Chiara C. Rizzarda's Blog, page 20

#AdventCalendar 21: Bewitched (2)

Second part of a ghost story by Edith Wharton, included in her collection Here and Beyond from 1926. First part here.

As he came in he faced the light from the north window, and Bosworth’s first thought was that he looked like a drowned man fished out from under the ice—“self-drowned,” he 92added. But the snow-light plays cruel tricks with a man’s colour, and even with the shape of his features; it must have been partly that, Bosworth reflected, which transformed Saul Rutledge from the straight muscular fellow he had been a year before into the haggard wretch now before them.

The Deacon sought for a word to ease the horror. “Well, now, Saul—you look’s if you’d ought to set right up to the stove. Had a touch of ague, maybe?”

The feeble attempt was unavailing. Rutledge neither moved nor answered. He stood among them silent, incommunicable, like one risen from the dead.

Brand grasped him roughly by the shoulder. “See here, Saul Rutledge, what’s this dirty lie your wife tells us you’ve been putting about?”

Still Rutledge did not move. “It’s no lie,” he said.

Brand’s hand dropped from his shoulder. In spite of the man’s rough bullying power he seemed to be undefinably awed by Rutledge’s look and tone.

93“No lie? You’ve gone plumb crazy, then, have you?”

Mrs. Rutledge spoke. “My husband’s not lying, nor he ain’t gone crazy. Don’t I tell you I seen ’em?”

Brand laughed again. “Him and the dead?”

“Yes.”

“Down by the Lamer pond, you say?”

“Yes.”

“And when was that, if I might ask?”

“Day before yesterday.”

A silence fell on the strangely assembled group. The Deacon at length broke it to say to Mr. Brand: “Brand, in my opinion we’ve got to see this thing through.”

Brand stood for a moment in speechless contemplation: there was something animal and primitive about him, Bosworth thought, as he hung thus, lowering and dumb, a little foam beading the corners of that heavy purplish underlip. He let himself slowly down into his chair. “I’ll see it through.”

The two other men and Mrs. Rutledge had remained seated. Saul Rutledge stood before them, like a prisoner at the bar, or 94rather like a sick man before the physicians who were to heal him. As Bosworth scrutinized that hollow face, so wan under the dark sunburn, so sucked inward and consumed by some hidden fever, there stole over the sound healthy man the thought that perhaps, after all, husband and wife spoke the truth, and that they were all at that moment really standing on the edge of some forbidden mystery. Things that the rational mind would reject without a thought seemed no longer so easy to dispose of as one looked at the actual Saul Rutledge and remembered the man he had been a year before. Yes; as the Deacon said, they would have to see it through….

“Sit down then, Saul; draw up to us, won’t you?” the Deacon suggested, trying again for a natural tone.

Mrs. Rutledge pushed a chair forward, and her husband sat down on it. He stretched out his arms and grasped his knees in his brown bony fingers; in that attitude he remained, turning neither his head nor his eyes.

“Well, Saul,” the Deacon continued, “your 95wife says you thought mebbe we could do something to help you through this trouble, whatever it is.”

Rutledge’s gray eyes widened a little. “No; I didn’t think that. It was her idea to try what could be done.”

“I presume, though, since you’ve agreed to our coming, that you don’t object to our putting a few questions?”

Rutledge was silent for a moment; then he said with a visible effort: “No; I don’t object.”

“Well—you’ve heard what your wife says?”

Rutledge made a slight motion of assent.

“And—what have you got to answer? How do you explain…?”

Mrs. Rutledge intervened. “How can he explain? I seen ’em.”

There was a silence; then Bosworth, trying to speak in an easy reassuring tone, queried: “That so, Saul?”

“That’s so.”

Brand lifted up his brooding head. “You mean to say you … you sit here before us all and say….”

96The Deacon’s hand again checked him. “Hold on, friend Brand. We’re all of us trying for the facts, ain’t we?” He turned to Rutledge. “We’ve heard what Mrs. Rutledge says. What’s your answer?”

“I don’t know as there’s any answer. She found us.”

“And you mean to tell me the person with you was … was what you took to be …” the Deacon’s thin voice grew thinner: “Ora Brand?”

Saul Rutledge nodded.

“You knew … or thought you knew … you were meeting with the dead?”

Rutledge bent his head again. The snow continued to fall in a steady unwavering sheet against the window, and Bosworth felt as if a winding-sheet were descending from the sky to envelop them all in a common grave.

“Think what you’re saying! It’s against our religion! Ora … poor child! … died over a year ago. I saw you at her funeral, Saul. How can you make such a statement?”

97“What else can he do?” thrust in Mrs. Rutledge.

There was another pause. Bosworth’s resources had failed him, and Brand once more sat plunged in dark meditation. The Deacon laid his quivering finger-tips together, and moistened his lips.

“Was the day before yesterday the first time?” he asked.

The movement of Rutledge’s head was negative.

“Not the first? Then when….”

“Nigh on a year ago, I reckon.”

“God! And you mean to tell us that ever since—?”

“Well … look at him,” said his wife. The three men lowered their eyes.

After a moment Bosworth, trying to collect himself, glanced at the Deacon. “Why not ask Saul to make his own statement, if that’s what we’re here for?”

“That’s so,” the Deacon assented. He turned to Rutledge. “Will you try and give us your idea … of … of how it began?”

There was another silence. Then Rutledge 98tightened his grasp on his gaunt knees, and still looking straight ahead, with his curiously clear unseeing gaze: “Well,” he said, “I guess it begun away back, afore even I was married to Mrs. Rutledge….” He spoke in a low automatic tone, as if some invisible agent were dictating his words, or even uttering them for him. “You know,” he added, “Ora and me was to have been married.”

Sylvester Brand lifted his head. “Straighten that statement out first, please,” he interjected.

“What I mean is, we kept company. But Ora she was very young. Mr. Brand here he sent her away. She was gone nigh to three years, I guess. When she come back I was married.”

“That’s right,” Brand said, relapsing once more into his sunken attitude.

“And after she came back did you meet her again?” the Deacon continued.

“Alive?” Rutledge questioned.

A perceptible shudder ran through the room.

99“Well—of course,” said the Deacon nervously.

Rutledge seemed to consider. “Once I did—only once. There was a lot of other people round. At Cold Corners fair it was.”

“Did you talk with her then?”

“Only a minute.”

“What did she say?”

His voice dropped. “She said she was sick and knew she was going to die, and when she was dead she’d come back to me.”

“And what did you answer?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you think anything of it at the time?”

“Well, no. Not till I heard she was dead I didn’t. After that I thought of it—and I guess she drew me.” He moistened his lips.

“Drew you down to that abandoned house by the pond?”

Rutledge made a faint motion of assent, and the Deacon added: “How did you know it was there she wanted you to come?”

“She … just drew me….”

There was a long pause. Bosworth felt, 100on himself and the other two men, the oppressive weight of the next question to be asked. Mrs. Rutledge opened and closed her narrow lips once or twice, like some beached shell-fish gasping for the tide. Rutledge waited.

“Well, now, Saul, won’t you go on with what you was telling us?” the Deacon at length suggested.

“That’s all. There’s nothing else.”

The Deacon lowered his voice. “She just draws you?”

“Yes.”

“Often?”

“That’s as it happens….”

“But if it’s always there she draws you, man, haven’t you the strength to keep away from the place?”

For the first time, Rutledge wearily turned his head toward his questioner. A spectral smile narrowed his colourless lips. “Ain’t any use. She follers after me….”

There was another silence. What more could they ask, then and there? Mrs. Rutledge’s presence checked the next question. The Deacon seemed hopelessly to revolve 101the matter. At length he spoke in a more authoritative tone. “These are forbidden things. You know that, Saul. Have you tried prayer?”

Rutledge shook his head.

“Will you pray with us now?”

Rutledge cast a glance of freezing indifference on his spiritual adviser. “If you folks want to pray, I’m agreeable,” he said. But Mrs. Rutledge intervened.

“Prayer ain’t any good. In this kind of thing it ain’t no manner of use; you know it ain’t. I called you here, Deacon, because you remember the last case in this parish. Thirty years ago it was, I guess; but you remember. Lefferts Nash—did praying help him? I was a little girl then, but I used to hear my folks talk of it winter nights. Lefferts Nash and Hannah Cory. They drove a stake through her breast. That’s what cured him.”

“Oh—” Orrin Bosworth exclaimed.

Sylvester Brand raised his head. “You’re speaking of that old story as if this was the same sort of thing?”

“Ain’t it? Ain’t my husband pining away 102the same as Lefferts Nash did? The Deacon here knows—”

The Deacon stirred anxiously in his chair. “These are forbidden things,” he repeated. “Supposing your husband is quite sincere in thinking himself haunted, as you might say. Well, even then, what proof have we that the … the dead woman … is the spectre of that poor girl?”

“Proof? Don’t he say so? Didn’t she tell him? Ain’t I seen ’em?” Mrs. Rutledge almost screamed.

The three men sat silent, and suddenly the wife burst out: “A stake through the breast! That’s the old way; and it’s the only way. The Deacon knows it!”

“It’s against our religion to disturb the dead.”

“Ain’t it against your religion to let the living perish as my husband is perishing?” She sprang up with one of her abrupt movements and took the family Bible from the what-not in a corner of the parlour. Putting the book on the table, and moistening a livid finger-tip, she turned the pages rapidly, till she came to one on which she laid her hand 103like a stony paper-weight. “See here,” she said, and read out in her level chanting voice:

“‘Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’

“That’s in Exodus, that’s where it is,” she added, leaving the book open as if to confirm the statement.

Bosworth continued to glance anxiously from one to the other of the four people about the table. He was younger than any of them, and had had more contact with the modern world; down in Starkfield, in the bar of the Fielding House, he could hear himself laughing with the rest of the men at such old wives’ tales. But it was not for nothing that he had been born under the icy shadow of Lonetop, and had shivered and hungered as a lad through the bitter Hemlock County winters. After his parents died, and he had taken hold of the farm himself, he had got more out of it by using improved methods, and by supplying the increasing throng of summer-boarders over Stotesbury way with milk and vegetables. He had been made a selectman of North Ashmore; for so young a man he had a standing in the county. But 104the roots of the old life were still in him. He could remember, as a little boy, going twice a year with his mother to that bleak hill-farm out beyond Sylvester Brand’s, where Mrs. Bosworth’s aunt, Cressidora Cheney, had been shut up for years in a cold clean room with iron bars in the windows. When little Orrin first saw Aunt Cressidora she was a small white old woman, whom her sisters used to “make decent” for visitors the day that Orrin and his mother were expected. The child wondered why there were bars to the window. “Like a canary-bird,” he said to his mother. The phrase made Mrs. Bosworth reflect. “I do believe they keep Aunt Cressidora too lonesome,” she said; and the next time she went up the mountain with the little boy he carried to his great-aunt a canary in a little wooden cage. It was a great excitement; he knew it would make her happy.

The old woman’s motionless face lit up when she saw the bird, and her eyes began to glitter. “It belongs to me,” she said instantly, stretching her soft bony hand over the cage.

105“Of course it does, Aunt Cressy,” said Mrs. Bosworth, her eyes filling.

But the bird, startled by the shadow of the old woman’s hand, began to flutter and beat its wings distractedly. At the sight, Aunt Cressidora’s calm face suddenly became a coil of twitching features. “You she-devil, you!” she cried in a high squealing voice; and thrusting her hand into the cage she dragged out the terrified bird and wrung its neck. She was plucking the hot body, and squealing “she-devil, she-devil!” as they drew little Orrin from the room. On the way down the mountain his mother wept a great deal, and said: “You must never tell anybody that poor Auntie’s crazy, or the men would come and take her down to the asylum at Starkfield, and the shame of it would kill us all. Now promise.” The child promised.

He remembered the scene now, with its deep fringe of mystery, secrecy and rumour. It seemed related to a great many other things below the surface of his thoughts, things which stole up anew, making him feel that all the old people he had known, and 106who “believed in these things,” might after all be right. Hadn’t a witch been burned at North Ashmore? Didn’t the summer folk still drive over in jolly buckboard loads to see the meeting-house where the trial had been held, the pond where they had ducked her and she had floated?… Deacon Hibben believed; Bosworth was sure of it. If he didn’t, why did people from all over the place come to him when their animals had queer sicknesses, or when there was a child in the family that had to be kept shut up because it fell down flat and foamed? Yes, in spite of his religion, Deacon Hibben knew….

And Brand? Well, it came to Bosworth in a flash: that North Ashmore woman who was burned had the name of Brand. The same stock, no doubt; there had been Brands in Hemlock County ever since the white men had come there. And Orrin, when he was a child, remembered hearing his parents say that Sylvester Brand hadn’t ever oughter married his own cousin, because of the blood. Yet the couple had had two healthy girls, and when Mrs. Brand pined away and died 107nobody suggested that anything had been wrong with her mind. And Vanessa and Ora were the handsomest girls anywhere round. Brand knew it, and scrimped and saved all he could to send Ora, the eldest, down to Starkfield to learn book-keeping. “When she’s married I’ll send you,” he used to say to little Venny, who was his favourite. But Ora never married. She was away three years, during which Venny ran wild on the slopes of Lonetop; and when Ora came back she sickened and died—poor girl! Since then Brand had grown more savage and morose. He was a hard-working farmer, but there wasn’t much to be got out of those barren Bearcliff acres. He was said to have taken to drink since his wife’s death; now and then men ran across him in the “dives” of Stotesbury. But not often. And between times he laboured hard on his stony acres and did his best for his daughters. In the neglected grave-yard of Cold Corners there was a slanting head-stone marked with his wife’s name; near it, a year since, he had laid his eldest daughter. And sometimes, at dusk, in the autumn, the village people saw 108him walk slowly by, turn in between the graves, and stand looking down on the two stones. But he never brought a flower there, or planted a bush; nor Venny either. She was too wild and ignorant….

Mrs. Rutledge repeated: “That’s in Exodus.”

The three visitors remained silent, turning about their hats in reluctant hands. Rutledge faced them, still with that empty pellucid gaze which frightened Bosworth. What was he seeing?

“Ain’t any of you folks got the grit—?” his wife burst out again, half hysterically.

Deacon Hibben held up his hand. “That’s no way, Mrs. Rutledge. This ain’t a question of having grit. What we want first of all is … proof….”

“That’s so,” said Bosworth, with an explosion of relief, as if the words had lifted something black and crouching from his breast. Involuntarily the eyes of both men had turned to Brand. He stood there smiling grimly, but did not speak.

“Ain’t it so, Brand?” the Deacon prompted him.

109“Proof that spooks walk?” the other sneered.

“Well—I presume you want this business settled too?”

The old farmer squared his shoulders. “Yes—I do. But I ain’t a sperritualist. How the hell are you going to settle it?”

Deacon Hibben hesitated; then he said, in a low incisive tone: “I don’t see but one way—Mrs. Rutledge’s.”

There was a silence.

“What?” Brand sneered again. “Spying?”

The Deacon’s voice sank lower. “If the poor girl does walk … her that’s your child … wouldn’t you be the first to want her laid quiet? We all know there’ve been such cases … mysterious visitations…. Can any one of us here deny it?”

“I seen ’em,” Mrs. Rutledge interjected.

There was another heavy pause. Suddenly Brand fixed his gaze on Rutledge. “See here, Saul Rutledge, you’ve got to clear up this damned calumny, or I’ll know why. You say my dead girl comes to you.” He laboured with his breath, and then jerked 110out: “When? You tell me that, and I’ll be there.”

Rutledge’s head drooped a little, and his eyes wandered to the window. “Round about sunset, mostly.”

“You know beforehand?”

Rutledge made a sign of assent.

“Well, then—tomorrow, will it be?”

Rutledge made the same sign.

Brand turned to the door. “I’ll be there.” That was all he said. He strode out between them without another glance or word. Deacon Hibben looked at Mrs. Rutledge. “We’ll be there too,” he said, as if she had asked him; but she had not spoken, and Bosworth saw that her thin body was trembling all over. He was glad when he and Hibben were out again in the snow.

#AdventCalendar 21: Bewitched (1)

Edith Wharton (January 24, 1862 – August 11, 1937) was an American novelist and designer, celebrated for her insightful portrayals of the upper-class society of her time. Born Edith Newbold Jones in New York, she grew up in a wealthy family that provided her with a privileged upbringing, which greatly influenced her literary work. Wharton is often associated with the Realism movement, which sought to depict everyday life and social realities without romantic embellishment.

Here and Beyond, published in April 1926, is a collection of short stories marking her first such compilation after World War I. The collection consists of six stories, showcasing Wharton’s range in themes and styles, from Gothic horror to social commentary. “Bewitched is the third of them, and it’s today’s feature. Enjoy.

It’s in four parts and it will lead us right up to Christmas.

The snow was still falling thickly when Orrin Bosworth, who farmed the land south of Lonetop, drove up in his cutter to Saul Rutledge’s gate. He was surprised to see two other cutters ahead of him. From them descended two muffled figures. Bosworth, with increasing surprise, recognized Deacon Hibben, from North Ashmore, and Sylvester Brand, the widower, from the old Bearcliff farm on the way to Lonetop.

It was not often that anybody in Hemlock County entered Saul Rutledge’s gate; least of all in the dead of winter, and summoned (as Bosworth, at any rate, had been) by Mrs. Rutledge, who passed, even in that unsocial region, for a woman of cold manners 80and solitary character. The situation was enough to excite the curiosity of a less imaginative man than Orrin Bosworth.

As he drove in between the broken-down white gate-posts topped by fluted urns the two men ahead of him were leading their horses to the adjoining shed. Bosworth followed, and hitched his horse to a post. Then the three tossed off the snow from their shoulders, clapped their numb hands together, and greeted each other.

“Hallo, Deacon.”

“Well, well, Orrin—.” They shook hands.

“’Day, Bosworth,” said Sylvester Brand, with a brief nod. He seldom put any cordiality into his manner, and on this occasion he was still busy about his horse’s bridle and blanket.

Orrin Bosworth, the youngest and most communicative of the three, turned back to Deacon Hibben, whose long face, queerly blotched and mouldy-looking, with blinking peering eyes, was yet less forbidding than Brand’s heavily-hewn countenance.

81“Queer, our all meeting here this way. Mrs. Rutledge sent me a message to come,” Bosworth volunteered.

The Deacon nodded. “I got a word from her too—Andy Pond come with it yesterday noon. I hope there’s no trouble here—”

He glanced through the thickening fall of snow at the desolate front of the Rutledge house, the more melancholy in its present neglected state because, like the gate-posts, it kept traces of former elegance. Bosworth had often wondered how such a house had come to be built in that lonely stretch between North Ashmore and Cold Corners. People said there had once been other houses like it, forming a little township called Ashmore, a sort of mountain colony created by the caprice of an English Royalist officer, one Colonel Ashmore, who had been murdered by the Indians, with all his family, long before the Revolution. This tale was confirmed by the fact that the ruined cellars of several smaller houses were still to be discovered under the wild growth of the adjoining slopes, and that the Communion plate of 82the moribund Episcopal church of Cold Corners was engraved with the name of Colonel Ashmore, who had given it to the church of Ashmore in the year 1723. Of the church itself no traces remained. Doubtless it had been a modest wooden edifice, built on piles, and the conflagration which had burnt the other houses to the ground’s edge had reduced it utterly to ashes. The whole place, even in summer, wore a mournful solitary air, and people wondered why Saul Rutledge’s father had gone there to settle.

“I never knew a place,” Deacon Hibben said, “as seemed as far away from humanity. And yet it ain’t so in miles.”

