November Night Tales

by Henry Chapman Mercer

  “Get up here,” urged the peasant, laying her hand on the bench.

  He mounted the seat. Over the heads of the crowd he saw the priest approach the woodpile and draw away its black cloth cover, revealing the carcass of a greyish animal stretched upon the faggots. His companion pulled his sleeve.

  “Do you see him?” she whispered.

  “I see a dog, or a wolf.”

  She crossed herself. “It is a man. You don’t believe it? The town is full of them. When they burn him, the others go away.”

  The crowd of peasants gathered close, and the priest held up a book and began to read aloud in Greek.

  Gradually his resonant voice rose high and clear in passionate declamation. The men had removed their sheepskin caps, and stood in silence, while a low crackling noise was presently followed by a cloud of whirling smoke. The wood-pile was on fire. As the smoke drew into the kitchen, a deep unison of many voices, blending with the tones of the priest, swelled into a hymn. Louder and louder, rising and falling in long refrains, it seemed to jingle in vibrations upon the beams in the shed. Fluttering tongues of flame shot into the sky over the heads of the choir. Cooks came out of the bakery and crowded the entrance, while the professor got down and walked outside, to stare at the dramatic scene.

  When the fire had died into embers, the chanting ceased, the peasants sat down again, and the stranger stepped into the shed to find his companion. But she had gone. He walked into the bakery, then came back, to look in vain for her in the crowd.

  It was getting late. “High time to return to the boat,” he thought, as he slowly passed the smoky square; and then, with a last look at the noisy company, and a bow to the priest, left the place.

  xii

  Following by guess-work the direction of his former path, the professor slowly made his way down the hill. Wild, half-considered memories of the general’s dinner and midnight talk at Orsova crowded upon him. But he had drunk too much for serious reflection. When a curious feeling that something was wrong with his surroundings yielded to drowsiness, he was crossing an open knoll by a deserted hut overlooking the river. There he saw a bench sheltered under the thatch, sat down upon it, and leaned against the wall.

  Moments passed as he looked outward upon the evening lights that streamed across the tree-tops and inward beyond the borderland of dreams. The place seemed confused with things astonishing, contradictory, casual, human feet floating in the air, a cave lit by glowworms, an ash tree, the Castle of Golubacz,—a face, framed in the ruins, now laughing, now frowning. He felt a gentle strain upon his shoulder that gradually increased into a pull, and awoke to find himself clutching the strap of his tin box.

  A woman was seated close by him on the bench. At first blending with the dream, her head quickly sharpened upon the background, until he recognized his Gipsy companion.

  “It is late, my gentleman,” said she, leaning toward him. “You will not sleep here?”

  “No,” he replied, rising. “I am going to the river.”

  “I will show you the river.”

  As he walked away, she joined him. “Have you forgotten your flowers?” she asked, pointing to the pink bouquet lying on the bench.

  “Let them go,” said he. “I am told they will bring me bad luck.”

  Again the angry glitter in the Gipsy’s eyes. “Yes,” she sneered. “What else did that old fool tell you?”

  “She was telling me about St. Basil.”

  “And miracles. Do you believe in miracles?”

  The professor pointed at the darkening sky. “I believe in that: no beginning; no end. What are miracles to that?”

  The answer seemed to suppress his companion, who walked beside him in silence, while, heedless of a strong misgiving, he went on. The wine was in his head. With the fall of night, the unending lanes seemed to turn in the wrong direction, rather uphill than down, until he began to suspect that his guide, who had lagged behind, was misleading him.

  They had passed a gate in a wattled fence, beyond which the walls of a house glimmered faintly through the trees. He noticed the perfume of flowers.

  “It’s very dark here,” said he. “What’s that?”

  He stopped suddenly at sight of a large animal seen for an instant in the twilight upon the path ahead of him.

