“Whar is this fool goin’?” he demanded angrily of space. “To the graveyard, I declar’, ez ef I war a harnt fur true, an’ buried sure enough. An’ I wish I war. I wish I war.”
He realized, after a moment’s consideration, that he had been unconsciously actuated by the chance of meeting the wagon, returning by this route from the cross-roads’ store. He was tired, disheartened; his spirit was spent; he would be glad of the lift. He reflected, however, that he must needs wait some time, for this was the date of a revival-meeting at the little church, and the distillers’ wagon would lag, that its belated night journey might not be subjected to the scrutiny and comment of the church-goers. Indeed, even now Walter Wyatt saw in the distance the glimmer of a lantern, intimating homeward-bound worshipers not yet out of sight.
“The saints kep’ it up late ter-night,” he commented.
He resolved to wait till the roll of wheels should tell of the return of the moonshiners’ empty wagon.
He crossed the river on the little footbridge and took his way languidly along the road toward the deserted church. He was close to the hedge that grew thick and rank about the little inclosure when he suddenly heard the sound of lamentation from within. He drew back precipitately, with a sense of sacrilege, but the branches of the unpruned growth had caught in his sleeve, and he sought to disengage the cloth without such rustling stir as might disturb or alarm the mourner, who had evidently lingered here, after the dispersal of the congregation, for a moment’s indulgence of grief and despair. He had a glimpse through the shaking boughs and the flickering mist of a woman’s figure kneeling on the crude red clods of a new-made grave. A vague, anxious wonder as to the deceased visited him, for in the sparsely settled districts a strong community sense prevails. Suddenly in a choking gust of sobs and burst of tears he recognized his own name in a voice of which every inflection was familiar. For a moment his heart seemed to stand still. His brain whirled with a realization of this unforeseen result of the fantastic story of his death in Eskaqua Cove, which the moonshiners, on the verge of detection and arrest, had circulated in Tanglefoot as a measure of safety. They had fancied that when the truth was developed it would be easy enough to declare the men drunk or mistaken. The “revenuers” by that time would be far away, and the pervasive security, always the sequence of a raid, successful or otherwise, would once more promote the manufacture of the brush whisky. The managers of the moon-shining interest had taken measures to guard Wyatt’s aged father from this fantasy of woe, but they had not dreamed that the mountain coquette might care. He himself stood appalled that this ghastly fable should delude his heart’s beloved, amazed that it should cost her one sigh, one sob. Her racking paroxysms of grief over this gruesome figment of a grave he was humiliated to hear, he was woeful to see. He felt that he was not worth one tear of the floods with which she bewept his name, uttered in every cadence of tender regret that her melancholy voice could compass. It must cease, she must know the truth at whatever cost. He broke through the hedge and stood in the flicker of the moonlight before her, pale, agitated, all unlike his wonted self.
She did not hear, amid the tumult of her weeping, the rustling of the boughs, but some subtle sense took cognizance of his presence. She half rose, and with one hand holding back her dense yellow hair, which had fallen forward on her forehead, she looked up at him fearfully, tremulously, with all the revolt of the corporeal creature for the essence of the mysterious incorporeal. For a moment he could not speak. So much he must needs explain. The next instant he was whelmed in the avalanche of her words.
“Te hev kem!” she exclaimed in a sort of shrill ecstasy. “Te hev kem so far ter hear the word that I would give my life ter hev said before. Te knowed it in heaven! an’ how like ye ter kem ter gin me the chanst ter say it at last! How like the good heart of ye, worth all the hearts on yearth—an’ buried hyar!”
With her open palm she smote the insensate clods with a gesture of despair. Then she went on in a rising tide of tumultuous emotion. “I love ye! Oh, I always loved ye! I never keered fur nobody else! an’ I war tongue-tied, an’ full of fool pride, an’ faultin’ ye fur yer ways; an’ I wouldn’t gin ye the word I knowed ye war wantin’ ter hear. But now I kin tell the pore ghost of ye—I kin tell the pore, pore ghost!”