“Miles ain’t the only distance,” Orrin Bosworth answered; and the two men, followed by Sylvester Brand, walked across the drive to the front door. People in Hemlock County did not usually come and go by their front doors, but all three men seemed to feel that, on an occasion which appeared to be so exceptional, the usual and more familiar approach by the kitchen would not be suitable.

They had judged rightly; the Deacon had 83hardly lifted the knocker when the door opened and Mrs. Rutledge stood before them.

“Walk right in,” she said in her usual dead-level tone; and Bosworth, as he followed the others, thought to himself: “Whatever’s happened, she’s not going to let it show in her face.”

It was doubtful, indeed, if anything unwonted could be made to show in Prudence Rutledge’s face, so limited was its scope, so fixed were its features. She was dressed for the occasion in a black calico with white spots, a collar of crochet-lace fastened by a gold brooch, and a gray woollen shawl, crossed under her arms and tied at the back. In her small narrow head the only marked prominence was that of the brow projecting roundly over pale spectacled eyes. Her dark hair, parted above this prominence, passed tight and flat over the tips of her ears into a small braided coil at the nape; and her contracted head looked still narrower from being perched on a long hollow neck with cord-like throat-muscles. Her eyes were of a pale cold gray, her complexion was an even white. 84Her age might have been anywhere from thirty-five to sixty.

The room into which she led the three men had probably been the dining-room of the Ashmore house. It was now used as a front parlour, and a black stove planted on a sheet of zinc stuck out from the delicately fluted panels of an old wooden mantel. A newly-lit fire smouldered reluctantly, and the room was at once close and bitterly cold.

“Andy Pond,” Mrs. Rutledge cried to some one at the back of the house, “step out and call Mr. Rutledge. You’ll likely find him in the wood-shed, or round the barn somewheres.” She rejoined her visitors. “Please suit yourselves to seats,” she said.

The three men, with an increasing air of constraint, took the chairs she pointed out, and Mrs. Rutledge sat stiffly down upon a fourth, behind a rickety bead-work table. She glanced from one to the other of her visitors.

“I presume you folks are wondering what it is I asked you to come here for,” she said in her dead-level voice. Orrin Bosworth and Deacon Hibben murmured an assent; Sylvester 85Brand sat silent, his eyes, under their great thicket of eyebrows, fixed on the huge boot-tip swinging before him.

“Well, I allow you didn’t expect it was for a party,” continued Mrs. Rutledge.

No one ventured to respond to this chill pleasantry, and she continued: “We’re in trouble here, and that’s the fact. And we need advice—Mr. Rutledge and myself do.” She cleared her throat, and added in a lower tone, her pitilessly clear eyes looking straight before her: “There’s a spell been cast over Mr. Rutledge.”

The Deacon looked up sharply, an incredulous smile pinching his thin lips. “A spell?”

“That’s what I said: he’s bewitched.”

Again the three visitors were silent; then Bosworth, more at ease or less tongue-tied than the others, asked with an attempt at humour: “Do you use the word in the strict Scripture sense, Mrs. Rutledge?”

She glanced at him before replying: “That’s how he uses it.”

The Deacon coughed and cleared his long 86rattling throat. “Do you care to give us more particulars before your husband joins us?”

Mrs. Rutledge looked down at her clasped hands, as if considering the question. Bosworth noticed that the inner fold of her lids was of the same uniform white as the rest of her skin, so that when she dropped them her rather prominent eyes looked like the sightless orbs of a marble statue. The impression was unpleasing, and he glanced away at the text over the mantelpiece, which read:

The Soul That Sinneth It Shall Die.

“No,” she said at length, “I’ll wait.”

At this moment Sylvester Brand suddenly stood up and pushed back his chair. “I don’t know,” he said, in his rough bass voice, “as I’ve got any particular lights on Bible mysteries; and this happens to be the day I was to go down to Starkfield to close a deal with a man.”

Mrs. Rutledge lifted one of her long thin hands. Withered and wrinkled by hard work and cold, it was nevertheless of the same leaden white as her face. “You won’t 87be kept long,” she said. “Won’t you be seated?”

Farmer Brand stood irresolute, his purplish underlip twitching. “The Deacon here—such things is more in his line….”

“I want you should stay,” said Mrs. Rutledge quietly; and Brand sat down again.

A silence fell, during which the four persons present seemed all to be listening for the sound of a step; but none was heard, and after a minute or two Mrs. Rutledge began to speak again.

“It’s down by that old shack on Lamer’s pond; that’s where they meet,” she said suddenly.

Bosworth, whose eyes were on Sylvester Brand’s face, fancied he saw a sort of inner flush darken the farmer’s heavy leathern skin. Deacon Hibben leaned forward, a glitter of curiosity in his eyes.

“They—who, Mrs. Rutledge?”

“My husband, Saul Rutledge … and her….”

Sylvester Brand again stirred in his seat. “Who do you mean by her?” he asked 88abruptly, as if roused out of some far-off musing.

Mrs. Rutledge’s body did not move; she simply revolved her head on her long neck and looked at him.

“Your daughter, Sylvester Brand.”

The man staggered to his feet with an explosion of inarticulate sounds. “My—my daughter? What the hell are you talking about? My daughter? It’s a damned lie … it’s … it’s….”

“Your daughter Ora, Mr. Brand,” said Mrs. Rutledge slowly.

Bosworth felt an icy chill down his spine. Instinctively he turned his eyes away from Brand, and they rested on the mildewed countenance of Deacon Hibben. Between the blotches it had become as white as Mrs. Rutledge’s, and the Deacon’s eyes burned in the whiteness like live embers among ashes.

Brand gave a laugh: the rusty creaking laugh of one whose springs of mirth are never moved by gaiety. “My daughter Ora?” he repeated.

“Yes.”

89“My dead daughter?”

“That’s what he says.”

“Your husband?”

“That’s what Mr. Rutledge says.”

Orrin Bosworth listened with a sense of suffocation; he felt as if he were wrestling with long-armed horrors in a dream. He could no longer resist letting his eyes return to Sylvester Brand’s face. To his surprise it had resumed a natural imperturbable expression. Brand rose to his feet. “Is that all?” he queried contemptuously.

“All? Ain’t it enough? How long is it since you folks seen Saul Rutledge, any of you?” Mrs. Rutledge flew out at them.

Bosworth, it appeared, had not seen him for nearly a year; the Deacon had only run across him once, for a minute, at the North Ashmore post office, the previous autumn, and acknowledged that he wasn’t looking any too good then. Brand said nothing, but stood irresolute.

“Well, if you wait a minute you’ll see with your own eyes; and he’ll tell you with his own words. That’s what I’ve got you here for—to see for yourselves what’s come over 90him. Then you’ll talk different,” she added, twisting her head abruptly toward Sylvester Brand.

The Deacon raised a lean hand of interrogation.

“Does your husband know we’ve been sent for on this business, Mrs. Rutledge?”

Mrs. Rutledge signed assent.

“It was with his consent, then—?”

She looked coldly at her questioner. “I guess it had to be,” she said. Again Bosworth felt the chill down his spine. He tried to dissipate the sensation by speaking with an affectation of energy.

“Can you tell us, Mrs. Rutledge, how this trouble you speak of shows itself … what makes you think…?”

She looked at him for a moment; then she leaned forward across the rickety bead-work table. A thin smile of disdain narrowed her colourless lips. “I don’t think—I know.”

“Well—but how?”

She leaned closer, both elbows on the table, her voice dropping. “I seen ’em.”

In the ashen light from the veiling of snow beyond the windows the Deacon’s little 91screwed-up eyes seemed to give out red sparks. “Him and the dead?”

“Him and the dead.”

“Saul Rutledge and—and Ora Brand?”

“That’s so.”

Sylvester Brand’s chair fell backward with a crash. He was on his feet again, crimson and cursing. “It’s a God-damned fiend-begotten lie….”

“Friend Brand … friend Brand …” the Deacon protested.

“Here, let me get out of this. I want to see Saul Rutledge himself, and tell him—”

“Well, here he is,” said Mrs. Rutledge.

The outer door had opened; they heard the familiar stamping and shaking of a man who rids his garments of their last snowflakes before penetrating to the sacred precincts of the best parlour. Then Saul Rutledge entered.

#AdventCalendar 20: The Swimming Shoes

Another story by Marie Corelli, included in her A Christmas Greeting from 1901.

In a beautiful clear lake swam a large family of Ducks. At the head of them all was the Mother-Duck, quacking proudly, and all the ducklings tried to imitate her voice, which they considered superior to that of the nightingale.

“Quack! Quack!” said she—“We have had enough of the water to-day. Let us swim to shore and see what kind of dinner we can pick up.”

Thereupon she turned briskly towards the land, and all her children dutifully followed her example, except the two youngest, who were very wilful and obstinate.

“What greedy creatures you are!” they cackled,—“Never can five minutes pass in peace without your wanting something to eat! We do not intend to come on shore; no! we shall remain here on the water and swim about by ourselves.”

“Naughty children!” screamed old Mother-Duck—“Come to me directly! The first lesson of life is obedience to your parents, so just come on shore at once!”

“Oh, bother you!” replied the two rude young ducklings—“You are an old Silly! Yes—we repeat it,—an old Silly! You know nothing. What! Are we going to obey you? No, indeed! We are much too clever for that,—much wiser than you are, and that’s the sober truth. So leave off scolding, if you please, for we mean to stay where we are.”

Now under the waters of the lake lived a little sprite, a good fairy, who hated naughty, disobedient children, as all good fairies do. And when he heard the ducklings, how they talked so rudely to their mother, he determined to punish them for their ill-manners.

“Tiresome little things!” he thought—“They want a lesson; and a lesson, and a sharp one too they shall have!”

With this, in the twinkling of an eye, he turned them into a pair of wooden shoes, and threw them on the shore in a heap of sand and mud. There they lay, quite dumb and unable to move. The old Duck and the rest of her family, seeing them disappear so suddenly, thought they had dived under the water to hide themselves. So without more ado, they waddled away with a great noise, cackling and lamenting over the wicked disobedience that had been shown by these two youngest ducklings to their Mother, who had been so kind to them. Meanwhile, they themselves lay in the mud quite still, no longer beautiful and shiny ducks, but only wooden shoes, and very ugly ones too.

The worst of it all was, that, shoes as they were, they suffered dreadfully from a desire to swim, and thus suffering they said to themselves,—

“Oh! if we could only get into the water! If some one would put us in—just for an instant!”

But they wished and sighed in vain, for an old peasant who was passing by at this moment caught sight of them and exclaimed,—

“Hullo! hullo! here are shoes! Yes, shoes, as I am a living man! Now this is what I call a lucky find!”

With these words he put them on, and walked away in the greatest state of excitement. But the shoes were much too small for him,—they pinched his gouty toes and made him altogether very uncomfortable, so on reaching home he told his wife he had bought her a nice pair of wooden shoes.

“I hope they will fit you,” he said—“I have often noticed, my dear, how the old shoes you wear let in the damp—now these will keep you warm and comfortable!”

The old wife tried them on. She was delighted with them. They fitted her to a T, as the saying is, and with hearty words and big tears of gratitude in her eyes, she thanked her tender husband again and again. He received these thanks in a very sly manner, for he knew in his heart that he did not altogether deserve them.

“I have,” he said inwardly, “given her something which cost me nothing,—absolutely nothing!” But he kept this to himself and smiled very good-humouredly, and thought—“Yes, yes! She ought to be grateful—of course she ought. And she is grateful. Ha! ha! That is the best of it!”

The next morning the old woman went down to the river to fetch a pitcher of water, and on her way she observed that her shoes were very muddy.

“I will wash them in the river,” she thought, “and then my husband will see what care I take of them—”

No sooner said than done. The shoes were put in the water,—but what was her astonishment, and her fright too, when she saw them swimming away as fast as they could go! The fact is that the transformed ducks no sooner found themselves in the water than they felt compelled to swim—to swim, as it were, for life and death. And on they went, and on and on, quite heedless of the poor old woman who sat down on the shore and cried bitterly. Her shoes had now gone away so far that they looked to her no bigger than bits of floating cork; and while she was lamenting and crying, her husband came suddenly upon her. When he was informed of what happened he gave her a good beating for letting the shoes go so easily, and then he starved her all day to make up (as he said) for the price of them. Ah! what a kind man he was!

Meanwhile the shoes went sailing away, and never once stopped to inquire where they were going, till suddenly they struck against some obstacle in the water. It was the blade of an oar, and they immediately saw that they were close to a small rowing-boat, in which sat two children,—a girl of about ten or eleven years of age, and her brother, a sturdy lad some five or six years older. The little girl leaned over the side of the boat to see what had happened to the oar, and exclaimed,—

“Oh, look! A pair of shoes! A pair of wooden shoes! What a funny thing to find a pair of shoes in the sea!”

Laughing merrily, she reached out her hand, and caught the shoes, one after the other, and lifted them into the boat.

“They are actually quite new,” said her brother, examining them with curiosity. “And I do believe they will just fit you. Try them on—” And he put one on his sister’s little foot. It fitted beautifully, so she put on the other, and then both children laughed aloud,—clear ringing laughter, like the tinkling of silver bells in a sledge.

“This is a good day’s fishing!” exclaimed the little girl. “Wooden shoes are not exactly pretty, but they are strong and useful, and these will save mother buying me a new pair. They come at the right time, too, for mine are worn into holes!”

As soon as the children landed, they ran home to tell their adventure. Their home was a hut on the sea-shore, and a very poor hut it was, for their father was only a fisherman, and they, with their mother, helped him to earn a living by making and mending the nets. The good mother smiled when she saw her little daughter return—she looked so bright and happy, and so proud of her wooden shoes.

“It is a lucky fishing,” she said—“and I will say nothing to spoil your pleasure, my little one; though your father told me to give you and Denis a scolding—”

Denis flushed angrily.

“Why, mother?” he inquired—“Why should we be scolded?”

“Nay, Denis,” said the mother gravely; “you should not ask, for you know the reason well enough. Your father has forbidden you to go out in the boat after dark, and yet you will do it, and what is worse, you take your little sister into the same danger as yourself,—and, as for you, Nanette,” she added, turning to the child, who stood silent and ashamed, “I wonder how you can be so naughty! I have told you never to go out at night with your brother. He does not know enough about the coast and the hidden rocks, on which many a brave ship has struck and foundered. But you are both so wild and wilful because you know I have too much to do to be always on the watch for your foolish pranks. You care nothing for your mother. Now that you are so pleased with the wooden shoes, I foresee what will happen. You will be always on the water, trying to find something else,—and some day you will both be drowned. Come, Nanette, be a good child, and promise me, at any rate, that you will not go out in the boat after sunset. Denis will not care to go alone, and so you will both be obedient. Come, come, promise me!”

“I promise you, mother,” said Nanette in a low voice.

Denis said nothing, and both children looked sad and sullen. As for the wooden shoes, the excitement about them soon subsided, though Nanette continued to wear them all day,—but they themselves noticed how reluctantly the little feet of their wearer seemed to run on the various domestic errands required,—and in what a petulant humour the golden-haired little Nanette seemed to be.

Night came at last, and the lovely moon rode high in the heavens, looking as round and bright as a silver shield. Every tiny wavelet on the sea was tipped with light, and here and there a deeper line of radiance showed plainly where the phosphorescent fish were gambolling and darting to and fro under the water. On the shore stood Denis, the fisherman’s son. He was stealthily at work, unfastening the moorings of his father’s skiff, and every now and then he glanced towards the hut in fear lest his parents should be on the watch. But the little home was shut for the night, and all was dark and silent. Carefully and almost noiselessly, young Denis pushed the boat towards the edge of the water, and then he ran swiftly to one of the windows of the hut and tapped softly. In another moment Nanette appeared, and with her brother’s help, she climbed through the window, and soon stood beside him. She wore her wooden shoes—and oh, how unhappy they felt! How they wished they could say, “Nanette! dear little Nanette! don’t disobey your mother!”

But they could only creak a faint disapproval as she ran along the shore in eager and feverish haste to be out with her brother on that sparkling and beautiful ocean. Quite forgetful of her promise to her mother, she laughed in sheer enjoyment of her own naughtiness and wilfulness, and as Denis pushed out the boat and rowed quickly and steadily away from land, she clapped her hands in excitement and exclaimed,—

“Oh, what a lovely night! What a shame it would be to stay in bed while the moon is shining so brightly!”

“Yes,” replied Denis, as he bent to the oars and rowed as swiftly as he could—“Father is very unkind to wish to prevent us enjoying ourselves. We do no harm.”

“Besides,” added Nanette, “even if the sea did get rough, you know how to manage a boat in a storm, don’t you?”

“Of course,” said Denis confidently—“But there’s no fear of a storm to-night. We are safe enough.”

As he spoke there came a sudden crash and crack—they had gone straight on a sharp rock!—a treacherous rock, hidden in the waves and unknown to any but experienced sailors. Their boat was splitting! The water rushed in—Denis looked about him in despair. They were three or four miles from the shore—poor Nanette screamed loudly.

“Be quiet!” cried her brother; “I will save you, dear! I can swim!” And, flinging off all the clothes that might impede his movements, he threw one strong arm round his sister, who was now speechless with terror, and plunging boldly into the waves with her, made gallant efforts to reach the land. As they left it, their boat parted asunder and broke in pieces. Oh, what fearful moments were those in which the unhappy children struggled for life and death, battling with the cruel sea!

Thoughts of their mother,—the disobedience they had shown towards her,—the picture of her despair and sorrow when she should hear of their dreadful end,—all the little touching memories of home swarmed thickly in upon them,—and Nanette gasped for breath.

“Are we going to die?” she muttered feebly.

“Yes, dear,” said poor Denis, “I am afraid so. My strength is going. I can’t swim any more.”

Then came a terrible moment, when all around them seemed of a blood-red colour—then it changed to a vivid green. The moon itself, the sky, the stars, all became green as the green water,—then gradually the arms of Denis relaxed, and the poor children sank together, down, down to their deaths. The moon shone, and the stars sparkled as brilliantly as ever, and only the floating pieces of the little boat remained on the rippling sea. Only the wreck?—No—there was something else,—the wooden shoes! They had been loosened by the movement of the waves from the feet of the poor little Nanette, and there they were, on their travels as before. They felt dreadfully miserable, and were very much shocked and frightened at the sudden and tragic end of their late owner.

“She disobeyed her mother,” thought they,—and they quivered and creaked as the water carried them along, for they remembered their own disobedience when they were ducklings; but they had not much time to think seriously, for they were now in the open sea, and they were obliged to go at a very rapid rate. After several days and nights of journeying without any fresh adventures, they arrived at a part of the ocean where a dreadful storm was raging. The sky was black as ink, and the thunder rolled and crashed among the clouds in a frightful manner. Suddenly a blaze of red fire sprang up into the sky—then another and another, and the shoes saw they were signal rockets from a ship in distress. Swimming on and on, they at last perceived an enormous vessel rocking to and fro on the mountainous waves, and they heard her tall masts fall, splintered by the lightning. Suddenly there came a great crash,—a gurgling noise,—and then all was over. Now and then the shoes saw some unhappy creature struggling with the great waves for a few seconds and then sucked down in an abyss to certain destruction. They were very much terrified at this dreadful scene, and they were trying to swim out of it as fast as possible, when they found themselves clutched by a man’s hand, probably in mistake for a plank or spar. The man was in the last agonies of drowning, and as he released his grasp of the wooden shoes, a flash of lightning illumined for a moment his ghastly and contorted features. Struggling to lift himself above the riotous and lofty billows, he cried, “Mother! mother! forgive my long disobedience!”

