A Night on the Moor and Other Tales of Dread

by R. Murray Gilchrist

  The girl came in again: this time I noted her grace of movement; it had something of the wearied goddess. ‘Aunt,’ she said quietly, ‘I wish to go into the woods—you can spare me? All I had to do is done; the women are sewing in the kitchen.’ She went to the further end of the room, where a cloak of rose-coloured silk hung, ermine-lined, from a nail in the panelling. She donned it at her leisure; her long and narrow hands were of a perfect colour. She tied the broad ribands of the collar; she lighted two candles that hung before a tarnished mirror, and gazed at her shadow; then, her lips moving silently, she left the room.

  ‘Ever the same,’ the elder woman said. ‘Night after night does she leave the house and travel about like an aimless thing. Come back, Dinah,’ she called, ‘come back.’ But the thin voice went wavering through the empty passages unanswered. So the hostess rose and with a half-apologetic ‘Good-night,’ left me alone. I sat down in the deep recess of the window behind a heavy curtain. A copy of Denis Diderot’s Religieuse lay on the little table. I took it up, and was soon engrossed in it: for of all books this is the most fascinating, the most disappointing, the most grim. A light came glimmering at the end of the vista before me: it grew and grew, and the moon uplifted herself waist-high above the trees. And when I had watched her thus far, I returned to my nun and reached page twenty-two of the second volume, where I read the following sentence: ‘After a few flourishes she played some things, foolish, wild, and incoherent as her own ideas, but through all the defects of her execution I saw she had a touch infinitely superior to mine.’ Then in the shaded window-seat I fell asleep. . . .

  The striking of a tall clock near the hearth awakened me: I had slept till midnight. The candles had been removed from the table to the piano; those in the girandole had guttered out or been extinguished. A young man sat at the piano on the embroidered stool. His back was towards me; I saw nothing but high, narrow shoulders and a dome-shaped head of dishevelled black-hair plentifully besprinkled with grey. From the road outside came a noise of horses whinnying and plunging. I looked out, and there was a lumbering coach drawn by four stallions which, black in daylight, shone now like burnished steel.

  The would-be musician turned and showed me a long painful face with glistening eyes and a brow ridged upward like a ruined stair. It was a face of intense eagerness: the eagerness of a man experimenting and praying for a result whereon his life depends. Without any prelude he played a dance of ghosts in an old ball-room: ghosts of men and women that moved in lavoltas and sarabands; ghosts that laughed at Susanna in the tapestry; ghosts that loved and hated. When the last chord had sent them crowding to their graves he turned and listened for a footstep. None came. He lifted a leather case from the side of the stool and, unfastening its clasps, took out a necklace which glistened in the candlelight like a fairy shower of rain and snow. ’Twas of table diamonds and margarites, the gems as big as filberts. He spread it across the wires, and after an instant’s reflection began to play. The carcanet rattled and jangled as he went: it was as an advancing host of cymbal-women. When he listened again, great tears oozed from his eyes. He took up the jewel and played a melody vapid at first, but so subtle in its repetitions that none might doubt its meaning: thus and not otherwise would sound a lyke-wake sung in a worn voice after a night of singing. And whilst he played, the door opened silently, and I saw Dinah, there in her nightgown, holding the posts with her hands. She took one swift glance, then disappeared again in the darkness, and came back carrying in her arms a bundle swathed in pure linen and strongly redolent of aromatic herbs. Holding this to her breast, she approached the man. Her shadow fell across the keys, and he lifted his head. From both came a long murmur: his of love and joy and protection, hers of agony. He rose and would have clasped her, but she drew back and placed her burden in his outstretched hands.

  ‘It is the child,’ she said. ‘Three months ago I gave birth to her, none knew save myself. . . . She was all that remained of you: all that I had, and I dared not part with her. . . . But now—now that I have seen you again—take her away—leave me—leave me in peace.’

  ‘Dinah,’ he said proudly, ‘listen to me.’

  ‘Nay,’ she whispered, ‘not again. If I listen I may forget your wickedness; I might be weak again. Leave me, Jake.’

