‘No; I must go on tomorrow to Basle,’ I answered. And then, hesitating a little, I added: ‘You heard of me, also, I fear, in the church.’
‘In the church?’ he repeated.
‘Seeing the door open, I went in—from curiosity—as a traveller; just to look round for a moment and rest.’
‘Naturally.’
‘I—I had no idea, however, that I was not alone there. I would not for the world have intruded——’
‘I do not understand,’ he said, seeing me hesitate. ‘The church stands open all day long. It is free to everyone.’
‘Ah! I see he has not told you!’
The priest smiled but looked puzzled.
‘He? Whom do you mean?’
‘The other priest, mon père—your colleague. I regret to have broken in upon his meditations; but I had been so long in the church, and it was all so still and quiet, that it never occurred to me that there might be someone in the confessional.’
The priest looked at me in a strange, startled way.
‘In the confessional!’ he repeated, with a catching of his breath. ‘You saw someone—in the confessional?’
‘I am ashamed to say that, having thoughtlessly opened the door——’
‘You saw—what did you see?’
‘A priest, mon père.’
‘A priest! Can you describe him? Should you know him again? Was he pale, and tall, and gaunt, with long black hair?’
‘The same, undoubtedly.’
‘And his eyes—did you observe anything particular about his eyes?’
‘Yes: they were large, wild-looking, dark eyes, with a look in them—a look I cannot describe.’
‘A look of terror!’ cried the pastor, now greatly agitated. ‘A look of terror—of remorse—of despair!’
‘Yes, it was a look that might mean all that,’ I replied, my astonishment increasing at every word. ‘You seem troubled. Who is he?’
But instead of answering my question, the pastor took off his hat, looked up with a radiant, awe-struck face, and said:
‘All-merciful God, I thank Thee! I thank Thee that I am not mad, and that Thou hast sent this stranger to be my assurance and my comfort!’
Having said these words, he bowed his head, and his lips moved in silent prayer. When he again looked up, his eyes were full of tears.
‘My son,’ he said, laying his trembling hand upon my arm, ‘I owe you an explanation; but I cannot give it to you now. It must wait till I can speak more calmly—till tomorrow, when I must see you again. It involves a terrible story—a story peculiarly painful to myself—enough now if I tell you that I have seen the thing that you describe—seen it many times; and yet, because it has been visible to my eyes alone, I have doubted the evidence of my senses. The good people here believe that much sorrow and meditation have touched my brain. I have half believed it myself till now. But you—you have proved to me that I am the victim of no illusion.’
‘But in Heaven’s name,’ I exclaimed, ‘what do you suppose I saw in the confessional?’
‘You saw the likeness of one who, guilty also of a double murder, committed the deadly sin of sacrilege in that very spot, more than thirty years ago,’ replied the Père Chessez, solemnly.
‘Caspar Rufenacht!’
‘Ah! you have heard the story? Then I am spared the pain of telling it to you. That is well.’
I bent my head in silence. We walked together without another word to the wicket, and thence round to the churchyard gate. It was now twilight, and the first stars were out.
‘Goodnight, my son,’ said the pastor, giving me his hand. ‘Peace be with you.’
As he spoke the words, his grasp tightened—his eyes dilated—his whole countenance became rigid.
‘Look!’ he whispered. ‘Look where it goes!’
I followed the direction of his eyes, and there, with a freezing horror which I have no words to describe, I saw—distinctly saw through the deepening gloom—a tall, dark figure in a priest’s soutane and broad-brimmed hat, moving slowly across the path leading from the parsonage to the church. For a moment it seemed to pause—then passed on to the deeper shade, and disappeared.
‘You saw it?’ said the pastor.
‘Yes—plainly.’
He drew a deep breath; crossed himself devoutly; and leaned upon the gate, as if exhausted.
‘This is the third time I have seen it this year,’ he said. ‘Again I thank God for the certainty that I see a visible thing, and that His great gift of reason is mine unimpaired. But I would that He were graciously pleased to release me from the sight—the horror of it is sometimes more than I know how to bear. Goodnight.’
