The Valancourt Book of Victorian Christmas Ghost Stories

by James D. Jenkins

  The tall, dark girl by Maisie’s side, whom the other called Yolande, leaned across to her sympathetically. “You don’t like that song?” she said, with just a tinge of reproach in her voice as she said it.

  “I hate it!” Maisie answered, trying hard to compose herself.

  “Why so?” the tall, dark girl asked, in a tone of calm and singular sweetness. “It is sad, perhaps; but it’s lovely—and natural!”

  “My own name is Maisie,” her new friend replied, with an ill-repressed shudder. “And somehow that song pursues me through life. I seem always to hear the horrid ring of the words, ‘When six braw gentlemen kirkward shall carry ye.’ I wish to Heaven my people had never called me Maisie!”

  “And yet why?” the tall, dark girl asked again, with a sad, mysterious air. “Why this clinging to life—this terror of death—this inexplicable attachment to a world of misery? And with such eyes as yours, too! Your eyes are like mine”—which was a compliment, certainly, for the dark girl’s own pair were strangely deep and lustrous. “People with eyes such as those, that can look into futurity, ought not surely to shrink from a mere gate like death! For death is but a gate—the gate of life in its fullest beauty. It is written over the door, ‘Mors janua vitae.’ ”

  “What door?” Maisie asked—for she remembered having read those selfsame words, and tried in vain to translate them, that very day, though the meaning was now clear to her.

  The answer electrified her: “The gate of the vault in Wolverden churchyard.”

  She said it very low, but with pregnant expression.

  “Oh, how dreadful!” Maisie exclaimed, drawing back. The tall, dark girl half frightened her.

  “Not at all,” the girl answered. “This life is so short, so vain, so transitory! And beyond it is peace—eternal peace—the calm of rest—the joy of the spirit.”

  “You come to anchor at last,” her companion added.

  “But if—one has somebody one would not wish to leave behind?” Maisie suggested timidly.

  “He will follow before long,” the dark girl replied with quiet decision, interpreting rightly the sex of the indefinite substantive. “Time passes so quickly. And if time passes quickly in time, how much more, then, in eternity!”

  “Hush, Yolande,” the other dark girl put in, with a warning glance; “there’s a new tableau coming. Let me see, is this ‘The Death of Ophelia’? No, that’s number four; this is number three, ‘The Martyrdom of St. Agnes.’ ”

  III

  “My dear,” Mrs. West said, positively oozing apology, when she met Maisie in the supper-room, “I’m afraid you’ve been left in a corner by yourself almost all the evening!”

  “Oh dear, no,” Maisie answered with a quiet smile. “I had that Oxford undergraduate at my elbow at first; and afterwards those two nice girls, with the flowing white dresses and the beautiful eyes, came and sat beside me. What’s their name, I wonder?”

  “Which girls?” Mrs. West asked, with a little surprise in her tone, for her impression was rather that Maisie had been sitting between two empty chairs for the greater part of the evening, muttering at times to herself in the most uncanny way, but not talking to anybody.

  Maisie glanced round the room in search of her new friends, and for some time could not see them. At last, she observed them in a remote alcove, drinking red wine by themselves out of Venetian-glass beakers. “Those two,” she said, pointing towards them. “They’re such charming girls! Can you tell me who they are? I’ve quite taken a fancy to them.”

  Mrs. West gazed at them for a second—or rather, at the recess towards which Maisie pointed—and then turned to Maisie with much the same oddly embarrassed look and manner as the undergraduate’s. “Oh, those!” she said slowly, peering through and through her, Maisie thought. “Those—must be some of the professionals from London. At any rate—I’m not sure which you mean—over there by the curtain, in the Moorish nook, you say—well, I can’t tell you their names! So they must be professionals.”

  She went off with a singularly frightened manner. Maisie noticed it and wondered at it. But it made no great or lasting impression.

  When the party broke up, about midnight or a little later, Maisie went along the corridor to her own bedroom. At the end, by the door, the two other girls happened to be standing, apparently gossiping.

