by Graeme Davis
“Well, according to this boy, sir, who was looking and listening with his whole body, as it were, because he had never before been suffered so near the Duchess, it appears that the noble couple sat down in great good humor, the Duchess playfully reproving her husband for his long absence, while the Duke swore that to look so beautiful was the best way of punishing him. In this tone the talk continued, with such gay sallies on the part of the Duchess, such tender advances on the Duke’s, that the lad declared they were for all the world like a pair of lovers courting on a summer’s night in the vineyard; and so it went till the servant brought in the mulled wine.
“‘Ah,’ the Duke was saying at that moment, ‘this agreeable evening repays me for the many dull ones I have spent away from you; nor do I remember to have enjoyed such laughter since the afternoon last year when we drank chocolate in the gazebo with my cousin Ascanio. And that reminds me,’ he said, ‘is my cousin in good health?’
“‘I have no reports of it,’ says the Duchess. ‘But your excellency should taste these figs stewed in malmsey—’
“‘I am in the mood to taste whatever you offer,’ said he; and as she helped him to the figs he added, ‘If my enjoyment were not complete as it is, I could almost wish my cousin Ascanio were with us. The fellow is rare good company at supper. What do you say, Madam? I hear he’s still in the country; shall we send for him to join us?’
“‘Ah,’ said the Duchess, with a sigh and a languishing look, ‘I see your excellency wearies of me already.’
“‘I, Madam? Ascanio is a capital good fellow, but to my mind his chief merit at this moment is his absence. It inclines me so tenderly to him that, by God, I could empty a glass to his good health.’
“With that the Duke caught up his goblet and signed to the servant to fill the Duchess’s.
“‘Here’s to the cousin,’ he cried, standing, ‘who has the good taste to stay away when he’s not wanted. I drink to his very long life—and you, Madam?’
“At this the Duchess, who had sat staring at him with a changed face, rose also and lifted her glass to her lips.
“‘And I to his happy death,’ says she in a wild voice; and as she spoke the empty goblet dropped from her hand and she fell face down on the floor.
“The Duke shouted to her women that she had swooned, and they came and lifted her to the bed. . . . She suffered horribly all night, Nencia said, twisting herself like a heretic at the stake, but without a word escaping her. The Duke watched by her, and toward daylight sent for the chaplain; but by this she was unconscious and, her teeth being locked, our Lord’s body could not be passed through them.
“The Duke announced to his relations that his lady had died after partaking too freely of spiced wine and an omelet of carp’s roe, at a supper she had prepared in honor of his return; and the next year he brought home a new Duchess, who gave him a son and five daughters. . . .”
V
The sky had turned to a steel gray, against which the villa stood out sallow and inscrutable. A wind strayed through the gardens, loosening here and there a yellow leaf from the sycamores; and the hills across the valley were purple as thunder-clouds.
“And the statue—?” I asked.
“Ah, the statue. Well, sir, this is what my grandmother told me, here on this very bench where we’re sitting. The poor child, who worshipped the Duchess as a girl of her years will worship a beautiful kind mistress, spent a night of horror, you may fancy, shut out from her lady’s room, hearing the cries that came from it, and seeing, as she crouched in her corner, the women rush to and fro with wild looks, the Duke’s lean face in the door, and the chaplain skulking in the antechamber with his eyes on his breviary. No one minded her that night or the next morning; and toward dusk, when it became known the Duchess was no more, the poor girl felt the pious wish to say a prayer for her dead mistress. She crept to the chapel and stole in unobserved. The place was empty and dim, but as she advanced she heard a low moaning, and coming in front of the statue she saw that its face, the day before so sweet and smiling, had the look on it that you know—and the moaning seemed to come from its lips. My grandmother turned cold, but something, she said afterward, kept her from calling or shrieking out, and she turned and ran from the place. In the passage she fell in a swoon; and when she came to her senses, in her own chamber, she heard that the Duke had locked the chapel door and forbidden any to set foot there. . . . The place was never opened again till the Duke died, some ten years later; and then it was that the other servants, going in with the new heir, saw for the first time the horror that my grandmother had kept in her bosom. . . .”