With this he again touched my hand; and so, seeing that he wished to be alone, I silently left him. At the Friedrich’s Thor I turned and looked back. He was still standing by the churchyard gate, just visible through the gloom of the fast deepening twilight.
I never saw the Père Chessez again. Save his own old servant, I was the last who spoke with him in this world. He died that night—died in his bed, where he was found next morning with his hands crossed upon his breast, and with a placid smile upon his lips, as if he had fallen asleep in the act of prayer.
As the news spread from house to house, the whole town rang with lamentations. The church-bells tolled; the carpenters left their work in the streets; the children, dismissed from school, went home weeping.
‘’Twill be the saddest Kermess in Rheinfelden tomorrow, mein Herr!’ said my good host of The Krone, as I shook hands with him at parting. ‘We have lost the best of pastors and of friends. He was a saint. If you had come but one day later, you would not have seen him!’
And with this he brushed his sleeve across his eyes, and turned away.
Every shutter was up, every blind down, every door closed, as I passed along the Friedrich’s Strasse about mid-day on my way to Basle; and the few townsfolk I met looked grave and downcast. Then I crossed the bridge, and, having shown my passport to the German sentry on the Baden side, I took one long, last farewell look at the little walled town as it lay sleeping in the sunshine by the river—knowing that I should see it no more.
Sister Johanna’s Story
IF YOU HAVE EVER heard of the Grödner Thal, then you will also have heard of the village of St Ulrich, of which I, Johanna Roederer, am a native. And if, as is more likely, you have never heard of either, then still, though without knowing it, many of you have, even from your earliest childhood, been familiar with the work by which, for many generations, we have lived and prospered. Your rocking-horse, your Noah’s ark, your first doll, came from St Ulrich—for the Grödner Thal is the children’s paradise, and supplies the little ones of all Europe with toys. In every house throughout the village—I might almost say in every house throughout the valley—you will find wood-carving, painting, or gilding perpetually going on; except only in the hay-making and harvest time, when all the world goes up to the hills to mow and reap, and breathe the mountain air. Nor do our carvers carve only grotesque toys. All the crucifixes that you see by the wayside, all the carved stalls and tabernacles, all the painted and gilded saints decorating screens and side altars in our Tyrolean churches, are the work of their hands.
After what I have said, you will no doubt have guessed that ours was a family of wood-carvers. My father, who died when my sister and I were quite little children, was a wood-carver. My mother was also a wood-carver, as were her mother and grandmother before her; and Katrine and I were of course brought up by her to the same calling. But, as it was necessary that one should look after the home duties, and as Katrine was always more delicate than myself, I gradually came to work less and less at the business; till at last, what with cooking, washing, mending, making, spinning, gardening, and so forth, I almost left it off altogether. Nor did Katrine work very hard at it, either; for, being so delicate, and so pretty, and so much younger than myself, she came, of course, to be a good deal spoiled and to have her own way in everything. Be
sides, she grew tired, naturally, of cutting nothing but cocks, hens, dogs, cats, cows, and goats; which were all our mother had been taught to make, and consequently, all she could teach to her children.
‘If I could carve saints and angels, like Ulrich, next door,’ Katrine used sometimes to say; ‘or if I might invent new beasts out of my own head, or if I might cut caricature nutcrackers of the Herr Pürger and Don Wian, I shouldn’t care if I worked hard all day; but I hate the cocks and hens, and I hate the dogs and cats, and I hate all the birds and beasts that ever went into the ark—and I only wish they had all been drowned in the Deluge, and not one left for a pattern!’
And then she would fling her tools away, and dance about the room like a wild creature, and mimic the Herr Pürger, who was the great wholesale buyer of all our St Ulrich ware, till even our mother, grave and sober woman as she was, could not help laughing, till the tears ran down her cheeks.
Now the Ulrich next door, of whom our little Katrine used to speak, was the elder of two brothers named Finazzer, and he lived in the house adjoining our own; for at St Ulrich, as in some of the neighbouring villages, one frequently sees two houses built together under one roof, with gardens and orchards surrounded by a common fence. Such a house was the Finazzer’s and ours; or I should rather say both houses were theirs, for they were our landlords, and we rented our cottage from them by the year.
