by John Buchan
Trouble began under the snows of Pelion as they turned the north end of Euboea. On the morning of the first Monday in April the light winds died away, and foul weather came out of the northwest. By midday it was half a gale, and in those yeasty shallow seas, with an iron coast to port and starboard, their position was dangerous. The nearest harbour was twenty miles distant, and neither of the crew had ever been there before. With the evening the gale increased, and it was decided to get out of that maze of rocky islands to the safer deeps of the Ægean.
It was a hard night for the two of them, and there was no chance of sleep. More by luck than skill they escaped the butt of Skiathos, and the first light found them far to the south-east among the long tides of the North Ægean. They ran close-reefed before the gale, and all morning with decks awash nosed and plunged in seas which might have been the wintry Atlantic. It was not till the afternoon that the gale seemed to blow itself out and two soaked and chilly mortals could relax their vigil. Soon bacon was frizzling on the cuddy-stove, and hot coffee and dry clothes restored them to moderate comfort.
The sky cleared, and in bright sunlight, with the dregs of the gale behind him, Vernon steered for the nearest land, an island of which he did not trouble to read the name, but which the chart showed to possess good anchorage. Late in the evening, when the light was growing dim, they came into a little bay carved from the side of a hill. They also came into fog. The wind had dropped utterly, and the land which they saw was only an outline in the haze. When they cast anchor the fog was rolling like a tide over the sea, and muffling their yards. They spent a busy hour or two, repairing the damage of the storm, and then the two of them made such a meal as befits those who have faced danger together. Afterwards Vernon, as his custom was, sat alone in the stern, smoking and thinking his thoughts. He wrote up his diary with a ship’s lantern beside him, while the mist hung about him low and soft as an awning.
He had leisure now for the thought which had all day been at the back of his mind. The night — the great night — had passed and there had been no dream. The adventure for which all his life he had been preparing himself had vanished into the Ægean tides. The hour when the revelation should have come had been spent in battling with the storm, when a man lives in the minute at grips with too urgent realities.
His first mood was one of dismal relaxedness. He felt as useless as an unstrung bow. I, the only man to whom he had ever confided his secret, had been right, and the long vigil had ended in fiasco. He tried to tell himself that it was a relief, that an old folly was over, but he knew that deep down in his heart there was bitter disappointment. The fates had prepared the stage, and rung up the curtain, and lo! there was no play. He had been fooled, and somehow the zest and savour of life had gone from him. After all, no man can be strung high and then find his preparations idle without suffering a cruel recoil.
And then anger came to stiffen him — anger at himself. What a God-forsaken ass he had been, frittering away his best years in following a phantom! . . . In his revulsion he loathed the dream which he had cherished so long. He began to explain it away with the common sense which on my lips he had accounted blasphemy. . . . The regular seasonal occurrence was his own doing — he had expected it and it had come — a mere case of subjective compulsion. . . . The fact that each year the revelation had moved one room nearer was also the result of his willing it to be so, for subconsciously he must have desired to hasten the consummation. . . . He went through every detail, obstinately providing some rationalistic explanation for each. I do not think he can have satisfied himself, but he was in the mood to deface his idols, and one feeling surged above all others — that he was done with fancies now and for ever. He has told me that the thing he longed for chiefly at that moment was to have me beside him that he might make formal recantation.
By-and-by he argued himself into some philosophy. He had dallied certain years, but he was still young, and the world was before him. He had kept his body and mind in hard training, and that at any rate was not wasted, though the primal purpose had gone. He was a normal man now among normal men, and it was his business to prove himself. He thought in his Calvinistic way that the bogus vision might have been sent to him for a purpose — the thing might be hallucination, but the askesis which it had entailed was solid gain. . . . He fetched from his locker the little book in which he had chronicled his inner life, and wrote in it “Finis.” Then he locked it and flung the key overboard. The volume would be kept at Severns to remind him of his folly, but it would never be opened by him.
By this time he was his own master again. He would sail for England next morning and get hold of me and make a plan for his life.
He was now conscious for the first time of his strange environment. The boat was in a half-moon of bay in an island of which he had omitted to notice the name but whose latitude and longitude he roughly knew. The night was close around him like a shell, for the fog had grown thicker, though the moon behind it gave it an opaque sheen. It was an odd place in which to be facing a crisis. . . .
His thoughts ran fast ahead to the career which he must shape from the ruins of his dream. He was too late for the Bar. Business might be the best course — he had big interests in the north of England which would secure him a footing, and he believed that he had the kind of mind for administration. . . . Or politics? There were many chances for a young man in the confused post-bellum world. . . .
He was absorbed in his meditations and did not hear the sound of oars or the grating of a boat alongside. Suddenly he found a face looking at him in the ring of lamplight — an old bearded face curiously wrinkled. The eyes, which were shrewd and troubled, scanned him for a second or two, and then a voice spoke:
“Will the Signor come with me?” it said in French.
Vernon, amazed at this apparition, which had come out of the mist, could only stare.
