In the shadow, near one of the towers, two white-skirted men were leaning against the wall, and beyond them he noticed a very abnormal-looking woman, hideously deformed in profile by a bristling mass of facial hair. But as he stared at her, and as she left her companions and approached him, the apparent beard changed to a grotesque mouth-mask of coarse brown grass. Around a dingy red gown glittered a very conspicuous polished belt, made of large metallic discs, mounted on strings of shells, or teeth, that jingled as she walked.
She stopped and pointed to the professor’s tin satchel.
“Excuse me, my gentleman. It is for the murder fly.” She tapped the pavement with her foot. “Come with me, sir. Gipsy woman will show you the murder fly.”
Her muffled words buzzed curiously under the mask while the professor again raised the glasses to his eyes, and then, politely declining her services, walked toward one of the battlements.
The woman followed him.
“It is too soon,” she mumbled. “When the murder fly comes out, the sky is black.”
She laid her hand on her mask.
“We must not breathe him, my gentleman, when we go down into his house.” Again her foot tapped the pavement.
The professor heard her words die into a hiss while, as he crossed to the other side of the rampart, the jingling behind him proved that the woman was still dogging his footsteps. He turned about, and taking a silver gulden from his pocket, handed it to her.
“Let me alone,” he said sternly. “You are worse than the murder fly.”
Instantly her manner changed. She held the coin in her hand, looked at it a moment, and then, with a contemptuous shrug, tossed it over the precipice.
“This is bad money,” she hissed. “You are a cheat!”
Under her pink-hooded handkerchief he could see a dangerous glitter in the greenish eyes as she shook her fist at him. Then, turning, she walked back to her companions and disappeared with them behind the wall.
The incident was decidedly disagreeable. But the professor was too much preoccupied to concern himself long with it, and took time enough to make sure that the suspected rapids were not yet in sight. Descending as he had come, and without stopping to examine the much-discussed exits of the murder fly, he at last got to the base of the ruin.
It was getting late by the time he reached the outer wall, and he had just passed the gateway, when, at a startling rattle of stones, a rock struck the ground at his feet and rolled into the open space ahead. He looked up, but saw no one on the wall-top, when another rock, missing him by a few inches, bounded after the first. Suddenly realizing his danger, he started to run, while one heavy mass after another crashed past him down the hill, until, thinking he was beyond their reach, he stopped. Just as his hand grasped the tin can, to make sure that it was safe, a heavy blow on the back of his head ended everything. He felt himself falling. Sensation and consciousness vanished.
When he came to himself he was lying, wounded and dazed, on the hillside. Karl was leaning over him. But for a time the scholar was unable to recall his surroundings, much less account for his condition to the astonished servant, who searched his pockets, to find that his watch, field-glasses and pistol were safe.
“And your tin box?” asked the young man.
With a wild sweep of his hands over his coat, the professor felt that it was gone. He staggered to his feet, and in the hope that the swinging package might have been broken from him in his fall, searched the surrounding stones and weeds. Karl lit several matches, in vain.
“They have stolen your box,” observed the young man as they groped down the hill in the twilight. “But why not your watch and the other things? Three of them, did you say, sir?”
“Two men and a woman.”
“A woman?” repeated the servant slowly, looking in astonishment at his master. “Was she dressed in red?”
In spite of his condition, the professor laughed.
“Boy, you had better get that infernal dream out of your head. The thing is bad enough as it is.”
iv
Following a restless night on the river shoals, several days at anchor above the rapids near Bavna, brought back the professor’s strength, but not his spirits. For a long time the loss of his manuscript was too much for his philosophy. In vain he tried to console himself with the thought that, having so imperfectly seen his treasure, he might have exaggerated its value. But the doubt remained, and with it a vague foreboding of approaching danger, half-felt among the rocks, in his cabin, or seemingly muttered under the roar of waters. As the disaster ended his further need for river travel, he might have left the Danube at Ravna, had not the hope of disposing of his houseboat at one of the larger landing ports induced him, as he thought, for the last time to buckle on his life preserver and steer into the rapids below Islas.
St. Brenkova, Dol Milanovac, Tiscovica, swept by. Then, after a long halt in the historic cliff-shadows at Kazan, where the throttled river pauses for its final plunge, they hurried again into the bright light.
Sunny meadows smiled. Trees waved their welcome. Ripples flashed as down the valley they sped, until early one afternoon their race was unexpectedly challenged in mid-river by some soldiers, in a boat, waving a flag.
“You are breaking the law, my friends,” shouted one of them, a heavy, red-faced petty officer, who held the flag and was standing up.
He pointed along the waterline toward the housetops of Orsova. “Don’t you know that we are blasting over there? You are smugglers.”
“No; traveling for science!” answered Karl.
His boat slid along the gunwale, and the soldier stepped aboard with two of his men. Ordering one of them to take Karl’s oar, he seized the rudder. The current was running like a millrace. But he knew how to steer, and holding the bow up-river, soon swung the houseboat skillfully along the side of a large moored barge, where a man caught it with a boat-hook.
