Seven Gothic Tales

by Isak Dinesen

  Count Augustus’s thoughts were still with his letter. It was addressed to a friend in Germany, a schoolfellow of his happy student days in Ingolstadt, and the only person to whom he could open his heart. But have I been, he thought, really truthful in my letter to him? I would give a year of my life to be able to talk to him tonight and, while talking, to watch his face. How difficult it is to know the truth. I wonder if it is really possible to be absolutely truthful when you are alone. Truth, like time, is an idea arising from, and dependent upon, human intercourse. What is the truth about a mountain in Africa that has no name and not even a footpath across it? The truth about this road is that it leads to Pisa, and the truth about Pisa can be found within books written and read by human beings. What is the truth about a man on a desert island? And I, I am like a man on a desert island. When I was a student my friends used to laugh at me because I was in the habit of looking at myself in the looking-glasses, and had my own rooms decorated with mirrors. They attributed this to personal vanity. But it was not really so. I looked into the glasses to see what I was like. A glass tells you the truth about yourself. With a shudder of disgust he remembered how he had been taken, as a child, to see the mirror-room of the Panoptikon, in Copenhagen, where you see yourself reflected, to the right and the left, in the ceiling and even on the floor, in a hundred glasses each of which distorts and perverts your face and figure in a different way—shortening, lengthening, broadening, compressing their shape, and still keeping some sort of likeness—and thought how much this was like real life. So your own self, your personality and existence are reflected within the mind of each of the people whom you meet and live with, into a likeness, a caricature of yourself, which still lives on and pretends to be, in some way, the truth about you. Even a flattering picture is a caricature and a lie. A friendly and sympathetic mind, like Karl’s, he thought, is like a true mirror to the soul, and that is what made his friendship so precious to me. Love ought to be even more so. It ought to mean, along the roads of life, the companionship of another mind, reflecting your own fortune and misfortunes, and proving to you that all is not a dream. The idea of marriage has been to me the presence in my life of a person with whom I could talk, tomorrow, of the things that happened yesterday.

  He sighed, and his thoughts returned to his letter. There he had tried to explain to his friend the reasons that had driven him from his home. He had the misfortune to have a very jealous wife. It is not, he thought, that she is jealous of other women. In fact she is that least of all, and the reason is, first, that she knows that she can hold her own with most of them, being the most charming and accomplished of them all; secondly, that she feels how little they mean to me. Karl himself will remember that the little adventures which I had at Ingolstadt meant less to me than the opera, when a company of singers came along and gave us Alceste or Don Giovanni—less even than my studies. But she is jealous of my friends, of my dogs, of the forests of Lindenburg, of my guns and books. She is jealous of the most absurd things.

  He remembered something that had happened some six months after his wedding. He had come into his wife’s room to bring her a pair of eardrops which he had made a friend in Paris buy for him from the estate of the Duke of Berri. He had always been fond of jewels himself, and had good knowledge of their quality and cut. It had even at times annoyed him that men should not be free to wear them, and after his marriage it had given him pleasure to make them set off the beauty of his young wife, who wore them so well. These were very fine, and he had been so pleased to have got them that he had fastened them in her ears himself, and held up the mirror for her to see them. She watched him, and was aware that his eyes were on the diamonds and not on her face. She quickly took them off and handed them to him. “I am afraid,” she said, with dry eyes more tragic than if they had been filled with tears, “that I have not your taste for pretty things.” From that day she had given up wearing jewels, and had adopted a style of dress as severe as that of a nun, and she was so elegant and graceful that she had created a sensation and made a whole school of imitators.

  Can I make Karl understand, Augustus thought, that she is indeed jealous of her own jewels? Surely nobody can understand such folly. I know that I do not understand her myself, and I often think that I make her as unhappy as she makes me. I had hoped to find, in my wife, somebody to whom I could be perfectly truthful, with whom I could share every motion of my mind. But with Malvina that is the most impossible thing of all. She has made me lie to her twenty times a day, and deceive her even in looks and voice. No, I am certain that it could not go on, and that I have been right in leaving her, for while I was with her it would have been the same thing always.