“Will the Signor come with me?” the voice spoke again. “We have grievous need of a man.”
Vernon unconsciously spoke not in French but in Greek.
“Who the devil are you, and where do you come from?”
“I come from the House. I saw you enter the bay before the fog fell. Had there been no fog, they would not have let me come to you.”
“Who are ‘they’?” Vernon asked.
But the old man shook his head. “Come with me and I will tell you. It is a long story.”
“But what do you want me to do? Confound it, I’m not going off with a man I never saw before who can’t tell me what he wants.”
The old man shrugged his shoulders despairingly. “I have no words,” he said. “But Mademoiselle Élise is waiting at the jetty. Come to her at any rate and she will reason with you.”
Vernon — as you will admit, if I have made his character at all clear to you — had no instinct for melodrama. He had nothing in him of the knight-errant looking for adventure, and this interruption out of the fog and the sea rather bored him than otherwise. But he was too young to be able to refuse such an appeal. He went below and fetched his revolver and an electric torch which he stuffed into a trouser pocket. He cried to the Epirote to expect him when he saw him, for he was going ashore.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll come and see what the trouble is.”
He dropped over the yacht’s side into the cockleshell of a boat, and the old man took up the sculls. The yacht must have anchored nearer land than he had thought, for in five minutes they had touched a shelving rock. Somebody stood there with a lantern which made a dull glow in the fog.
Vernon made out a middle-aged woman with the air and dress of a lady’s maid. She held the lantern close to him for a moment, and then turned wearily to the other. “Fool, Mitri!” she cried. “You have brought a peasant.”
“Nay,” said the old man, “he is no peasant. He is a Signor, I tell you.”
The woman again passed the light of her lantern over Vernon’s face and figure. “His dress is a peasant’s, but such clothes may be a nobleman’s w
him. I have heard it of the English.”
“I am English,” said Vernon in French.
She turned on him with a quick movement of relief.
“You are English . . . and a gentleman? But I know nothing of you . . . only that you have come out of the sea. Up in the House we women are alone, and my mistress has death to face, or worse than death. We have no claim on you, and if you give us your service it means danger — oh, what danger! See, the boat is there. You can return in it and go away, and forget that you have been near this accursed place. But oh, Monsieur, if you hope for Heaven and have pity on a defenceless angel, you will not leave us.”
Vernon’s blood was slow to stir, and as I have said, he had no instinct for melodrama. This gesticulating French maid was like something out of an indifferent play.
“Who is your mistress?” he asked. “Did she send you for me?”
The woman flung up her hands.
“I will speak the truth. My mistress does not know you are here. Only Mitri and I saw you. She will not ask help, for she is foolishly confident. She is proud and fearless, and will not believe the evidence of her eyes. She must be saved in spite of herself. I fear for her and also for myself, for the whole House is doomed.”
“But, Mademoiselle, you cannot expect me to intrude uninvited on your mistress. What is her name? What do you want me to do?”
She clutched his arm and spoke low and rapidly in his ear.
“She is the last of her line, you must know — a girl with a wild estate and a father dead these many months. She is good and gracious, as I can bear witness, but she is young and cannot govern the wolves who are the men of these parts. They have a long hatred of her house, and now they have it rumoured that she is a witch who blights the crops and slays the children. . . . Once, twice, they have cursed our threshold and made the blood mark on the door. We are prisoners now, you figure. They name her Basilissa, meaning the Queen of Hell, and there is no babe but will faint with fright if it casts eyes on her, and she as mild and innocent as Mother Mary. . . . The word has gone round to burn the witch out, for the winter has been cruel and they blame their sorrows on her. The hour is near, and unless salvation comes she will go to God in the fire.”
There was something in the hoarse, excited voice which forbade Vernon to dismiss lightly this extraordinary tale. The woman was patently terrified and sincere. It might be a trap, but he had his pistol, and from an old man and a woman he had nothing to fear. On the other hand, there might be some desperate need which he could not disregard. It seemed to him that he was bound to inquire further.
“I am willing to go to your mistress,” he said, and the woman, murmuring “God’s mercy,” led the way up a steep causeway to some rocky steps cut in a tamarisk thicket.
She stopped half-way to whisper an injunction to go quietly. “They cannot see us in this blessed fog,” she whispered, “but they may hear us.” Then to Vernon: “They watch us like wild beasts, Monsieur; their sentries do not permit us to leave the House, but this night the kind God has fooled them. But they cannot be far off, and they have quick ears.”
The three crept up the rock staircase made slippery by the heavy mist. Presently a great wall of masonry rose above them, and what seemed the aperture of a door. “Once,” the woman whispered, “there were three such posterns, but two were walled up by my lady’s father — walled up within, with the doors left standing. This our enemies do not know, and they watch all three, but this the least, for it looks unused. Behold their work!”
Vernon saw that tall bundles of brushwood had been laid around the door, and that these had with difficulty been pushed back when it was opened.
“But what . . . ?” he began.
