Seven Gothic Tales

by Isak Dinesen

  They were looking toward the door of the osteria when it was opened and the old Prince walked out, leaning upon his servant’s arm. He was very elegantly dressed in a bottle-green coat, and made up with great care, and he carried himself with the utmost grace and dignity. It was plain that he was deeply moved. The sun rose at this moment above the horizon, but it did not change or dominate the scene any more than did his arrival. All the others were in some way repressing or disguising their real feelings, whereas he showed his distress with the simplicity of an unspoiled child, perfectly confident of the sympathy of his surroundings. His dark eyes were moist, but frank and gentle, as if everything in life were natural and sweet to him, and he gave the same impression of assurance and mastery as a great virtuoso who on his violin runs up and down all the scales, even to the devil’s own thrill, as if it were child’s play. This equilibrium of his mind was as striking and surprising as the balance of his great body upon his extraordinarily small and elegant feet. The moment Augustus met his eyes, on that morning on the terrace, he felt convinced that the shot of this old man would be deadly. Jupiter himself, with his thunderbolt within the pocket of his coat-tail, could not have given a stronger impression of insuperability.

  He spoke with courtesy and friendliness to them all, and seemed to make the doctor his slave from the first instant. The fish-like eyes of the latter followed the great man’s slightest movement. He was in no hurry, but obviously did not want to draw things out, either. It was clear, from the moment when he came in, that everything would proceed with the measure and grace of a perfectly performed minuet.

  After a few remarks on the weather and the surroundings, and and on his gratitude to the two seconds, he offered, still standing, the choice of pistols to his friend, and as Giovanni, with one of them in his hand, withdrew a little to the place marked for him, he freed himself of his servant’s arm, made a deep bow to his adversary and a sort of great movement of relief, as if he had now happily come to the end of everyday existence and the beginning of real life, and, holding the other pistol, he seated himself in the large armchair, resting, for a moment, the weapon on his knee. Augustus took up his position at an equal distance from both duelists, so that each of them should be able to hear his signal. A faint breeze at this moment ran through the leaves of the trees in the garden, shaking down the blossoms and spreading their fragrance.

  At the moment when Augustus was clearing his throat to pronounce the one—two—three of the moment, the slim figure of the girl, who stood with her face toward him, stepped up to the old Prince, and, lifting one hand to her hip, she spoke to him in a clear low voice, as if a bird of the garden had descended on his shoulder to sing to him.

  “Allow me, Prince,” she said, “to speak to you before you shoot. I have something to tell you. If I were quite sure about the issue of your duel I would wait till you have killed your friend, but nobody can know certainly the ways of providence, and I do not wish you to die before you have heard what I have to say.” All faces had turned toward her, but she looked only into the still and sorrowful face of the old man. She looked very young and small, but her deep gravity and great self-possession gave her figure a terrible importance, as if a young destroying angel had rushed from the blue sky above them onto the stone terrace, to stand in judgment there.

  “A year ago,” she said, “Rosina, your wife, went in the middle of the night to see her cousin Mario, who was to leave Pisa in the morning, at the house of her old nurse near the harbor. It was necessary to those two to meet and decide what they were to do, and Rosina also felt that her strength was giving way, and that she must see her lover again or she thought that she might die.

  “Rosina, as you know, always had a night lamp burning in her bedroom, and she dared not put it out on this night for fear that you yourself might walk through the room, or that one of your spies, her maids, might look in, and, on finding the room empty, might wake up all the house. So she asked her best friend, a virgin like herself, one who, by virtue of a sacred vow, would always be ready to serve her, to take her place in the bed for this one hour. Between them they bribed your negro servant, Baba, with twelve yards of crimson velvet and a little Bologna dog belonging to Rosina’s friend—which was all that they possessed in the world to give away—to let them in and out of the house. They came and went away dressed like the apothecary’s assistant, who would sometimes be called for to give a clyster to your old housekeeper. Rosina went to her nurse’s house and talked to Mario in the old woman’s presence, for so it had to be. They pledged eternal fidelity and she gave him a letter to her great-uncle in Rome, and she came back to the palazzo a little after one o’clock. This, Prince, was my tale, which I wanted you to know.”

  They all stood perfectly immobile, like a party of little wooden dolls placed on that terrace of the inn, in the middle of the great landscape—Augustus and the old doctor, because they did not know what this speech meant; the old Prince and Giovanni, because they were too deeply impressed to move.

  At last the old man spoke. “Who,” said he, “has sent you to tell me this today, my pretty young signore?” The girl looked him straight in the eyes.

  “Do you not recognize me, Prince?” she asked. “I am that girl, Agnese della Gherardesci, who did your wife this service. You have seen me at your wedding, where I was a bridesmaid, dressed in yellow. Also at one time you came into Rosina’s rooms, and I was playing chess with the Professor Pacchiani, whom you had sent to talk to her about her duties. She stood at the window so as not to show that she was crying.” After she had spoken these words the Prince Giovanni never took his eyes off her face; during all that happened later he kept quite still, like one of the trees in the garden.

