I was now quite convinced that his brain was affected, and I saw plainly enough that he would never consent to take the necessary steps for the funeral.
I began to wonder whether I had not better send for another doctor, for I felt that I did not care to try the opiate again on my own responsibility, and something must be done about the funeral.
I spent a day in considering the matter—a day passed by John Hurst beside his wife’s body. Then I made up my mind to try all my powers to bring him to reason, and to this end I went once more into the chamber of death. I found Hurst talking wildly, in low whispers. He seemed to be talking to some one who was not there. He did not know me, and suffered himself to be led away. He was, in fact, in the first stage of brain fever. I actually blessed his illness, because it opened a way out of the dilemma in which I found myself. I wired for a trained nurse from town, and for the local undertaker. In a week she was buried, and John Hurst still lay unconscious and unheeding; but I did not look forward to his first renewal of consciousness.
Yet his first conscious words were not the inquiry I dreaded. He only asked whether he had been ill long, and what had been the matter. When I had told him, he just nodded and went off to sleep again.
A few evenings later I found him excited and feverish, but quite himself, mentally. I said as much to him in answer to a question which he put to me—
“There’s no brain disturbance now? I’m not mad or anything?”
“No, no, my dear fellow. Everything is as it should be.”
“Then,” he answered slowly, “I must get up and go to her.”
My worst fears were realized.
In moments of intense mental strain the truth sometimes overpowers all one’s better resolves. It sounds brutal, horrible. I don’t know what I meant to say; what I said was—
“You can’t; she’s buried.”
He sprang up in bed, and I caught him by the shoulders.
“Then it’s true!” he cried, “and I’m not mad. Oh, great God in heaven, let me go to her; let me go! It’s true! It’s true!”
I held him fast, and spoke.
“I am strong—you know that. You are weak and ill; you are quite in my power—we’re old friends, and there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to serve you. Tell me what you mean; I will do anything you wish.” This I said to soothe him.
“Let me go to her,” he said again.
“Tell me all about it,” I repeated. “You are too ill to go to her. I will go, if you can collect yourself and tell me why. You could not walk five yards.”
He looked at me doubtfully.
“You’ll help me? You won’t say I’m mad, and have me shut up? You’ll help me?”
“Yes, yes—I swear it!” All the time I was wondering what I should do to keep him from his mad purpose.
He lay back on his pillows, white and ghastly; his thin features and sunken eyes showed hawklike above the rough growth of his four weeks’ beard. I took his hand. His pulse was rapid, and his lean fingers clenched themselves round mine.
“Look here,” he said, “I don’t know—there aren’t any words to tell you how true it is. I am not mad, I am not wandering. I am as sane as you are. Now listen, and if you’ve a human heart in you, you’ll help me. When I married her I gave up hypnotism and all the old studies; she hated the whole business. But before I gave it up I hypnotized her, and when she was completely under my control I forbade her soul to leave its body till my time came to die.”
I breathed more freely. Now I understood why he had said, “She cannot die.”
“My dear old man,” I said gently, “dismiss these fancies, and face your grief boldly. You can’t control the great facts of life and death by hypnotism. She is dead; she is dead, and her body lies in its place. But her soul is with God who gave it.”
“No!” he cried, with such strength as the fever had left him. “No! no! Ever since I have been ill I have seen her, every day, every night, and always wringing her hands and moaning, ‘Let me go, John—let me go’.”
“Those were her last words, indeed,” I said; “it is natural that they should haunt you. See, you bade her soul not leave her body. It has left it, for she is dead.”
His answer came almost in a whisper, home on the wings of a long breathless pause.
“She is dead, but her soul has not left her body.”
I held his hand more closely, still debating what I should do.
“She comes to me,” he went on; “she comes to me continually. She does not reproach, but she implores, ‘Let me go, John—let me go!’ And I have no more power now; I cannot let her go, I cannot reach her. I can do nothing, nothing. Ah!” he cried, with a sudden sharp change of voice that thrilled through me to the ends of my fingers and feet: “Ah, Kate, my life, I will come to you! No, no, you shan’t be left alone among the dead. I am coming, my sweet.”
He reached his arms out towards the door with a look of longing and love, so really, so patently addressed to a sentient presence, that I turned sharply to see if, in truth, perhaps—Nothing—of course—nothing.
“She is dead,” I repeated stupidly. “I was obliged to bury her.”
A shudder ran through him.
“I must go and see for myself,” he said.
Then I knew—all in a minute—what to do.
“I will go,” I said, “I will open her coffin, and if she is not—is not as other dead folk, I will bring her body back to this house.”
“Will you go now?” he asked, with set lips.
It was nigh on midnight. I looked into his eyes.
“Yes, now,” I said; “but you must swear to lie still till I return.”
“I swear it.” I saw I could trust him, and I went to wake the nurse. He called weakly after me, “There’s a lantern in the tool-shed—and, Bernard—”
“Yes, my poor old chap.”
“There’s a screwdriver in the sideboard drawer.”
I think until he said that I really meant to go. I am not accustomed to lie, even to mad people, and I think I meant it till then.
