Vintage Vampire Stories

by Robert Eighteen-Bisang

  As for the strange lady with Madonna face, Adams was far too shrewd of a man of the world to make know the extraordinary circumstance to every one. He told Tony Jeratczesco, and inquiries were made; but no such person had been seen or heard of, and so the matter dropped; and it is only within the last few months that Mr. Adams, now retired from his delicate and difficult profession of valet and living in the neighbourhood of Newmarket, could be prevailed upon to give a detailed account of all the strange facts connected with the death of his master, show Hippy Rowan’s diary, and complete his story by producing a photograph which he himself had taken of the dead man’s neck, on which is plainly visible the imprint of the Kiss of Judas.

  Mary Elizabeth Braddon: Herself (1894)

  Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1837-1915) was the most popular and prolific of the Victorian “sensation” novelists. Her best seller, Lady Audley’s Secret, which was published in 1862, was followed by more than eighty novels. The exact number is not known because her husband, John Maxwell, published some of her work under a variety of pseudonyms.

  Braddon was a close friend of Bram and Florence Stoker for many years. Braddon wrote to Bram on 23 June, 1897, to congratulate him on the success of Dracula. Her letter concluded: “We will talk of it more anon, when I have soberly read and meditated thereupon. I have done my humdrum little story of transfusion in ‘The Good Lady Ducayne’—but your ‘bloofer lady....’”

  “Good Lady Ducayne” debuted in the Strand Magazine in February 1896, and has been reprinted dozens of times. One year earlier, she wrote a grimmer, more atmospheric tale of vampirism that has escaped popular attention. “Herself ” was first published in the Sheffied Weekly Telegraph on 17 November, 1894. Its protagonist, Lota, is a rebellious and independent woman in the tradition of heroines such as Lucy Audley (who, incidentally, may be one of the models for Bram Stoker’s hapless heroine, Lucy Westenra).

  CHAPTER I

  “And you intend to keep the Orange Grove for your own occupation, Madam,” interrogates the lawyer gravely, with his downward-looking eyes completely hidden under bushy brows.

  “Decidedly,” answered my friend. “Why, the Orange Grove is the very best part of my fortune. It seems almost a special Providence, don’t you know, Helen,” pursued Lota, turning to me, “that my dear old grandfather should have made himself a winter home in the south. There are the doctors always teasing me about my weak chest, and there is a lonely house and gardens and orange groves waiting for me in a climate invented on purpose for weak chests. I shall live there every winter of my life, Mr. Dean.”

  The eminently respectable solicitor allowed a lapse of silence before he replied.

  “It is not a lucky house, Miss Hammond.”

  “How not lucky?”

  “Your grandfather only lived to spend one winter in it. He was in very good health when he went there in December—a strong, sturdy old man—and when he sent for me in February to prepare the will which made you his sole heiress, I was shocked at the change in him—broken—wasted—nerves shattered—a mere wreck.

  “That was very sad; but surely you would not blame a lovely villa in Italy,” smiling down at a photograph in her lap, the picture of the typical southern villa, French windows, verandah, balconies, tower, terraces, garden, and fountain, “for the sudden break-up of an elderly constitution. I have heard that old men of very active habits and a hardy way of living, like my dear old grandfather, are apt to grow old suddenly.”

  “It was not merely that he was aged—he was mentally changed—nervous, restless, to all appearance unhappy.”

  “Well, didn’t you ask him why?” demanded Lota, whose impetuous temper was beginning to revolt against the lawyer’s solemnity.

  “My position hardly warranted my questioning Mr. Hammond on a matter so purely personal. I saw the change, and regretted it. Six weeks later he was gone.”