And with this last supreme effort of strength, the unfortunate sailor sank and was lost for ever.

The wooden shoes were now completely horrified at the awful sights it had been their lot to see.

“What an experience!” they said to themselves—“Oh, how much better to be ducks than shoes! Surely no happy duck in a pond ever witnessed such scenes! The life of a duck in a pond is so peaceful—so placid!”

“Oh, if they had never disobeyed their good, kind Mother-Duck,” they thought!—but, in spite of their recollections, they were compelled to go swimming on as they were, and so they got carried by a cross current out of the ocean down a great river, and out of the great river into a smaller one, and out of that into a lake,—a beautiful clear lake which they seemed to remember. As they floated along pleasant memories came into them, and they felt as if something strange was about to happen.

Suddenly they saw a beautiful duck with shining feathers coming towards them, and they nearly jumped out of the water in their excitement, for they moaned creakily to themselves,—

“We were ducks once! we were ducks once!”

“Yes,” said a soft voice near—“Poor little Nanette was alive once, but she disobeyed her mother, and now where is she?”

The shoes trembled in the water, and then said to themselves,—

“If we could be ducks again, we would never disobey our mother!”

Scarcely had they thought this than they felt a most curious change coming over them, and ere they had time to consider what it was, lo and behold!—they saw themselves mirrored in the water, two beautiful plump ducks, with rainbow-tinted plumes and sleek shining heads, swimming gracefully along!

“Quack! quack!” they said—“Now we know where we are! This is the same lake where we were born, and where we used to float,—and there is our dear home, over there by the shore! Let us find our mother, and we will never disobey her again!”

And neither they did. They were heartily welcomed home; and their strange adventures served to amuse the whole farm-yard for several months, though a cross old Turkey-cock was one day heard to gobble out,—

“I don’t believe they were ever shoes at all! When they disobeyed their mother, they lost themselves and got frightened;—then they hid away for a time, and came back with an absurd story they just invented to make themselves look important!”

But whoever pays attention to the gobblings of a Turkey-cock?

Ok, so, I’m playing the latest Dragon Age

Ok, so, I’ve been playing Dragon Age: Veilguard, the latest title in a franchise I love to bits, and I’ve been at it since the day it came out. I’m around 100 hours of gameplay, and I just finished Chapter 10/14. I’m avoiding major spoilers but I know the serious shit has yet to go down, and still I have thoughts. Mostly on the protagonist. So hear me out.

Warning: though I have one bone to pick with production, I’m enjoying the game tremendously so don’t expect this to be just another “they ruined my game” post. I like Veilguard. A lot.

So, here’s my thought.

[image error] My Rook is a human mage, an explorer of ancient Elven ruins called “a Veiljumper”. She lives up to her profession and indeed jumps through the Veil, but only when she’s out of mana.

Your main character, nicknamed Rook, is “the most powerful piece on a chessboard”, at least according to the guy who gave them the nickname. And they are. They clearly are the most powerful in battle, regardless of the class they’ll grind down darkspawn and venatori and all other kind of weird shit like there’s no tomorrow. And there won’t be one. For the things you’re fighting, at least.

Rook also invariably sucks at their specific job.

Regardless of the origin you pick, you’ll still need to recruit a better Grey Warden, a more competent Veil Jumper, a higher-ranked Antivan Crow, a more qualified Mourn Watcher, a different Shadow Dragon, a more specialized Lord of Fortune and so on.

What’s Rook’s actual skill? Talk to people and help them figure out their bullshit so that they’ll be able to focus on their job.

They’re also losing their minds, and no one ever goes to talk to them the way Rook goes to talk to everyone else.

So yeah, Rook is a project manager.

And I relate so much.

#AdventCalendar 19: The Ghost’s Summons

Ada Buisson was an English author, born on March 26, 1839, in Battersea, Surrey. She is primarily recognized for her contributions to the genre of ghost stories during the Victorian era, so she’s right up our alley this Christmas. Buisson’s literary career was unfortunately brief, as she passed away at the young age of 27 on December 27, 1866.

Buisson’s most notable work is “The Ghost’s Summons,” published in 1868 in Belgravia, a magazine edited by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a prominent novelist and fellow ghost story writer. This story exemplifies the tradition of Christmas ghost stories that gained popularity in the Victorian period, particularly following the success of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in 1843.

It’s the story I give you this evening.

“Wanted, sir—a patient.”
It was in the early days of my professional career, when patients were scarce and fees scarcer; and though I was in the act of sitting down to my chop, and had promised myself a glass of steaming punch afterwards in honor of the Christmas season, I hurried instantly into my surgery.
I entered briskly; but no sooner did I catch sight of the figure standing leaning against the counter than I started back with a strange feeling of horror which for the life of me I could not comprehend.
Never shall I forget the ghastliness of that face—the white horror stamped upon every feature — the agony which seemed to sink the very eyes beneath the contracted brows; it was awful to me to behold, accustomed as I was to scenes of terror.
“You seek advice,” I began, with some hesitation.
“No; I am not ill.”
“You require then—”
“Hush!” he interrupted, approaching more nearly, and dropping his already low murmur to a mere whisper. “I believe you are not rich. Would you be willing to earn a thousand pounds?”
A thousand pounds! His words seemed to burn my very ears.
“I should be thankful, if I could do so honestly,” I replied with dignity. “What is the service required of me?”
A peculiar look of intense horror passed over the white face before me; but the blue-black lips answered firmly, “To attend a death-bed.”
“A thousand pounds to attend a death-bed! Where am I to go, then ?—whose is it?”
“Mine.”
The voice in which this was said sounded so hollow and distant, that involuntarily I shrank back. “Yours! What nonsense! You are not a dying man. You are pale, but you appear perfectly healthy. You—”
“Hush!” he interrupted; “I know all this. You cannot be more convinced of my physical health than I am myself; yet I know that before the clock tolls the first hour after midnight I shall be a dead man.”
“But—”
He shuddered slightly; but stretching out his hand commandingly, motioned me to be silent. “I am but too well informed of what I affirm,” he said quietly; “I have received a mysterious summons from the dead. No mortal aid can avail me. I am as doomed as the wretch on whom the judge has passed sentence. I do not come either to seek your advice or to argue the matter with you, but simply to buy your services. I offer you a thousand pounds to pass the night in my chamber, and witness the scene which takes place. The sum may appear to you extravagant. But I have no further need to count the cost of any gratification; and the spectacle you will have to witness is no common sight of horror.”
The words, strange as they were, were spoken calmly enough; but as the last sentence dropped slowly from the livid lips, an expression of such wild horror again passed over the stranger’s face, that, in spite of the immense fee, I hesitated to answer.
“You fear to trust to the promise of a dead man! See here, and be convinced,” he exclaimed eagerly; and the next instant, on the counter between us lay a parchment document; and following the indication of that white muscular hand, I read the words, “And to Mr. Frederick Kead, of 14 High-street, Alton, I bequeath the sum of one thousand pounds for certain services rendered to me.”
“I have had that will drawn up within the last twenty-four hours, and I signed it an hour ago, in the presence of competent witnesses. I am prepared, you see. Now, do you accept my offer, or not?”
My answer was to walk across the room and take down my hat, and then lock the door of the surgery communicating with the house.
It was a dark, icy-cold night, and somehow the courage and determination which the sight of my own name in connection with a thousand pounds had given me, flagged considerably as I found myself hurried along through the silent darkness by a man whose death-bed I was about to attend.
He was grimly silent; but as his hand touched mine, in spite of the frost, it felt like a burning coal.
On we went—tramp, tramp, through the snow—on, on, till even I grew weary, and at length on my appalled ear struck the chimes of a church-clock; whilst close at hand I distinguished the snowy hillocks of a churchyard.
Heavens! was this awful scene of which I was to be the witness to take place veritably amongst the dead?
“Eleven,” groaned the doomed man. “Gracious God! but two hours more, and that ghostly messenger will bring the summons. Come, come; for mercy’s sake, let us hasten.”
There was but a short road separating us now from a wall which surrounded a large mansion, and along this we hastened until we reached a small door.
Passing through this, in a few minutes we were stealthily ascending the private staircase to a splendidly-furnished apartment, which left no doubt of the wealth of its owner.
All was intensely silent, however, through the house; and about this room in particular there was a stillness that, as I gazed around, struck me as almost ghastly.
My companion glanced at the clock on the mantelshelf, and sank into a large chair by the side of the fire with a shudder. “Only an hour and a half longer,” he muttered. “Great heaven! I thought I had more fortitude. This horror unmans me.” Then, in a fiercer tone, and clutching my arm, he added, “Ha! you mock me, you think me mad; but wait till you see—wait till you see!”
I put my hand on his wrist; for there was now a fever in his sunken eyes which checked the superstitious chill which had been gathering over me, and made me hope that, after all, my first suspicion was correct, and that my patient was but the victim of some fearful hallucination.
“Mock you!” I answered soothingly. “Far from it; I sympathise intensely with you, and would do much to aid you. You require sleep. Lie down, and leave me to watch.”
He groaned, but rose, and began throwing off his clothes; and, watching my opportunity, I slipped a sleeping-powder, which I had managed to put in my pocket before leaving the surgery, into the tumbler of claret that stood beside him.
The more I saw, the more I felt convinced that it was the nervous system of my patient which required my attention; and it was with sincere satisfaction I saw him drink the wine, and then stretch himself on the luxurious bed.
“Ha,” thought I, as the clock struck twelve, and instead of a groan, the deep breathing of the sleeper sounded through the room; “you won’t receive any summons to-night, and I may make myself comfortable.”
Noiselessly, therefore, I replenished the fire, poured myself out a large glass of wine, and drawing the curtain so that the firelight should not disturb the sleeper, I put myself in a position to follow his example.
How long I slept I know not, but suddenly I aroused with a start and as ghostly a thrill of horror as ever I remember to have felt in my life.
Something—what, I knew not—seemed near, something nameless, but unutterably awful.
I gazed round.
The fire emitted a faint blue glow, just sufficient to enable me to see that the room was exactly the same as when I fell asleep, but that the long hand of the clock wanted but five minutes of the mysterious hour which was to be the death-moment of the “summoned” man!
Was there anything in it, then?—any truth in the strange story he had told?
The silence was intense.
I could not even hear a breath from the bed; and I was about to rise and approach, when again that awful horror seized me, and at the same moment my eye fell upon the mirror opposite the door, and I saw—
Great heaven! that awful Shape—that ghastly mockery of what had been humanity—was it really a messenger from the buried, quiet dead?
It stood there in visible death-clothes; but the awful face was ghastly with corruption, and the sunken eyes gleamed forth a green glassy glare which seemed a veritable blast from the infernal fires below.
To move or utter a sound in that hideous presence was impossible; and like a statue I sat and saw that horrid Shape move slowly towards the bed.
What was the awful scene enacted there, I know not. I heard nothing, except a low stifled agonized groan; and I saw the shadow of that ghastly messenger bending over the bed.
Whether it was some dreadful but wordless sentence its breathless lips conveyed as it stood there, I know not; but for an instant the shadow of a claw-like hand, from which the third finger was missing, appeared extended over the doomed man’s head; and then, as the clock struck one clear silvery stroke, it fell, and a wild shriek rang through the room—a death-shriek.
I am not given to fainting, but I certainly confess that the next ten minutes of my existence was a cold blank; and even when I did manage to stagger to my feet, I gazed round, vainly endeavoring to understand the chilly horror which still possessed me.
Thank God! the room was rid of that awful presence—I saw that; so, gulping down some wine, I lighted a wax-taper and staggered towards the bed. Ah, how I prayed that, after all, I might have been dreaming, and that my own excited imagination had but conjured up some hideous memory of the dissecting-room!
But one glance was sufficient to answer that.
No! The summons had indeed been given and answered.
I flashed the light over the dead face, swollen, convulsed still with the death-agony; but suddenly I shrank back.
Even as I gazed, the expression of the face seemed to change: the blackness faded into a deathly whiteness; the convulsed features relaxed, and, even as if the victim of that dread apparition still lived, a sad solemn smile stole over the pale lips.
I was intensely horrified, but still I retained sufficient self-consciousness to be struck professionally by such a phenomenon.
Surely there was something more than supernatural agency in all this?
Again I scrutinized the dead face, and even the throat and chest; but, with the exception of a tiny pimple on one temple beneath a cluster of hair, not a mark appeared. To look at the corpse, one would have believed that this man had indeed died by the visitation of God, peacefully, whilst sleeping.
How long I stood there I know not, but time enough to gather my scattered senses and to reflect that, all things considered, my own position would be very unpleasant if I was found thus unexpectedly in the room of the mysteriously dead man.
So, as noiselessly as I could, I made my way out of the house. No one met me on the private staircase; the little door opening into the road was easily unfastened; and thankful indeed was I to feel again the fresh wintry air as I hurried along that road by the churchyard.
There was a magnificent funeral soon in that church; and it was said that the young widow of the buried man was inconsolable; and then rumors got abroad of a horrible apparition which had been seen on the night of the death; and it was whispered the young widow was terrified, and insisted upon leaving her splendid mansion.
I was too mystified with the whole affair to risk my reputation by saying what I knew, and I should have allowed my share in it to remain forever buried in oblivion, had I not suddenly heard that the widow, objecting to many of the legacies in the last will of her husband, intended to dispute it on the score of insanity, and then there gradually arose the rumor of his belief in having received a mysterious summons.
On this I went to the lawyer, and sent a message to the lady, that, as the last person who had attended her husband, I undertook to prove his sanity; and I besought her to grant me an interview, in which I would relate as strange and horrible a story as ear had ever heard. The same evening I received an invitation to go to the mansion. I was ushered immediately into a splendid room, and there, standing before the fire, was the most dazzlingly beautiful young creature I had ever seen.
She was very small, but exquisitely made; had it not been for the dignity of her carriage, I should have believed her a mere child. With a stately bow she advanced, but did not speak. “I come on a strange and painful errand,” I began, and then I started, for I happened to glance full into her eyes, and from them down to the small right hand grasping the chair. The weddingring was on that hand!
“I conclude you are the Mr. Kead who requested permission to tell me some absurd ghoststory, and whom my late husband mentions here.” And as she spoke she stretched out her left hand towards something—but what I knew not, for my eyes were fixed on that hand.
Horror! White and delicate it might be, but it was shaped like a claw, and the third finger was missing!
One sentence was enough after that. “Madam, all I can tell you is, that the ghost who summoned your husband was marked by a singular deformity. The third finger of the left hand was missing,” I said sternly; and the next instant I had left that beautiful sinful presence.
That will was never disputed. The next morning, too, I received a check for a thousand pounds; and the next news I heard of the widow was, that she had herself seen that awful apparition, and had left the mansion immediately.

#AdventCalendar 18: The White Raven

James Edward Preston Muddock, known by his pen name Dick Donovan, was a British journalist and fiction writer born on May 28, 1843, in Southampton, England. Muddock is best remembered for his contributions to the detective and horror fiction genres, having published nearly 300 stories and 37 novels under the Donovan name between 1889 and 1922.

Muddock’s detective character, Dick Donovan, was a Glasgow detective whose stories were initially serialized in various periodicals before being collected into books. The first story featuring Donovan, “The Saltmarket Murder Case,” was published in January 1888. His works were often compared to those of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, with Donovan being popular in his own right prior to the widespread fame of Holmes.

This particular story, “The White Raven”, comes from Tales of Terror, a collection of horror stories published in 1899.

It was generally said of my father—who was a son of the late Sir John Mark Stainsby—that he was somewhat of an oddity. He certainly had original ideas, and it was a favourite remark of his that he did not care to baa, because the great family of human sheep baaed in chorus. It was due, no doubt, to this faculty of originality that he became the owner of Moorland Grange, which was situated on the edge of wild Dartmoor. My father was a widower; I was his only daughter, but I had four brothers, and I doubt it any girl’s brothers were more devoted to her than mine were to me. We were a very united family, and had for many years resided in London, and as my father had ample means we found life very enjoyable. I was considered to be an exceedingly fortunate young woman. My friends all too flatteringly told me I was beautiful, and I know that when I looked into my mirror the reflection that met my gaze was certainly not one to make me shudder. Of course this was vanity, but then that is a woman’s especial privilege, and so I don’t intend to make any apology for the remark, for I am quite sure that I never was a plain-looking girl.

When my father purchased Moorland Grange I was just turned twenty years of age, and was looking forward with eager pleasure—what girl does not?—to my marriage with one of the dearest and most devoted of men. His name was Herbert Wilton. By profession he was a civil engineer, and for some time he had been in the Brazils, surveying for a new line of railroad which an English company had undertaken to construct. Herbert’s engagement had nearly expired, and we were to be married on the New Year’s Day following his return.

My father had some relatives in Devonshire; he was exceedingly fond of that part of the country. And on one occasion, after having been on a visit there, he said:

‘Lydia, how would you like to go and live in Devonshire?’

I told him that hardly anything could give me greater pleasure, and then he astonished me by telling me that he had bought one of the ‘queerest, tumble-down, romantic, ghost-haunted old houses imaginable.’ It was known as ‘Moorland Grange,’ and he had got it for, as he said, ‘an old song,’ as it had been without a tenant for twenty-five years. The cause of this was, as I learnt, mainly attributable to an evil reputation it had acquired, owing to a remarkable murder that had been committed in the house at some remote period. That at least was the current legend, and it certainly affected the interests of the owners of the property. It was another instance of the truth of the adage about giving a dog a bad name. This house had got a bad name, and people shunned it as they might have shunned a leper. For some time the estate had been in Chancery, and as no purchaser could be found for it, my father had been able to secure it at a ridiculously low figure, and he intended—as he told me cheerfully—to purge it of its evil reputation.

At this time only my two younger brothers—who were mere boys—were at home, the others being in India; and so they, my father and I, with three servants, started for Moorland Grange, so as to get it in order, as we intended to reside there permanently.

The time of year was April, and the nearest station to the Grange was Tavistock, where we arrived about five in the afternoon, on as wild, bleak, and windy a day as our fickle and varying climate is capable of giving us even in tearful April. From the station we had a drive of over three miles. My father had deputed an old man named Jack Bewdley to meet us with a trap. Jack had been promised work on our new estate as handy man, woodcutter, or anything else in which he could be useful. He had nearly reached the allotted span, and was gnarled and twisted like an ancient oak. Born and bred in the neighbourhood of Dartmoor, he had never been fifty miles away from his native place in his life. He was a blunt, rugged, honest rustic, very superstitious and very simple: and as soon as he saw me he exclaimed, as he opened his bleared old eyes to their fullest capacity:

‘By goom, miss, but you be powerful handsome! I hope as how you won’t be a seeing of the White Raven in th’ owd Grange.’

This compliment made me blush, and I asked him what the White Raven was, whereupon he looked very melancholy, and answered:

‘Ah, I woan’t be the chap to make your pretty face white wi’ fright, so doan’t ye ask me, please.’

As I was in no way a nervous or superstitious girl, I was amused rather than otherwise at old Jack’s mysterious air, and I did not question him further then, as I felt pretty sure when we had become better acquainted he would be more communicative. We reached the Grange after a very cold and windy drive. The day was done, but there was just light enough lingering in the angry sky to outline the place in ghostly silhouette. It was a house of many gables, with all sorts of angles and projecting eaves, and a grotesque Gothic porch that was approached by a flight of steps with stone balustrades. The whole building was covered with a mantling of dense ivy, which obscured the windows and hung down in ragged streamers, that swayed and rasped mournfully in the chill wind. All around were gloomy woods, and the garden was a forlorn wilderness of rank weeds. Old Jack’s wife had got a few of the rooms cleaned out for our immediate use, and some furniture had been sent in, so that we were enabled to make ourselves tolerably comfortable on this the first night in our strange abode.