  “Oh, you’ve not gone home yet?” Maisie said, as she passed, to Yolande.

  “No, we’re stopping here,” the dark girl with the speaking eyes answered.

  Maisie paused for a second. Then an impulse burst over her. “Will you come and see my room?” she asked, a little timidly.

  “Shall we go, Hedda?” Yolande said, with an inquiring glance at her companion.

  Her friend nodded assent. Maisie opened the door, and ushered them into her bedroom.

  The ostentatiously opulent fire was still burning brightly, the electric light flooded the room with its brilliancy, the curtains were drawn, and the shutters fastened. For a while the three girls sat together by the hearth and gossiped quietly. Maisie liked her new friends—their voices were so gentle, soft, and sympathetic, while for face and figure they might have sat as models to Burne-Jones or Botticelli. Their dresses, too, took her delicate Welsh fancy; they were so dainty, yet so simple. The soft silk fell in natural folds and dimples. The only ornaments they wore were two curious brooches of very antique workmanship—as Maisie supposed—somewhat Celtic in design, and enamelled in blood-red on a gold background. Each carried a flower laid loosely in her bosom. Yolande’s was an orchid with long, floating streamers, in colour and shape recalling some Southern lizard; dark purple spots dappled its lip and petals. Hedda’s was a flower of a sort Maisie had never before seen—the stem spotted like a viper’s skin, green flecked with russet-brown, and uncanny to look upon; on either side, great twisted spirals of red-and-blue blossoms, each curled after the fashion of a scorpion’s tail, very strange and lurid. Something weird and witch-like about flowers and dresses rather attracted Maisie; they affected her with the half-repellent fascination of a snake for a bird; she felt such blossoms were fit for incantations and sorceries. But a lily-of-the-valley in Yolande’s dark hair gave a sense of purity which assorted better with the girl’s exquisitely calm and nun-like beauty.

  After a while Hedda rose. “This air is close,” she said. “It ought to be warm outside to-night, if one may judge by the sunset. May I open the window?”

  “Oh, certainly, if you like,” Maisie answered, a vague fore­boding now struggling within her against innate politeness.

  Hedda drew back the curtains and unfastened the shutters. It was a moonlit evening. The breeze hardly stirred the bare boughs of the silver birches. A sprinkling of soft snow on the terrace and the hills just whitened the ground. The moon lighted it up, falling full upon the Hall; the church and tower below stood silhouetted in dark against a cloudless expanse of starry sky in the background. Hedda opened the window. Cool, fresh air blew in, very soft and genial, in spite of the snow and the lateness of the season. “What a glorious night!” she said, looking up at Orion overhead. “Shall we stroll out for a while in it?”

  If the suggestion had not thus been thrust upon her from outside, it would never have occurred to Maisie to walk abroad in a strange place, in evening dress, on a winter’s night, with snow whitening the ground; but Hedda’s voice sounded so sweetly persuasive, and the idea itself seemed so natural now she had once proposed it, that Maisie followed her two new friends on to the moonlit terrace without a moment’s hesitation.

  They paced once or twice up and down the gravelled walks. Strange to say, though a sprinkling of dry snow powdered the ground under foot, the air itself was soft and balmy. Stranger still, Maisie noticed, almost without noticing it, that though they walked three abreast, only one pair of footprints—her own—lay impressed on the snow in a long trail when they turned at either end and re-paced the platform. Yolande and Hedda must step lightly indeed; or perhaps her own feet might be warmer
or thinner shod, so as to melt the light layer of snow more readily.

  The girls slipped their arms through hers. A little thrill coursed through her. Then, after three or four turns up and down the terrace, Yolande led the way quietly down the broad flight of steps in the direction of the church on the lower level. In that bright, broad moonlight Maisie went with them undeterred; the Hall was still alive with the glare of electric lights in bedroom windows; and the presence of the other girls, both wholly free from any signs of fear, took off all sense of terror or loneliness. They strolled on into the churchyard. Maisie’s eyes were now fixed on the new white tower, which merged in the silhouette against the starry sky into much the same grey and indefinite hue as the older parts of the building. Before she quite knew where she was, she found herself at the head of the worn stone steps which led into the vault by whose doors she had seen old Bessie sitting. In the pallid moonlight, with the aid of the greenish reflection from the snow, she could just read the words inscribed over the portal, the words that Yolande had repeated in the drawing-room, “Mors janua vitae.”