  Poor old gran’pa. We were such friend when I was a little thing. And then they sent me to Germany with a governess—poor little motherless mite—and then they packed me off to Pekin where father was Consul and there he died, and then they sent me home again—and I was taken up by the smartest of all my aunts, and had my little plunge in society, and always exceeded my allowance; was up to my eyes in debt—for a girl. I suppose a man would hardly count such bills as I used to owe. And then gran’pa took it into his head to be pleased with me; and here I am—residuary legatee. I think that’s what you call me?” with an interrogative glance at the lawyer, who nodded a grave assent, “and I am going to spend the winter months in my villa near Taggia. Only think of that, Helen, Taggia—Tag-gi-a!”

  She syllabled the word slowly, ending with a little smack of her pretty lips as if it were something nice to eat, and she looked at me for sympathy.

  “I haven’t the faintest idea what you mean by Tag-gi-a,” said I. “It sounds like an African word.”

  “Surely you have read Dr.Antonio.”

  “Surely I have not.”

  “Then I have done with you. There is a gulf between us. All that I know of the Liguria comes out of that delightful book. It taught me to pine for the shores for the Mediterranean when I was quite a little thing. And they show you Dr. Ruffini’s house at Taggia. His actual house, where he actually lived.”

  “You ought to consider, Miss Hammond, that the Riviera has changed a good deal since Ruffini’s time,” said the lawyer. “Not that I have anything to say against the Riviera per se. All I would advise is that should winter in a more convenient locality than a romantic gorge between San Remo and Alassio. I would suggest Nice, for instance.”

  “Nice.Why, someone was saying only the other day that Nice is the chosen rendezvous of all the worst characters in Europe and America.”

  “Perhaps that’s what makes it such an agreeable place,” said the lawyer. “There are circles and circles in Nice.You need never breathe the same atmosphere as the bad characters.

  “A huge towny place,” exclaimed Lota. “Gran’pa said it was not better than Brighton.”

  “Could anything be better than Brighton?” asked I.

  “Helen, you were always a Philistine. It was because of the horridness of Nice and Cannes that gran’pa bought a villa—four times too big for him—in this romantic spot.”

  She kissed the white house in the photograph. She gloated over the wildness of the landscape, in which the villa stood out, solitary, majestic. Palms, olives, cypress—a deep gorge cutting through the heart of the picture—mountains romantically remote—one white crest in the furthest distance—a foreground of tumbled crags and threads of running water.

  “Is it really real?” she asked suddenly, “not a photographer’s painted background? They have such odious tricks, those photographers. One sits for one’s picture in a tidy South Kensington studio, and they send one home smirking out of a primeval forest, or in front of a stormy ocean. Is it real?

  “Absolutely real.”

  “Very well, Mr. Dean. Then I am going to establish myself there in the first week of December, and if you want to be very careful of me for gran’pa’s sake all you have to do is to find me a thoroughly respectable major-domo, who won’t drink my wine or run away with my plate. My aunt will engage the rest of my people.”

  “My dear young lady, you may command any poor services of mine; but really now, is it not sheer perversity to choose a rambling house in a wild part of the country where your ample means would allow you to hire the prettiest bijou-villa on the Riviera?”

  “I hate bijou houses, always too small for anybody except some sour old maid who wants to over-hear all her servants say about her. The spacious rambling house—the wild solitary landscape—those are what I want, Mr. Dean. Get me a butler who won’t cut my throat, and I ask no more.”

  “Then madam, I have done. A willful woman must have her way, even when it is a foolish way.”

  “Everything in life is foolish,” Lota answered, lightly. “The people who live haphazard come out just as well at the end as yo
ur ineffable wiseacres. And now that you know I am fixed as fate, that nothing you can say will unbend my iron will, do, like a darling old family lawyer whom I have known ever since I began to know one face from another, do tell me why you object to the Orange Grove. Is it the drainage?”

  “There is no drainage.”

  “Then that’s all right,” checking it off on her forefinger. “Is it the neighbours?”

  “Need I say there are no neighbours?”

  “Number two satisfactory.”

  “Is it the atmosphere? Low the villa is not; damp it can hardly be, perched on the side of a hill.”