  ‘Dinah, you must hear me. Why, out of all the love you held and hold for me, can you condemn? When I left you I fell mad; for the year I have been mad, and only yesterday did they set me loose. See, I have brought you all the diamonds; to-morrow you will be Dame Inowslad.’ And he laid the dead thing on a table, and caught the mother to his bosom. Her figure was shaken with sobs.

  ‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘it has been hard; but my trial has brought the true guerdon of happiness. Only once have I missed seeing the place where you promised to meet me—the place where you said you loved me; and that was on the night of my lonely travailing.’

  Outside the horses plunged and snorted: a shrunken postillion swaying at the neck of the off-leader. In the hollows of the road lay sheets of mist, and the moonlight turned them into floods. A long train of startled owls left the hollow sycamores and passed hooting . . . hooting . . . down the glade.

  ‘Let us go,’ Sir Jake said; ‘by morning light we shall be in sight of Cammere, where Heaven grant us a happy time;—a year of joy for each week of pain. Do not wait to dress; rich robes and linen are inside the coach; I have brought many of my mother’s gowns.’

  Dinah extricated herself from his embrace, and went to find her cloak. During her absence a strange and terrible look came into Inowslad’s face and he smote his forehead. He smiled at her re-appearing. ‘Dinah,’ he said, looking downwards, so that she might not see his eyes, ‘Dinah, I am so happy that I can scarce see. Lead me from the house.’

  He took up the dead little one in his right arm, and carried it as believers carry relics. The outer door closed softly; they descended the mossgrown steps, and entered the coach. The horses leaped forward, half drowning the sound of a chuckle. A glint of the moon pierced the coach windows, and I saw a brown hand, convulsed and violent, griping a long white throat.

  The Lost Mistress

  PART I.

  A half-dead Spirea Japonica stood on the writing table; reared against the pot was a miniature, which, as the only beautiful thing in the room, and, moreover, as the work of John Ravil himself, merits a full description. Not even the most ardent flatterer of the sex would have sworn that the woman was less than eight and twenty. She was reclining on a luxurious, shawl-covered chair, with a background of pale roses and quaintly shapen mirrors. One hand held a frontal of pearls just taken from the light-brown hair; the other a letter which she was reading with some tenderness. Her face was fair, her eyes of a rich blue. Firm and lustrous shoulders peeped through the smooth white muslin of her gown. Mother Eve could not have peered her physical charm.

  John Ravil himself was grotesque even to ugliness. Of scarcely the middle height, ill-shapen in body, and husky voiced, his peculiarities were so marked that it was impossible for him to walk in the streets without exciting unfavourable comment. His complexion was neither light nor dark; and an odd look was given by a bushy copper-coloured moustache, whose ends had never known training. An overhanging forehead, with knitted brows and stiff white hair that stood on end, completed the list of his most noticeable faults. Despite the marks of age, however, he was as yet only in his twenty-third year, and evidences of his youth were visible in his large brown eyes that seemed at times to belong to a young child.

  To-day those eyes were full of terrified perplexity. A change had come into his life; the love that had sapped his fountain of inspiration, and hindered him in his struggle for bread, had grown more and more absorbing of late, and in proportion, the passion of the beloved one had dwindled. Life had nothing for him save this woman: fame could never come now, and in his unhappiness he felt himself degraded to the verge of the commonplace.

  After awhile he rose, with a heavy indraught of breath, and opening t
he secret drawer of an old mahogany bureau took thence a small bundle of letters, each enclosed in its gilt-edged envelope. A band of white paper, whereon was inscribed ‘Flavia’s Correspondence,’ was tied round all. This he loosened, and taking the topmost letter, reverentially unfolded the sheet. It had been written soon after their first meeting. Flavia’s hand was eccentrically masculine. ‘Forgive me,’ it ran, ‘for being so obtuse last night in not divining the meaning of your words. You stung me somehow when you laughed at my singing: it was not till afterwards that I understood your laughter—strange and harsh as it sounded—as a far greater compliment than any other man could bestow. Truth to tell, I half resented the little speech that followed. Why should I sing only alone or only for one? Heaven knows that I have not a beautiful voice, but still I believe (and I am not an egotist) that I have the power of expressing the predominant sentiment of the song. Addio, stay, I often visit that alley of firs you admire so—in the afternoon of most fine days—and a voice sounds infinitely more spacious there. Shall I sing there alone?’