She buried her swollen, tear-stained face in her hands, and shook her head to and fro with the realization of the futility of late repentance. As she once more lifted her eyes, she was obviously surprised to see him still standing there, and the crisis seemed to restore to him the faculty of speech.
“Minta Elladine,” he said huskily and prosaically, “I ain’t dead!”
She sprang to her feet and stood gazing at him, intent and quivering.
“I be truly alive an’ kicking an’ ez worthless ez ever,” he went on.
She said not a word, but bent and pallid, and, quaking in every muscle, stood peering beneath her hand, which still held back her hair.
“It’s all a mistake,” he urged. “This ain’t no grave. The top war dug a leetle ter turn off a revenuer’s suspicions o’ the moonshiners. They put that tale out.”
Still, evidently on the verge of collapse, she did not speak.
“Ye needn’t be afeared ez I be goin’ ter take fur true all I hearn ye say; folks air gin ter vauntin’ the dead,” he paused for a moment, remembering the caustic comments over the deal of the cards, then added, “though I reckon I hev hed some cur’ous ’speriences ez a harnt.”
She suddenly threw up both arms with a shrill scream, half nervous exhaustion, half inexpressible delight. She swayed to and fro, almost fainting, her balance failing. He caught her in his arms, and she leaned sobbing against his breast.
“I stand ter every word of it,” she cried, her voice broken and lapsed from control. “I love ye, an’ I despise all the rest!”
“I be powerful wild,” he suggested contritely.
“I ain’t keerin’ ef ye be ez wild ez a deer.”
“But I’m goin’ to quit gamesome company an’ playin’ kyerds an’ sech. I expec’ ter mend my ways now,” he promised eagerly.
“Ye kin mend ’em or let ’em stay tore, jes ez ye please,” she declared recklessly. “I ain’t snatched my lovyer from the jaws o’ death ter want him otherwise; ye be plumb true-hearted, I know.”
“I mought ez well hev been buried in this grave fer the last ten year’ fer all the use I hev been,” he protested solemnly; “but I hev learnt a lesson through bein’ a harnt fer a while—I hev jes kem ter life. I’m goin’ ter live now. I’ll make myself some use in the world, an’ fust off I be goin’ ter hinder the murder of a man what they hev got trapped up yander at the still.”
This initial devoir of his reformation, however, Wyatt found no easy matter. The event had been craftily planned to seem an accident, a fall from a cliff in pursuing the wagon, and only the most ardent and cogent urgency on Wyatt’s part prevailed at length. He argued that this interpretation of the disaster would not satisfy the authorities. To take the raider’s life insured discovery, retribution. But as he had been brought to the still in the night, it was obvious that if he were conveyed under cover of darkness and by roundabout trails within striking distance of the settlements, he could never again find his way to the locality in the dense wilderness. In his detention he had necessarily learned nothing fresh, for the only names he could have overheard had long been obnoxious to suspicion of moonshining, and afforded no proof. Thus humanity, masquerading as caution, finally triumphed, and the officer, blindfolded, was conducted through devious and winding ways many miles distant, and released within a day’s travel of the county town.
Walter Wyatt was scarcely welcomed back to life by the denizens of the cove generally with the enthusiasm attendant on the first moments of his resuscitation, so to speak. He never forgot the solemn ecstasy of that experience, and in later years he was wont to ann
ul any menace of discord with his wife by the warning, half jocose, half tender: “Ye hed better mind; ye’ll be sorry some day fur treatin’ me so mean. Remember, I hev viewed ye a-weepin’ over my grave before now.”
A reformation, however complete and salutary, works no change of identity, and although he developed into an orderly, industrious, law-abiding citizen, his prankish temperament remained recognizable in the fantastic fables which he delighted to recount at some genial fireside of what he had seen and heard as a ghost.
“Pears like, Watt, ye hed more experiences whenst dead than living” said an auditor, as these stories multiplied.