  The old Prince sat in the large chair, looking more than ever like a beautiful and severe old idol made in a mosaic of gold, ivory and ebony. He looked with interest at the young girl. “I am extremely sorry, Signora,” he said with a deep courtesy. Then again he sat silent.

  “And so,” he said very slowly after a time, “if Baba had been faithful to me I should have found the two together at that house near the harbor, in the night, and I should have had them in my hand?”

  “Yes, that you would,” said the girl. “But they would not have minded being killed by you if they had died together.”

  “No, no, no,” said the old Prince, “by no means. How can you imagine that I would have killed either of them? But I would have taken their clothes away and told them that I was going to have them killed in a terrible way, in the morning, and I would have had them shut up together alone, over the night. When she was frightened or angry her face, her whole body, blushed like an oleander flower.” This gave him stuff for thought for a long time. He seemed to stiffen more and more into something inanimate, until suddenly a great wave of high color spread over his old face.

  “And,” he exclaimed with deep emotion, “I should have had her, my lovely child, to play with still!”

  There was a long silence; nobody dared to speak in the presence of so great a pain.

  Suddenly he smiled at them all, a very gentle and sweet smile. “Always,” he said in a high and clear voice, “we fail because we are too small. I grudged the boy Mario that, in a petty grudge. And in my vanity I thought that I should prefer an heir to my name, if it was to be, out of a ducal house. Too small I have been, too small for the ways of God.”

  “Nino,” he said after a minute, “Nino, my friend, forgive me. Give me your hand.” Deeply moved, Giovanni put away his pistol and took the hand of his old friend. But the old Prince, after having squeezed the young man’s fingers, again took hold of his pistol, as if on guard against a greater enemy.

  His deep dark eyes looked straight in front of him. His mouth was slightly open, as if he were going to sing. “Carlotta,” he said.

  Then, with a strange, as if weary, movement, he turned to the right and fell, with the chair, sideways onto the ground, his heavy weight striking the stone pavement with a dull thud. The chai
r lay with its two legs in the air as he rolled out of it onto the pavement and remained still. At that moment his pistol, which he was still holding in his hand, went off, the bullet, taking a wild line up in the air, passed so close to Augustus’s head that he heard its whistle as it passed, like a bird’s singing. It stunned him for a second, and brought back the image of his wife. When he felt steady on his feet again he saw the doctor, kneeling beside the old Prince, lifting both arms toward heaven. The face of the old man slowly took on an ashen color. The paint on his cheeks and mouth looked like rose and crimson enamel upon silver.

  The doctor dropped his arms and put one hand on the breast of the still figure. After a minute he turned his head and looked back at the people behind him, his face so terrified that it had no expression in it at all. Meeting their eyes, it changed. He got up and solemnly declared to them, “All is over.”

  They remained quite still around him. The figure of the old Prince, lying immovably on the ground, still held the center of the picture as much as if he had been slowly ascending to heaven, and they his disciples, left behind, gazing up toward him. Only Nino, like one of those figures which were put into sacred pictures as the portrait of the man on whose order they were painted, kept somehow his own direction.

  The sun, rising in the blue morning sky, lent a misty bloom to the green broadcloth covering the heavy curves of the old man’s body upon the stone terrace.

  VIII. THE FREED CAPTIVE

  When the old Prince’s servants had lifted him up and carried him into the house, Giovanni and Agnese found themselves face to face on the deserted terrace. Their dark eyes met, and as if this were the most fatal of her missions on this spring morning, she looked straight at him for as long a time as it took the landlady’s cock—which was a descendant of the cock in the house of the high priest Caiaphas, and whose ancestors had been brought to Pisa by the Crusaders—to raise and finish a long crow. Then she turned to follow the others into the house. At that he spoke, standing quite still. “Do not go away,” he said. She stood for a moment, waiting, but did not speak to him. “Do not go away,” he said again, “before you have let me speak to you.”

  “I cannot think,” said she, “that you can have anything to say to me.” He stood for a long time, very pale, as if making a great effort to collect his voice, then he spoke in a changed and low voice:

  Lo spirito mio, che giá cotanto

  tempo era stato ch’alia sua presenza

  non era di stupor tremando affranto

  sanza degli occhi aver più conoscenza,

  per occulta virtù che da lei mosse

  d’antico amor senti la gran potenza.

  There was a long and deep silence. She might have been a little statue in the garden, except for the light morning wind playing with and lifting her soft locks.

  “I had left you,” he said, speaking altogether like a person in a dream, “and was going away, but I turned back at the door. You were sitting up in the bed. Your face was in the shadow, but the lamp shone on your shoulders and your back. You were naked, for I had torn off your clothes. The bed had green and golden curtains, like my forests in the mountains, and you were like my picture of Daphne, who turns away and is changed into a laurel. And I was standing in the dark. Then the clock struck one. For a year,” he cried, “I have thought of nothing but that one moment.”