  The words brought no answer. He turned around. The woman was gone. He listened; then called, half-startled at the sound of his own voice. The dark openings in the trees gave no sign, while as he felt again the curious sensation, as if his surroundings were slipping away from him, or did not exist, a heavy concussion upon his back sent him staggering forward. With a sharp quick pain in his shoulder came a loud report close behind him. The weight fell away, and he turned upon the officer he had seen on the beach.

  The man’s face was distorted with rage. He was pointing with a pistol toward the house, and the professor looked back,—but saw nothing.

  He was fumbling with his coat. “I have been robbed,” he cried.

  Out of breath and muttering curses, the officer pushed his weapon into a belt mounted with pistols and pulled out another.

  “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  “No. But there was a woman here. I had a satchel.”

  “Do you want it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Come on, then, if you’re not afraid.”

  They hurried through a gate and along a path to a white thatched building with open windows set with flowers, and passed a closed door. Beyond this another door stood ajar. Listening, and hearing no noise, the officer cocked his pistol and pushed it open.

  A close, sickening smell met them as they entered a room faintly lit by the fading window-light and a grease-lamp flickering on a shelf. They saw a garret, a step-ladder, some kettles on a bench, and around the walls, or hanging from the rafters, dark masses of clothing and shoes. Some of the shoes were of child’s size. The professor had just noticed a miniature row set on a table near one of the windows, when the officer, who was ahead, suddenly stopped, at a guttural sound from the corner of the room. His eyes were fixed upon a partly-opened door to the left of the staircase, when the sound came again,—more distinctly, a low, long-protracted growl. He lifted his double-barreled pistol, but as the door stood motionless, he walked forward and pushed it with his foot. With a loud creak, it swung inward, and the men started back at the sight of two lustrous points of light glaring at them from the darkness.

  The officer fired, paused a moment, and then sprang through the doorway.

  There was a muffled rustling from beyond the opening, a flash, and a second report. The professor picked up the lamp and came to the threshold of a smoky, windowless closet like a kitchen. He saw a high pile of faggots, near which the officer had stopped. He was leaning forward, and presently began tossing aside a litter of loose sticks and bundles that scattered the floor, until, over the hearth of a dead fire, the unsteady gleams revealed a pool of blood, then the clawed feet, legs, and hairy body of an animal.

  “Hand me the lamp,” said the man and, taking it, he stooped and held it close to the bloody head and glittering jaws of a wolf.

  “Now you know what that woman is,” he exclaimed savagely. “You saw her.”

  “I don’t know what I saw,” muttered the professor. “Good God! What’s that?”

  From outside the house a moaning cry, rising into a shriek, with quavering wails, slowly died away in an answering chorus of distant howlings.

  “Come quick!” cried the officer.

  He turned towards the door, and the professor stepped away from the place, when, at a half-concealed glitter on the floor, he sprang backward.

  “For God’s sake, bring the lamp!” He had stooped to seize the partly-unrolled fleece of his manuscript, and was holding it up in both hands.

  “Thank Heaven!”
came his breathless words. Turning it about in the approaching light, while the officer muttered something inaudibly, he rolled it up and followed his companion into the outer room. When he had thrust his recovered treasure into his pocket, the two men hurried out into the twilight.

  As if possessed by a frenzy, the officer, who seemed to have forgotten his surroundings, went on talking to himself. Once they stopped at a rattle of bushes behind a fence, then hastened on, and a few moments later had reached a lane corner, where the crazed fanatic, refusing to listen to the professor’s grateful offers, abruptly left him.

  The professor started to run. Down the steep hill he stumbled and sprang in the gathering darkness, until, reaching an opening ahead, the scene seemed to shift suddenly into a place already familiar,—a fading of fences and trees into the great well-sweep with the smith’s garden beyond. He stopped at the clutch of a hand on his arm.

  “Thank God it’s not true,” came Karl’s frightened voice. “The blacksmith told me they had murdered you.”