“I did, fur a fack,” Watt protested. “I war a powerful onchancy, onquiet ghost. I even did my courtin’ whilst in my reg’lar line o’ business a-hanatin’ a graveyard.”
THE DREAM-GOWN OF THE JAPANESE AMBASSADOR, by Brander Matthews
(1896.)
I
After arranging the Egyptian and Mexican pottery so as to contrast agreeably with the Dutch and the German beer-mugs on the top of the bookcase that ran along one wall of the sitting-room, Cosmo Waynflete went back into the bedroom and took from a half-empty trunk the little cardboard boxes in which he kept the collection of playing-cards, and of all manner of outlandish equivalents for these simple instruments of fortune, picked up here and there during his two or three years of dilettante travelling in strange countries. At the same time he brought out a Japanese crystal ball, which he stood upon its silver tripod, placing it on a little table in one of the windows on each side of the fireplace; and there the rays of the westering sun lighted it up at once into translucent loveliness.
The returned wanderer looked out of the window and saw on one side the graceful and vigorous tower of the Madison Square Garden, with its Diana turning in the December wind, while in the other direction he could look down on the frozen paths of Union Square, only a block distant, but as far below him almost as though he were gazing down from a balloon. Then he stepped back into the sitting-room itself, and noted the comfortable furniture and wood-fire crackling in friendly fashion on the hearth, and his own personal belongings, scattered here and there as though they were settling themselves for a stay. Having arrived from Europe only that morning, he could not but hold himself lucky to have found these rooms taken for him by the old friend to whom he had announced his return, and with whom he was to eat his Christmas dinner that evening. He had not been on shore more than six or seven hours, and yet the most of his odds and ends were unpacked and already in place as though they belonged in this new abode. It was true that he had toiled unceasingly to accomplish this, and as he stood there in his shirt-sleeves, admiring the results of his labors, he was conscious also that his muscles were fatigued, and that the easy-chair before the fire opened its arms temptingly.
He went again into the bedroom, and took from one of his many trunks a long, loose garment of pale-gray silk. Apparently this beautiful robe was intended to serve as a dressing-gown, and as such Cosmo Waynflete utilized it immediately. The ample folds fell softly about him, and the rich silk itself seemed to be soothing to his limbs, so delicate was its fibre and so carefully had it been woven. Around the full skirt there was embroidery of threads of gold, and again on the open and flowing sleeves. With the skilful freedom of Japanese art the pattern of this decoration seemed to suggest the shrubbery about a spring, for there were strange plants with huge leaves broadly outlined by the golden threads, and in the midst of them water was seen bubbling from the earth and lapping gently over the edge of the fountain. As the returned wanderer thrust his arms into the dressing-gown with its symbolic embroidery on the skirt and sleeves, he remembered distinctly the dismal day when he had bought it in a little curiosity-shop in Nuremberg; and as he fastened across his chest one by one the loops of silken cord to the three coins which served as buttons down the front of the robe, he recalled also the time and the place where he had picked up each of these pieces of gold and silver, one after another. The first of them was a Persian daric, which he had purchased from a dealer on the Grand Canal in Venice; and the second was a Spanish peso struck under Philip II. at Potosi, which he had found in a stall on the embankment of the Quay Voltaire, in Paris; and the third was a York shilling, which he had bought from the man who had turned it up in ploughing a field that sloped to the Hudson near Sleepy Hollow.
Having thus wrapped himself in this unusual dressing-gown with its unexpected buttons of gold and silver, Cosmo Waynflete went back into the front room. He dropped into the arm-chair before the fire. It was with a smile of physical satisfaction that he stretched out his feet to the hickory blaze.
The afternoon was drawing on, and in New York the sun sets early on Christmas day. The red rays shot into the window almost horizontally, and they filled the crystal globe with a curious light. Cosmo Waynflete lay back in his easy-chair, with his Japanese robe about him, and gazed intently at the beautiful ball which seemed like a bubble of air and water. His mind went back to the afternoon in April, two years before, when he had found that crystal sphere in a Japanese shop within sight of the incomparable Fugiyama.