  But what will happen to me now? I do not know what to do with myself or my life. Can I trust to fate to hold out a helping hand to me just for once?

  He took a small object from his waistcoat pocket and looked at it. It was a smelling-bottle, such as ladies of an earlier generation had been wont to use, made in the shape of a heart. It had painted on it a landscape with large trees and a bridge across a river. In the background, on a high hill or rock, was a pink castle with a tower, and on a ribbon below it all was written Amitié sincère.

  He smiled as he thought that this little bottle had played its part in making him go to Italy. It had belonged to a maiden aunt of his father’s, who had been the beauty of her time, and to whom he had been devoted. As a girl she had traveled in Italy, and had been a guest in that same rose-colored palace, and every dream of romance and adventure was in her mind attached to it. She had faith in her little smelling-bottle, thinking that it would cure any ache of the teeth or the heart. When he had been a little boy he had shared these fancies of hers, and had himself made up tales of the beautiful things to be found in the house and the happy life to be led there. Now that she was many years dead, nobody would know where it was to be found. Perhaps, he thought, some day I shall come across the bridge under the trees and see the rock and the castle before me.

  How mysterious and difficult it is to live, he thought, and what does it all mean? Why does my life seem to me so terribly important, more important than anything that has ever happened? Perhaps in a hundred years people will be reading about me, and about my sadness tonight, and think it only entertaining, if even that.

  II. THE ACCIDENT

  At that moment he was interrupted in his thoughts by a terrible noise behind him. He turned around and the sinking sun shone straight into his eyes so that he was blinded and for a few seconds saw the world as all silver, gold and flames. In a cloud of dust a large coach was coming toward him at a terrifying speed, the horses running in a wild gallop and hurling the carriage from one side of the road to the other. While he was looking at it he seemed to see two human forms being whirled down and out. They were, in fact, the coachman and lackey who were thrown from their seats to the road. For a moment Augustus thought of throwing himself in the way of the horses to stop them, but before the carriage reached him something gave way; first one and then the other of the horses detached itself from the carriage and came galloping past him. The carriage was thrown to one side of the road, stopping dead there, with one of the back wheels off. He ran toward it.

  Leaning against the seat of the smashed carriage now lying in the dust was a bald old man with a refined face and a large nose. He stared straight at Augustus, but was so deadly pale and kept so still that Augustus wondered if he had not really been killed after all. “Allow me to help you, Sir,” Augustus said. “You have had a horrible accident, but I hope you are not badly hurt.” The old man looked at him as before, with bewildered eyes.

  A broad young woman who had sat in the opposite seat and had been thrown down on her hands and knees between cushions and boxes, now began disentangling herself with loud lamentations. The old man turned his eyes upon her. “Put on my bonnet,” he said. The maid, as Augustus found her to be, after some struggle got hold of a large bonnet with ostrich feathers, and managed to get it fixed on the old ba
ld head. Fastened inside the bonnet was an abundance of silvery curls, and in a moment the old man was transformed into a fine old lady of imposing appearance. The bonnet seemed to set her at ease. She even found the shadow of a sweet and thankful smile for Augustus.

  The coachman now came running up, all covered with dust, while the lackey was still lying in a dead faint in the middle of the road. Also the people of the osteria had come out with uplifted arms and loud exclamations of sympathy. One of them brought one of the horses back, and at a distance two peasants were seen trying to get hold of the other. Between them they carried the old lady out of the wreckage of the coach and into the best bedroom of the inn, which was adorned with an enormous bed with red curtains. She was still pale as a corpse, and breathed with difficulty. Her right arm seemed to have been broken above the wrist, but what other injuries she had received they could not tell. The maid, who had large round eyes like big black buttons, turned toward Augustus and asked: “Are you a doctor?”