  Faintly seen down the hill, the old Hungarian was beckoning violently from his gate, while from the trees beyond them echoed a wild din of shouts and howlings.

  They reached the garden at a run and got into the smithy, followed by the old man, who, pushing them through the rear door of the shed, closed it behind them.

  “He said there was a woman following you. Did you see her?” asked the trembling, breathless servant as they stopped on the beach to look back.

  The blacksmith had opened the door. He was waving his arms, and again they heard his shout:—“Quick! Get away quick!”

  A moment later, reaching the houseboat, they dragged the anchor out of the mud and, leaving the gang-plank behind, pushed off.

  Before they had stopped rowing in the current, the tree outlines had vanished against the yet glowing horizon. For a long time wailing echoes, rising on the night wind from no fixed direction, seemed to follow them in the sky. At last these sounds died away, and as the great river, bending to the southward, bore them on, nothing but the murmur of ripples broke the silence, until a swollen eddy drew them into one of the channels of a group of islands.

  The young moon had set when, seizing a bough that swept by in the starlight, they found rest and safety at last, in the secluded tangle of an island forest.

  xiii

  With the professor’s safe arrival at Widdin, two days later, our available sources of information end. His own posthumous notes, if ever published, must account for the later history of the great manuscript.

  Apart from its fame, established at Geneva, and afterwards at Stockholm, it has often been said that the ill-luck that clouded its discovery clung to it to the last. The scholar’s conscientious scruples as to recompensing the monks at Jollok were thwarted by the death of the abbot and by another insurrection in Hungary, and it is well known that several persons died or were injured while in possession of the treasure. Science was robbed of it when the ship, bringing it from Dantzig to Copenhagen, foundered in a storm.

  THE DOLLS’ CASTLE

  i

  It was late one hot summer night, at the Templehouse Club in Eastport. The waiters were still busy in the wine-room, where, at several tables, groups of fashionably-dressed members, considering it too hot to sleep, preferred warm discussion and cooling drinks to the use of their latch keys. Charles Carrington, the dramatist, with a tall, ice-filled glass before him and a palmleaf fan in his hand, was sitting alone near an open window, laughing to himself. He was looking about the room, as he had often done before, at the characteristic movements of his genial if argumentative friend, George Westbrook, which that night seemed unusually ridiculous.

  Whoever remembers the wine-room of the Templehouse Club in the eighties, remembers George Westbrook and the unique habit he had, which no one who knew the man ever thought of resenting, of introducing provocative, highly-debatable, and sometimes outrageous subjects of discussion among his convivial friends; and then, when the inevitable argument followed, of leaving the scene of dispute, to stir up debate in other parts of the room.

  The fact that he appeared to proceed unconsciously and without mischievous intent,—though his topics had the combustibility of slow matches laid to gunpowder,—made the thing all the more absurd to those who could appreciate it, and that night, as the polemical uproar proved, he had succeeded better than usual.

  At one of the nearest tables the discussion had reached a climax, on the introduction of a stranger,—a short, heavy-jawed, clean shaven man, whom Westbrook had brought in from outside. Whereupon, Westbrook, or the “Doctor,” as he was nicknamed, got up as usual, left the disputants, and came over to Carrington.

  “Sit down, Westbrook,” said the latter, “what’s the matter over there?”

  “A worn-out ghost story, about a haunted house, that your friend B—— persists in telling, although it has been demolished over and over again. He says he knows a lady, who knew a man who was found dead there with a bulldog, and so forth. The house is in London, in Berkeley Square. You have heard of it, of course.”

  “What, Bulwer’s ‘House in the Brain?’ ”

  “No. That was a mistake. Bulwer never saw the house. Ouida in one of her stories mixed it up with another house. I happened to meet a man in the library who knows all about it, so I brought him up to settle the matter, and I think he has done it.”

  “And spoiled a good ghost story,” said Carrington. “Quite right, provided he has facts, but these haunted houses can’t be disposed of on theory nowadays. We must investigate them, one by one, as they come up. Of course you know about the haunted house on Belbridge Street.”

