Charlotte married Joseph Hadley Riddell, a civil engineer who had moved to London from his native Staffordshire.
Her first novel appeared in 1858 under the gender-neutral pseudonym of F. G. Trafford. Over the next forty years or so, she published forty novels, numerous stories, and a number of collections, using her married name of Mrs. J. H. Riddell from 1864. In the 1860s, she was the part-owner and editor of The St. James’s Magazine, a prominent London literary journal, and she also edited another magazine titled Home.
Like most writers of her day, male and female, Charlotte did not restrict herself to a single genre. Several of her novels involved hauntings, though, and in 1882 she published a collection of supernatural tales under the title Weird Stories. Some of her short stories, like “The Old House in Vauxhall Walk,” “The Last of Squire Ennismore,” and “Hertford O’Donnell’s Warning” appear regularly in collections of horror fiction.
“Forewarned, Forearmed” comes from an earlier publication, the three-volume miscellany Frank Sinclair’s Wife and Other Stories, which appeared in 1874. Perhaps because of the collection’s wide-ranging nature, “Forewarned, Forearmed” is less often anthologized than many of Mrs. Riddell’s other supernatural fiction. This is a pity, because it is an effective tale of a disputed inheritance, attempted murder, and a prophetic dream.
It is a tale within a tale, beginning with a description of the narrator: this was a popular format at the time, but frowned on by most modern editors. Every paragraph of the narrated story begins with an open quotation mark, which the reader may find distracting at first—but Mrs. Riddell’s writing soon carries the reader along and the initial distraction quickly fades.
The story which I am about to tell is not a chapter out of my own life. The incidents which go to furnish it were enacted years before I was born; the performers in it died forty years ago, and have left nor son nor heir to inherit the memory.
I question whether the man live (the woman may, seeing women are more enduring than men) who could identify the names of the persons concerning whom I shall have hereafter to speak, but the facts happened, nevertheless.
Many a time I have heard them rehearsed, many a night I have sat on the hearthrug fascinated, listening to how Mr. Dwarris dreamt a dream, and many a night I have passed through the folding-doors that led from the outer to the lesser hall, and walked to bed along the corridors thinking tremblingly of the face which continually reappeared—of the journey in the coach and the post-chaise—all the particulars of which I purpose in due time to recount. Further, it is in my memory, that I was wont to place a pillow against my back in the night season, lest some vague enemy should enter my room and strike me under the fifth rib; and I went through much anguish when the Storm King was abroad, fancying I heard stealthy footsteps in the long gallery, and the sound o
f another person’s breathing in the room beside my own.
But in spite of this, Mr. Dwarris’ dream was one of the awful delights of my childhood; and when strangers gathered around the social hearth, and the conversation turned upon supernatural appearances, as it often did in those remote days in lonely country houses, it was always with a thrill of pleasure that I greeted the opening passages of this, the only inexplicable yet true story we possessed.
It was the fact of this possession, perhaps, which made the tale dear to me—other stories belonged to other people; it was their friends or their relatives who had seen ghosts, and been honoured with warnings, but Mr. Dwarris’ dream was our property.
We owned it as we owned the old ash tree that grew on the lawn. Though Mr. Dwarris was dead and gone, though at the age of threescore years and ten he had departed from a world which had used him very kindly, and which he had enjoyed thoroughly, to another world that he only knew anything of by hearsay, that in fact he only believed in after the vague gentlemanly sceptical fashion which was considered the correct thing about the beginning of this century, still he had been a friend of our quiet and non-illustrious family.
In our primitive society he had been considered a man of fashion, a person whose opinions might safely be repeated, whose decisions were not to be lightly contradicted. He was kind enough in the days when postage was very high (would those days could come back again) to write long letters to his good friends who lived far away from Court, and craved for political and fashionable gossip—long letters filled with scraps of news and morsels of scandal, which furnished topics of conversation for many days and weeks, and made pleasant little breaks in the monotony of that country existence.