  “I believe the back rooms are damp. The hill side comes too near the windows. The back rooms are decidedly gloomy, and I believe damp.”

  “And how many rooms are there in all?”

  “Nearer thirty than twenty. I repeat it is a great rambling house, ever so much too large for you or any sensible young lady.”

  “For the sensible young lady, no doubt,” said Lota, nodding impertinently at me. “She likes a first floor in Regency Square, Brighton, with a little room under the tiles for her maid. I am not sensible, and I like lots of rooms; rooms to roam about in, to furnish and unfurnish, and arrange and rearrange; rooms to see ghosts in. And now, dearest Mr. Dean, I am going to pluck out the heart of your mystery.What kind of ghost is it that haunts the Orange Grove? I know there is a ghost.”

  “Who told you so?”

  “You. You have been telling me so for the last half-hour. It is because of the ghost you don’t want me to go to the Orange Grove.You might just as well be candid and tell me the whole story. I am not afraid of ghosts. In fact, I rather like the idea of having a ghost on my property. Wouldn’t you Helen, if you had property?”

  “No,” I answered, decisively. “I hate ghosts. They are always associated with damp houses and bad drainage. I don’t believe you would find a ghost in Brighton, not even if you advertised for one.”

  “Tell me all about the ghost,” urged Lota.

  “There is nothing to tell. Neither the people in the neighbourhood nor the servants of the house went so far as to say the Orange Grove was haunted. The utmost assertion was that time out of mind the master or the mistress of that house had been miserable.”

  “Time out of mind. Why, I thought gran’pa built the house twenty years ago.”

  “He only added the front which you see in the photograph. The back part of the house, the larger part, is three hundred years old. The place was a monkish hospital, the infirmary belonging to a Benedictine monastery in the neighbourhood, and to which the sick from other Benedictine houses were sent.”

  “Oh, that was ages ago and ages ago. You don’t suppose that the ghosts of all the sick monks, who were so inconsiderate as to die in my house, haunt the rooms at the back?”

  “I say again, Miss Hammond, nobody has ever to my knowledge asserted that the house was haunted.”

  “Then it can’t be haunted. If it were the servants would have seen something. They are champion ghost-seers.”

  “I am not a believer in ghosts, Miss Hammond,” said the friendly old lawyer; “but I own to a grain of superstition on one point. I can’t help thinking there is such a thing as ‘luck.’ I have seen such marked distinctions between the lucky and unlucky people I have met in my professional career. Now, the Orange Grove has been an unlucky house for the last hundred years. It’s bad luck is as old as its history. And why, in the name of all that’s reasonable, should a beautiful young lady with all the world to choose from insist upon living at the Orange Grove?”

  “First, because it is my own house; next, because I hardly conceived a passion for it the moment I saw this photograph; and thirdly, perhaps because your opposition has given a zest to the whole thing. I shall establish myself there next December, and you must come out to me after Christmas, Helen.Your beloved Brighton is odious in February and March.”

  “Brighton is always delightful,” answered I, “but of course I shall be charmed to go to you.”

  CHAPTER II

  AN EARTHLY PARADISE

  I was Lota’s dearest friend, and she was mine. I had never seen anyone quite so pretty, or quite so fascinating then: I have never seen anyone as pretty or as fascinating since. She was no Helen, no Cleopatra, no superbly modelled specimen of typical loveliness. She was only herself. Like no one else, and to my mind better than everybody else—a delicately-wrought ethereal creature, all spirit and fire and impulse and affection, flinging herself with ardour into every pursuit, living intensely in the present, curiously reckless of the future, curiously forgetful of the past.

  When I parted with her at Charing Cross Station on the first of December it was understood that I was to join her about the middle of January. One of my uncles was going to Italy at that time, and was to escort me to Taggia, where I was to be met by my hostess. I was surprised, therefore, when a telegram arrived before Christmas, entreating me to go to her at once.

  I telegraphed back: “Are you ill?”