“And the crypt?” I asked. “Has it never been opened?”
“Heaven forbid, sir!” cried the old man, crossing himself. “Was it not the Duchess’s express wish that the relics should not be disturbed?”
THE VACANT LOT
by Mary E. Wilkins-Freeman
1903
Born in Randolph, Massachusetts, to strict Congregationalist parents, Mary Wilkins started writing children’s stories as a teenager, to help support her family. When she was about fifteen, her family moved to Brattleboro, Vermont, and opened a dry-goods business; she attended the local high school and went on to Mount Holyoke College (then Mount Holyoke Female Seminary) and Glenwood Seminary. The family business failed when she was twenty, and the family moved back to Randolph; ten years later, with both her parents dead, Mary was obliged to support herself entirely through her writing.
In 1892, at the age of almost forty, she met Dr. Charles Manning Freeman, seven years her junior. After a long courtship, the two were married in 1902. Freeman was an alcoholic, drug addict, gambler, and womanizer, who was eventually admitted to the New Jersey State Hospital for the Insane in Trenton. Mary divorced him shortly afterward, and when he died, he left her one dollar; the rest went to his chauffeur.
Mary’s strict New England Congregationalist upbringing shows through in much of her writing. “The Little Maid at the Door,” for example, is a tale of the Salem witch trials, and several of her other stories are set in Congregationalist communities. She also wove a strong thread of domestic realism into many of her stories, and her female characters often challenge contemporary notions of a woman’s role in society. “Luella Miller,” one of her most popular tales, concerns a female vampire of sorts, who, far from being helpless, uses the appearance of feminine helplessness to literally drain the life out of others.
“The Vacant Lot” is a different kind of tale: a straightforward ghost story with something of affectionate pastiche in the way the characters are drawn. Even here, though, it is possible to see echoes of Mary’s past: a family in the dry-goods business, moving from a smaller community to a city and then moving back again—not, in this case, because the business failed, but for an altogether darker reason.
When it became generally known in Townsend Centre that the Townsends were going to move to the city, there was great excitement and dismay. For the Townsends to move was about equivalent to the town’s moving. The Townsend ancestors had founded the village a hundred years ago. The first Townsend had kept a wayside hostelry for man and beast, known as the “Sign of the Leopard.” The sign-board, on which the leopard was painted a bright blue, was still extant, and prominently so, being nailed over the present Townsend’s front door. This Townsend, by name David, kept the village store. There had been no tavern since the railroad was built through Townsend Centre in his father’s day. Therefore the family, being ousted by the march of progress from their chosen employment, took up with a general country store as being the next thing to a country tavern, the principal difference consisting in the fact that all the guests were transients, never requiring bedchambers, securing their rest on the tops of sugar and flour barrels and codfish boxes, and their refreshment from stray nibblings at the stock in trade, to the profitless deplenishment of raisins and loaf sugar and crackers and cheese.
The flitting of the Townsends from the home of their ancestors was du
e to a sudden access of wealth from the death of a relative and the desire of Mrs. Townsend to secure better advantages for her son George, sixteen years old, in the way of education, and for her daughter Adrianna, ten years older, better matrimonial opportunities. However, this last inducement for leaving Townsend Centre was not openly stated, only ingeniously surmised by the neighbours.
“Sarah Townsend don’t think there’s anybody in Townsend Centre fit for her Adrianna to marry, and so she’s goin’ to take her to Boston to see if she can’t pick up somebody there,” they said. Then they wondered what Abel Lyons would do. He had been a humble suitor for Adrianna for years, but her mother had not approved, and Adrianna, who was dutiful, had repulsed him delicately and rather sadly. He was the only lover whom she had ever had, and she felt sorry and grateful; she was a plain, awkward girl, and had a patient recognition of the fact.