  Here John Ravil bit his white lower lip until the blood oozed in scarlet drops. O the midsummer noon-tide; the trembling air; the golden dusk that clung around the fir trunks! Flavia had wafted towards him from the eastern glade, clad in azure and seeming like a cloudborne cherub. Cherubs sing too, and she sang; but no cherub ever sang as she. Only one song—

  ‘Oh turn, love, oh turn I pray

  I prithee, love, turn to me.’

  But such memories add to one’s agony.

  The second letter, dated two months later, told of capitulation.

  ‘You did not come,—some scruple withheld you? If you had known how utterly sick I grew as the hours passed you would have pitied me. At every sound I gazed from my window, craving to see you on the terrace, your head downcast as ever; your eyes waiting for the brightness that my presence alone can bring. You are very cruel; I could not bear you to suffer as I do. Even when absent you magnetise me. Nothing appeals to me now—the gorgeous sunsets of late; the autumn foliage; the knee-deep drifts of already fallen leaves. Come to-night, my lover, my—I had almost blasphemed! Just to let my heart spring to yours, my blood leap through my body, my beauty grow paramount.’

  Ravil sat for a while with his hands covering his face. The blood trickled down his chin and fell on the white sheet; he wiped it away, replaced the letter in its envelope and took the next. The tide of love was flowing yet.

  ‘Genius,’ it began, ‘poet-painter, genius of mine, I thank you for your idealising of me. But I was never as lovely as the picture. I am almost glad that you insisted on retaining it, for I should have become jealous of its excellence, and perhaps destroyed it in some frenzy. How lively must my image be to you in absence!

  ‘To other people you are grotesque (what you said was true): to me you are the handsomest in the world. I and none other have seen that wondrous lighting of countenance, have heard that quickening of the voice. At this moment I could tear myself without a murmur from the vain world, to dwell in some remote garden where conventionalism triumphs not; where we should exist for each other, and let our lives form one perfection. Come to-night: I will sit with your head cushioned on my breast. Bring your story and let us cry together.’

  Soon after this the woman’s passion had begun to fade. Ravil knew what was in the other letters. She had wearied slowly of the genius. Her feeling had been too fervent to endure. She was healthy and full-blooded. Another, ‘a swart-haired Hercules,’ had taken her fancy; and with the admission of this second love all the old worship had grown lukewarm. In proportion, however, as she had become less infatuated, he had descended almost to madness: had craved over humbly that she would consider the wrong she was doing him; had sworn that if she were false to him, life would hold naught of goodness more.

  Men as highly strung and as unfortunate have little sustaining strength. Fate, the evil godmother, bestows an excess of imaginative power, and Nature, angry in the unwelcome gift, takes her spite out of the unsinning god-child, and makes him timorous and unmanly.

  Flavia’s last letter must have cost her an effort. Each word was as a dart through his vitals.

  ‘My love, there is a certain proverb which I am not powerful enough to disprove, that the constancy of women exists more in fiction than in reality. You accuse me of no longer loving you? In a measure you are wrong: your friendship will be more to me than anything in life. One way I have failed. Forgive me if I tell you that you will ever appeal to my spiritual part. We never could have married; in my cooler moments I have often acknowledged myself too cowardly to cross the bridge between our ranks. The homage of my kind is necessary after all. Let us regard the past as a pleasant episode.

  ‘Apparently you have heard the rumour of my approaching marriage. Let me beg of you one thing: in honour you are bound to return my letters; yours are ready in exchange. I shall be much pained to part with what has given me almost preternatural pleasure. Why should we not meet and bid each other good-bye?’

  PART II.

