Vintage Vampire Stories

by Robert Eighteen-Bisang

  To me his death was a personal sorrow. I was, and had been since his appointment, fifteen months before, his private secretary ; and, previous to that again, for the twelve years since I came down from the ’Varsity we had been intimate friends, though he was some years my senior.

  On the morning of that 16th day of June I was sitting at my desk as usual, between the ante-room and his private office. The last person who had been admitted to his presence was a lady, who, dressed in black and closely veiled, made at the time no distinct impression on my mind. The Under Secretary had refused admittance to some ten or twelve people that morning, but, on my handling him this lady’s card, he told me to admit her. She was with him for, perhaps, half an hour. It must have been about 11 o’clock when she passed out. It was just 11:30 when I went into his office and found him dead in his chair.

  Some of these facts—with many more or less imaginative details—were presented to the world by the morning papers, as already mentioned, of the 17th. But in no paper was any mention made of the veiled lady, for the altogether sufficient reason that no representative of any paper knew of the veiled lady’s existence.

  At about a quarter before twelve we were standing—two or three others of the higher employees of the department and myself—in my office, waiting for the arrival of the doctor. The door of the Under Secretary’s private room was closed. In the excitement the doorkeeper in the ante-room had presumably deserted his post, for, seeing those to whom I was talking glance toward the outer door, I turned and found myself again confronting the veiled lady.

  “Can I see Mr. Westerby once more?” she asked.

  “Mr.Westerby, madam,” I answered, “is dead.”

  She did not reply at once, but with both hands raised her veil as if to obtain a clearer view of my face, to see if I spoke the truth. In doing so, she showed me the most beautiful face that I have ever seen, or ever expect to see. One dreams of such eyes. Perhaps Endymion looked into them. But I have never hoped to see them in a woman’s face. I scarcely remember that she murmured in a low, incredulous voice, the one word—

  “Dead ?”

  “He died, madam, suddenly, less than an hour ago.”

  We had been standing as we spoke, within earshot of the others. She now drew back to where my desk stood, in the further corner of the room, whither I followed her.

  “Was any one with him after I left, can you remember?” she asked.

  “No madam, I had no occasion to go into his room for some little time after you went. When I did so, he was dead.”

  It was some time before she spoke again; then—

  “Excuse me,” she said, hesitatingly, “but I hope I shall not have to appear in connection with this.You can understand how very much I should dislike”—this with the faintest smile—“to have my name in all of the newspapers. Of course, if there is an inquest, and if my evidence can be of service, I shall have to give it. But it does not seem to me that anything I can say could be of importance. He was well when I saw him—that is all.”

  Then, after a pause, during which I was silent: “If you can manage it so that my name will not be mentioned, I shall be very grateful to you,” she said. As she spoke, she drew one of her cards from a small black card case and handed it to me, adding, “and I hope you will call and let me have the pleasure of thanking you.”

  I took the card and assured her that I would do what I could in her behalf. She lowered her veil again and left the room. I read the card now with more interest than I had the former one when taking it to my chief. It said:

  MRS. WALTER F. TIERCE,

  19, Grasmere Crescent,W.

  Mrs. Tierce had hardly gone when the doctor came in, followed a moment later by a police inspector.

  “Heart disease,” the doctor said. The inspector asked me a few questions and said that no inquest would be necessary.

  I was hardly conscious at the time, I think, that I was telling the officer that no one had been with the Under Secretary for an hour before his death. Nor when it was over and I recognized what I had done, did my conscience disturb me much. It was a mere courtesy to a woman, such as any man would do if he had it in his power. Why should she be made to suffer because he chanced to die about the time that she happened to call upon him?

  So the world next morning heard nothing of the veiled lady.

  Within a month I was back in my old chambers in Lincoln’s Inn trying to gather up the interrupted threads of legal studies—a task which would, perhaps, have progressed more rapidly if it had received my entire attention. As it was, however, work had to be content to divide my thoughts somewhat unequally with another subject—Mrs. Walter Tierce.

  ‘Mrs.Tierce was a widower. When I called at her home immediately after the funeral, she met me with delightful cordiality.

  I called frequently after my first visit, and never met any other visitor at the house. It was difficult to understand how so charming a woman could live in a fashionable quarter of London in such complete isolation. But I had no desire that it should be otherwise.

  At the age of thirty-five I had settled down, more or less reconciled to the belief that I should never marry. In theory, I have always maintained that it is the duty to himself and to society of every healthy man to take to himself a wife and assume the responsibilities of a householder before he is thirty years of age. A bachelor’s life is an inchoate existence; a species of half-life at best—“like the odd half of a pair of scissors,” as Benjamin Franklin said. It is as the head of a family alone, with the care of others on his shoulders, that a man arrives at the possibility of his best development. This was my loudly proclaimed belief. And still I was unmarried. If one could only wake some morning and find himself married—in his own house, with a charming and domestic wife—perhaps with children! But the necessary preliminaries to arriving at that state terrified me. The difficulty of a selection (in the face of an apparently incurable incapability of falling seriously in love with any one individual) was appalling.