The next day I set to work with my brothers to explore the house, and soon I was quite able to endorse my father’s opinion that it was the queerest, oddest, most romantic and ghostly place imaginable. I have already said that I was neither nervous nor superstitious, but I honestly confess that the rambling, draughty, echoing building quite depressed me. The Grange was said to be over 400 years old, though in some respects it had been modernised; nevertheless it was full of surprises in the shape of nooks and corners, deep, dark recesses, strange angles, dimly-lighted passages, winding staircases, and wainscoted and raftered rooms. One of these rooms was long and narrow, tapering away at one end almost to a point. The walls were wainscoted right to the ceiling, and the ceiling itself panelled with oak. There was a wide open fireplace, and a very massive carved mantel. Two diamond-paned windows lighted the room, one of the windows being filled in with blue and red glass. But at this time the windows were so obscured by the hanging ivy that we had to cut it away to let in the light. I became greatly interested in this antique chamber, and in a spirit of fun and ridicule I at once dubbed it ‘the haunted chamber,’ and declared I would use it as my bedroom. Afterwards, when talking about it to my father, I said laughingly:

‘If that room, pa, hasn’t got a ghost, it will have to have one, and we must invent one for it.’

‘Oh,’ he added,’ according to old Jack Bewdley that’s the room where the White Raven shows itself.’

A little later I went to Jack, who was busy trying to clear some of the weeds away from the long-neglected grounds, and I said to him:

‘Look here, Bewdley, what’s this story about the White Raven? Come, now, you must tell me.’

He paused in his work, leaned his grizzled chin on the handle of his spade, and as a scared look spread itself over his shrivelled face, he answered me thus:

‘There be zum foak in these parts, miss, as vow they’ve seen th’ White Raven, and they doa say as how them as sees it dies within th’ week. But I doan’t know if them as said they’ve seen it died or not.’

‘Have you seen it, Jack,’ I asked, trying to look very serious, though I could scarcely keep from laughing.

‘Noa, noa, thank God, noa!’ he exclaimed with startling earnestness, and mopping his bald head with his red handkerchief, although the weather was cold, while his tanned and weather-beaten cheeks seemed to me to become pale. Then he asked, ‘Have you been in what we foak call the oak chamber?’

Guessing what room he referred to I told him that I had, and he at once said that it was in that chamber that the mysterious White Raven always showed itself to the doomed person.

Of course I was incredulous, and ridiculed the whole idea; nor can I say I was more deeply impressed when on a subsequent and more critical examination of the chamber I found the following doggerel carved in old English on one of the panels—

The stranger who beneath this roof shall lie,
And sees the White Raven is sure to die;
For a curse rests on the unhallowed place,
And the blood that was shed you here may trace.
So, stranger, beware, sleep not in the room,
Lest you should meet with a terrible doom.

From people in the neighbouring villages I learned that in this very room, which I had been prompted to call the haunted chamber, tradition said that at some distant period a very beautiful lady had been brutally done to death by a jealous and dissipated husband, who gave out that she had eloped. He allowed her body to fester and moulder away in the room, and many years afterwards her skeleton was found, and that since then she had haunted the place in the shape of a white raven, while to anyone to whom she appeared it was a fatal sign. But why that should have been so nobody attempted to explain.

Now I will honestly confess that the gruesomeness of the story—which, however, I did not believe in its entirety —so far affected me that I changed my mind about occupying the room myself, and my father said he would take it for his own bedroom. But he also, for some reason or other, did not occupy it, although it was made into a most luxurious sleeping apartment. In the course of a few weeks the Grange began to present a very different appearance, and where gloom and melancholy had reigned, cheerfulness and light spread themselves. Under the fostering care of three or four gardeners the gardens blazed with flowers; some of the timber that encroached too much on the house was cut away, and the windows of the building were cleared of the ivy. I came at last to love the old place, for it was so bizarre, so unlike anything else I had ever seen: and in spite of all the predictions and croakings of the ignorant peasantry round about, who declared that sooner or later the curse which had affected everyone who had ever lived there since the poor lady was murdered would affect us, we were very comfortable and very happy. The summer lingered long that year, but the autumn was short, and winter set in with quite startling suddenness; by the end of the first week in December snow began to fall, and it continued snowing more or less for several days until the country round about was buried.

During all the year I had been pining for my love, who came not, although I knew that he was on his way home. But he had remained in Brazil longer than he intended, owing to the death from yellow fever of one of the surveying party, so that Herbert had been induced to renew his engagement for another six months, to do the dead man’s work. With painful suspense and anxiety I had for days been scanning the papers for a report of the vessel which was bearing him to me, for she was overdue, but the weather at sea had been fearful, and old seamen said that vessels making for the Channel would have a hard time of it. As she was to call at Plymouth I persuaded my father to take me there in order that we might welcome Herbert as soon as ever he touched English soil again. As papa denied me nothing, he readily consented to this, but it was not until three days before Christmas that the welcome news came to me that the vessel had entered the Sound.

Need I dwell upon the joy I experienced when, after our long separation, I felt Herbert’s dear arms around me once more. How handsome and manly he looked! The sun had tanned him brown, the fine sea voyage home had braced him up after the enervating Brazilian climate, and he declared that he had never been in better health in his life. He was possessed of a wonderful constitution, and during the whole time he had been in Brazil had never had a day’s illness.

Of course I told him that, selfish as it seemed, I was going to keep him for Christmas Day, and on New Year’s Day I was to become his bride, according to the long prior arrangement. He said that it was necessary for him to go to London to see his friends and to make some preparations, but he promised that he would be with me again on Christmas Eve. And so I parted from him, and as we were to meet again so soon, and in less than a fortnight he was to be my husband, I was verily at that moment one of the happiest girls alive.

As my father was thoroughly imbued with the spirit of old-fashioned English hospitality he generally kept open house at Christmas time, and this being our first Christmas at the Grange we had a large number of visitors, so that the house was quite full. In order that Herbert, when he came, might be fittingly bestowed as the bridegroom-elect, we decided that he should occupy the haunted chamber, for it certainly was the best sleeping room in the house; and though some silly and unusual nervousness—as I believed then—had prevented my occupying it as I intended, neither I nor my rather attached the slightest importance to the supernatural stories current in the district. With my own hands I arranged the room for Herbert, filling it with nick-nacks and odds and ends, and everything I could think of that was likely to give him pleasure or add to his comfort.

Christmas Eve of that year was marked by a snowstorm such as, the country people said, had not been known for forty years. The train that brought my love from London was very late, and I had become quite anxious, but all anxiety was forgotten when I helped him to divest himself of his snow-laden topcoat in the hall, and taking me in his arms he kissed me in his hearty, cheery way. We were a very jovial party, and that night was a happy, gladsome night, the memory of which will never leave me. Nor shall I ever forget dear Herbert’s words, as he kissed me good-night on the stairs as the great hall clock struck one.

‘Darling little woman,’ he whispered,’ what joy, what happiness, what ecstasy, to think that in a week’s time you will belong to me!’

I had no words. I could only sigh in token of the supreme happiness that filled my heart to overflowing.

Christmas morning broke bright, clear, and beautiful. The snow had ceased to fall, and a hard frost had set in. It was veritable Canadian weather—crisp, crystalline, and invigorating. As soon as breakfast was over Herbert took me on one side and said:

‘You know, Lydia, I am about one of the most practical men that you could find in a day’s march, and hitherto I have been without, as I believe, a scrap of superstition in my composition. But, by Jove! after last night’s experience I’ll be hanged if I don’t believe with Shakespeare that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.’

At these words I turned deadly pale. I scarcely knew why, but such was the case, and I gasped out: ‘What—what do you mean?’

‘Well,’ he answered, with a laugh that wasn’t sincere, for it was obviously forced, ‘I believe that room in which I slept is positively haunted.’

Now, I may state here that not a word of any kind had been mentioned to Herbert about the stories that were current with regard to the house. Both my father and I had resolved that the subject should be strictly avoided, so that none of our lady guests might be alarmed. As he spoke, I looked up into his brown face, and I saw that it was filled with a puzzled and troubled expression, while his splendid eyes had an unusual expression in them.

‘Tell me,’ I said quickly,’ what did you see or hear?’

‘Oh, don’t let us talk about it,’ he answered lightly. ‘Perhaps, after all, I have simply been dreaming.’

‘Yes, yes—tell me—you must tell me, Herbert,’ I exclaimed. ‘You know that I am strong-nerved.’

He seemed to hesitate; but laughing again, though it was the same forced laugh, he said:

‘Well, the fact is, if ever I saw a raven in my life, I saw one last night, only it was white.’

At this I almost fainted, and he caught me by the arm. I made a desperate effort, however, and recovered myself.

‘Go on; tell me all about it,’ I said peremptorily.

 

And the sum and substance of what he told me was this. He had seen a white raven, or what appeared to be a white raven, flying round and round the room. It made no noise, which amazed him and, as he confessed, startled him. He tried to catch this mysterious and noiseless bird, but it had no substantiality—it was an airy phantom; but once or twice, when he appeared to grasp it, a deep groan and sigh broke upon his ears.

Although a strange fear seemed to turn my heart cold, I endeavoured not to show it, nor could I bring myself to tell my lover of the tradition so common all over the country side about the murdered lady and the White Raven.

If the extraordinary apparition had any real effect on Herbert, he soon shook it off, and his hearty ringing laughter made music in the house, and his eyes were filled again with the old look of love with which they always greeted me. It had been arranged that the gentlemen were to form a shooting party, to go out on to the moor and try and bag some wild ducks. At first I was disposed to dissuade Herbert from going—ah, would that I had done so!—but it seemed to me weak and foolish. Moreover, he was so anxious to go for the novelty of the thing, and so I whispered in his ear as he was standing on the steps:

‘Take care of yourself, love, for my sake.’

‘Of course I will, darling; and you do the same,’ he answered cheerily.

I watched his manly form until he was hidden from my sight by the trees. He looked splendid in his perfect health, and his magnificent physique was set off to every possible advantage by the superb coat of Russian sable that he wore. How proud I felt of him! for truly he was a man to be proud of.

 

Three hours later the party returned, minus Herbert. They said he had got separated from them in some way, and they quite thought he had come back. Although a sense of something being wrong overcame me for the moment, I tried to think that it was simply nervousness. Of course, the gentlemen at once hurried back to the moor, and when they came again they brought my lover mangled and shattered, and, as it seemed then, in the agony of death. Oh, my God! how awful it was! I thought I should have gone raving mad. It appears that Herbert had been found in a hollow, whither he had fallen by the breaking away of the snow under his feet. In his fall he had not only fractured an arm and some of his ribs, but his gun had gone off full in his face, and, besides disfiguring him frightfully, had destroyed both his eyes.

It can be imagined what a terrible shock it was to the household, and how the joy and mirth were turned to lamentations and moaning. Doctors were procured, but they pronounced the sufferer’s condition as critical; they left us no room to hope that the sight would be restored under any circumstances.

Ah, what a fearful dark Christmas that became to me! I think in my agony of mind I cursed my fate, my God; and how I hated the house, and shuddered as I thought of the horrible room where my beloved had seen the strange apparition of the White Raven.

Up to a short time previously, it would have been difficult to have found a girl more sceptical than I was about anything that savoured of superstition; but now I was filled with a strange dread, and reared my own shadow.

When I saw old Jack for the first time after the accident, he said to me:

‘Is it true, miss, that Meester Wilton’s been asleeping in the haunted room?’

‘Yes, Jack; it is,’ I answered, in heartbroken tones.

‘Then, maybe, he’s seen the White Raven…’

‘He has,’ I replied; whereupon I thought the old man would have fallen down in a fit, so scared did he seem; and he mumbled out:

‘God bless us and preserve us all! I wouldn’t sleep in that room, miss, not if Queen Victoriey was to give me her golden crown. That there room, miss, ought to be shut up, and no one ever allowed to go anigh it agen.’

 

The shadow that had so suddenly and cruelly fallen upon us rendered the Christmas festivities out of the question, and most of the guests sorrowfully departed the following day. Many long weeks ensued—dark, torturing weeks to me, for my loved one was suspended, as it were, by a single hair over that profound abyss into which all living atoms finally fall, and from which no sound ever comes to break the mystery. But if they were dark weeks to me, how much, how infinitely, how unspeakably darker to him who, in the pride of his manhood, had been deprived of the power of ever again beholding the wonders of God’s creation. And yet he murmured not, nor uttered complaint nor groan. To me the one consolation I had in this hideous calamity was being near him, being able to tend him, and hear his voice, which had lost none of its old cheerfulness. Slowly, very slowly, as the summer drifted by, he began to regain some of his lost strength, and we led him out beneath the trees and into the sunlight, though it was ever, ever night to him, for not a glimmer of vision remained. And as I looked at his sightless orbs and his maimed and torn face, from which no human power could banish the cruel and ghastly scars, I hated the Grange with a hate that hath no words.

 

One day he asked to be taken to where my father was, and, putting his arm in mine, we entered my father’s presence.

‘Mr. Stainsby,’ he began, with an attempt at a smile,

‘I am not quite the same man I was when I came here last Christmas. But in my misfortune an angel has watched over me in the person of your daughter, who, but for this mishap, would now have been my wife. She has brought me out of the shadow of the grave, and I owe a duty to her no less than to you. That duty is to release her from all promises and vows, and leave her perfectly free to bestow her heart on some one who is whole and sound. I am now but a battered wreck, and all I can hope for is to break up soon and drift away into the great and mysterious ocean of eternal silence. But let me ask you, sir, to see to it that the man upon whom you bestow your daughter is as near perfection as a man may come; for no more perfect woman than she is walks the world. I have nothing more to add further than, in such poor words as well up from my stricken heart, to thank you for your hospitality.’

He had tried so hard to be strong and collected, and show no sign of the awful despair that was crushing him. But is the man born who could go through such an ordeal unmoved? His lips quivered, his voice grew weak, and something like a spasm caught his breath.

My own eyes were filled with blinding, scalding tears, and my heart fluttered like the wing of a bird in pain. Gliding over to where he stood, I placed my arms about his neck, and laying my cheek against his scarred face, I found voice to say to my father, who was also deeply affected and moved:

‘Father, the man whom Herbert would have you choose for me need be sought no further than this room. He is here. My heart beats to his heart; my face is pressed to his.’

My father came to us. He laid one hand on Herbert’s shoulder, and the other on my head; and thus he spoke:

‘A woman’s love that clings not to a man when calamity overtakes him is worthless. Freely do I bestow her upon you, Herbert, if it is her wish and your wish that you should be united.’

‘My husband,’ I murmured, as I clung closer to him, and it was my only answer.

Herbert tried to persuade me that it was to my happiness and my interest to abandon him; but he might as well have tried to convince the winds of heaven that they should not blow. Externally the Herbert as I had first known him had changed. His handsome face was handsome no longer, and his wondrous eyes were sightless for ever. But his heart was the same. What could change that—the bravest, truest, tenderest that ever beat in man’s breast? And so ere the next Christmas had dawned I was Herbert’s wife, and soon after that my father abandoned the accursed Grange to the gloom and the silence and the melancholy from which he had reclaimed it, and a little later it was burned to the ground. We never knew how the fire originated; but it was generally supposed that some of the superstitious people in the neighbourhood wilfully set it alight, under the impression that a place that was accursed by the spilling of human blood should no longer be allowed to encumber the earth. When I heard of its destruction I confess that I rejoiced, and I said to myself:

‘Never again will the White Raven bring calamity to a household as it has brought to ours.’

 

For five years I walked with my husband in his darkness, and let him see the world through my eyes. Two children blessed—literally blessed—our union, a girl and a boy. But my beloved husband never fully recovered from the shock of the awful accident on that dark and memorable Christmas Day; and, though he uttered no moan, his blindness preyed upon his mind, and a short, brief illness took him from me.

For long years the grass has waved over his grave. Other men have praised my face and sought my hand; but to all I have turned a deaf ear, for my love was buried in Herbert’s grave. But in my son the father lives again, and when I gaze upon his handsome face and splendid figure, I feel that God is very good, and that He chastens us to make us more perfect in His sight.

#AdventCalendar 16 and 17 catch up

Well, it seems I mismanaged my planned content for the last two days, so here we are. We’re going to open two boxes at once while we wait for this evening’s planned story.

It’s another two charming tales from George Webbe Dasent‘s Popular Tales from the Norse (1912) and the fist one is one of my favourite tales: East of the Sun, West of the Moon. I wrote a commentary here and… can you believe it’s been four years already? ’cause I can’t.

Once on a time there was a poor husbandman who had so many children that he hadn’t much of either food or clothing to give them. Pretty children they all were, but the prettiest was the youngest daughter, who was so lovely there was no end to her loveliness.

So one day, ’twas on a Thursday evening late at the fall of the year, the weather was so wild and rough outside, and it was so cruelly dark, and rain fell and wind blew, till the walls of the cottage shook again. There they all sat round the fire busy with this thing and that. But just then, all at once something gave three taps on the window-pane. Then the father went out to see what was the matter; and, when he got out of doors, what should he see but a great big White Bear.

“Good evening to you,” said the White Bear.

“The same to you,” said the man.

“Will you give me your youngest daughter? If you will, I’ll make you as rich as you are now poor,” said the Bear.

Well, the man would not be at all sorry to be so rich; but still he thought he must have a bit of a talk with his daughter first; so he went in and told them how there was a great White Bear waiting outside, who had given his word to make them so rich if he could only have the youngest daughter.

The lassie said “No!” outright. Nothing could get her to say anything else; so the man went out and settled it with the White Bear, that he should come again the next Thursday evening and get an answer. Meantime he talked his daughter over, and kept on telling her of all the riches they would get, and how well off she would be herself; and so at last she thought better of it, and washed and mended her rags, made herself as smart as she could, and was ready to start. I can’t say her packing gave her much trouble.

Next Thursday evening came the White Bear to fetch her, and she got upon his back with her bundle, and off they went. So, when they had gone a bit of the way, the White Bear said—

“Are you afraid?”

“No! she wasn’t.”

“Well! mind and hold tight by my shaggy coat, and then there’s nothing to fear,” said the Bear.

So she rode a long, long way, till they came to a great steep hill. There, on the face of it, the White Bear gave a knock, and a door opened, and they came into a castle, where there were many rooms all lit up; rooms gleaming with silver and gold; and there too was a table ready laid, and it was all as grand as grand could be. Then the White Bear gave her a silver bell; and when she wanted anything, she was only to ring it, and she would get it at once.

Well, after she had eaten and drunk, and evening wore on, she got sleepy after her journey, and thought she would like to go to bed, so she rang the bell; and she had scarce taken hold of it before she came into a chamber, where there was a bed made, as fair and white as any one would wish to sleep in, with silken pillows and curtains, and gold fringe. All that was in the room was gold or silver; but when she had gone to bed, and put out the light, a man came and laid himself alongside her. That was the White Bear, who threw off his beast shape at night; but she never saw him, for he always came after she had put out the light, and before the day dawned he was up and off again. So things went on happily for a while, but at last she began to get silent and sorrowful; for there she went about all day alone, and she longed to go home to see her father and mother, and brothers and sisters. So one day, when the White Bear asked what it was that she lacked, she said it was so dull and lonely there, and how she longed to go home to see her father and mother, and brothers and sisters, and that was why she was so sad and sorrowful, because she couldn’t get to them.