  “No,” said the old lady from the bed, in a very faint voice, hoarse with pain. “No, he is neither a doctor nor a priest, of which I want none. He is a nobleman, and that is the only person I need. Leave the room, all of you, and let me speak to him alone.”

  When they were alone her face changed and she shut her eyes; then she told him to come nearer and asked his name. “Count,” she said, after a short silence, “do you believe in God?”

  Such a direct question threw Augustus into confusion, but as he found her pale old eyes fixed on him, he answered: “That was in fact the very question which I was asking myself at the moment when your horses ran away. I cannot tell.”

  “There is a God,” she said, “and even very young people will realize it some day. I am going to die,” she went on, “but I cannot, I will not, die till I have seen my granddaughter once more. Will you, as a man of noble birth and high mind, undertake to find her and bring her here?” She paused, and a strange series of expressions passed over her face. “Tell her,” she said, “that I cannot lift my right hand, and that I will bless her.”

  Augustus, after wondering a moment, asked her where the young lady could be found. “She is in Pisa,” said the grandmother, “and her name is Donna Rosina di Gampocorta. If you had been in the country nine months ago you would have known her name, for then nobody talked of anything else.” She spoke so feebly that he had to keep his head close to her pillow, and for a moment he thought that all was over. Then she seemed to collect her strength. Her voice changed and became at times very high and clear, but he was not sure that she saw him or knew where she was. A faint color rose into her cheeks; her eyelids, like thick crape, trembled slightly. Strange and deep emotions seemed to shake her whole being. “I will tell you my whole story,” she said, “so that you will understand what I want you to do for me.”

  III. THE OLD LADY’S STORY

  “I am an old woman,” she said, “and I know the world. I do not cling to it, for I know enough about it to realize that whatever you cling to will either patronize you or get tired of you. I do not even cling to God, for that same reason. Do not pretend to be sorry for me because I am going to die, for I feel that it is really more comme il faut to be dead than alive.

  “I have had lovers, a husband, hundreds of friends and admirers. I have myself in my life loved three people, and of those I have now only one left, this girl Rosina.

  “Her mother was not my own child—I was her stepmother. But we were more devoted to each other than any mother and daughter ever have been. It was all meant to be so, for from my girlhood I have had the greatest terror of childbearing, and when I was demanded in marriage by a widower, whose first wife had died in childbirth, I made it a condition that I should never bear him any children myself, and because of my beauty and wealth he agreed. The girl Anna was so lovely that I have with my own eyes seen the statue of St. Joseph at the Basilica turn his head to look at her, remembering the appearance of the Virgin at the time that they were betrothed. Her feet were like swan’s bills, and the shoemaker made us our shoes over the same last. I brought her up to know that a woman’s beauty is the crowning masterpiece of God, and is not to be given away, but when she was seventeen years old she fell in love with a man, a soldier, at that—for this was the time of the wars of the French and their dreadful Emperor. She married him and followed him, and a year later she died in great agonies, like her mother.

  “Though I have never had it in me really to care for any male, I had hoped that the child would be a boy. But it was a girl, and she was given into my care, for her father could not stand the sight of her, and in fact he died of a broken heart only a few months later, leaving her the heiress of his great riches, of which most was booty of war.

  “Now as my granddaughter grew up, you will understand that I was all the time thinking of how I could best arrange the future for her. Did I say that her mother’s beauty was the Almighty’s highest work? No, it proved to be but his probation work, Rosina herself being the masterpiece of his craft. She was so fair that it was said in Pisa that when she drank red wine you could follow its course as it ran down her throat and chest. I did not want her to marry, so I was for a long time well pleased to see the hardness and contempt that the child showed toward all men, and especially toward the brilliant young swains who surrounded her with their adoration. But I was getting old, and I did not want to die and leave her alone in the world, either. Upon the morning of her seventeenth birthday I took to the Church of Santa Maria della Spina a great treasure that had been in my mother’s family for many hundred years, a belt of chastity that one of her ancestors had had made in Spain when he went to fight the infidels. And because his wife was a niece of St. Ferdinand of Castile, it was set with crosses of rubies. This I gave so that the saints should help me to think of what to do.