The barge was full of workmen, busy in adjusting a piece of machinery, and the soldier-pilot, climbing aboard, stepped up to a tall, handsome man, in the white uniform of an Austrian general, who was directing the work. The latter listened to him a moment, then came to the side of the barge.
“A houseboat, it seems,” he remarked, evidently impressed by the stately appearance of the scholar, who stood at the door of his cabin, without a hat. “No cargo?”
The professor declared their purpose.
“But you must have heard that the river is closed, for blasting.”
The challenged traveler apologized for his venture, took out a card, and handed it to his questioner whose highly intelligent face brightened at sight of the noted name.
“Nothing is happening just now,” he said; “but we must look out for you.”
An explanation followed in which the traveler inquired as to the possibilities of boat sale at Orsova, while the chivalric engineer justified his rules as safeguards for commerce and against lawsuits. As they talked on the professor soon found that in the directing mind of the great river project he had met a warm friend of science.
“You must spend the night here,” continued the hurried general when, after several eager questions, the conversation was interrupted by an orderly. “And in that case, dine with me. Yes? At my headquarters up the hill yonder.” He pointed to a grove of trees above the town, and naming the dinner hour, climbed down into another boat, which had meanwhile joined them, and was carried away among the barges.
v
Several hours passed, spent by the professor in examining the engineering works that had overwhelmed the little village of Orsova in those days, and it was late in the afternoon when he left his floating house and, after a hot walk up the mountain side, reached a many-pillared, dingy wooden building, set upon the slope of a lawn under high trees. No fairer evening ever shone over the town and river. The
birds were singing overhead. A mellow glow in the light mist seemed to gild the porch and newly-set dinner-table, where, in the fresh white of his gold-faced uniform, the tall soldier met his guest.
“Is the air too much here?” he asked. “If so, we will move inside.”
“By no means,” cried the heated professor, looking around him and up the hill at vistas of sky and cloud, framed in green. “You have the ideal background,—the indescribable plus ultra, orchestra included. Just listen to the nightingales.”
“Yes,” said the general, “the lay of the land is very attractive. A broken-down hotel, with an old pleasure-ground, now a sort of birds’ paradise. There is a stream beyond there that you don’t see. I came upon it by chance, but am here very little, except at night, when, as you notice, I am alone and depend upon guests like yourself.”
As they waited, two white-gloved soldiers hurried to and from the table, while the conversation, introduced by the host’s hasty sketch of the great engineering work under his supervision and the difficulties of blasting in the rapids below, soon turned to the unfortunate literary expedition of the professor.
“It hardly seems like a common robbery,” observed the general, after listening to a description of the thieves at Golubacz. “The Gipsy woman with a mask gives it an odd look. But as long as the origin of the murder fly remains uncertain, we shall have these dangerous impostors posing as guides. Besides which the caves there, supposed to breed the insect, are known to contain gold. Hence the Gipsies, who are all gold hunters, as you know.”
These caves, he continued, had never been properly explored, notwithstanding their traces of mining operations by the Romans, thus fully accounting for the ancient celebrity of the neighborhood as a source of precious metal. The fact was further established by certain local customs, such as the singular process of washing gold in sheepskins, described by Agricola, and still practiced by the Gipsies.
As the Tokay passed around the table and the candles flickered in their glass globes, the learned engineer declared that the Greeks in the narrative of Herodotus had first associated the surrounding mountains with the terrible and still-surviving superstition of the werwolf, and gave his reasons for believing, further, that the great historian had confused the country with the ancient Colchis, in Jason’s classic search for the Golden Fleece.
“But here,” said he, “history fades into prehistoric darkness,—myths, many of which we may discard as baseless fancies, while others, like that of Jason, still show their prototype.”
Some of these sheepskin trophies of the gold-washers, he declared, were still encrusted with gold and were more absorbent than others. Some that he had seen were so heavily gilded that they had become fetishes in the eyes of the superstitious peasants, who, fearing to remove the precious dust, buried them with the dead, or even burned them, as votive offerings to the werwolf.
He was about to continue, when the sudden appearance of an orderly interrupted him. He listened for a moment to the man, then, with apologies, rose and followed him into the house.
vi
The professor sat looking at the sparkling glasses and silver before him. Over long intervals of time, linked by mysterious events, his wandering thoughts, inspired by the general’s conversation, soon returned to earth. From Jason and the Golden Fleece, Colchis and the sorcerers of Herodotus, to the werwolf of modern times, unconscious comparison had exaggerated his own failure. He helped himself to the delicious Tokay. But, in spite of it, memories, tantalizing, distressing, vivid, of his defeated plans had got the better of him by the time the general returned.
But the latter seemed preoccupied with some very pleasant thought as he stepped quickly up to the table, stopped, and stood a moment looking at his guest. Filling a glass, he lifted it to his lips.
“Allow me to drink to your health, professor,” said he. “I have some news for you,—almost too strange to be true.”
The professor rose.
“Retribution on earth. Rare, you know, yet not altogether out of the question.”