  The chamber was softly radiant with mother-o’-pearl colours, all so blended that by contrast a woman’s face might wear a heightened charm. Plants with pale leaves and white flowers filled the oriel; dusky mandarins leered in corners; chastened pictures hung on the silk-covered walls. Before each window was drawn a gleaming tissue.

  Flavia rose from the piano with a great sigh: tears were rolling down her cheeks (evidently the song had suggested woe), and some fell on the brown cover of a volume that lay on the table. It was John Ravil’s Venus’s Apple, a romance which, he had once dreamed, was like to bring him fame. Flavia took it up and held it over her breast until it was warm. It should ever be the dearest book in the world! Although love was dead, gratitude remained. For his short hour her lover had been all-in-all; through him she had tasted of intellectual pleasures unknown before their meeting.

  ‘He will bear it well enough in time,’ she sighed; ‘it will give him strength for his work; he will use his Oriental richness no longer,—will curb his luxuriance, and develop an epigrammatic style, which, being coupled with that fine imaginativeness of his, must needs fillip him into popularity.’

  The thought gave consolation, and she became herself again in mentally comparing the two lovers: the one saturnine, ugly, oppressive; the other bright, laughing, and handsome—her ideal of manhood. Sure ’twas only in an unwholesome dream that Ravil had been victor?

  She raised the lid of her cedar desk and took his letters from their nest amidst dried rose-leaves. Then she sank back to her favourite chair, leaning almost in the same posture as in the miniature. The collection was unfastened and placed in her lap, and soon, with a few more sighs, she raised the sheets for a last reading.

  Even for letters of passion they were extravagant: the weakness of his nature, his need of a restraining power, was manifest in each. They were almost hysterical: no man healthy in body and mind could have written them. Yet Flavia’s face grew troubled, and her lips moved pitifully.

  ‘Why did you look at me so,’ the first began, ‘look at our first greeting as if I had been by your side all my life? You brought a strange fluttering to my heart; you stopped my breath; the room whirled round and round. You must have thought me a very fool in the incoherent words I spoke. You may guess the cause; my oppressed brain had never permitted me even to imagine such beauty as yours.

  ‘Only once before in my life have I known such a feeling: I had read a story told of love and death under a southern sky. The hot malaria, the aroma of lilies, the thick water, seemed to envelop me, and I swooned. It was like rain on parched ground to find myself still in my own room, nodding my head to the bunch of yellow-flags I had bought of a child at the door.

  ‘But now I swoon again, and the awakening can only come at the transition into the next world’s darkness.

  ‘I am in love’s wine-press, shrieking at the weight that must descend and crush out new-born joy. Give me, in the name of God, one word of tenderness, an
d forget that I ever dared to lift my eyes.’

  As Flavia read she smiled, as women smile upon a baby thrusting out a tiny fist with broken flowers. As free and natural a gift was Ravil’s love. Her eyes grew tender: she looked at her shoulder just as if his head were resting there.

  ‘Poor head, poor coarse hair!’ she said.

  The next letter treated of some dereliction.

  ‘You have tortured me cruelly. When you rode past on the road, I stamped in the dust till my folly was manifest, even to myself. Who is he? I insist on knowing. When I saw him loose-mouthed and peering right into your pupils all the tigerish part of me sprang up, and I could have destroyed him for his temporary usurpation of my rights. How dared he look at you so? All night I lay awake, calling upon your name, praying for some miracle to bring you to my chamber.’

  Flavia remembered her exultation when her fingers tore this sheet open: how she had been so merry as to sing and run and play like a young girl. She passed hastily over more, and came to that he had written after she had yielded him her honour. Her own letters had feebly echoed his at the time.

  ‘Sweetest and noblest,’ it ran, ‘life has changed. The dense veil that shrouded my future has been withdrawn. To-day I feel infinitely more inspired than ever I felt in my youth. A myriad rich ideas float from my brain, and were it not for very impatience of the hour of our meeting I would sit at my table and write some grand epic, or some romance that would shake the centre of every heart. Love! love!’

  Flavia’s eyes glittered now; but grew languid quickly as she fell to picturing old scenes. The minutes passed and passed, ere she returned to her task. The letter she took had signs of a lover’s doubts.