But her mother was ambitious, more so than her father, who was rather pugnaciously satisfied with what he had, and not easily disposed to change. However, he yielded to his wife and consented to sell out his business and purchase a house in Boston and move there.
David Townsend was curiously unlike the line of ancestors from whom he had come. He had either retrograded or advanced, as one might look at it. His moral character was certainly better, but he had not the fiery spirit and eager grasp at advantage which had distinguished them. Indeed, the old Townsends, though prominent and respected as men of property and influence, had reputations not above suspicions. There was more than one dark whisper regarding them handed down from mother to son in the village, and especially was this true of the first Townsend, he who built the tavern bearing the Sign of the Blue Leopard. His portrait, a hideous effort of contemporary art, hung in the garret of David Townsend’s home. There was many a tale of wild roistering, if no worse, in that old roadhouse, and high stakes, and quarreling in cups, and blows, and money gotten in evil fashion, and the matter hushed up with a high hand for inquirers by the imperious Townsends who terrorized everybody. David Townsend terrorized nobody. He had gotten his little competence from his store by honest methods—the exchanging of sterling goods and true weights for country produce and country shillings. He was sober and reliable, with intense self-respect and a decided talent for the management of money. It was principally for this reason that he took great delight in his sudden wealth by legacy. He had thereby greater opportunities for the exercise of his native shrewdness in a bargain. This he evinced in his purchase of a house in Boston.
One day in spring the old Townsend house was shut up, the Blue Leopard was taken carefully down from his lair over the front door, the family chattels were loaded on the train, and the Townsends departed. It was a sad and eventful day for Townsend Centre. A man from Barre had rented the store—David had decided at the last not to sell—and the old familiars congregated in melancholy fashion and talked over the situation. An enormous pride over their departed townsman became evident. They paraded him, flaunting him like a banner in the eyes of the new man. “David is awful smart,” they said; “there won’t nobody get the better of him in the city if he has lived in Townsend Centre all his life. He’s got his eyes open. Know what he paid for his house in Boston? Well, sir, that house cost twenty-five thousand dollars, and David he bought it for five. Yes, sir, he did.”
“Must have been some out about it,” remarked the new man, scowling over his counter. He was beginning to feel his disparaging situation.
“Not an out, sir. David he made sure on’t. Catch him gettin’ bit. Everythin’ was in apple-pie order, hot an’ cold water and all, and in one of the best locations of the city—real high-up street. David he said the rent in that street was never under a thousand. Yes, sir, David he got a bargain—five thousand dollars for a twenty-five-thousand-dollar house.”
“Some out about it!” growled the new man over the counter.
However, as his fellow townsmen and allies stated, there seemed to be no doubt about the desirableness of the city house which David Townsend had purchased and the fact that he had secured it for an absurdly low price. The whole family were at first suspicious. It was ascertained that the house had cost a round sum only a few years ago; it was in perfect repair; nothing whatever was amiss with plumbing, furnace, anything. There was not even a soap factory within smelling distance, as Mrs. Townsend had vaguely surmised. She was sure that she had heard of houses being undesirable for such reasons, but there was no soap factory. They all sniffed and peeked; when the first rainfall came they looked at the ceiling, confidently expecting to see dark spots where the leaks had commenced, but there were none. They were forced to confess that their suspicions were allayed, that the house was perfect, even overshadowed with the mystery of a lower price than it was worth. That, however, was an additional perfection in the opinion of the Townsends, who had their share of New England thrift. They had lived just one month in their new house, and were happy, although at times somewhat lonely from missing the society of Townsend Centre, when the trouble began. The Townsends, although they lived in a fine house in a genteel, almost fashionable, part of the city, were true to their antecedents and kept, as they had been accustomed, only one maid. She was the daughter of a farmer on the outskirts of their native village, was middle-aged, and had lived with them for the last ten years. One pleasant Monday morning she rose early and did the family washing before breakfast, which had been prepared by Mrs. Townsend and Adrianna, as was their habit on washing-days. The family were seated at the breakfast table in their basement dining-room, and this maid, whose name was Cordelia, was hanging out the clothes in the vacant lot. This vacant lot seemed a valuable one, being on a corner. It was rather singular that it had not been built upon. The Townsends had wondered at it and agreed that they would have preferred their own house to be there. They had, however, utilized it as far as possible with their innocent, rural disregard of property rights in unoccupied land.