  Answer: “Not ill; but I want you.”

  My reply: “Impossible. Will go as arranged.”

  I would have given much, as I told Lota in the letter that followed my last message, to have done what she wished; but family claims were too strong. A brother was to marry at the beginning of the year, and I should have been thought heartless had I shirked the ceremony. And there was the old idea of Christmas as a time for family gatherings. Had she been ill, or unhappy, I would have cancelled every other claim, and gone to her without one hour’s delay, I told her; but I knew her a creature of caprices, and this was doubtless only one caprice among many.

  I knew that she was well cared for. She had a maiden aunt with her, the mildest and sweetest of spinsters, who absolutely adored her. She had her old nurse and slave, a West Indian half-caste, who had accompanied her from Pekin, and she had—

  “Another, and a dearer one still.”

  Captain Holbrook, of the Stonyshere Regiment, was at San Remo. I had seen his name in a travelling note in the World, and I smiled as I read the announcement, and thought how few of his acquaintance would know as well as I knew the magnet which attracted him to quit San Remo rather than to Monte Carlo or Nice. I knew that he loved Violetta Hammond devotedly, and that she had played fast and loose with him, amused at his worship, accepting all his attentions in her light happy manner, and giving no heed to the future.

  Yes, my pretty, insouciante Lota was well cared for, ringed round with exceeding love, guarded as faithfully as a god in an Indian temple. I had no uneasiness about her, and I alighted in a very happy frame of mind at the quiet little station at Taggia, beside the tideless sea, in dusk of a January evening.

  Lota was on the platform to welcome me, with Miss Elderson, her maternal aunt, in attendance upon her, the younger lady muffled in sealskin from head to foot.

  “Why Lota,” said I, when we had kissed, and laughed a little with eyes full of tears, “you are wrapped up as if this were Russia, and to me the air feels balmier than an English April.”

  “Oh, when one has a hundred guinea coat one may as well wear it,” she answered carelessly. “I bought this sealskin among my mourning.”

  “Lota is chillier than she used to be,” said Miss Elderson, in her plaintive voice.

  There was a landau with a pair of fine strong horses waiting to carry us up to the villa. The road wound gently upward, past orange and lemon groves, and silvery streamlets, and hanging woods, where velvet dark cypresses rose tower-like amidst the silvery grey of the olives, and so to about midway between the valley, where Taggia’s antique palaces and church towers gleamed pale in the dusk, and the crest of the hill along which straggled the white houses of a village. The after-glow was rosy in the sky when a turn of the road brought our faces towards the summer-like sea, and in that lovely light every line in Lota’s face was but too distinctly visible. Too distinctly, for I saw the cruel change which three months had made in her fresh young beauty. She had left me al
l the bloom of girlhood, gay, careless, brimming over with the joy of life and the new delight of that freedom of choice which wealth gives to a fatherless and motherless girl. To go where she liked, do as she liked, roam the world over, choosing always the companions she loved—that had been Lota’s dream of happiness, and if there had been some touch of self-love in her idea of bliss there had been also a generous and affectionate heart, and unfailing kindness to those whom Fate had not used so kindly.

  I saw her now a haggard, anxious-looking woman, the signs of worry written too plainly on the wan pinched face, the lovely eyes larger but paler than of old, and the markings of nervous depression visible in the droop of the lips that had once been like Cupid’s bow.

  I remember Mr. Dean’s endeavour to dissuade her from occupying her grandfather’s villa on this lovely hill, and I began to detest the Orange Grove before I had seen it. I was prepared to find an abode of gloom—a house where the foul miasma from some neighbouring swamp crept in at every window, and hung grey and chill in every passage; a house whose too obvious unwholesomeness had conjured up images of terror, the spectral forms engendered of slackened nerves, and sleepless nights. I made up my mind that if it were possible for a bold and energetic woman to influence Lota Hammond I would be that woman, and whisk her off to Nice or Monte Carlo before she had time to consider what I was doing.