Ulrich, named after the patron saint of our village, was a tall, brown, stalwart man, very grave, very reserved, very religious, and the finest wood sculptor in all the Grödner Thal. No Madonnas, no angels, could compare with his for heavenly grace and tenderness; and as for his Christs, a great foreign critic who came to St Ulrich some ten or twelve years ago said that no other modern artist with whose works he was acquainted could treat that subject with anything like the same dignity and pathos. But then, perhaps, no other modern artist went to work in the same spirit, or threw into it, not only the whole force of a very noble and upright character, but all the loftiest aspirations of a profoundly religious nature.
His younger brother, Alois, was a painter, fair-haired, light-hearted, sure-loving; as unlike Ulrich, both in appearance and disposition, as it is possible to conceive. At the time of which I am telling you, he was a student in Venice and had already been three years away from home. I used to dream dreams, and weave foolish romances about Alois and my little Katrine, picturing to myself how he would some day come home, in the flush, perhaps, of his first success, and finding her so beautiful and a woman grown, fall in love with her at first sight, and she with him; and the thought of this possibility became at last such a happy certainty in my mind, that when things began to work round in quite the other way, I could not bring myself to believe it. Yet so it was, and, much as I loved my darling, and quick-sighted as I had always been in everything that could possibly concern her, there was not a gossip in St Ulrich who did not see what was coming before I even suspected it.
When, therefore, my little Katrine came to me one evening in the orchard and told me, half laughing, half crying, that Ulrich Finazzer had that day asked her to be his wife, I was utterly taken by surprise.
‘I never dreamed that he would think of me, dear,’ she said, with her head upon my bosom. ‘He is so much too good and too clever for such a foolish birdie as poor little Katrine.’
‘But—but my birdie loves him?’ I said, kissing her bright hair.
She half lifted her head, half laughed through her tears, and said with some hesitation:
‘Oh, yes, I love him. I—I think I love him—and then I am quite sure he loves me, and that is more than enough.’
‘But, Katrine——’
She kissed me, to stop the words upon my lips.
‘But you know quite well, dear, that I never could love any lover half as much as I love you; and he knows it too, for I told him so just now, and now please don’t look grave, for I want to be very happy tonight, and I can’t bear it.’
And I also wanted her to be very happy, so I said all the loving things I could think of, and when we went in to supper we found Ulrich Finazzer waiting for us.
‘Dear Johanna,’ he said, taking me by both hands, ‘you are to be my sister now.’
And then he kissed me on the forehead. The words were few; but he had never spoken to me or looked at me so kindly before, and somehow my heart seemed to come into my throat, and I could not answer a word.
It was now the early summer time, and they were to be married in the autumn. Ulrich, meanwhile, had his hands full of work as usual, and there was, besides, one important task which he wanted to complete before his wedding. This task was a Christ, larger than life, which he designed as a gift to our parish church, then undergoing complete restoration. The committee of management had invited him in the first instance to undertake the work as an order, but Ulrich would not accept a price for it. He preferred to give it as a free-will offering, and he meant it to be the best piece of wood-sculpture that had ever yet left his hand. He had made innumerable designs for it both in clay and on paper, and separate studies from life for the limbs, hands, and feet. In short, it was to be no ordinary piece of mere conventional Grödner Thal work, but a work of art in the true sense of the word. In the meanwhile, he allowed no one to see the figure in progress—not even Katrine; but worked upon it with closed doors, and kept it covered with a linen cloth whenever his workshop was open.
So the summer time wore on, and the roses bloomed abundantly in our little garden, and the corn yellowed slowly on the hill-sides, and the wild white strawberry-blossoms turned to tiny strawberries, ruby-red, on every mossy bank among the fir-forests of the Seisser Alp. And still Ulrich laboured on at his great work, and sculptured many a gracious saint besides; and still the one object of his earthly worship was our little laughing Katrine.