He leaned on his elbow, and looked at me with wide open eyes. “Think,” he said, “what she must feel. Out of the body, and yet tied to it, all alone among the dead. Oh, make haste, make haste; for if I am not mad, and I have really fettered her soul, there is but one way!”
“And that is?”
“I must die too. Her soul can leave her body when I die.”
I called the nurse, and left him. I went out, and across the wold to the church, but I did not go in. I carried the screwdriver and the lantern, lest he should send the nurse to see if I had taken them. I leaned on the churchyard wall, and thought of her. I had loved the woman, and I remembered it in that hour.
As soon as I dared I went back to him—remember I believed him mad—and told the lie that I thought would give him most ease.
“Well?” he said eagerly, as I entered.
I signed to the nurse to leave us.
“There is no hope,” I said. “You will not see your wife again till you meet her in heaven.”
I laid down the screwdriver and the lantern, and sat down by him.
“You have seen her?”
“Yes.”
“And there’s no doubt?”
“There is no doubt.”
“Then I am mad; but you’re a good fellow, Bernard, and I’ll never forget it in this world or the next.”
He seemed calmer, and fell asleep with my hand on his. His last word was a “Thank you”, that cut me like a knife.
When I went into his room next morning he was gone. But on his pillow a letter lay, painfully scrawled in pencil, and addressed to me.
“You lied. Perhaps you meant kindly. You didn’t understand. She is not dead. She has been with
me again. Though her soul may not leave her body, thank God it can still speak to mine. That vault—it is worse than a mere churchyard grave. Good-bye.”
I ran all the way to the church, and entered by the open door. The air was chill and dank after the crisp October sunlight. The stone that closed the vault of the Hursts of Hurstcote had been raised, and was lying beside the dark gaping hole in the chancel floor. The nurse, who had followed me, came in before I could shake off the horror that held me moveless. We both went down into the vault. Weak, exhausted by illness and sorrow, John Hurst had yet found strength to follow his love to the grave. I tell you he had crossed that wold alone, in the grey of the chill dawn; alone he had raised the stone and had gone down to her. He had opened her coffin, and he lay on the floor of the vault with his wife’s body in his arms.
He had been dead some hours.
* * * *
The brown eyes filled with tears when I told my wife this story.
“You were quite right, he was mad,” she said. “Poor things! Poor lovers!”
But sometimes when I wake in the grey morning, and, between waking and sleeping, think of all those things that I must shut out from my sleeping and my waking thoughts, I wonder was I right or was he? Was he mad, or was I idiotically incredulous? For—and it is this thing that haunts me—when I found them dead together in the vault, she had been buried five weeks. But the body that lay in John Hurst’s arms, among the mouldering coffins of the Hursts of Hurstcote, was perfect and beautiful as when first he clasped her in his arms, a bride.
THE DEAD VALLEY, by Ralph Adams Cram
I have a friend, Olof Ehrensvaerd, a Swede by birth, who yet, by reason of a strange and melancholy mischance of his early boyhood, has thrown his lot with that of the New World. It is a curious story of a headstrong boy and a proud and relentless family: the details do not matter here, but they are sufficient to weave a web of romance around the tall yellow-bearded man with the sad eyes and the voice that gives itself perfectly to plaintive little Swedish songs remembered out of childhood. In the winter evenings we play chess together, he and I, and after some close, fierce battle has been fought to a finish—usually with my own defeat—we fill our pipes again, and Ehrensvaerd tells me stories of the far, half-remembered days in the fatherland, before he went to sea: stories that grow very strange and incredible as the night deepens and the fire falls together, but stories that, nevertheless, I fully believe.
One of them made a strong impression on me, so I set it down here, only regretting that I cannot reproduce the curiously perfect English and the delicate accent which to me increased the fascination of the tale. Yet, as best I can remember it, here it is.
“I never told you how Nils and I went over the hills to Hallsberg, and how we found the Dead Valley, did I? Well, this is the way it happened. I must have been about twelve years old, and Nils Sjoeberg, whose father’s estate joined ours, was a few months younger. We were inseparable just at that time, and whatever we did, we did together.
“Once a week it was market day in Engelholm, and Nils and I went always there to see the strange sights that the market gathered from all the surrounding country. One day we quite lost our hearts, for an old man from across the Elfborg had brought a little dog to sell, that seemed to us the most beautiful dog in all the world. He was a round, woolly puppy, so funny that Nils and I sat down on the ground and laughed at him, until he came and played with us in so jolly a way that we felt that there was only one really desirable thing in life, and that was the little dog of the old man from across the hills. But alas! we had not half money enough wherewith to buy him, so we were forced to beg the old man not to sell him before the next market day, promising that we would bring the money for him then. He gave us his word, and we ran home very fast and implored our mothers to give us money for the little dog.