  Yolande moved down one step. Maisie drew back for the first time with a faint access of alarm. “You’re—you’re not going down there!” she exclaimed, catching her breath for a second.

  “Yes, I am,” her new friend answered in a calmly quiet voice. “Why not? We live here.”

  “You live here?” Maisie echoed, freeing her arms by a sudden movement and standing away from her mysterious friends with a tremulous shudder.

  “Yes, we live here,” Hedda broke in, without the slightest emotion. She said it in a voice of perfect calm, as one might say it of any house in a street in London.

  Maisie was far less terrified than she might have imagined beforehand would be the case under such unexpected conditions. The two girls were so simple, so natural, so strangely like herself, that she could not say she was really afraid of them. She shrank, it is true, from the nature of the door at which they stood, but she received the unearthly announcement that they lived there with scarcely more than a slight tremor of surprise and astonishment.

  “You will come in with us?” Hedda said in a gently enticing tone. “We went into your bedroom.”

  Maisie hardly liked to say no. They seemed so anxious to show her their home. With trembling feet she moved down the first step, and then the second. Yolande kept ever one pace in front of her. As Maisie reached the third step, the two girls, as if moved by one design, took her wrists in their hands, not unkindly, but coaxingly. They reached the actual doors of the vault itself—two heavy bronze valves, meeting in the centre. Each bore a ring for a handle, pierced through a Gorgon’s head embossed upon the surface. Yolande pushed them with her hand. They yielded instantly to her light touch, and opened inward. Yolande, still in front, passed from the glow of the moon to the gloom of the vault, which a ray of moonlight just descended obliquely. As she passed, for a second, a weird sight met Maisie’s eyes. Her face and hands and dress became momentarily self-luminous; but through them, as they glowed, she could descry within every bone and joint of her living skeleton, dimly shadowed in dark through the luminous haze that marked her body.

  Maisie drew back once more, terrified. Yet her terror was not quite what one could describe as fear: it was rather a vague sense of the profoundly mystical. “I can’t! I can’t!” she cried, with an appealing glance. “Hedda! Yolande! I cannot go with you.”

  Hedda held her hand tight, and almost seemed to force her. But Yolande, in front, like a mother with her child, turned round with a grave smile, “No, no,” she said reprovingly. “Let her come if she will, Hedda, of her own accord, not otherwise. The tower demands a willing victim.”

  Her hand on Maisie’s wrist was strong but persuasive. It drew her without exercising the faintest compulsion. “Will you come with us, dear?” she said, in that winning silvery tone which had captivated Maisie’s fancy from the very first moment they spoke together. Maisie gazed into her eyes. They were deep and tender. A strange resolution seemed to nerve her for the effort. “Yes, yes—I—will—come—with you,” she answered slowly.

  Hedda on one side, Yolande on the other, now went before her, holding her wrists in their grasp, but rather enticing than drawing her. As each reached the gloom, the same luminous appearance which Maisie had noticed before spread over their bodies, and the same weird skeleton shape showed faintly through their limbs in darker shadow. Maisie crossed the threshold with a convulsive gasp. As she crossed it she looked down at her own dress and body. They were semi-transparent, like the others’, though not quite so self-luminous; the framework of her limbs appeared within in less certain outline, yet quite dark and distinguishable.

  The doors swung to of themselves behind her. Those three stood alone in the vault of Wolverden.