II
As he peered into its transparent depths, with his vision focused upon the spot of light where the rays of the setting sun touched it into flame, he was but little surprised to discover that he could make out tiny figures in the crystal. For the moment this strange thing seemed to him perfectly natural. And the movements of these little men and women interested him so much that he watched them as they went to and fro, sweeping a roadway with large brooms. Thus it happened that the fixity of his gaze was intensified. And so it was that in a few minutes he saw with no astonishment that he was one of the group himself, he himself in the rich and stately attire of a samurai. From the instant that Cosmo Waynflete discovered himself among the people whom he saw moving before him, as his eyes were fastened on the illuminated dot in the transparent ball, he ceased to see them as little figures, and he accepted them as of the full stature of man. This increase in their size was no more a source of wonderment to him than it had been to discern himself in the midst of them. He accepted both of these marvellous things without question—indeed, with no thought at all that they were in any way peculiar or abnormal. Not only this, but thereafter he seemed to have transferred his personality to the Cosmo Waynflete who was a Japanese samurai and to have abandoned entirely the Cosmo Waynflete who was an American traveller, and who had just returned to New York that Christmas morning. So completely did the Japanese identity dominate that the existence of the American identity was wholly unknown to him. It was as though the American had gone to sleep in New York at the end of the nineteenth century, and had waked a Japanese in Nippon in the beginning of the eighteenth century.
With his sword by his side—a Murimasa blade, likely to bring bad luck to the wearer sooner or later—he had walked from his own house in the quarter of Kioto which is called Yamashina to the quarter which is called Yoshiwara, a place of ill repute, where dwell women of evil life, and where roysterers and drunkards come by night. He knew that the sacred duty of avenging his master’s death had led him to cast off his faithful wife so that he might pretend to riot in debauchery at the Three Sea-Shores. The fame of his shameful doings had spread abroad, and it must soon come to the ears of the man whom he wished to take unawares. Now he was lying prone in the street, seemingly sunk in a drunken slumber, so that men might see him and carry the news to the treacherous assassin of his beloved master. As he lay there that afternoon, he revolved in his mind the devices he should use to make away with his enemy when the hour might be ripe at last for the accomplishment of his holy revenge. To himself he called the roll of his fellow-ronins, now biding their time, as he was, and ready always to obey his orders and to follow his lead to the death, when at last the sun should rise on the day of vengeance.
So he gave no heed to the scoffs and the jeers of those who passed along the street, laughing him to
scorn as they beheld him lying there in a stupor from excessive drink at that inordinate hour of the day. And among those who came by at last was a man from Satsuma, who was moved to voice the reproaches of all that saw this sorry sight.
“Is not this Oishi Kuranosuke,” said the man from Satsuma, “who was a councillor of Asano Takumi no Kami, and who, not having the heart to avenge his lord, gives himself up to women and wine? See how he lies drunk in the public street! Faithless beast! Fool and craven! Unworthy of the name of a samurai!”
And with that the man from Satsuma trod on him as he lay there, and spat upon him, and went away indignantly. The spies of Kotsuke no Suke heard what the man from Satsuma had said, and they saw how he had spurned the prostrate samurai with his foot; and they went their way to report to their master that he need no longer have any fear of the councillors of Asano Takumi no Kami. All this the man, lying prone in the dust of the street, noted; and it made his heart glad, for then he made sure that the day was soon coming when he could do his duty at last and take vengeance for the death of his master.
III
He lay there longer than he knew, and the twilight settled down at last, and the evening stars came out. And then, after a while, and by imperceptible degrees, Cosmo Waynflete became conscious that the scene had changed and that he had changed with it. He was no longer in Japan, but in Persia. He was no longer lying like a drunkard in the street of a city, but slumbering like a weary soldier in a little oasis by the side of a spring in the midst of a sandy desert. He was asleep, and his faithful horse was unbridled that it might crop the grass at will.
The Fourth Ghost Story MEGAPACK: 25 Classic Haunts! Page 11