  But now the picture of a home rose frequently before me, altogether pleasant to contemplate—a home in which two wonderful black eyes smiled at me across the breakfast tablecloth in the morning and were waiting to meet mine as I looked up from my reading in our library at night.

  In fact, I was in love—at times. But there were also times when my condition seemed, on analysis, curiously unsatisfactory to myself, curiously contradictory. Especially was this the case immediately after being in Mrs. Tierce’s presence, when there was a certain reaction. On leaving her home, I never failed to ask myself wonderingly, if I really loved her as a man should love a woman before asking her to be his wife. She filled all my thoughts by day and a large share of my dreams by night. Those eyes haunted me. In her presence I was helpless—intoxicated—a blind worshipper. I longed to touch her with my hands, to stroke the fabric of her dress or any object which her hands had recently touched. My whole being ached with very tenderness to approach more nearly to her—to be in contact with her—to caress her. The physical attraction of her presence was overmastering.

  Fifteen minutes after leaving her, however, I would be dimly wondering if this was really love—the love that a husband should feel for a wife. This absolute submission of my individuality to hers—would it last through days and weeks and months of constant companionship? Through all the stress of years of wedded life? And if it did not, if my individuality asserted itself, and I became critical of her, what then?

  Not that her beauty was her only attraction. On the contrary, few women whom I have ever met have impressed me more distinctly with their intellectuality.

  But her most charming characteristic was a certain admirable self-possession and self-control. She seemed so thoroughly to understand herself and to know what was her right relation to things around her; and this without a suspicion of masculinity or of the business air. Never for a moment was there danger of her losing either her mental or emotional equilibrium.

  In fact, she was adorab
le. But, though there was no point of view from which she did not seem to me to be entirely the most delightful thing that I had ever seen, I never failed to experience that same misgiving immediately after quitting her presence. It was as short-lived as it was regular in its recurrence. An hour later, as I sat in my chambers alone, her eyes haunted me once more.

  Though I had never spoken of my love, she must have read it in my eyes a hundred times, nor apparently was the perusal distasteful to her.

  I had been back in Lincoln’s Inn now five months, and was sitting in my chambers one dark mid-afternoon in December. Had I been reading, I must have lit the gas. But there was light enough to sit and dream of her; light enough to see those eyes in the shadow of my book-case. My one clerk was away and would not return for an hour. So I dreamed uninterruptedly until a shuffling outside my office door recalled me to myself. It would have looked more business-like in the eyes of a client to have light enough in the room to work by, and I made a movement toward the matchbox. But there was no time. A knock at the door sounded and the door itself was thrown wide open. There was an interval of some seconds and then a figure entered, moving heavily and painfully with the aid of a crutch—a man and crippled, that was all that I could see.

  The figure moved laboriously half way across the floor toward me. Then, standing on one foot, the visitor placed his crutch against the wall and allowed himself to drop heavily into a chair a few feet away from me, while I stood looking on, mutely anxious to render assistance but not knowing how to offer it.

  After a short silence he spoke, simply pronouncing my name; not interrogatively, but as if to inform me that he knew to whom he was speaking and that his business was with me. I bowed in response, and with matter-of-fact business suavity asked what I could do for him.

  He was silent for some moments, and as he sat fronting the window to which my back was turned, and through which came what small light there was in the office, I could see his face plainly enough. Not an old man, by any means, probably younger than myself, with features that must once have been handsome, and would be still but for the deep lines of sorrow or of pain. The figure, too, as he sat, looked full and healthy with nothing but a certain stiffness of pose to tell of its infirmity. At last he spoke, hurriedly, and in a hard, feverish-sounding voice.

  “Nothing, thank you.You can do nothing for me. I have come to do something for you, instead.” I bowed in acknowledgement.

  “I have come to warn you,” he went on, still hurriedly and shifting uneasily in his seat, like one who has an unpleasant thing to tell and is anxious to be over with it. The strangeness of his voice and manner, and the intentness—almost the fierceness—with which he looked at me, made me uneasy in my turn. I doubted his sanity, and wished there was more light or that my clerk was present.

  “I came to warn you,” he said again, and I saw his hands moving nervously as he leaned toward me and spoke harshly and quickly. “You are in love with her—Mrs. Tierce. No; don’t deny it. I know, I know, and before heaven, if I can save you I will.”

  The heaviness of his breathing told the intensity of the excitement under which he was laboring as he went on, edging further forward on his chair and reaching out his hands towards me;

  “She is not a woman; she is not human.Yes, I know how beautiful she is; how helpless a man must be before her. I have known it for six years; and had I not known it I should not now be what I am.You will think me mad,” he said. “You probably think me so now. I do not wonder at it. What else should you think when a stranger comes into your chambers and tells you that in these matter-of-fact nineteenth-century days there exist beings who are not human—who have more than human attributes, and that one of these beings is the woman whom you love?”

  He was quieter now, more serious, and spoke almost argumentatively, as one who seeks only to convince, while he almost despaired of doing it.

  “You are laughing at me now—or pitying me; but I call the Almighty God to witness that I speak the truth—if a God can be almighty and let her live. I tell you, sir, that to know her is death. If you do not believe me you will become worse than I am—as her husband is who died at her feet here in London—as the American is who died before her in the café at Nice—as heaven only knows how many more are who have crossed her path.”