  Alone, for a minute or two; and then, as her eyes grew accustomed to the grey dusk of the interior, Maisie began to perceive that the vault opened out into a large and beautiful hall or crypt, dimly lighted at first, but becoming each moment more vaguely clear and more dreamily definite. Gradually she could make out great rock-hewn pillars, Romanesque in their outline or dimly Oriental, like the sculptured columns in the caves of Ellora, supporting a roof of vague and uncertain dimensions, more or less strangely dome-shaped. The effect on the whole was like that of the second impression produced by some dim cathedral, such as Chartres or Milan, after the eyes have grown accustomed to the mellow light from the stained-glass windows, and have recovered from the blinding glare of the outer sunlight. But the architecture, if one may call it so, was more mosquelike and magical. She turned to her companions. Yolande and Hedda stood still by her side; their bodies were now self-luminous to a greater degree than even at the threshold; but the terrible transparency had disappeared altogether; they were once more but beautiful though strangely transfigured and more than mortal women.

  Then Maisie understood in her own soul, dimly, the meaning of those mystic words written over the portal—“Mors janua vitæ”—Death is the gate of life; and also the interpretation of that awful vision of death dwelling within them as they crossed the threshold; for through that gate they had passed to this underground palace.

  Her two guides still held her hands, one on either side. But they seemed rather to lead her on now, seductively and resistlessly, than to draw or compel her. As she moved in through the hall, with its endless vistas of shadowy pillars, seen now behind, now in dim perspective, she was gradually aware that many other people crowded its aisles and corridors. Slowly they took shape as forms more or less clad, mysterious, varied, and of many ages. Some of them wore flowing robes, half mediæval in shape, like the two friends who had brought her there. They looked like the saints on a stained-glass window. Others were girt merely with a light and floating Coan sash; while some stood dimly nude in the darker recesses of the temple or palace. All leaned eagerly forward with one mind as she approached, and regarded her with deep and sympathetic interest. A few of them murmured words—mere cabalistic sounds which at first she could not understand; but as she moved further into the hall, and saw at each step more clearly into the gloom, they began to have a meaning for her. Before long, she was aware that she understood the mute tumult of voices at once by some internal instinct. The Shades addressed her; she answered them. She knew by intuition what tongue they spoke; it was the Language of the Dead; and, by passing that portal with her two companions, she had herself become enabled both to speak and understand it.

  A soft and flowing tongue, this speech of the Nether World—all vowels it seemed, without distinguishable consonants; yet dimly recalling every other tongue, and compounded, as it were, of what was common to all of them. It flowed from those shadowy lips as clouds issue inchoate from a mountain valley; it was formless, uncertain, vague, but yet beautiful. She hardly knew, indeed, as it fell upon her senses, if it were sound or perfume.

  Through this tenuous world Maisie moved as in a dream, her two companions still cheering and guiding her. When the
y reached an inner shrine or chantry of the temple she was dimly conscious of more terrible forms pervading the background than any of those that had yet appeared to her. This was a more austere and antique apartment than the rest; a shadowy cloister, prehistoric in its severity; it recalled to her mind something indefinitely intermediate between the huge unwrought trilithons of Stonehenge and the massive granite pillars of Philae and Luxor. At the further end of the sanctuary a sort of Sphinx looked down on her, smiling mysteriously. At its base, on a rude megalithic throne, in solitary state, a High Priest was seated. He bore in his hand a wand or sceptre. All round, a strange court of half-unseen acolytes and shadowy hierophants stood attentive. They were girt, as she fancied, in what looked like leopards’ skins, or in the fells of some earlier prehistoric lion. These wore sabre-shaped teeth suspended by a string round their dusky necks; others had ornaments of uncut amber, or hatchets of jade threaded as collars on a cord of sinew. A few, more barbaric than savage in type, flaunted torques of gold as armlets and necklets.

  The High Priest rose slowly and held out his two hands, just level with his head, the palms turned outward. “You have brought a willing victim as Guardian of the Tower?” he asked, in that mystic tongue, of Yolande and Hedda.

  “We have brought a willing victim,” the two girls answered.

  The High Priest gazed at her. His glance was piercing. Maisie trembled less with fear than with a sense of strangeness, such as a neophyte might feel on being first presented at some courtly pageant. “You come of your own accord?” the Priest inquired of her in solemn accents.