“Well, well!” said the Bear, “perhaps there’s a cure for all this; but you must promise me one thing, not to talk alone with your mother, but only when the rest are by to hear; for she’ll take you by the hand and try to lead you into a room alone to talk; but you must mind and not do that, else you’ll bring bad luck on both of us.”

So one Sunday the White Bear came and said now they could set off to see her father and mother. Well, off they started, she sitting on his back; and they went far and long. At last they came to a grand house, and there her brothers and sisters were running about out of doors at play, and everything was so pretty, ’twas a joy to see.

“This is where your father and mother live now,” said the White Bear; “but don’t forget what I told you, else you’ll make us both unlucky.”

“No! bless her, she’d not forget;” and when she had reached the house, the White Bear turned right about and left her.

Then when she went in to see her father and mother, there was such joy, there was no end to it. None of them thought they could thank her enough for all she had done for them. Now, they had everything they wished, as good as good could be, and they all wanted to know how she got on where she lived.

Well, she said, it was very good to live where she did; she had all she wished. What she said beside I don’t know; but I don’t think any of them had the right end of the stick, or that they got much out of her. But so in the afternoon, after they had done dinner, all happened as the White Bear had said. Her mother wanted to talk with her alone in her bed-room; but she minded what the White Bear had said, and wouldn’t go up stairs.

“Oh, what we have to talk about will keep,” she said, and put her mother off. But somehow or other, her mother got round her at last, and she had to tell her the whole story. So she said, how every night, when she had gone to bed, a man came and lay down beside her as soon as she had put out the light, and how she never saw him, because he was always up and away before the morning dawned; and how she went about woeful and sorrowing, for she thought she should so like to see him, and how all day long she walked about there alone, and how dull, and dreary, and lonesome it was.

“My!” said her mother; “it may well be a Troll you slept with! But now I’ll teach you a lesson how to set eyes on him. I’ll give you a bit of candle, which you can carry home in your bosom; just light that while he is asleep, but take care not to drop the tallow on him.”

Yes! she took the candle, and hid it in her bosom, and as night drew on, the White Bear came and fetched her away.

But when they had gone a bit of the way, the White Bear asked if all hadn’t happened as he had said.

“Well, she couldn’t say it hadn’t.”

“Now, mind,” said he, “if you have listened to your mother’s advice, you have brought bad luck on us both, and then, all that has passed between us will be as nothing.”

“No,” she said, “she hadn’t listened to her mother’s advice.”

So when she reached home, and had gone to bed, it was the old story over again. There came a man and lay down beside her; but at dead of night, when she heard he slept, she got up and struck a light, lit the candle, and let the light shine on him, and so she saw that he was the loveliest Prince one ever set eyes on, and she fell so deep in love with him on the spot, that she thought she couldn’t live if she didn’t give him a kiss there and then. And so she did, but as she kissed him, she dropped three hot drops of tallow on his shirt, and he woke up.

“What have you done?” he cried; “now you have made us both unlucky, for had you held out only this one year, I had been freed. For I have a stepmother who has bewitched me, so that I am a White Bear by day, and a Man by night. But now all ties are snapt between us; now I must set off from you to her. She lives in a castle which stands East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon, and there, too, is a Princess, with a nose three ells long, and she’s the wife I must have now.”

She wept and took it ill, but there was no help for it; go he must.

Then she asked if she mightn’t go with him.

No, she mightn’t.

“Tell me the way, then,” she said, “and I’ll search you out; that surely I may get leave to do.”

“Yes, she might do that,” he said; “but there was no way to that place. It lay East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon, and thither she’d never find her way.”

So next morning, when she woke up, both Prince and castle were gone, and then she lay on a little green patch, in the midst of the gloomy thick wood, and by her side lay the same bundle of rags she had brought with her from her old home.

So when she had rubbed the sleep out of her eyes, and wept till she was tired, she set out on her way, and walked many, many days, till she came to a lofty crag. Under it sat an old hag, and played with a gold apple which she tossed about. Her the lassie asked if she knew the way to the Prince, who lived with his stepmother in the castle that lay East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon, and who was to marry the Princess with a nose three ells long.

“How did you come to know about him?” asked the old hag; “but maybe you are the lassie who ought to have had him?”

Yes, she was.

“So, so; it’s you, is it?” said the old hag. “Well, all I know about him is, that he lives in the castle that lies East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon,, and thither you’ll come, late or never; but still you may have the loan of my horse, and on him you can ride to my next neighbour. Maybe she’ll be able to tell you; and when you get there, just give the horse a switch under the left ear, and beg him to be off home; and, stay, this gold apple you may take with you.”

So she got upon the horse, and rode a long long time, till she came to another crag, under which sat another old hag, with a gold carding-comb. Her the lassie asked if she knew the way to the castle that lay East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon, and she answered, like the first old hag, that she knew nothing about it, except it was east o’ the sun and west o’ the moon.

“And thither you’ll come, late or never; but you shall have the loan of my horse to my next neighbour; maybe she’ll tell you all about it; and when you get there, just switch the horse under the left ear, and beg him to be off home.”

And this old hag gave her the golden carding-comb; it might be she’d find some use for it, she said. So the lassie got up on the horse, and rode a far far way, and a weary time; and so at last she came to another great crag, under which sat another old hag, spinning with a golden spinning-wheel Her, too, she asked if she knew the way to the Prince, and where the castle was that lay East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon,. So it was the same thing over again.

“Maybe it’s you who ought to have had the Prince?” said the old hag.

Yes, it was.

But she, too, didn’t know the way a bit better than the other two. “East o’ the sun and west o’ the moon it was,” she knew—that was all.

“And thither you’ll come, late or never; but I’ll lend you my horse, and then I think you’d best ride to the East Wind and ask him; maybe he knows those parts, and can blow you thither. But when you get to him, you need only give the horse a switch under the left ear, and he’ll trot home of himself.”

And so, too, she gave her the gold spinning-wheel. “Maybe you’ll find a use for it,” said the old hag.

Then on she rode many many days, a weary time, before she got to the East Wind’s house, but at last she did reach it, and then she asked the East Wind if he could tell her the way to the Prince who dwelt east o’ the sun and west o’ the moon. Yes, the East Wind had often heard tell of it, the Prince and the castle, but he couldn’t tell the way, for he had never blown so far.

“But, if you will, I’ll go with you to my brother the West Wind, maybe he knows, for he’s much stronger. So, if you will just get on my back, I’ll carry you thither.”

Yes, she got on his back, and I should just think they went briskly along.

So when they got there, they went into the West Wind’s house, and the East Wind said the lassie he had brought was the one who ought to have had the Prince who lived in the castle East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon: and so she had set out to seek him, and how he had come with her, and would be glad to know if the West Wind knew how to get to the castle.

“Nay,” said the West Wind, “so far I’ve never blown; but if you will, I’ll go with you to our brother the South Wind, for he’s much stronger than either of us, and he has flapped his wings far and wide. Maybe he’ll tell you. You can get on my back, and I’ll carry you to him.”

Yes! she got on his back, and so they travelled to the South Wind, and weren’t so very long on the way, I should think.

When they got there, the West Wind asked him if he could tell her the way to the castle that lay East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon, for it was she who ought to have had the Prince who lived there.

“You don’t say so! That’s she, is it?” said the South Wind.

“Well, I have blustered about in most places in my time, but so far have I never blown; but if you will, I’ll take you to my brother the North Wind; he is the oldest and strongest of the whole lot of us, and if he don’t know where it is, you’ll never find any one in the world to tell you. You can get on my back, and I’ll carry you thither.”

Yes! she got on his back, and away he went from his house at a fine rate. And this time, too, she wasn’t long on her way.

So when they got to the North Wind’s house, he was so wild and cross, cold puffs came from him a long way off.

“Blast you both, what do you want?” he roared out to them ever so far off, so that it struck them with an icy shiver.

“Well,” said the South Wind, “you needn’t be so foulmouthed, for here I am, your brother, the South Wind, and here is the lassie who ought to have had the Prince who dwells in the castle that lies East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon, and now she wants to ask you if you ever were there, and can tell her the way, for she would be so glad to find him again.”

“Yes, I know well enough where it is,” Said the North Wind; “once in my life I blew an aspen-leaf thither, but I was so tired I couldn’t blow a puff for ever so many days after. But if you really wish to go thither, and aren’t afraid to come along with me, I’ll take you on my back and see if I can blow you thither.”

Yes! with all her heart; she must and would get thither if it were possible in any way; and as for fear, however madly he went, she wouldn’t be at all afraid.

“Very well, then,” said the North Wind, “but you must sleep here to-night, for we must have the whole day before us, if we’re to get thither at all.

Early next morning the North Wind woke her, and puffed himself up, and blew himself out, and made himself so stout and big, ’twas gruesome to look at him; and so off they went high up through the air, as if they would never stop till they got to the world’s end.

Down here below there was such a storm; it threw down long tracts of wood and many houses, and when it swept over the great sea, ships foundered by hundreds.

So they tore on and on,—no one can believe how far they went,—and all the while they still went over the sea, and the North Wind got more and more weary, and so out of breath he could scarce bring out a puff, and his wings drooped and drooped, till at last he sunk so low that the crests of the waves dashed over his heels.

“Are you afraid?” said the North Wind.

“No!” she wasn’t.

But they weren’t very far from land; and the North Wind had still so much strength left in him that he managed to throw her up on the shore under the windows of the castle which lay East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon; but then he was so weak and worn out, he had to stay there and rest many days before he could get home again.

Next morning the lassie sat down under the castle window, and began to play with the gold apple; and the first person she saw was the Long-nose who was to have the Prince.

“What do you want for your gold apple, you lassie?” said the Long-nose, and threw up the window.

“It’s not for sale, for gold or money,” said the lassie. “If it’s not for sale for gold or money, what is it that you will sell it for? You may name your own price,” said the Princess.

“Well! if I may get to the Prince, who lives here, and be with him to-night, you shall have it,” said the lassie whom the North Wind had brought.

Yes! she might; that could be done. So the Princess got the gold apple; but when the lassie came up to the Prince’s bed-room at night he was fast asleep; she called him and shook him, and between whiles she wept sore; but all she could do she couldn’t wake him up. Next morning as soon as day broke, came the Princess with the long nose, and drove her out again.

So in the day-time she sat down under the castle windows and began to card with her golden carding-comb, and the same thing happened. The Princess asked what she wanted for it; and she said it wasn’t for sale for gold or money, but if she might get leave to go up to the Prince and be with him that night, the Princess should have it. But when she went up she found him fast asleep again, and all she called, and all she shook, and wept, and prayed, she couldn’t get life into him; and as soon as the first gray peep of day came, then came the Princess with the long nose, and chased her out again.

So in the day-time the lassie sat down outside under the castle window, and began to spin with her golden spinning-wheel, and that, too, the Princess with the long nose wanted to have. So she threw up the window and asked what she wanted for it. The lassie said, as she had said twice before, it wasn’t for sale for gold or money; but if she might go up to the Prince who was there, and be with him alone that night, she might have it.

Yes! she might do that and welcome. But now you must know there were some Christian folk who had been carried off thither, and as they sat in their room, which was next the Prince, they had heard how a woman had been in there, and wept and prayed, and called to him two nights running, and they told that to the Prince.

That evening, when the Princess came with her sleepy drink, the Prince made as if he drank, but threw it over his shoulder, for he could guess it was a sleepy drink. So, when the lassie came in, she found the Prince wide awake; and then she told him the whole story how she had come thither.

“Ah,” said the Prince, “you’ve just come in the very nick of time, for to-morrow is to be our wedding-day; but now I won’t have the Long-nose, and you are the only woman in the world who can set me free. I’ll say I want to see what my wife is fit for, and beg her to wash the shirt which has the three spots of tallow on it; she’ll say yes, for she doesn’t know ’tis you who put them there; but that’s a work only for Christian folk, and not for such a pack of Trolls, and so I’ll say that I won’t have any other for my bride than the woman who can wash them out, and ask you to do it.”

So there was great joy and love between them all that night. But next day, when the wedding was to be, the Prince said—

“First of all, I’d like to see what my bride is fit for.”

“Yes!” said the step-mother, with all her heart.

“Well,” said the Prince, “I’ve got a fine shirt which I’d like for my wedding shirt, but some how or other it has got three spots of tallow on it, which I must have washed out; and I have sworn never to take any other bride than the woman who’s able to do that. If she can’t, she’s not worth having.”

Well, that was no great thing they said, so they agreed, and she with the long nose began to wash away as hard as she could, but the more she rubbed and scrubbed, the bigger the spots grew.

“Ah!” said the old hag, her mother, “you can’t wash; let me try.”

But she hadn’t long taken the shirt in hand, before it got far worse than ever, and with all her rubbing, and wringing, and scrubbing, the spots grew bigger and blacker, and the darker and uglier was the shirt.

Then all the other Trolls began to wash, but the longer it lasted, the blacker and uglier the shirt grew, till at last it was as black all over as if it had been up the chimney.

“Ah!” said the Prince, “you’re none of you worth a straw: you can’t wash. Why there, outside, sits a beggar lassie, I’ll be bound she knows how to wash better than the whole lot of you. Come in, Lassie! “he shouted.

Well, in she came.

“Can you wash this shirt clean, lassie, you?” said he.

“I don’t know,” she said, “but I think I can.” And almost before she had taken it and dipped it in the water, it was as white as driven snow, and whiter still.

“Yes; you are the lassie for me,” said the Prince.

At that the old hag flew into such a rage, she burst on the spot, and the Princess with the long nose after her, and the whole pack of Trolls after her,—at least I’ve never heard a word about them since.

As for the Prince and Princess, they set free all the poor Christian folk who had been carried off and shut up there; and they took with them all the silver and gold, and flitted away as far as they could from the castle that lay East o’ the Sun and West o’ the Moon.

The second one is a Christmas classic: The Cat on the Dovrefjell. I wrote about it here.

Once on a time there was a man up in Finnmark who had caught a great white bear, which he was going to take to the King of Denmark. Now, it so fell out that he came to the Dovrefell just about Christmas Eve, and there he turned into a cottage where a man lived, whose name was Halvor, and asked the man if he could get house-room there for his bear and himself.

“Heaven never help me, if what I say isn’t true!” said the man; “but we can’t give any one house-room just now, for every Christmas Eve such a pack of Trolls come down upon us that we are forced to flit, and haven’t so much as a house over our own heads, to say nothing of lending one to any one else.”

“Oh!” said the man, “if that’s all, you can very well lend me your house; my bear can lie under the stove yonder, and I can sleep in the side-room.”

Well, he begged so hard, that at last he got leave to stay there; so the people of the house flitted out, and before they went everything was got ready for the Trolls; the tables were laid, and there was rice porridge, and fish boiled in lye, and sausages, and all else that was good, just as for any other grand feast.

So, when everything was ready, down came the Trolls. Some were great, and some were small; some had long tails, and some had no tails at all; some, too, had long, long noses; and they ate and drank, and tasted everything. Just then one of the little Trolls caught sight of the white bear, who lay under the stove; so he took a piece of sausage and stuck it on a fork, and went and poked it up against the bear’s nose, screaming out,—

“Pussy, will you have some sausage?”

Then the white bear rose up and growled, and hunted the whole pack of them out of doors, both great and small.

Next year Halvor was out in the wood on the afternoon of Christmas Eve, cutting wood before the holidays, for he thought the Trolls would come again; and just as he was hard at work, he heard a voice in the wood calling out—

“Halvor! Halvor!”

“Well,” said Halvor, “here I am.”

“Have you got your big cat with you still?”

“Yes, that I have,” said Halvor; “she’s lying at home under the stove, and what’s more, she has now got seven kittens, far bigger and fiercer than she is herself.”

“Oh, then, we’ll never come to see you again,” bawled out the Troll away in the wood, and he kept his word; for since that time the Trolls have never eaten their Christmas brose with Halvor on the Dovrefell.

#AdventCalendar 15: The Devil’s Motor

Another story by Marie Corelli, included in her A Christmas Greeting from 1901.

In the dead midnight, at that supreme moment when the Hours that are past slip away from the grasp of the Hours yet to be, there came rushing between Earth and Heaven the sound of giant wheels,—the glare of great lights,—the stench and the muffled roar of a huge Car, tearing at full speed along the pale line dividing the Darkness from the Dawn. And he who stood within the Car, steering it straight onward, was clothed in black and crowned with fire; large bat-like wings flared out on either side of him in woven webs of smoke and flame, and his face was white as bleached bone. Like glowing embers his eyes burned in their cavernous sockets, shedding terrific glances through the star-strewn space,—and on his thin lips there was a frozen shadow of a smile more cruel than hate,—more deadly than despair.

“On!” he cried—“Still on! On with an endless rush and roar! Over the plains of the world that is gone,—over the heights of the world to come—on, still on! Without pause, without pity, without love, without regret! Follow me, all ye Forces which are destined to work the ruin of Mankind,—follow! On, on, over all beauty, all tenderness, all truth I ride,—I, the Avenger, the Destroyer, the Torturer of Souls, the Arch-Enemy of God! The Kingdom of Hell grows wide and deep,—praise be to the Man who makes it! I count up my growing possessions in the ever-breeding spawn of human lust and avarice,—I breathe and live and rejoice in the fat poison-vapours of human Selfishness! The men of these latter days are my food and sustenance,—the women my choice morsels, my dainty delicates! Brute beasts and blind, they snatch at every lie I offer them;—rejecting Eternal Life, they choose Eternal Death,—verily they shall have their reward! Like a blight my Spirit shall encompass them,—and whosoever would scour the air and scorch the earth must run on the straight road of his desire with Me!”

The great Car flashed along with grinding, thunderous wheels, and as it flew, vast Phantom-forms followed it, like rolling clouds jagged with the lightning,—the fairness of the world grew black; and sulphureous fumes quenched all sweetness from the air. The forests dropped like broken reeds,—the mountains crumbled into pits and quarries, the seas and rivers, the lakes and waterfalls dried up into black and muddy waters; and all the land was bereft of beauty. In the place of wholesome green fields and leafy woods, there rose up gigantic cities, built in on every side, and bristling with thousands upon thousands of chimneys belching forth sickening smoke into the overhanging gloom which hid the skies, and the cities were full of a deafening noise and crashing confusion as of ten million million hammers beating incessantly—beating away all peace, all solitude, all health, all rest. On,—on, and into these countless prisons of stone and mortar the Demon of the Car swept vast and ever-hurrying crowds of human beings, with the furious force of a mighty whirlwind sweeping dead leaves into the sea.