Whether it was that, being so grave himself, and she so gay, he loved her the better for the contrast, I cannot tell; but his affection for her seemed to deepen daily. I watched it as one might watch the growth of some rare flower, and I wondered sometimes if she prized it as she ought. Yet I scarcely know how, child that she was, she should ever have risen to the heights or sounded the depths of such a nature as his. That she could not appreciate him, however, would have mattered little, if she had loved more. There was the pity of it. She had accepted him, as many a very young girl accepts her first lover, simply because he was her first. She was proud of his genius—proud of his preference—proud of the house, and the lands, and the worldly goods that were soon to be hers; but for that far greater wealth of love, she held it all too lightly.
Seeing this day after day, with the knowledge that nothing I could say would make things better, I fell, without being conscious of it, into a sad and silent way that arose solely out of my deep love for them both, and had no root of selfishness in it, as my own heart told me then, and tells me to this day.
In the midst of this time, so full of happiness for Ulrich, so full of anxiety for me, Alois Finazzer came home suddenly. We had been expecting him in a vague way ever since the spring, but the surprise when he walked in unannounced was as great as if we had not expected him at all.
He kissed us all on both cheeks, and sat down as if he had not been away for a day.
‘What a rich fellow I am!’ he said, joyously. ‘I left only a grave elder brother behind me when I went to Venice, and I come back finding two dear little sisters to welcome me home again.’
And then he told us that he had just taken the gold medal at the academy, that he had sold his prize picture for two hundred florins, and that he had a pocketful of presents for us all—a necklace for Katrine, a spectacle-case for our mother, and a housewife for myself. When he put the necklace round my darling’s neck he kissed her again, and praised her eyes, and said he should some day put his pretty little sister into one of his pictures.
He was greatly changed. He went away a curly-headed lad of eighteen; he came back a man, bearded and self-confident.
Three years
, at certain turning-points on the road of life, work with us more powerfully, whether for better or worse, than would ten years at any other period. I thought I liked Alois Finazzer better when he was those three years younger.
No so Katrine, however—not so our mother—not so the St Ulrich folk, all of whom were loud in his praise. Handsome, successful, gay, generous, he treated the men, laughed with the girls, and carried all before him.
As for Ulrich, he put his work aside, and cleared his brow, and made holiday for two whole days, going round with his brother from house to house, and telling everyone how Alois had taken the great gold medal in Venice. Proud and happy as he was, however, he was prouder and happier still when, some three or four days later, at a meeting of the church committee of management, the commune formally invited Alois to paint an altar-piece for the altar of San Marco at the price of three hundred florins.
That evening Ulrich invited us to supper, and we drank Alois’s health in a bottle of good Barbera wine. He was to stop at home now, instead of going back to Venice, and he was to have a large room at the back of Ulrich’s workshop for a studio.
‘I’ll bring your patron saint into my picture if you will sit for her portrait, Katrine,’ said Alois, laughingly.
And Katrine blushed and said, ‘Yes’; and Ulrich was delighted; and Alois pulled out his pocket-book, and began sketching her head on the spot.
‘Only you must try to think of serious things, and not laugh when you are sitting for a saint, my little Mädchen,’ said Ulrich, tenderly; whereupon Katrine blushed still more deeply, and Alois, without looking up from his drawing, promised that they would both be as grave as judges whenever the sittings were going on.
And now there began for me a period of such misery that even at this distance of time I can scarcely bear to speak or think of it. There, day after day, was Alois painting in his new studio, and Katrine sitting to him for Santa Catarina, while Ulrich, unselfish, faithful, trustful, worked on in the next room, absorbed in his art, and not only unconscious of treachery, but incapable of conceiving it as a possibility. How I tried to watch over her, and would fain have watched over her still more closely if I could, is known to myself alone. My object was to be with her throughout all those fatal sittings; Alois’s object was to make the appointments for hours when my household duties compelled me to remain at home. He soon found out that my eyes were opened. From that moment it was a silent, unacknowledged fight between us, and we were always fighting it.
THE PHANTOM COACH: Collected Ghost Stories Page 28