“We got the money, but we could not wait for the next market day. Suppose the puppy should be sold! The thought frightened us so that we begged and implored that we might be allowed to go over the hills to Hallsberg where the old man lived, and get the little dog ourselves, and at last they told us we might go. By starting early in the morning we should reach Hallsberg by three o’clock, and it was arranged that we should stay there that night with Nils’s aunt, and, leaving by noon the next day, be home again by sunset.
“Soon after sunrise we were on our way, after having received minute instructions as to just what we should do in all possible and impossible circumstances, and finally a repeated injunction that we should start for home at the same hour the next day, so that we might get safely back before nightfall.
“For us, it was magnificent sport, and we started off with our rifles, full of the sense of our very great importance: yet the journey was simple enough, along a good road, across the big hills we knew so well, for Nils and I had shot over half the territory this side of the dividing ridge of the Elfborg. Back of Engelholm lay a long valley, from which rose the low mountains, and we had to cross this, and then follow the road along the side of the hills for three or four miles, before a narrow path branched off to the left, leading up through the pass.
“Nothing occurred of interest on the way over, and we reached Hallsberg in due season, found to our inexpressible joy that the little dog was not sold, secured him, and so went to the house of Nils’s aunt to spend the night.
“Why we did not leave early on the following day, I can’t quite remember; at all events, I know we stopped at a shooting range just outside of the town, where most attractive pasteboard pigs were sliding slowly through painted foliage, serving so as beautiful marks. The result was that we did not get fairly started for home until afternoon, and as we found ourselves at last pushing up the side of the mountain with the sun dangerously near their summits, I think we were a little scared at the prospect of the examination and possible punishment that awaited us when we got home at midnight.
“Therefore we hurried as fast as possible up the mountain side, while the blue dusk closed in about us, and the light died in the purple sky. At first we had talked hilariously, and the little dog had leaped ahead of us with the utmost joy. Latterly, however, a curious oppression came on us; we did not speak or even whistle, while the dog fell behind, following us with hesitation in every muscle.
“We had passed through the foothills and the low spurs of the mountains, and were almost at the top of the main range, when life seemed to go out of everything, leaving the world dead, so suddenly silent the forest became, so stagnant the air. Instinctively we halted to listen.
“Perfect silence,—the crushing silence of deep forests at night; and more, for always, even in the most impenetrable fastnesses of the wooded mountains, is the multitudinous murmur of little lives, awakened by the darkness, exaggerated and intensified by the stillness of the air and the great dark: but here and now the silence seemed unbroken even by the turn of a leaf, the movement of a twig, the note of night bird or insect. I could hear the blood beat through my veins; and the crushing of the grass under our feet as we advanced with hesitating steps sounded like the falling of trees.
“And the air was stagnant,—dead. The atmosphere seemed to lie upon the body like the weight of sea on a diver who has ventured too far into its awful depths. What we usually call silence seems so only in relation to the din of ordinary experience. This was silence in the absolute, and it crushed the mind while it intensified the senses, bringing down the awful weight of inextinguishable fear.
“I know that Nils and I stared towards each other in abject terror, listening to our quick, heavy breathing, that sounded to our acute senses like the fitful rush of waters. And the poor little dog we were leading justified our terror. The black oppression seemed to crush him even as it did us. He lay close on the ground, moaning feebly, and dragging himself painfully and slowly closer to Nils’s feet. I think this exhibition of utter animal fear was the last touch, and must inevitably
have blasted our reason—mine anyway; but just then, as we stood quaking on the bounds of madness, came a sound, so awful, so ghastly, so horrible, that it seemed to rouse us from the dead spell that was on us.
“In the depth of the silence came a cry, beginning as a low, sorrowful moan, rising to a tremulous shriek, culminating in a yell that seemed to tear the night in sunder and rend the world as by a cataclysm. So fearful was it that I could not believe it had actual existence: it passed previous experience, the powers of belief, and for a moment I thought it the result of my own animal terror, an hallucination born of tottering reason.
“A glance at Nils dispelled this thought in a flash. In the pale light of the high stars he was the embodiment of all possible human fear, quaking with an ague, his jaw fallen, his tongue out, his eyes protruding like those of a hanged man. Without a word we fled, the panic of fear giving us strength, and together, the little dog caught close in Nils’s arms, we sped down the side of the cursed mountains,—anywhere, goal was of no account: we had but one impulse—to get away from that place.
“So under the black trees and the far white stars that flashed through the still leaves overhead, we leaped down the mountain side, regardless of path or landmark, straight through the tangled underbrush, across mountain streams, through fens and copses, anywhere, so only that our course was downward.
“How long we ran thus, I have no idea, but by and by the forest fell behind, and we found ourselves among the foothills, and fell exhausted on the dry short grass, panting like tired dogs.
“It was lighter here in the open, and presently we looked around to see where we were, and how we were to strike out in order to find the path that would lead us home. We looked in vain for a familiar sign. Behind us rose the great wall of black forest on the flank of the mountain: before us lay the undulating mounds of low foothills, unbroken by trees or rocks, and beyond, only the fall of black sky bright with multitudinous stars that turned its velvet depth to a luminous gray.
The Gothic Terror MEGAPACK™: 17 Classic Tales Page 30