“No room to breathe—no time to think—no good to serve!” he cried—“Now shall you forget that God exists! Now shall you all have your own wild way, for Your way is My way! Now shall you resolve yourselves back to an embryo of worms and apes, and none shall rescue you, no, not one! For the Seven Angels of the Judgment Day are sounding their trumpets of terror, and who shall silence the voices, or stay the thunderings and lightnings, or the great earthquake? Hail and fire!—and the trees, and the green grass burnt up and destroyed,—the sun and the moon, the day and the night smitten into one blackness! We will have no more virtues!—no more hopes of Heaven! Honour shall be as a rag on a fool’s back, and Gold shall be the pulse of Life! Gold, gold, gold! Fight for it, steal it, pile it up, hoard it, count it, hug it, eat it, sleep with it, die with it! Lo, I give it to you in millions, packed down and pressed together in full and overflowing measure—I scatter it on you even as a destroying rain!—build with it, buy with it, gamble with it, sell your souls and bodies for it,—there are devils enough in hell to drive all your bargains! Sneer at truth, defeat justice, snatch virtue’s mask to cover vice, drug conscience, feed and fatten yourselves with the lusts of animalism till the cancer of sin makes of you a putrefaction and an open sore in the sight of the sun! Come, learn from me such wisdom as shall compass your own destruction! Unto you shall be unlocked the under-mysteries of Nature, and the secrets of the upper air,—you shall bend the lightning to your service, and the lightning shall slay!—you shall hollow out the ground, and delve a swift road through it for yourselves in fancied proud security and the earth shall crumble in upon you as a grave, and the cities you have built shall crush you in their falling,—you shall seek to bind the winds and sail the skies, and Death shall wait for you in the clouds, and exult in your downfall. Come, tie your pigmy chariots to the sun, and so be drawn into its flaming vortex of perdition! All Creation shall rejoice to be cleansed from the pollution of your presence, for God hath sworn to give unto Me all who reject Him, and the Hour of the Gift has come!”

Still faster and more furiously flew the Car,—red meteors flashed in its course—and the Phantom shapes which followed its flight crowded together in an ever-thickening, ever, darkening multitude, while bright stars were shaken down from heaven like snowflakes whirling in a winter blast. And mingling with the grinding roar of its wheels came other sounds,—sounds of fierce laughter and loud cursing,—yells and shrieks and groans of torture,—the screams of the suffering, the sobs of the dying,—and as the Fiend drove on with swiftly quickening speed, men and women and little children were trampled down one upon another and killed in their thousands, and the Car was splashed thick with human blood. And He who was clothed in black and crowned with fire, shouted exultingly as He dashed along over massacred heaps of dead rations and the broken remnants of thrones.

“Progress and Speed!” he yelled—“Rush on, world, with me!—rush on! There is but one end—hasten we to reach it! No halt by the way to gather the flowers of thought,—the fruits of feeling;—no pause for a lifting of the eyes to the wide firmament, where millions of spheres, more beautiful than this which men make wretched, sail on their courses like fair ships bound for God’s golden harbours! No time to listen to the singing of the birds of hope, the ripple of the sweet waters of refreshment, the murmur of cool grasses waving in the fields of peace;—no time, no stop,—no lull for quiet breathing,—on!—forever on! Up and ride with me all ye who would reach the goal! Come, ye fools of avarice! Come, ye blown and bursting windbags of world’s conceit and vain pretension! Come, ye greedy maws of gluttony—ye human pottles of drink—ye wolves of vice! Come, ye shameless women of lusts and lies and vanities! Come, false hearts and treacherous tongues and painted faces!—come, dear demons all, and ride with me! Come, ye pretenders to holiness—ye thieves of virtue, who give “charity” to the poor with the right hand, and cheat your neighbour with the left!—come, ye gamblers with a Nation’s honour, stake your last throw! Come, all ye morphia-fed vampires and slaves to poison!—grasp at my wheels and cling! On—on—over the fragments of mighty Empires,—over the hearts of kings and queens,—over the lives of the brave, the good, and the wise!—let us trample them all down and crush them into dust and ashes! What shall we do with wisdom, we who have done with God? What with purity?—what with courage? Naught are these but reproach and bitterness—mere obstacles in the broad way which leadeth to destruction;—ride them down! On—on! to the destined end!—on with rush and hurry and panting eagerness to reach the only goal—the last of winning-posts—the close of Certainties,—the Grave!”

Like a flashing blur of fiery wheels the Car now spun along in the blackness of the night, and the drifting Phantoms round about it were as great grey sails swelling with the angry blast, and sweeping it onward through the dark.

“Pray no more—hope no more—love no more!” cried the Fiend. “Be as the shifting sands, or as the trembling quicksilver—inconstant, capricious—ever in motion, never at rest! Change—change and revolt! All ye who weary of old things, behold I give you new! Bodies shall be pampered and souls killed for your pleasure—vices shall be called foulest ‘sensations,’—each merely to be tried, excused, and condemned in turn,—and virtues shall have no more place at all in the scale of feeling! The music of life shall clash into wild discord—the love of home shall be a lost glory,—tenderness for the young and reverence for the old shall be the faded sentiments of the past, only fit for a mummer’s jest! Change—Change and Sensation! Roll out your columns of vaporous notoriety, ye printing-presses of the world!—spread wide the fame of the Anarchist and the Courtesan,—mock and revile the spirits of the wise and true,—noise abroad the name of the Murderer, and treat the Poet with derision—give flattery to the rich, and scorn to the humble,—teach nothing but the art of lying,—add venom to the tongue of scandal,—dig up the graves of the great, and kill the reputations of the brave and pure! Help nothing on that is noble—nothing that is honest,—nothing that is of God, or for God,—print every lie, grudge every truth, and let your trumpet-note be that of blatant Atheism and Devilry to the end! Set trade against trade,—community against community,—nation against nation—till with your windy bombast and senseless twaddle you fill your witches’ cauldron of mischief and contention to the full! Up and ride with me, ye Plotters against Peace!—ye whose hands are against every man!—there is no time to be lost—up and away with a rush and a roar!—for the Great Star has fallen from heaven to earth, and to Him is given the key of the bottomless pit! The pit is open—the gate stands wide—up, and speed on with Me!”

Like lightning now the great Car tore through space—its flaring lamps flashing, its wheels grinding with the sullen noise of a bursting volcano,—and amidst cries and shrieks indescribable, it leaped, as it were, from peak to peak of toppling clouds that towered above and around it like mighty mountains. And presently it seemed as if a thin, pale line of purple fire glimmered afar off, and by this light was seen a monstrous ridge of dense blackness jutting sharply over some vast incalculable depth of horror. On—still on—the Car rushed; and He of the sable robes and flaming crown urged apace its reckless speed with wild shouts of wilder laughter.

“All the world in such haste to die!” he cried. “All the world gone mad with the craze of movement! Up in the air, down on the earth—all turned to whirling, flying, tossing atoms of dust in a storm, and lo, the End! Be patient now, for ye shall never wander again—be silent now, for prayer and cursing, laughter and tears are done—let the hoarded gold drop from your grasp—it can purchase nothing yonder! Was it worth while, think you,—this rush headlong, to be cast into silence? Was it worth while to leave the sunshine for this dark?—beauty for this decay?—sweet sounds of love and tenderness for this still glow of the eternal flame which is not quenched—this gnawing of the eternal worm whose appetite is never satisfied? Lo, ye have burnt up a world to light Hell with its flame!—but the world shall blossom again like a flower springing from the dust, and ye whose soulless lives have been a curse and an outrage on its fairness, shall pace its pleasant paths no more! Rejoice, O earth!—rejoice, O sea!—to be freed of the burden of mankind! Rejoice, O birds, that the hand of the spoiler shall no longer wound or slay!—rejoice, O trees, that the axe of the destroyer shall no more cast ye down!—rejoice, O all ye living creatures of the field and forest, that Treachery no longer stalks the world in man’s disguise! Take back thy planet, O great God, cleansed of a pigmy race! Create a new Humanity!—for this is past!”

On—on,—along the black ridge jutting darkly over silent Immensity, with a whirl of fire and roar of thunder the Car flew,—and then—as if for one brief breathing part of a second it paused! Like a vast Shadow between earth and heaven the Demon stood—his bony hand on the steering-wheel—and every point in his flaming crown scintillating with the sparkle of a million stars. Round about him soared and stooped countless terrific Phantom-shapes—some like wrecked ships—some like torn flags of honour—some like mounted warriors—some like throned kings—some like fair women veiled in a mist of tears,—and beneath his bat-like pinions, outstretched to north and south, there glimmered a pale crowd of white faces, upturned wild eyes and imploring hands—all crushed together in a writhing mass of agony! But no sound came from those dumb mouths agape with terror,—all were silent as Death itself, and only the thunderous roar of the Car echoed through space, as, after that infinitely brief pause, it dashed furiously onward and down!—down,—down sheer over the edge of that mystic precipice into the fathomless abyss of the Unseen and Unknown!

A thousand lightnings leaped after it—a thousand crashing echoes vibrated through the Universe with its fall,—one frightful human cry shuddered up to Heaven—and then—silence! Gradually, gently, and by faint degrees, a purpling fire crimsoned the wavering rise of dawn—a cool wind parted the air into sweet breadths of fragrance—and in the centre of the awful stillness a scarlet sun rose slowly in a clear sky, fixing the red seal of God on the closed history of a World!

#AdventCalendar 14: Sora Moria Castle

A few years ago, I did a commentary on this Norse folktale. This year, I give you the whole text. It comes from the 1912 English edition.

Once on a time there was a poor couple who had a son whose name was Halvor. Ever since he was a little boy he would turn his hand to nothing, but just sat there and groped about in the ashes. His father and mother often put him out to learn this trade or that, but Halvor could stay nowhere; for, when he had been there a day or two, he ran away from his master, and never stopped till he was sitting again in the ingle, poking about in the cinders.

Well, one day a skipper came and asked Halvor if he hadn’t a mind to be with him, and go to sea, and see strange lands. Yes, Halvor would like that very much; so he wasn’t long in getting himself ready.

 

How long they sailed I’m sure I can’t tell; but the end of it was, they fell into a great storm, and when it was blown over, and it got still again, they couldn’t tell where they were; for they had been driven away to a strange coast, which none of them knew anything about.

Well, as there was just no wind at all, they stayed lying wind-bound there, and Halvor asked the skipper’s leave to go on shore and look about him; he would sooner go, he said, than lie there and sleep.

“Do you think now you’re fit to show yourself before folk,” said the skipper, “why, you’ve no clothes than those rags you stand in?”

But Halvor stuck to his own, and so at last he got leave but he was to be sure and come back as soon as ever it ​began to blow. So off he went and found a lovely land; wherever he came there were fine large flat corn-fields and rich meads, but he couldn’t catch a glimpse of a living soul. Well, it began to blow, but Halvor thought he hadn’t seen enough yet, and he wanted to walk a little farther, just to see if he couldn’t meet any folk. So after a while he came to a broad high road, so smooth and even, you might easily roll an egg along it. Halvor followed this, and when evening drew on he saw a great castle ever so far off, from which the sunbeams shone. So as he had now walked the whole day and hadn’t taken a bit to eat with him; he was as hungry as a hunter, but still the nearer he came to the castle, the more afraid he got.

In the castle kitchen a great fire was blazing, and Halvor went into it, but such a kitchen he had never seen in all his born days. It was so grand and fine; there were vessels of silver and vessels of gold, but still never a living soul. So when Halvor had stood there a while and no one came out, he went and opened a door, and there inside sat a Princess who span upon a spinning-wheel.

“Nay, nay, now!” she called out, “dare Christian folk come hither? But now you’d best be off about your business, if you don’t want the Troll to gobble you up; for here lives a Troll with three heads.”

“All one to me,” said the lad, “I’d be just as glad to hear he had four heads beside; I’d like to see what kind of fellow he is. As for going, I won’t go at all. I’ve done no harm; but meat you must get me, for I’m almost starved to death.”

When Halvor had eaten his fill, the Princess told him to try if he could brandish the sword that; hung against the ​wall; no, he couldn’t brandish it, he couldn’t even lift it up.

“Oh!” said the Princess, “now you must go and take a pull of that flask that hangs by its side; that’s what the Troll does every time he goes out to use the sword.”

So Halvor took a pull, and in the twinkling of an eye he could brandish the sword like nothing; and now he thought it high time the Troll came; and lo! just then up came the Troll puffing and blowing. Halvor jumped behind the door.

“Hutetu,” said the Troll, as he put his head in at the door,” what a smell of Christian man’s blood!”

“Ay,” said Halvor, “you’ll soon know that to your cost,” and with that he hewed off all his heads.

Now the Princess was so glad that she was free, she both danced and sang, but then all at once she called her sisters to mind, and so she said,—

“Would my sisters were free too!”

“Where are they?” asked Halvor.

Well, she told him all about it; one was taken away by a Troll to his castle, which lay fifty miles off, and the other by another Troll to his castle, which was fifty miles farther still.

“But now,” she said, “you must first help me to get this ugly carcase out of the house.”

Yes, Halvor was so strong he swept everything away, and made it all clean and tidy in no time. So they had a good and happy time of it, and next morning he set off at peep of gray dawn; he could take no rest by the way, but ran and walked the whole day. When he first saw the castle he got a little afraid; it was far grander than the ​first, but here too there wasn’t a living soul to be seen. So Halvor went into the kitchen, and did’nt stop there either, but went straight farther on into the house.

“Nay, nay,” called out the Princess, “dare Christian folk come hither? I don’t know I’m sure how long it is since I came here, but in all that time I haven’t seen a Christian man. ‘Twere best you saw how to get away as fast as you came; for here lives a Troll who has six heads.”

“I shan’t go,” said Halvor, “if he had six heads besides.”

“He’ll take you up and swallow you down alive,” said the Princess.

But it was no good, Halvor wouldn’t go; he wasn’t at all afraid of the Troll, but meat and drink he must have, for he was half starved after his long journey. Well, he got as much of that as he wished, but then the Princess wanted him to be off again.

“No,” said Halvor, “I won’t go, I’ve done no harm, and I’ve nothing to be afraid about.”

“He won’t stay to ask that,” said the Princess, “for he’ll take you without law or leave; but as you won’t go, just try if you can brandish that sword yonder, which the Troll wields in war.”

He couldn’t brandish it, and then the Princess said he must take a pull at the flask which hung by its side, and when he had done that he could brandish it.

Just then back came the Troll, and he was both stout and big, so that he had to go sideways to get through the door. When the Troll got his first head in he called out,—

“Hutetu, what a smell of Christian man’s blood!”

But that very moment Halvor hewed off his first head, ​and so on all the rest as they popped in. The Princess was overjoyed, but just then she came to think of her sisters, and wished out loud they were free. Halvor thought that might easily be done, and wanted to be off at once, but first he had to help the Princess to get the Troll’s carcase out of the way, and so he could only set out next morning.

It was a long way to the castle, and he had to walk fast and run hard to reach it in time; but about nightfall he saw the castle, which was far finer and grander than either of the others. This time he wasn’t the least afraid, but walked straight through the kitchen, and into the castle. There sat a Princess who was so pretty, there wag no end to her loveliness. She, too, like the others, told him there hadn’t been Christian folk there ever since she came thither, and bade him go away again, else the Troll would swallow him alive, and do you know, she said, he has nine heads.

“Ay, ay,” said Halvor, “if he had nine other heads, and nine other heads still, I won’t go away,” and so he stood fast before the stove. The Princess kept on begging him so prettily to go away, lest the Troll should gobble him up, but Halvor said,—

“Let him come as soon as he likes.”

So she gave him the Troll’s sword, and bade him take a pull at the flask, that he might be able to brandish and wield it.

Just then back came the Troll puffing and blowing and tearing along. He was far stouter and bigger than the other two, and he too had to go on one side to get through the door. So when he got his first head in, he said as the others had said,—

​”Hutetu, what a smell of Christian man’s blood!”

That very moment Halvor hewed off the first head and then all the rest; but the last was the toughest of them all, and it was the hardest bit of work Halvor had to do to get it hewn off, although he knew very well he had strength enough to do it.

So all the Princesses came together to that castle, which was called Soria Moria Castle, and they were glad and happy as they had never been in all their lives before, and they all were fond of Halvor and Halvor of them, and he might choose the one he liked best for his bride; but the youngest was fondest of him of all the three.

But there, after a while, Halvor went about, and was so strange and dull and silent. Then the Princesses asked him what he lacked, and if he didn’t like to live with them any longer? Yes, he did, for they had enough and to spare, and he was well off in every way, but still somehow or other he did so long to go home, for his father and mother were alive, and them he had such a great wish to see.

Well, they thought that might be done easily enough.

“You shall go thither and come back hither, safe and unscathed, if you will only follow our advice,” said the Princesses.

Yes, he’d be sure to mind all they said. So they dressed him up till he was as grand as a king’s son, and then they set a ring on his finger, and that was such a ring, he could wish himself thither and hither with it; but they told him to be sure not to take it off, and not to name their names, for there would be an end of all his bravery, and then he’d never see them more.

​”If I only stood at home I’d be glad,” said Halvor; and it was done as he had wished. Then stood Halvor at his father’s cottage door before he knew a word about it. Now it was about dusk at even, and so, when they saw such a grand stately lord walk in, the old couple got so afraid they began to bow and scrape. Then Halvor asked if he couldn’t stay there, and have a lodging there that night. No; that he couldn’t.

“We can’t do it at all,” they said, “for we haven’t this thing or that thing which such a lord is used to have; ’twere best your lordship went up to the farm, no long way off, for you can see the chimneys, and there they have lots of everything.”

Halvor wouldn’t hear of it—he wanted to stop; but the old couple stuck to their own, that he had better go to the farmer’s; there he would get both meat and drink; as for them, they hadn’t even a chair to offer him to sit down on.

“No,” said Halvor, “I won’t go up there till to-morrow early, but let me just stay here to-night; worst come to the worst, I can sit in the chimney corner.”

Well, they couldn’t say anything against that; so Halvor sat down by the ingle, and began to poke about in the ashes, just as he used to do when he lay at home in old days, and stretched his lazy bones.

Well, they chattered and talked about many things; and they told Halvor about this thing and that; and so he asked them if they had never had any children.

“Yes, yes, they had once a lad whose name was Halvor, but they didn’t know whither he had wandered; they couldn’t even tell whether he were dead or alive.”

“Couldn’t it be me now?” said Halvor.

​”Let me see; I could tell him well enough,” said the old wife, and rose up. “Our Halvor was so lazy and dull, he never did a thing; and besides, he was so ragged, that one tatter took hold of the next tatter on him. No; there never was the making of such a fine fellow in him as you are, master.”

A little while after the old wife went to the hearth to poke up the fire, and when the blaze fell on Halvor’s face, just as when he was at home of old poking about in the ashes, she knew him at once.

“Ah! but is it you after all, Halvor?” she cried; and then there was such joy for the old couple, there was no end to it; and he was forced to tell how he had fared, and the old dame was so fond and proud of him, nothing would do but he must go up at once to the farmer’s and show himself to the lassies, who had always looked down on him. And off she went first, and Halvor followed after. So, when she got up there, she told them all how her Halvor had come home again, and now they should only just see how grand he was, for, said she, “he looks like nothing but a king’s son.”

“All very fine,” said the lassies, and tossed up their heads. “We’ll be bound he’s just the same beggarly, ragged boy he always was.”

Just then in walked Halvor, and then the lassies were all so taken aback, they forgot their sarks in the ingle, where they were sitting darning their clothes, and ran out in their smocks. Well, when they were got back again, they were so shamefaced they scarce dared look at Halvor, towards whom they had always been proud and haughty.

“Ay, ay,” said Halvor, “you always thought ​yourselves so pretty and neat, no one could come near you; but now you should just see the eldest Princess I have set free; against her you look just like milkmaids, and the midmost is prettier still; but the youngest, who is my sweetheart, she’s fairer than both sun and moon. Would to Heaven she were only here,” said Halvor, “then you’d see what you would see.”

He had scarce uttered these words before there they stood, but then he felt so sorry, for now what they had said came into his mind. Up at the farm there was a great feast got ready for the Princesses, and much was made of them, but they wouldn’t stop there.

“No; we want to go down to your father and mother,” they said to Halvor; “and so we’ll go out now and look about us.”