  Of course I had no doubt of his madness; but his earnestness—the utter strength of conviction with which he spoke—was strangely moving. That he, poor fellow, believed what he said, it was impossible to doubt.

  “It is six years since I saw her first at Havre, in France. I chanced to be seated at the next table to her at Frascati’s, and I knew that I loved her then. The American was with her. I followed her to Cannes, to Trouville, to Monaco, to Nice; and where she went the American went, too. There was no impropriety in their companionship, but he followed her as I did; only that he had her acquaintance and I had not. And I knew, or thought I knew, that it would he useless for me to try and win her while he was there. He evidently worshipped her, and she—for he was a handsome fellow (Reading was his name)—seemed to care for him. So I watched her from a distance, waiting and hoping; and as I have told you my turn came.

  “It was in the Café Royal, and nobody it happen but herself. Suddenly she rushed out from the corner where they were sitting and called for help. Every one crowded around, and he was dead—dead in his chair, with his face upturned and his eyes fixed, staring like one suddenly terrified. They said it was heart disease. Heart disease!”

  It had grown almost dark, and he drew his chair close to me. The paling light from the window just showed me the worn face and the sunken, feverish eyes.

  “Then I came to know her,” he continued, after a pause. “I hung upon her as he had done, and for three months I believed that I was the happiest man in Europe. In Venice, in Florence, in Paris, in London, I was constantly with her, day after day. She seemed to love me, and in the Bois or in Hyde Park how proud I was to be seen by her side! Then she went to stay for a month at Oxford, and I, with her permission, followed her there, and would call for her at the Mitre every morning. Under the shadow of the grey college walls and in the well-trimmed walks and gardens, it seemed that her face put on a new and holier beauty in keeping with the place. There it was that I told her that I loved her and asked her to be my wife, as we stood for a minute to rest in the cloisters of Christ Church.”

  His voice was very sad. It had lost its harshness, and as he remembered—or did he only imagine?—the sweetness of those days of love-making, there was more of a soft regretfulness than of anger in his tones.

  “She did not refuse me,” he said,“nor did she explicitly accept me. But I was idiotically happy—happy for three whole days—until that afternoon in the Magdalen Walks, when in ten minutes I became, from a healthy, strong man, the wreck you see me now.”

  The regretfulness was all gone, and the hard, fierce ring was in his voice again as he went on:

  “It was on one of the benches in Addison’s Walk, as they call it, and I pressed her for some more definite promise than she had yet given me. She did not seem to listen to me, to heed me, as she leaned back, her hands lying idly in her lap and her great, grave eyes looking out across the meadow. I grew more passionate; clasped her hands and begged for an answer. At last she turned her face towards me. I met her eyes—”

  His voice broke and he stopped speaking. For a minute or more we sat in silence in the twilight, his face buried in his hands. Then he raised his head again, and in slow, unimpassioned accents, continued:

  “As our eyes met, hers looked lusterless, hardly as if she saw me or was looking at me, but as I gazed into them they changed. Somewhere inside them, or behind them, a flame was lit. The pupils expanded, black and brilliant as eyes never shone before.What was it? Was it love? And leaning still closer, I gazed more intensely into the eyes that seemed now to blame before me. And as I looked the spell came upon me. It was as though I swooned. Dimly I became aware that I was losing my power of motion, of
speech, of thought. The eyes engulfed me. I was vaguely conscious that I must somehow disengage myself from the spell that was upon me; but I could not. I was powerless, and she—it was as if she fed upon my very life. I cannot phrase it otherwise. I was numb, and, though I tried to speak, could not move one muscle. Then consciousness began to leave me, and I was on the point of—God knows what—swoon or death—when the crunching of feet on the gravel path came sharply to my ears.

  “Who was it that passed I do not know. I know not how long I sat there. I remember that she rose without a word and left me. When I moved it was evening. The sun was behind the college walls, and the walk was dark. With my brain hardly awake and my lower limbs still benumbed, slowly I made my way out of the college gates and up the High Street to the Clarendon Hotel, where I was staying. Next morning I awoke what you see me now—a cripple, paralytic for life.”

  During all this narrative I had sat silent, engrossed in the madman’s tale. As a piece of dramatic elocution, it was magnificent. When he finished I cast about for some commonplace remark to make, but in the state of my feelings it was not easy to find one, and it was he who again broke the silence:

  “Tierce, poor fool! I warned him as I am warning you. It was two years afterward that she married him, and in two weeks more he was dead—dead in their house in Park Lane—died of heart disease! Heart disease!”

  And as he said it, I could not help thinking of James Westerby.

  My visitor was about to speak again when a football sounded on the stairs outside, the door opened, and my clerk stood in the entrance, astonished at the darkness.

  “Come in, Jackson,” I called, to let him know that I was there, and “light the gas, please.”

  My visitor rose painfully, and again took his crutch.

  “I have told you all that is vital to the case,” he said in the matter-of-fact voice of a client addressing his attorney, “and you will, of course, do as you think best.”