  “That same evening I gave a great ball, at which the Prince Pozentiani saw Rosina, and applied for her hand. Now I will ask you, Count, was this not an answer to my prayer? For the Prince was a magnificent match. He is today the richest man in the province, for it is well known that his family can never keep their hands from making money in one way or another. Although he is a little advanced in years he is the most charming person, a Mæcenas, a man of refined tastes and many talents, and an old friend of mine. And I knew also that a caprice of nature had made him, although an admirer of our sex, incapable of being a lover or a husband. It was his vanity or his weakness not to like this to be known, and he used to keep the most expensive courtesans with him, and people were afraid of him, so that the secret did not get out. But I happened to know, because he had at a time many years ago been one of my greatest admirers, and I had liked him very much. I was so happy and thankful that I saw my own face smile to me in the mirror, like the face of a blessed spirit.

  “The child Rosina herself was pleased with the Prince’s proposal, and for a time she liked him very much because of his wit and charming manners and the rich gifts which he showered upon her. The betrothal had been announced when one night, after I had already retired to bed, Rosina came into my room in her frock of high-red satin. She stood in the light of the candles, as lovely as the young St. Michele himself commanding the heavenly hosts, and told me, as if it might have been welcome news to me, that she had fallen in love with her cousin Mario, and would never marry anybody but him. Already at that moment I felt my heart faint within me. But I controlled my face, and only reminded her that the Prince was a deadly shot, and that, whatever she thought of her cousin, she had better keep him out of his way if she really liked him. She only answered as if she had been in love with death itself.

  “I did not dislike Mario for I have always had a curious weakness for my husband’s family, although they have all in them a sort of eccentricity, which has in this boy come out in a passion for astronomy. But as a husband he could not be compared to the Prince, and moreover I had only to see Rosina and him together to realize that any weakness of mine here would, within nine months, lead her straight into
her mother’s tomb. Rosina had had her head turned by the Prince’s flatteries. She imagined that should she want the moon, she was to have it, much more her young cousin. When I saw her holding on to her fancy I took her before me and explained to her the facts of life. But God alone knows what has come over the generation of women who have been born after the Revolution of the French and the novels of that woman de Staël—wealth, position and a tolerant husband are not enough to them, they want to make love as we took the Sacrament.”

  Here the old lady interrupted her tale. “Are you married?” she asked.

  “Yes, I am married,” the young man answered her.

  “I need not then,” she went on, as if satisfied with the accent of his reply, “develop to you the folly of these ideas. Rosina was so obstinate that I could not reason with her. If in the end she had told me that what she wanted was to have nine children, I should not have been surprised.

  “I have arrived at an age when I cannot very well stand to be crossed. I got furious with her, as furious as I would have been with a brigand whom I had seen slinging her over his horse to carry her off to wild mountains. I told the Prince that we must hurry with the wedding, and I kept Rosina shut up in the house. I lived through these months in such a state of deadly worry that I hardly ever slept, and each night was like a journey around the world.

  “Rosina had a friend, Agnese della Gherardesci, whom all her life she had loved next to me. Once, when the girls were doing needlework together, they had pricked their fingers, mixed their blood, and vowed sisterhood. This girl had been allowed to grow up wild and had become a real child of the age. She got into her head the notion that she looked like the Milord Byron, of whom so much is talked, and she used to dress and ride as a man, and to write poetry. To make Rosina happier I made Agnese come and stay with her the last week before the wedding. But there is a demon in girls when they believe a love affair to be at stake, and I think that she managed somehow to bring letters to Mario.