  “I never heard of it.”

  Carrington, in his enthusiastic way, described the place as altogether the most typical, portentous, remarkable thing of the kind he had ever seen. He said he had first heard of it as a shunned investment in real estate when reading law with Sharp, Dorrance, and Blair, since which time it had more than once figured in the newspapers.

  “It depends on the point of view,” observed Westbrook. “Newspaper stories about haunted houses don’t appeal to me, and never did.”

  “Would you like to see the house?” asked Carrington.

  Westbrook looked at his watch.

  “Never mind the time,” urged his friend; “it’s too hot to go to bed.”

  “All right,” Westbrook agreed at length. “We will have a stroll down River Street, at any rate.”

  And they passed out of the noisy forum, into a dark corridor, where “Silence like a poultice came to heal the blows of sound.”

  Crossing thence a hall, floored with summer-matting and perfumed with the genial aroma of distilled spirits and lemons, they reached the open front entrance and went out into the night.

  ii

  The heat was sweltering, and they walked slowly, so that it took them a long time to get out of the confines of respectability, into the region of the squalid, the disreputable, and the obscure. Save for a few belated Jews in their torchlit clothes dens, it was too late for the night life, even of River Street. And beyond that the houses were dark. Here and there a would-be sleeper in a shabby hall-way stirred or yawned as they went by. But the dirty doorstep groups and curbstone gossips had gone to bed, and by the time the two friends had reached Tenth Street and walked down to the corner of Belbridge, the well-lit pavements on either side of the great house, as far as they could see, were deserted.

  “There,” said Carrington, stopping at the crossway and pointing through the trees at the sinister building; “what do you think of that?”

  They walked along the pavement where the black and magnified leaf-shadows fluttered under foot, looked up at the rows of closed shutters, and stopped before the high, marble steps that marked the unusual level of the first floor above the basement. Westbrook noticed the vile scribblings on t
he front door, near a dingy sign-board marked To Let, with its inscription broken away at the word Inquire. Beyond, through the gate-bars in a very high brick wall, a courtyard with a grassy pavement and out-buildings was lost in darkness.

  “Porte-cochère and stables,” said Carrington, “with out-kitchens and shrubbery in the background. Can you see them?”

  “It is too dark back there for anything but the ghost,” said Westbrook; and then he looked up at the half-lit, towering walls, swept by the restless shadows of the trees. “All very grand, of course, but I see nothing so remarkable about it, except that the whole thing is out of place, built at the wrong end of town.”

  “Times have changed, my boy,” declared Carrington. “In the old days, this part of the world was in the midst of things. The Polish Jew had not yet appeared.”

  “He and the ghost came together, no doubt,” remarked Westbrook, sarcastically.

  “Never mind the ghost. I don’t pretend to say that there is proof of a ghost. But it is the appearance of the place rather than its history that strikes me. From a dramatic point of view, I wanted you to see that garden. It is exactly what I am looking for as the background for a play that I have in hand.”

  Westbrook laughed. “Set to music, I suppose,—another version of the Contes d’Hoffman, wonders included. Where will you put Doctor Miracle?”

  “Almost anywhere here,” returned Carrington enthusiastically. The two men had stepped back across the pavement and were looking along the basement where the barred windows were without shutters, when the dramatist felt his sleeve plucked and turned to see a small, swarthy man close to his side, holding up a piece of paper as if for inspection. A little girl stood behind him, and as the light caught the miniature face and wondering upturned eyes, he noticed that she carried in her arms a large doll. The man tried to say something, but stopped, while Carrington took the paper and, holding it up to the light, noticed the words “Belbridge Street,” written in pencil under a number upon it. Beckoning the man to follow him, and continuing his conversation with Westbrook, Carrington walked to the corner, turned up to the left, and stopped before a small white building across the way.