So he went down with them, and they came to a great lake just outside the farm. Close by the water was such a lovely green bank; here the Princesses said they would sit and rest a while; they thought it so sweet to sit down and look over the water.

So they sat down there, and when they had sat a while, the youngest Princess said,—

“I may as well comb your hair a little, Halvor.”

Yes, Halvor laid his head on her lap, and so she combed his bonny locks, and it wasn’t long before Halvor fell fast asleep. Then she took the ring from his finger, and put another in its stead; and so she said,—

“Now hold me all together! and now would we were all in Soria Moria Castle.”

So when Halvor woke up, he could very well tell that he had lost the Princesses, and began to weep and wail; ​and he was so downcast, they couldn’t comfort him at all. In spite of all his father and mother said, he wouldn’t stop there, but took farewell of them, and said he was safe not to see them again; for if he couldn’t find the Princesses again, he thought it not worth while to live.

Well, he had still three hundred dollars left, so he put them into his pocket, and set out on his way. So when he had walked a while, he met a man with a tidy horse, and he wanted to buy it, and began to chaffer with the man.

“Ay,” said the man, “to tell the truth, I never thought of selling him; but if we could strike a bargain, perhaps”—

“What do you want for him,” asked Halvor.

“I didn’t give much for him, nor is he worth much; he’s a brave horse to ride, but he can’t draw at all; still he’s strong enough to carry your knapsack and you too, turn and turn about,” said the man.

At last they agreed on the price, and Halvor laid the knapsack on him, and so he walked a bit, and rode a bit, turn and turn about. At night he came to a green plain where stood a great tree, at the roots of which he sat down. There he let the horse loose, but he didn’t lie down to sleep, but opened his knapsack and took a meal. At peep of day off he set again, for he could take no rest. So he rode and walked, and walked and rode the whole day through the wide wood, where there were so many green spots and glades that shone so bright and lovely between the trees. He didn’t know at all where he was or whither he was going, but he gave himself no more time to rest than when his horse cropped a bit of grass, and he took a snack out of his knapsack when they came to one of those ​green glades. So he went on walking and riding by turns, and as for the wood there seemed to be no end to it.

But at dusk the next day he saw a light gleaming away through the trees.

“Would there were folk hereaway,” thought Halvor, “that I might warm myself a bit and get a morsel to keep body and soul together.”

When he got up to it, he saw the light came from a wretched little hut, and through the window he saw an old old couple inside. They were as grey-headed as a pair of doves, and the old wife had such a nose! why, it was so long she used it for a poker to stir the fire as she sat in the ingle.

“Good evening,” said Halvor.

“Good evening,” said the old wife.

“But what errand can you have in coming hither?” she went on, “for no Christian folk have been here these hundred years and more.”

Well, Halvor told her all about himself, and how he wanted to get to Soria Moria Castle, and asked if she knew the way thither.

“No,” said the old wife, “that I don’t, but see now, here comes the Moon, I’ll ask her, she’ll know all about it, for doesn’t she shine on everything.”

So when the Moon stood clear and bright over the treetops, the old wife went out.

“Thou Moon, Thou Moon,” she screamed, “canst thou tell me the way to Soria Moria Castle?”

“No,” said the Moon, “that I can’t, for the last time I shone there a cloud stood before me.”

“Wait a bit still,” said the old wife to Halvor, “by and ​by comes the West Wind; he’s sure to know it, for he puffs and blows round every corner.”

“Nay, nay,” said the old wife when she went out again, “you don’t mean to say you’ve got a horse too; just turn the poor beastie loose in our ‘toun,’ and don’t let him stand there and starve to death at the door.”

Then she ran on,—

“But won’t you swop him away to me; we’ve got an old pair of boots here, with which you can take twenty miles at each stride; those you shall have for your horse, and so you’ll get all the sooner to Soria Moria Castle.”

That Halvor was willing to do at once; and the old wife was so glad at the horse, she was ready to dance and skip for joy.

“For now,” she said, “I shall be able to ride to church. I too, think of that.”

As for Halvor, he had no rest, and wanted to be off at once, but the old wife said there was no hurry. “Lie down on the bench with you and sleep a bit, for we’ve no bed to offer you, and I’ll watch and wake you when the West Wind comes.”

So after a while up came the West Wind, roaring and howling along till the walls creaked and groaned again. Out ran the old wife.

“Thou West Wind, Thou West Wind! Canst thou tell me the way to Soria Moria Castle? Here’s one who wants to get thither.”

“Yes, I know it very well,” said the West Wind, “and now I’m just off thither to dry clothes for the wedding that’s to be; if he’s swift of foot he can go along with me.”

Out ran Halvor.

​”You’ll have to stretch your legs if you mean to keep up,” said the West Wind.

So off he set over field and hedge, and hill and fell, and Halvor had hard work to keep up.

“Well,” said the West Wind, “now I’ve no time to stay with you any longer, for I’ve got to go away yonder and tear down a strip of spruce wood first before I go to the bleaching-ground to dry the clothes; but if you go alongside the hill you’ll come to a lot of lassies standing washing clothes, and then you’ve not far to go to Soria Moria Castle.”

In a little while Halvor came upon the lassies who stood washing, and they asked if he had seen anything of the West Wind, who was to come and dry the clothes for the wedding.

“Ay, ay, that I have,” said Halvor, “he’s only gone to tear down a strip of spruce wood. It’ll not be long before he’s here,” and then he asked them the way to Sokia Moria Castle.

So they put him into the right way, and when he got to the Castle it was full of folk and horses; so full it made one giddy to look at them. But Halvor was so ragged and torn from having followed the West Wind through bush and brier and bog, that he kept on one side, and wouldn’t show himself till the last day when the bridal feast was to be.

So when all, as was then right and fitting, were to drink the bride and bridegroom’s health and wish them luck, and when the cupbearer was to drink to them all again, both knights and squires, last of all he came in turn to Halvor. He drank their health, but let the ring which the Princess ​had put upon his finger as he lay by the lake fall into the glass, and bade the cupbearer go and greet the bride and hand her the glass.

Then up rose the Princess from the board at once.

“Who is most worthy to have one of us,” she said, “he that has set us free, or he that here sits by me as bridegroom.”

Well they all said there could be but one voice and will as to that, and when Halvor heard that he wasn’t long in throwing off his beggar’s rags, and arraying himself as bridegroom.

“Ay, ay, here is the right one after all,” said the youngest Princess as soon as she saw him, and so she tossed the other one out of the window, and held her wedding with Halvor.

#AdventCalendar 13: The Wind of Dunowe

H.D. Everett, born Henrietta Dorothy Huskisson on March 4, 1851, was a British author known for her ghost stories and novels, particularly under the pseudonym Theo Douglas. She gained popularity during the late Victorian and Edwardian eras, though she’s vastly underrated nowadays. Her literary career began relatively late in life, around the age of 44, and she published numerous works until her death in 1923. This story comes from the collection The Death-Mask and Other Ghosts, published in 1920. H.P. Lovecraft cited the collection in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature, noting its adherence to traditional ghost story models while occasionally achieving “singular heights of spiritual terror.” M.R. James, another prominent figure in ghost literature, praised Everett’s collection for its quality, and also observed that it had been largely overlooked by critics and scholars.

I hope this will give you the chance to rediscover it.

It was growing late, the Autumn evening was advanced out of the long northern twilight to be on the edge of dark, when Reginald Noyes left the Dunowe smoking-room where he had been chatting to his host, and dashed upstairs, two steps at a stride, to dress for dinner. The warning bell had rung some time before, so he was not surprised to find his wife already attired in her evening gown. She was seated with her back to him, warming her toes at the wide and glowing fire of peat.

Noyes would have been just as well pleased not to find her there—a moderate statement of his sentiments. It was a case of the grey mare being the better horse, and the young man had not always an easy time with his chosen partner. To one sensitive to such indications, the psychic atmosphere of the big

state bedroom was charged with displeasure, and this was accentuated by a shrug of an averted shoulder. Surely something more was wrong than the mere fact that Noyes was behind time.

“Why, Flossie, what’s the matter?”

The frivolous nickname ill-fitted Mrs. Noyes, at least in her present mood. And at all times she was rather of the severe type of beauty, even when the sun shone—the metaphorical sun.

“Matter? Matter enough! It’s no use: I can’t stick it out here for another ten days, to the limit of our invitation. I’m bored to death. Coming to Dunowe has been altogether a mistake. You must make some excuse for a change of plan, and take me back to town.”

“Why—you wanted to cultivate the MacIvors: you even schemed to be invited. You were as pleased as I was when we were both asked—every bit. The shooting is excellent, and MacIvor such a good fellow. And I’m sure his mother received us with every kindness. Have you and she fallen out?”

“Do I ever fall out with any one? I’ve no patience with you when you are absurd. Of course there has been no quarrel. But I’m sick to death of this ghostly old barrack. There isn’t the least chance here of bringing off any coup. And, as you know very well, if we don’t between now and Christmas—!”

Here there was an effective pause. Noyes winced. Probably he did know what was meant. But he put up a further objection.

“You said, with a view to coups, that this visit was the very thing you wanted—to get into a house-party with Mrs. Noel MacIvor, and have a chance to draw the feather over her. By George, Noel was a lucky man when he married her, in spite of the snub nose and the American accent. A girl with two millions to her fortune, and likely to have as much again when Poppa dies. And when all the MacIvors are as poor as rats, and he the second son!”

“Two millions—yes. But it seems they were dollars, not pounds sterling, as we heard. And the girl is as sharp and as well able to take care of herself and her money as—as the paternal Yankee himself.”

“Well—she can be fairly generous when she likes. MacIvor tells me she offered to restore Dunowe for him,—put the Castle in complete repair. That was pretty well for a sister-in-law. But of course he wouldn’t consent.”

“More fool he to refuse such an offer. But in other ways she is downright stingy: dresses herself like a schoolgirl of seventeen, sweet simplicity unadorned. Not a jewel, even. And she should have had plenty of toilets and jewels in those Saratoga trunks we saw carried in!”

“I daresay you would have liked to have the ransacking of them!”

“I thought of that. But the Noels are far off in the other wing, and she has a dragon of a maid who seems always to be on guard.”

“Good heavens, Flossie! I hope you won’t do more than think of it. That sort of thing never pays. And we should be marked for ever!”

“Nonsense. What marks one is not the doing, but being found out. I don’t mean to run risks. I said, there is the maid. And I doubt if the jewels are there, though they ought to be. It isn’t worth while. But we are bound to get hold of the money—or money’s worth—by Christmas.”

Probably Noyes winced for the second time at this renewed reminder, but he was at the moment out of sight. He had plunged into the dressing-room, and was throwing things about there in the course of a hurried toilet. The door between the two rooms was set wide, and now and then he came to the opening to speak.

“I thought you were depending on your bridge. You wanted to play Auction with Mrs. Noel—that was the tale in London. You never said a word about her jewels.”

“Right: I meant to play here, and win from her. But the little fool hates cards. And the old lady is puritanical, and hates them too. They are practically barred, or allowed with a limit of sixpenny stakes.”

“Can’t you work it some other way? Flatter the heiress, and creep up her sleeve.”

Get her to restore us, as MacIvor won’t let her do up the Castle!”—a laugh here, which was presently extinguished in the folds of a towel.

“I can get round most—girls, but she doesn’t take to me. She’s like a—a glacis with no vantage for the foot. The only human bit about her is that she’s curious. She’s curious about the ghost here, and wants to find out. I told her I would try to help her——”

“You would help her! Why doesn’t she question the family? They would know if there is anything in it. But of course there isn’t.”

“It is the solitary point on which we touch. A sympathetic interest in ghosts is better than no fellow-interest at all. I’ve given myself out as psychical—save the mark! “—and here the lady laughed. “I might personate the ghost, and get at the boxes that way. But the clue of how to make up is still to seek. We do not know what sort of figure is seen.”

“Surely she could ask her husband!”

“Noel told her something, and then he shut up, and would say no more. Lady MacIvor can’t bear the subject mentioned, and Sir Ian is just as bad. And she thinks Noel must have been laughing at her. He said the ghost was a gale of wind: a gale which blows inside the castle when the real weather is still. Now a gale of wind won’t help me to the boxes. But it is mixed up somehow with an ancestress. I can’t find out which, though I asked all the questions I could, quite innocently, about the pictures. Ghosts apart, I tell you there is no chance here, and the sooner we get out of this the better. I wrote to-day to Juliet in Hampshire: you know she wanted me for her bridge parties, though she says I must not sweep the board as I did last winter. But of course that was only her joke. Gracious, there’s the second gong. I must go down at once, and leave you to follow.”

Dinner was served in the hall at Dunowe Castle, a noble but somewhat bare room, stone-floored, and so lofty as to be open to the rafters. The diners were, however, well protected from any chill; a great fire blazed, and the table was set within folding screens of Spanish leather, while a thick carpet was spread under foot. Dunowe knew nothing of the modern luxury of electric light, and the moderate illumination of the table was effected by candles in tall silver holders. This was all very well within the screens, but the corners of the big room were abandoned to gloom, and only a single lamp burned overhead in the gallery. The piquante little American bride looked round her with a shiver as she descended the staircase. Here was hiding more than ample for dozens of ghosts, and that shrewd draught from the gallery which blew on her uncovered shoulders might be the precursor of the supernatural wind which was supposed to be the MacIvor family omen.

It was not a numerous party which assembled at the table. A married pair with a couple of clever daughters had quitted the Castle that morning, frigid old people, and the girls plain and elderly: impecunious also, and of no account from the point of view of Mrs. Noyes. There were Noel MacIvor and Reginald Noyes, and four other men who were “guns,” seven in all with the host; but the American bride and Mrs. Noyes were the only ladies remaining, with the exception of the stately old dame who sat at the head of the table, and was Sir Ian MacIvor’s mother. Sir Ian had placed the lady guest on his right hand, and his sister-in-law opposite. Mrs. Noyes was still in a clouded humour and had little to say, but she must have been well entertained by the pretty American’s lively chatter. Ian MacIvor was a handsomer man than his more fortunate brother, but the family honours seemed to have brought with them a weight of care, not to say melancholy, and he looked old beyond his years.

“I went over to Eagles’ Cairn to-day with the mater,” said the bride, whose Christian name was Caryl. “You know they are all coming to Dunowe for the dance next week, and Mollie Campbell sent you a very particular message. She says they are going to put on fancy dress, as it makes it just twice the fun, and she hopes all the women you expect will do the same. Of course you men will wear the tartan. The mater did not seem to mind. I said I’d be delighted, and I thought Mrs. Noyes would dress up too.” Then, with an appeal also to her vis-à-vis: “Say, that was right, was it not?”

“Quite right, if you ladies do not mind the trouble for such a small impromptu affair. It was just like Mollie Campbell to propose it. She is a child still about what you call dressing up!”

“Perhaps we all are. I can answer for one, at least. What do you say, Mrs. Noyes?”

“Certainly, if we are still here—I am not sure——”

“Oh, you must stay for it. We cannot let you off. And about costumes: the dear mater and I talked it over in the carriage coming home. She is going to wear a great-grandmother dress that she has stowed away with a lot of others in those chests on the gallery, and I am to try on a particular one that she thinks will suit me. It is like the dress Lady Sibell wears in the picture, where she has on the heirloom pearls and that queer harp-shaped brooch. Oh, Ian,”—with a sudden thought, and striking together the pink palms of her pretty hands. “It would be just splendid if you’d lend me the pearls for that one night! Say, will you? I’d take the greatest care of them. That is, if you keep them here, and not lodged at the bank. Are they here at Dunowe?”

“Yes,” he said, “I have them here.” He did not refuse the request, but he met it gravely, and might have been divined unwilling by one less eager.

“Then you’ll let me have them, won’t you?”—the piquante little face eloquent with appeal, and the clasped hands held out. “I’d like—oh, I would like to be Lady Sibell, just for the one night. I’d say I was Lady Sibell come alive out of the picture, if they can’t guess who I am. I might even pretend to be the ghost!”

“A good idea,” he admitted, but still there was that air of a reluctance he would not put into words. “But I wouldn’t call myself Lady Sibell, if I were you. She mightn’t like it. Couldn’t you for the same period find a different name?”

“Why, is Lady Sibell the——? But I must not ask you that! It’s charming of you, Ian. I must tell Noel. I feel as if I could hardly wait for Wednesday. If they are here in the house, could you show them to me to-night?”

“I have them here—yes. In fact, they are in the built-in safe in my den, for they are not allowed to leave Dunowe. They don’t often see the light. But you may be disappointed in them. They are not pure white, and some of them are irregular. No doubt they are Scotch river pearls, not oriental.”

The description, though depreciatory, seemed to excite interest in both his hearers. Mrs. Noyes was also listening.

“Tinted pearls, are they? I wonder what colour?”

“Pinkish—to the best of my recollection.”

“Pink pearls!” Caryl clasped her hands again. “They must be lovely. And I may wear them, may I not? Just for the one night!”

He smiled now in giving consent; she looked so pretty and childish in her eagerness.

“Yes, you shall have them for the dance. They may only be worn by a MacIvor. An odd provision, is it not; but it is in the deed, which also says they must not be taken out of the castle. But now you are married, you are a MacIvor, Caryl. So that will be all right.”

It is said that lookers on see most of the game. Mrs. Noyes, looking and listening, was aware that Noel, who also listened, was rendered uneasy by his wife’s request. He was on the edge of a protest, Mrs. Noyes thought, but Sir Ian made a slight repressive sign. Caryl the bride was to have her way. Other MacIvor brides had worn the pearls, but they were wedded to the head of the house, and not to a younger son. Noel was aware that Ian thought himself too poor to marry: was it in the elder brother’s mind that Caryl in the future would have the right to the pearls as the reigning lady of Dunowe.”

“Could you let me see them to-night?” Caryl persisted.

“And may I see them too?” put in Mrs. Noyes. “I admire pearls, and I may not be here when Mrs. MacIvor wears them at the dance. Our plans are uncertain. I daresay Reginald told you——?”

No, Noyes had said nothing: in fact he had had no opportunity since the conversation in the bedroom. Sir Ian hoped, conventionally, that nothing would hurry them away so soon. In the husband’s case, it would be with him a genuine matter of regret, but he would be able to spare Mrs. Flossie with perfect equanimity. He had no great liking for the lady: the surface of her was smooth enough, but he had an instinctive feeling that something unpleasant might be encountered underneath. He would be happy, he said, to show the pearls to both ladies, if they would honour him by paying a visit to his “den.”

While dinner was in progress the wind was rising, buffeting round the many angles and turrets of the house; and now and then there was a roar in the wide chimney of the hall. It was evident that Lady MacIvor was listening, and listening with apprehension, though was it not the saying that when the ghost wind blew in the castle, the outer and mundane weather was sure to be a dead calm? The old dame was never high coloured—(old she was, to be the mother of those two stalwart sons). Hers was the ivory pallor of age, but a change of tint might have been noted on her cheek and lips, as she sat at the head of the table trying spasmodically to converse. On observing this, Sir Ian remarked, in a voice so far raised as to be sure to catch her ear:

“We are going to have a wild night of it. I could have forecasted as much when we were out to-day. The equinoctial gales have given us the go-by this year, but now it seems as if one of them was setting in in earnest.”

Only an equinoctial gale, a natural feature, and Ian cheerful in the forecast. Surely that should have set her mind at rest, and she contrived to smile back at him down the length of the table. But there was still a quiver about the proud old head, and as she smoothed her lace mittens it was palpable that the thin hands they covered trembled. And when she heard of the display about to be made in the “den,” it seemed as if her uneasiness increased. She said, however, no word to oppose. Lady Sibell’s pearls must be shown and worn, as Ian had given his word. She was a fatalist in her way: what must be, must be: but Heaven grant showing and wearing might bring no evil on the house, which in the past had been stricken enough and to spare.