The general paused, and the professor, little suspecting what was to come, looked inquiringly at the masterful face and the kindly grey eyes that sparkled with suppressed emotion.
“Those rascals that robbed you, it seems, have not confined themselves to Golubacz, but have been here, breaking into one of our storehouses. Our sentinels fired on them, of course. One fellow met his end, and upon him they found——” The general paused again and rang a little table-bell. “Something that you may perhaps recognize——” As he pushed back some of the dishes, one of the waiters appeared with a tray, which he placed upon the table.
The professor started in speechless astonishment when his eye caught the unmistakable form of his tin can, wrapped in its leather strap, lying upon a napkin.
“The villains have opened it,” said the general; “but examine it. Your treasure is safe.”
Overwhelmed, half-frightened, the professor picked it up, to see that the solder had been filed off around the edge of the lid. The brown bundle was in its place. He slowly pulled it out and removed the waxed cover. No sign of disfiguration or injury marked the embroidered leather as, with trembling hands, he unbuttoned its thongs and displayed the gorgeous scroll, only half-seen at its former examination. Disregarding the exposed text, he rapidly unrolled the whole manuscript and, pushing aside the dishes, turned it upside-down upon the table, where, like the wind-swept embers of a fire, it seemed to glimmer in shifting tints of red, yellow, and blue.
The general leaned over it, touched it several times, and turned to one of the candles, to examine his forefinger. “This is a very strange coincidence,” he at length said.
“A splendid piece of embroidery,” declared the professor.
“Yes, but do you realize that it is worked upon a sheepskin? If I am not mistaken, one of the fleeces of the gold-washers. The gold has been fixed.”
The magnificent fretwork, outlined in minute beads of gold and blue stone or glass, interwoven with sparkling threads, appeared to be wrought upon a background of luminous wool, in panelled designs, showing a series of human figures. The professor was overcome. He pointed to one of the larger of these. “There,” said he. “If you have been in the catacombs at Rome, you must recognize the favorite emblem of the early Christians,—the Good Shepherd, carrying the sheep.”
The general pulled out a small magnifying-glass and held it close to the embroidery.
“Pardon me,” he objected, “the head is not human.” He handed the professor the glass. “Look at it again. It is that of an animal, a wolf; or, rather, a man with a wolf’s head. We spoke of the Devil, the werwolf, and here he is.”
He stepped back, while the professor again leaned forward, and carefully examined the figure.
“I agree with you,” he admitted at last. “But what an outrageous freak of monkish decoration.”
“Rather, black magic,” the general contended. “The monks never made the thing. The sheep is the victim. Look at the children devoured by wolves, in the small medallions. They repeat the diabolical idea. The text should correspond.”
The professor turned the book over and for a long time examined it in silence. It consisted of isolated passages in several Balkan dialects, with illuminated designs at intervals, representing the sun, moon, stars, and the planet Mercury. Some of the texts were in rhyme, and some, partly decipherable, stood, he said, rather for exorcisms of an evil spirit than prayers, since the names of God, the Virgin Mary, or saints, nowhere appeared.
“The work of a sorcerer,” said the general, “one of the Wolf Books, as the peasants call them.” He left the table and began walking up and down the terrace.
“I have heard of these books,” he continued, “used by exorcists in connection with this infernal superstition; but I never until now saw one. To my mind, it would account for y
our robbery at Golubacz; at least, according to the peasants, who would tell us that if these Gipsy thieves were wolf-men, they would have ‘smelt’ the book through your tin box. No wonder Trenck wanted it, if he dabbled in this sort of thing.”
“But why should the monks of Jollok preserve such an unholy relic?” asked the professor.
“On account of its magnificent cover. Some learned abbot, no doubt, recognized its value. As for Trenck, with all his faults, he would have appreciated it under any circumstances. The wonder is that he let it slip through his fingers.”
“As a werwolf,” remarked the professor, laughing, “he seems to have lost the gift of smell.”
The general enjoyed the joke, then sat down again.
“These coincidences are very remarkable,” said he, after several moments of silence.
vii
He was leaning upon the table, his grey eyes fixed steadily upon the magnificent scroll spread out before him.
“There is something else,” he continued slowly and with hesitation, “another coincidence. I have not mentioned it because I thought it rather too ghastly for the dinner-table.”
He stopped to offer a cigar to the professor; then, taking one himself, proceeded:
“When the Gipsy who carried this tin package of yours was shot, as I told you, a very strange thing is said to have happened,—too strange, in fact, to be believed.”
He paused again to light his cigar.
“Without parallel at this season of the year, our storehouses on the other side of the mountain were attacked, they say, by wolves. There are large sheep enclosures attached, and it chanced that the day before the occurrence a little daughter of one of the shepherds died and was laid out in a vacant stable near the gate of the stockade. The gate was open. There was plenty of noise, clatter among the sheep and howling. But when the sentinels fired in the dark at what they took to be wolves, they killed your man, as I told you, with this tin can hanging about his neck. One or more wolves,—wolves, remember, so they say, escaped.
November Night Tales Page 10