“It means that they would burn us,” she hissed. “Now, Monsieur, do you believe my tale, and, believing, does your courage fail you?”
To Vernon, shy, placid, a devotee of all the conventions, it was beginning to seem a monstrous thing to enter this strange house at the bidding of two servants, primed with a crazy tale, to meet an owner who had given no sign of desiring his presence. A woman, too — apparently a young woman. The thing was hideously embarrassing, the more so as he suddenly realized that he was barefooted, and clad in his old jersey and corduroys. I think he would have drawn back except for the sight of the fagots — that and the woman’s challenge to his courage. He had been “dared” like a schoolboy, and after twenty-four hours fighting with storms and the shattering of the purpose of a lifetime he was in that half-truculent, half-reckless mood which is prone to accept a challenge. There was business afoot, it appeared, ugly business.
“Go on. I will see your mistress,” he said.
With a key the old man unlocked the door. The lock must have been recently oiled, for it moved easily. The three now climbed a staircase which seemed to follow the wall of a round tower. Presently they came into a stone hall with ancient hangings like the banners in a church. From the open frame of the lantern a second was kindled, and the two lights showed a huge desolate place with crumbling mosaics on the floor and plaster dropping from the walls and cornices. There was no furniture of any kind, and the place smelt damp and chilly like a vault.
“These are unused chambers,” the woman said, and her voice was no longer hushed but high-pitched with excitement. “We live only on the landward side.”
Another heavy door was unlocked, and they entered a corridor where the air blew warmer, and there was a hint of that indescribable scent which comes from human habitation. The woman stopped and consulted in whispers with the old man. Now that she had got Vernon inside, her nervousness seemed to have increased. She turned to him at last:
“I must prepare my mistress. If Monsieur will be so good he will wait here till I fetch him.”
She opened a door and almost pushed Vernon within. He found himself in black darkness, while the flicker of the lantern vanished round a bend in the corridor.
CHAPTER XIV.
From his pocket Vernon drew his electric torch and flashed it round the room in which he found himself. It was the extreme opposite of the empty stone hall, for it was heavily decorated and crowded with furniture. Clearly no one had used it lately, for dust lay on everything, and the shutters of the windows had not been unbarred for months. It had the air, indeed, of a lumber-room, into which furniture had been casually shot. The pieces were, for the most part, fine and costly. There were several Spanish cabinets, a wonderful red-lacquer couch, quantities of Oriental rugs which looked good, and a litter of Chinese vases and antique silver lamps.
But it was not the junk which filled it that caught Vernon’s eye. It was the walls, which had been painted and frescoed in one continuous picture. At first he thought it was a Procession of the Hours or the Seasons, but when he brought his torch to bear on it he saw that it was something very different. The background was a mountain glade, and on the lawns and beside the pools of a stream figures were engaged in wild dances. Pan and his satyrs were there, and a bevy of nymphs, and strange figures half animal, half human. The thing was done with immense skill — the slanted eyes of the fauns, the leer in a contorted satyr face, the mingled lust and terror of the nymphs, the horrid obscenity of the movements. It was a carnival of bestiality that stared from the four walls. The man who conceived it had worshipped darker gods even than Priapus.
There were other things which Vernon noted in the jumble of the room. A head of Aphrodite, for instance — Pandemos, not Urania. A broken statuette of a boy which made him sick. A group of little figures which were a miracle in the imaginative degradation of the human form. Not the worst relics from the lupanars of Pompeii compared with these in sheer subtlety of filth. And all this in a shuttered room stifling with mould and disuse.
There was a door at the farther end which he found unlocked. The room beyond was like a mortuary — the walls painted black and undecorated save for one small picture. There was a crack in the shutters here, and perhaps a broken window, for a breath of the clean sea air met him. The
re was no furniture except an oblong piece of yellow marble which seemed from the rams’ heads and cornucopias to be an old altar. He turned his torch on the solitary picture. It represented the stock scene of Salome with the head of John the Baptist, a subject which bad artists have made play with for the last five hundred years. But this was none of the customary daubs, but the work of a master — a perverted, perhaps a crazy, genius. The woman’s gloating face, the passion of the hands caressing the pale flesh, the stare of the dead eyes, were wonderful and awful. If the first room had been the shrine of inhuman lust, this had been the chapel of inhuman cruelty.
He opened another door and found himself in a little closet, lined to the ceiling with books. He knew what he would find on the shelves. The volumes were finely bound, chiefly in vellum, and among them were a certain number of reputable classics. But most belonged to the backstairs of literature — the obscenities of Greek and of silver Latin, the diseased sidewalks of the Middle Ages, the aberrations of the moderns. It was not common pornography; the collection had been made by some one who was a scholar in vice.
Vernon went back to the first room, nauseated and angry. He must get out of this damned place, which was, or had been, the habitation of devils. What kind of owner could such a house possess? The woman had said that it was a young girl, as virtuous as the Virgin. But, great God! how could virtue dwell in such an environment?