  Again the two young people stood quite still. Like the marionettes of the night before, they were within stronger hands than their own, and had no idea what was going to happen to them. He spoke again:

  Di penter sì mi punse ivi l’ortica

  che di tutt’altre cose, qual mi torse

  più nel suo amor, più mi si fe’ nemica.

  Tanta riconoscenza il cuor mi morse

  eh’ io caddi vinto.…

  He stopped because, though he had repeated these lines to himself many times, at the moment he could not remember any more. It was as if he might have dropped down dead, like his old adversary.

  She turned again and looked at him, very severely, and yet her face expressed the clearness and calm which the sound of poetry produces in the people who love it. She spoke very slowly to him, in her clear and sweet voice, like a bird’s:

  … da tema e da vergogna

  voglio che tu omai ti disviluppe

  e che non parli più com’ uom che sogna.

  She looked away for a moment, drew a deep breath, and her voice took on more force.

  Sappi che il vaso che il serpente ruppe

  fu e non è, ma chi n’ha colpa creda

  che vendetta di Dio non teme suppe.

  With these words she walked away, and though she passed so near to him that he might have held her back by stretching out his hand, he did not move or try to touch her, but stood upon the same spot as if he intended to remain there forever, and followed her with his eyes as she walked up to the house.

  Augustus came out of the door at that same moment, and walked up to meet her. Though he was deeply affected by the happenings of the morning, and last of all by the sight of the old Prince, now lying in peace and dignity on a large bed within the inn, his conscience told him that he ought to make an effort to get the message of the old lady to Pisa, and he wanted the girl to help him and guide him there. At the same time he was, now that he understood more of the whole affair which had brought on the morning’s tragedy, shy of approaching her, as one of the principal figures in it, and talking to her of such trivial matters as roads and coaches. She met him, however, as if he had been an old friend whom she was happy to meet again. She took his hand and looked at him. She was changed, like a statute come to life, he thought.

  She listened with great interest to all he had to tell her, and was naturally eager to bring the message to her friend as soon as possible. She suggested that they travel together in her phaëton, which would be quicker than his coach. She told him that she would drive it herself.

  “My friend,” she said, “let us go away. Let us go to Pisa as quickly as we can. For I am free. I can choose where I will go, I can think of tomorrow. I think that tomorrow is going to be lovely. I can remember that I am seventeen, and that by the mercy of God I have sixty years more to live. I am no more shut up within one hour. God!” she said with a sudden deep shudder, “I cannot remember it now if I try.”

  She looked like a young charioteer who is confident of winning his race. It was clear that the idea of speed was at this moment the most attractive of all ideas to her. As they were going into the house she looked back at the terrace.

  “We have all been wrong,” she said. “That old man was great and might well have been loved. While he was alive we wished for his death, but now that he is dead I think that we all wish that he were back.”

  “That,” said Augustus, who had been reflecting upon his own life, “may make us realize that every human being whom we meet and get to know is, after all, something in our minds, like a tree planted in our gardens or a piece of furniture within our house. It may be better to keep them and try to put them to some use, than to cast them away and have nothing at all there in the end.” She thought of this for a little while. “Then the old Prince shall be,” said she, “within the garden of my mind a great fountain, made of black marble, near which it is always cool and fresh, and from which great cascades of water are rushing and playing. I shall go and sit there sometimes, when I have much to think of. If I had been Rosina I would not have tried to get away from him. I would have made him happy. It would have been good if he had been happy; it is hard to make anybody unhappy.”

  Augustus, who thought he heard the note of a late regret in her voice, said in order to console her: “Remember now that you have saved the other’s life.” She changed color and was silent for a moment. Then she turned and looked at him with deep serenity. “Who,” she said, “would have stood by and heard a man so unjustly accused?”

  As soon as her carriage was ready they started for Pisa and went at a great speed. The day was beginning to ge
t warm, the road was dusty, and the shadows of the trees were keeping close underneath them. Augustus had left his address with the old doctor in case there would have to be an inquest, but after all the old Prince had died a natural death.

  IX. THE PARTING GIFT

  Count Augustus von Schimmelmann had been staying in Pisa for more than three weeks and had come to like the place. He had had a love affair with a Swedish lady, some years older than himself, who lived in Pisa to keep away from her husband, and had a small opera stage on which she appeared to her friends. She was a disciple of Swedenborg, and told Augustus that she had had a vision of herself and him in the next world. What really interested him more were the attempts of two priests, one old and one young, to convert him to the Church of Rome. He had no intention of joining it, but it surprised and pleased him that anyone should chose to occupy himself so much with his soul, and he took much trouble in explaining to the churchmen his ideas and states of mind. He could, however, foresee that this affair of spiritual seduction could not go on forever, but would, like, worse luck, all affairs of seduction, have to come to an end one way or another, and he had begun to give much of his time to a secret political society to which he had been introduced as coming from a freer country. At their séances he had met one of the genuine old Jacobins, an exile, a former member of the Mountain, who had been a friend of Robespierre. Augustus often visited him in a little dark and dirty room high up in an old house, and discussed tyranny and freedom with him. He was also taking painting lessons, and had begun to copy an old picture in the gallery.