It was in truth a stormy evening, a gale sweeping over from the western ocean, and buffeting the old castle as it had been smitten many times before during its centuries of existence. But the wind was external, not within the walls, except for such natural draughts as found their way through undefended chinks and crannies. There was a huge fire in the castle drawing-room of logs and peat, but despite of it Lady MacIvor shivered, and drew a voluminous white cloud of Shetland knitting close about her shoulders as she sat alone.

The two younger women had betaken themselves to Sir Ian’s den, and there he had the safe set open, and was displaying the contents of an antique casket made of some dark foreign wood, cornered and clamped with steel. Within, on a velvet bed, lay the pearls of Dunowe.

Both ladies admired the string, which was just long enough to encircle a slender throat, and had a ruby clasp. Caryl declared that the faint rosy flush upon the pearls was even more exquisite than the purity of white. She took them out of the case for closer view, and then passed the necklace over for Mrs. Noyes also to examine. But when they came into unrelated handling, a queer thing happened.

The room was lighted by four candles in tall holders, two on the table, and two set high on the mantel-shelf. These lights were not extinguished nor did they flicker, but the illuminating power of them died down till each showed only a faint point of bluish flame. The room was almost in darkness, and the three persons grouped at the table could scarcely distinguish each the face of the other in the sudden gloom.

“What is the matter with the candles?” Mrs. Noyes exclaimed: esprit fort as she considered herself, she was for the moment appalled.

Sir Ian took the pearls from her hand and replaced them in their case, and, as he did so, the lights gradually brightened until they burned as before. He did not answer the question or give any explanation: he appeared not to have noticed the darkness and the return of illumination.

“You shall have them on Wednesday evening,” he said to Caryl as he turned the key. “I am glad they come up to your expectation.”

“I think they are exquisite,” she said, “but I am almost frightened of them now. Ian, I know you won’t tell me, but is it that Lady Sibell does not want them worn? Was it her doing to put out the candles, and make them burn again when you took back the necklace? No, you needn’t answer, for I have found out! You may keep it as secret as you like, but I am certain now she is the ghost!”

Mrs. Noyes was awake that night when her husband came up to their rooms; she had also something to say.

“You need not be in too great haste over arranging our departure. The fourteenth will do for me. I have made up my mind to stay over the dance.”

“You will stay for the dance, and leave the day after: is that it? Rather a mistake if anything should happen to be missing, and there is a hue and cry. Better make it the end of the week, the day set for us, and let me have another good shoot.”

“You think of nothing but your shooting, Reginald. I never knew any one so selfish.”

“This time, my dear, I am thinking of something quite other than myself. I am thinking of you, and the risk you are running, or are about to run. For of course this change of plan is because you have seen the pearls.”

“Don’t speak so loud. Heaven knows who may be outside the door.”

“I am speaking with all discretion, and I want to know. You were there when MacIvor took them out of the safe. What are they like?”

“I had no time to look them over—of course, and there may be flaws. I had them in my own hands less than a minute. But I should say there were twenty at least the size of a large pea, and a dozen that would double that, all faintly tinted pink. The back of the string seemed made up of small ones, an odd and end lot, quite negligible. Whether those at the back were pink I could not see: there was a very bad light. But the middle ones would sell for a fortune in New York, if

we can get them there. The latest craze of the Five Hundred is for pearls, and pink pearls head the market.”

“You’ll never get them out of this house without detection and exposure, let alone across the Atlantic. Give it up, Flossie: your scheme is a bad egg. I’m off on Monday, and I shall take you with me. That’s my last word.”

It might be Reginald Noyes’s last word, but it was not Flossie’s. Many words followed on the lady’s part: indeed discussions and recriminations raged till the small hours, of which the result only need be noted. The couple would remain over the dance and until the following Saturday, and Mrs. Noyes held herself at liberty to pursue the course she had planned, and possess herself (if she could) of the pearls. And the following instructions were issued to the obedient Reginald, a little later on.

“Look here. I want you to engage Mrs. Noel for the fourth dance: it is a valse. No, I know you don’t valse well, but that does not matter. The big salon is cleared for dancing on account of the oak floor, but the flirtation nooks and refreshments will be in the hall. Get her to sit out with you, and take her to the nook right in the corner, left of fireplace, the one from which you see the stairs. It is shut in at the back with palms and evergreens, and there is a high-backed seat. Take her there while the dancing is still going on, and the hall is empty: tell her you want to confide in her: keep her engrossed.”

“I can take her there—good: but as to confiding! What the devil am I to confide? She’s the last sort of girl to stand love-making, and we haven’t an idea in common. As you said once before.”

“Talk to her about the ghost. Tell her you’ve seen it, with the tallest story you can make up—sulphur and brimstone, horns and hoofs, and all the diabolical horrors. She’ll believe you, for on that subject she would swallow anything. If you do that, you’ll have her fixed—for as long as will suit my purpose. You understand?”

The morning of Wednesday, Mrs. Noyes developed a headache. It was most tiresome of it to come when it did, and she accepted sympathy freely, and swallowed the offered remedies, which was heroic. To lose the dance would disappoint her, more acutely than words could say. No, not the actual dance; she must give up that in any case, for it would be impossible with such a giddy head. But if she could get better—ever such a little better—she would still hope to watch the spectacle from some quiet corner, where she would not be in the way. She was sure dear Lady MacIvor would excuse her arraying herself in the elaborate costume which had been arranged, and in which she was to be a pooudré. But she happened to have with her a dark domino and half-mask, which would do well enough, and this she could throw on at the last moment if she felt able to come down. She would be inconspicuous so attired, and could slip away when fatigued.

So, when the evening came, she assumed a close-fitting sheath-like dress of black satin, in which her spare figure would occupy the least possible space, even when covered by the domino. She would not venture down till the dancing was well begun, but the right moment would find her ready and the headache cured.

Noyes hated the whole business, but had so far fallen under his wife’s domination that he was prepared to play his part in the drama. He took the opportunity to acquaint himself with the special flirtation nook she had indicated, to which he was expected to lead his partner. It could not have been better arranged for Flossie’s purpose. A large Chesterfield settee was placed across the corner, backed by an apparent grove of tall palms and evergreens, which masked the door into a side-passage. This door was not to be used in the service of the night, as the passage did not lead to the kitchens, and indeed communicated only with the gun-room and a side staircase. Flossie would do her part, there was no doubt of that: it only remained for him to act up to the rôle for which he was cast, and whisper to a lady psychically interested some thrilling particulars about an imagined ghost.

He foresaw difficulty. The American bride was curious, but she was also an indefatigable dancer, and determined to enjoy herself to the full. Would she be tempted into that retirement, even by a hinted confidence as to ghosts seen at Dunowe?

Caryl was in wild spirits when the hour arrived, enchanted with the effect of her old-world costume, now completed with the heirloom pearls, and a quaint harp-shaped brooch which also figured in the picture. Her hair was dressed after the fashion of Lady Sibell’s portrait, and Caryl made the painted lady a mock courtesy as she passed her in the gallery.

“No, you mustn’t say you know me,” she said laughing to her intimates. “I’m not Caryl MacIvor to-night, or Noel’s wife. I’m his lady-ancestress instead.” And then, in a following whisper: “I doubt if the dear old mater really approves of the travesty, though she would not interfere to spoil my fun. You know she’s very superstitious, and in dressing up as Lady Sibell I strongly suspect I’m also impersonating the ghost.”

The Dunowe dance being an impromptu, there were no printed programmes; but those who had pockets—only the men had pockets—carried cards in them, and little stubs of pencils. In this way Noyes had Caryl’s name down for Number Four, but when he came to claim it, that young person seemed to be deeply engaged with another partner.

“Do you really want to dance with me?”  she queried. “Because I’m enjoying myself very much with Freddy.” (Freddy was one of the “guns.”)

“I do really want this dance, and you know you promised. If you wish, I’ll let you off the other; but do try me first.”

She yielded, and they swung off together on the well waxed floor.

“I know I valse badly,” he said presently, “and I am unpractised in the new steps. What I really want is to get you to sit out with me. I have something to tell you: it’s—it’s about a ghost. I have just had a horrible experience, and you’ll be the first to hear of it: I have told nobody else. We shall get the hall to ourselves—for five minutes—if you don’t mind coming this way.”

“About the ghost?” There was quickened interest in her repetition of his words: his fish was rising to the fly. And perhaps she was not wholly unwilling to cut short her gyrations with an unskilled partner.

“You’ll be comfortable sitting here, and that other fellow won’t think of looking for you behind this screen. I really want to consult you—ask your advice. For I’ve had the fright of my life this afternoon.”

She sank down on the soft cushions, leaning well back, which was what Flossie wished. As he took his seat beside her, he heard a slight rustle in the bower of foliage at the back of the couch, and it did not help to steady his nerves.

“I suppose it would not do to say anything to Sir Ian. My first idea, of course, was that it was a real man. A fellow with bad intentions, and no business where he was. In short, a burglar.”

“A burglar—in broad daylight!”

“Ghosts are not supposed to like daylight, are they, any more than burglars? Though I know next to nothing of the habits of ghosts. But the daylight wasn’t—wasn’t broad.”

Noyes felt he was floundering, and wondered what Flossie would think of his efforts at narration, in her hiding-place at the back.

“I mean it was getting dark—dusk, you know. If it hadn’t been, I could not have seen the flame so distinctly. Yes, there seemed to be a flame about him, or at least a light. It came out of his eyes, I think, but really I don’t know. You see, I’ve had no experience.”

“You thought it was a man first, and then you saw it was a ghost? No, I wouldn’t tell Ian: he does not care for these things, and I think they make him uncomfortable. But I would like to hear more about it. Ah-h-h, what’s that?”

“Did you see anything?”

“No, but I thought something touched me—at the back of my neck—like a finger!”

Noyes noticed that her hand went up at once to feel for the safety of the pearls.

Flossie’s first attempt had been a failure, and he was nearly at the end of ghost-invention. Flames out of the eyes: he had better say next that his apparition breathed them out of its mouth.

“What touched you was a camellia leaf: see, I have broken it off. What were you asking me?”

“Was it the flame made you think the appearance supernatural? Or was there anything else?”

“Well—you see a real man couldn’t be on fire, and yet be still and give no sign of pain. But a ghost might look like that, if—if it came from the wrong place. But what made me sure in the end, was that it vanished. It just went right out—while I stood there.”

Noyes was facing sideways as he sat, and, with attention apparently riveted on his companion, he saw with half an eye the two hands again come forward out of the bower of greenery to attack the clasp of the necklace—this time with a lighter and defter touch, which did not alarm the victim. The string of pearls dropped one dangling end, and then was cautiously withdrawn. He made a desperate effort after self-control, continuing to look his partner steadily in the face, as if absorbed in their conversation. The scheme had worked well; Flossie had secured her prize, and now the best thing he could do was to lead Caryl back without delay into the thick of the throng. It would not do for her to recognise too precisely when and where the heirloom disappeared.

“If you’ll come a little further out into the room, I can show you whereabouts in the gallery the ghost stood. You never heard of anything like it haunting Dunowe? But you see, they will not speak of the Dunowe ghosts, so whether familiar or not we cannot tell. There is the music ending, and I suppose I must take you back to the dancing-room. Thank you for giving me a hearing. Think it over, and tell me what conclusion you come to. At supper, perhaps; or to-morrow.”

He offered his arm, and at the same moment a slight click of the concealed door informed him Flossie had escaped from her hiding-place. Caryl rose, and presently he was pointing out to her an imaginary spot on the gallery above the hall.

“I was just turning out of the corridor on my way down, when there he was straight before me. I give you my word it was horrible. And then to go like that, snuffed out in a moment!”

He had not told his story well; he was conscious of its lack of vraisemblance. And it left on the listener’s mind an impression of insincerity, eager as she was to believe. Yet there was about Noyes a kind of subdued agitation which was curious: he would hardly have been so moved, she thought, by what was exaggerated or untrue. Yes, they would take an opportunity to speak of it again, and he might tell her husband if he liked, but no word must be said before Ian.

As they crossed the hall, a car drove up with late arriving guests, and now the double doors of the entrance were being set wide. Servants came hurrying forward, and Lady MacIvor at the entrance of the ballroom was ready to receive her guests. Noyes and Caryl passed her going in, and but for the expectation and look beyond, probably she would at once have noticed the disappearance of the pearls. But the moment following a strange thing happened; one likely to be memorable ever after in the annals of Dunowe.

Did the gust of air rush in from those opened doors, or whence did it originate? A whirlwind blast tore through the house, extinguishing lights, swaying the pictures on the walls, tearing down wreaths of evergreens with which the saloon had been decked for the festal night. A wind which blew upstairs as well as down, shrieking through corridor and gallery, bursting open doors and whirling into closed rooms, so that no portion of the house escaped. There were cries of terror from the women guests, but the blast ceased as suddenly as it began, and Sir Ian’s voice was heard above the din, begging everybody to be calm. The room would be quickly re-lighted, and the dancing would go on.

But the lights when they were brought, revealed pale faces which looked questioningly one to another. This was a strange thing which had happened, and beyond nature. The ghostly wind of Dunowe had hitherto been a joke in the neighbourhood: after the experience of that night it would take rank as an article of faith.

The renewed illumination, however, brought with it a diversion. Caryl’s loss was noted. Mollie Campbell exclaimed: “My dear, where are your pearls?” and the bride put both hands to her neck in uttermost dismay.

Had they been torn off and whirled from her by the ghost-wind—the act of an affronted ghost? But common sense suggested they had dropped to the floor, and had been swept away into some corner by a trailing skirt: this was advanced as the most likely explanation, though in these days all dancing gowns are sufficiently abbreviated. The necklace must be close at hand—Caryl was positive she had it in safety not ten minutes before—her dancing-partners could testify they had noticed it about her throat. The idea of theft occurred to nobody: theft was impossible in that secure house, and in the midst of friends.

“Oh, Ian, I am sorry: I am miserable to have lost it,” she said, almost in tears. “I had no notion that the snap was weak: had I thought of it, I would have tied it on. I ought to have taken more care.”

“You must not let that trouble you,” he said to her kindly. “It will not be lost—it will come back to us”: the last words sotto voce to Noel, who was as distressed as his wife. But what he meant by them he did not explain.

Noyes was among the searchers, round the floor and beyond, though well aware it could not be there. The ghostly wind, the darkness, had not helped to steady his shaken nerves, but in a way he welcomed the diversion. Everyone was talking and thinking of the strange event, and if Caryl had been robbed, that darkness would be held thieves’ opportunity. No suspicion could rest on Flossie, sick in her room.

But some half-hour later Sir Ian came to him.

“Noyes, I am sorry to tell you your wife is ill. We have a doctor here among our guests, and, if you are willing, I think it might be as well for him to see her. The matter? Oh, only a fainting-fit, but it seems to be obstinate. Some of the women found her lying in the corridor after the rush of wind, and I fear she may have been frightened. She was carried to bed, and the housekeeper and my mother’s maid are both with her. If you will go up, I’ll send Rawlins. He will know what to do.”

Noyes went upstairs at once, his heart heavy with apprehension. Not so much on account of possible danger, though he was honestly fond of his wife, despite her outbreaks of temper, and the domination of the

grey mare. What he dreaded was, discovery of what she had done. She must have fainted on her way back to their room, with the pearls upon her. And these women who found her in the corridor, who carried her to bed, would be certain to unfasten her dress in trying to recover her, and there would be the fatal necklace—doubtless well-known to both of them, housekeeper and maid. Neither would suppose it a guest’s possession, even if unaware of Caryl’s loss, and the search going on below. As he hurried upstairs, he felt like a man under sentence, who has just been informed that his hour has come.

He found Flossie laid upon the bed, moaning faintly.

“Madam is coming round nicely now, sir,” said the housekeeper. “It was the faint going on so long that frightened us. I don’t think she will be the worse.”

The woman spoke cordially, not as if she knew them for discovered criminals; but there could be no further interchange, as the doctor was at the door.

While Dr. Rawlins examined the patient, Noyes looked round the room. Flossie’s dress had been undone as a matter of course, and her few ornaments were unpinned and laid on the dressing-table, but the pearls were not among them. When he drew near the bed on the opposite side to the doctor, Mrs. Noyes turned her head on the pillow and looked at him. That she recognised her husband there could be no doubt, but there was a dreadful apprehension in her eyes. No word, however, could then be interchanged.

“Your wife has had a shock of some kind, and collapse has followed. Most likely the wind frightened her. I understand the people here consider it supernatural, and I am ready to confess it was odd, though I don’t give in to spooks. You had better let the maid settle Mrs. Noyes comfortably for the night, and I daresay Mrs. Holbrook, the housekeeper, will sit up.”

“No, no,” Noyes objected. “Nobody need sit up. I can look after her: the women need not stay. You think there is no danger?”

“No danger that I foresee: she is reviving quite satisfactorily. But I will come up again before I leave. I shall find you here?”

Noyes assented, and expressed his thanks. Then, when he had shut the door upon the doctor, he went back to the bed. His wife’s eyes met his, filled with the same agony of fear.

“Are—the women—gone?” she panted.
“Yes for the moment, but they are coming back. Where are the pearls?”
“I don’t know—I don’t know!”
“You had them. Where did you put them when you left the hall?”
“Inside the bosom of my dress—within everything—next to the skin. When I came to myself, all my clothing had been opened… They must have found——! Unless, indeed, the pearls were taken—when——!”

Speech failed, a violent shudder convulsed her, the apprehension in her face deepened into horror. The hand he had taken in his clutched him hard.

“Why—what——?”

“The wind came: it was more than wind—it was anger, fury. It seems, when I look back, there was a face with it; or I dreamed the face after. A face that was terrible. I was so near safety when it came: a few more steps: and I was full of triumph. The wind struck me down. I knew no more till I found myself in here, and the women with me. Do you think the pearls—were taken—when I fell?”

After the fateful interruption of the wind, and a general dismay over Caryl’s loss, the dance was not kept up late. The first gay frolic of it was only half-heartedly renewed, and the guests did not find much appetite for the excellent supper. It was but little after one o’clock when Sir Ian closed the great doors upon the last departure, and retreated to his den. Caryl had put in his hands the quaint antique brooch worn to fasten her dress as Lady Sibell, and again she made tearful expression of her sorrow over the loss of the pearls.

“I think they will be given back,” he said: “this and no more.”

His errand to the den was to replace the brooch. He unlocked the safe with his own key, a key that had no duplicate, and never left his possession. He opened the steel-clamped casket to lay the brooch within, and there, safe and unharmed, was the gleaming roseate string, the heirloom pearls of Dunowe.

A few minutes later he knocked at his brother’s door.

“Noel! it is I, Ian, I want to speak to you.”

Noel opened at once: he was in pyjamas, and had been on the point of getting into bed.

“What is it, old fellow?”

“Only to tell you that the pearls are found. Let Caryl know. She will sleep all the better.”

“By George, I should think she will, and I, too! Where did they turn up?”

“In their place, in my locked safe. I unlocked it to put the brooch away, and they were there.”

“In your locked safe! Did you leave it undone?”

“No. And I had the key.”

“Then how—who——?”

“No mortal hand, I think. You know, there is a saying—— I tell you, but I shall slur it over to the others. Better so. Good-night.”