“We might just as well hang out our washing in that vacant lot,” Mrs. Townsend had told Cordelia the first Monday of their stay in the house. “Our little yard ain’t half big enough for all our clothes, and it is sunnier there, too.”
So Cordelia had hung out the wash there for four Mondays, and this was the fifth. The breakfast was about half finished—they had reached the buckwheat cakes—when this maid came rushing into the dining-room and stood regarding them, speechless, with a countenance indicative of the utmost horror. She was deadly pale. Her hands, sodden with soapsuds, hung twitching at her sides in the folds of her calico gown; her very hair, which was light and sparse, seemed to bristle with fear. All the Townsends turned and looked at her. David and George rose with a half-defined idea of burglars.
“Cordelia Battles, what is the matter?” cried Mrs. Townsend. Adrianna gasped for breath and turned as white as the maid. “What is the matter?” repeated Mrs. Townsend, but the maid was unable to speak. Mrs. Townsend, who could be peremptory, sprang up, ran to the frightened woman and shook her violently. “Cordelia Battles, you speak,” said she, “and not stand there staring that way, as if you were struck dumb! What is the matter with you?”
Then Cordelia spoke in a fainting voice.
“There’s—somebody else—hanging out clothes—in the vacant lot,” she gasped, and clutched at a chair for support.
“Who?” cried Mrs. Townsend, rousing to indignation, for already she had assumed a proprietorship in the vacant lot. “Is it the folks in the next house? I’d like to know what right they have! We are next to that vacant lot.”
“I—dunno—who it is,” gasped Cordelia. “Why, we’ve seen that girl next door go to mass every morning,” said Mrs. Townsend. “She’s got a fiery red head. Seems as if you might know her by this time, Cordelia.”
“It ain’t that girl,” gasped Cordelia. Then she added in a horror-stricken voice, “I couldn’t see who ’twas.”
They all stared.
“Why couldn’t you see?” demanded her mistress. “Are you struck blind?”
&nb
sp; “No, ma’am.”
“Then why couldn’t you see?”
“All I could see was—” Cordelia hesitated, with an expression of the utmost horror.
“Go on,” said Mrs. Townsend, impatiently.
“All I could see was the shadow of somebody, very slim, hanging out the clothes, and—”
“What?”
“I could see the shadows of the things flappin’ on their line.”
“You couldn’t see the clothes?”
“Only the shadow on the ground.”
“What kind of clothes were they?”
“Queer,” replied Cordelia, with a shudder.
“If I didn’t know you so well, I should think you had been drinking,” said Mrs. Townsend. “Now, Cordelia Battles, I’m going out in that vacant lot and see myself what you’re talking about.”
“I can’t go,” gasped the woman.
With that Mrs. Townsend and all the others, except Adrianna, who remained to tremble with the maid, sallied forth into the vacant lot. They had to go out the area gate into the street to reach it. It was nothing unusual in the way of vacant lots. One large poplar tree, the relic of the old forest which had once flourished there, twinkled in one corner; for the rest, it was overgrown with coarse weeds and a few dusty flowers. The Townsends stood just inside the rude board fence which divided the lot from the street and stared with wonder and horror, for Cordelia had told the truth. They all saw what she had described—the shadow of an exceedingly slim woman moving along the ground with up-stretched arms, the shadows of strange, nondescript garments flapping from a shadowy line, but when they looked up for the substance of the shadows nothing was to be seen except the clear, blue October air.
