I found voice, though the voice was a shriek. I remember that I broke
forth with words like these, “I do not fear, my soul does not fear”; and
at the same time I found strength to rise.
Still in that profound gloom, I rushed to one of the windows, tore aside
the curtain, flung open the shutters; my first thought was, LIGHT.
And when I saw the moon, high, clear, and calm, I felt a joy that almost
compensated for the previous terror. There was the moon, there was also
the light from the gas-lamps in the deserted, slumberous street. I
turned to look back into the room; the moon penetrated its shadow very
palely and partially, but still there was light. The dark thing,
whatever it might be, was gone; except that I could yet see a dim
shadow, which seemed the shadow of that shade, against the opposite
wall.
My eye now rested on the table, and from under the table (which was
without cloth or cover, an old mahogany round table) rose a hand,
visible as far as the wrist. It was a hand, seemingly, as much of flesh
and blood as my own, but the hand of an aged person, lean, wrinkled,
small too, a woman’s hand. That hand very softly closed on the two
letters that lay on the table; hand and letters both vanished. Then came
the same three loud measured knocks I had heard at the bed-head before
this extraordinary drama had commenced.
As these sounds slowly ceased, I felt the whole room vibrate sensibly;
and at the far end rose, as from the floor, sparks or globules like
bubbles of light, many-colored—green, yellow, fire-red, azure—up and
down, to and fro, hither, thither, as tiny will-o’-the-wisps the sparks
moved, slow or swift, each at its own caprice. A chair (as in the
drawing-room below) was now advanced from the wall without apparent
agency, and placed at the opposite side of the table.
Suddenly, as forth from the chair, grew a shape, a woman’s shape. It was
distinct as a shape of life, ghastly as a shape of death. The face was
that of youth, with a strange, mournful beauty; the throat and shoulders
were bare, the rest of the form in a loose robe of cloudy white.
It began sleeking its long yellow hair, which fell over its shoulders;
its eyes were not turned toward me, but to the door; it seemed
listening, watching, waiting. The shadow of the shade in the background
grew darker, and again I thought I beheld the eyes gleaming out from the
summit of the shadow, eyes fixed upon that shape.
As if from the door, though it did not open, grew out another shape,
equally distinct, equally ghastly—a man’s shape, a young man’s. It was
in the dress of the last century, or rather in a likeness of such dress;
for both the male shape and the female, though defined, were evidently
unsubstantial, impalpable—simulacre, fantasms; and there was something
incongruous, grotesque, yet fearful, in the contrast between the
elaborate finery, the courtly precision of that old-fashioned garb, with
its ruffles and lace and buckles, and the corpse-like aspect and
ghost-like stillness of the fitting wearer. Just as the male shape
approached the female, the dark shadow darted from the wall, all three
for a moment wrapped in darkness.
When the pale light returned, the two fantoms were as if in the grasp of
the shadow that towered between them, and there was a blood-stain on the
breast of the female; and the fantom male was leaning on its fantom
sword, and blood seemed trickling fast from the ruffles, from the lace;
and the darkness of the intermediate shadow swallowed them up—they were
gone. And again the bubbles of light shot, and sailed, and undulated,
growing thicker and thicker and more wildly confused in their movements.
The closet door to the right of the fireplace now opened, and from the
aperture came the form of a woman, aged. In her hand she held
letters—the very letters over which I had seen _the_ hand close; and
behind her I heard a footstep. She turned round as if to listen, and
then she opened the letters and seemed to read: and over her shoulder I
saw a livid face, the face as of a man long drowned—bloated, bleached,
sea-weed tangled in its dripping hair; and at her feet lay a form as of
a corpse, and beside the corpse cowered a child, a miserable squalid
child, with famine in its cheeks and fear in its eyes. As I looked in
the old woman’s face, the wrinkles and lines vanished, and it became a
face of youth—hard-eyed, stony, but still youth; and the shadow darted
forth and darkened over these fantoms, as it had darkened over the last.
Nothing now was left but the shadow, and on that my eyes were intently
fixed, till again eyes grew out of the shadow—malignant, serpent eyes.
And the bubbles of light again rose and fell, and in their disordered,
irregular, turbulent maze mingled with the wan moonlight. And now from
these globules themselves, as from the shell of an egg, monstrous things
burst out; the air grew filled with them; larvæ so bloodless and so
hideous that I can in no way describe them except to remind the reader
of the swarming life which the solar microscope brings before his eyes
in a drop of water—things transparent, supple, agile, chasing each
other, devouring each other—forms like naught ever beheld by the naked
eye.
As the shapes were without symmetry, so their movements were without
order. In their very vagrancies there was no sport; they came round me
and round, thicker and faster and swifter, swarming over my head,
crawling over my right arm, which was outstretched in involuntary
command against all evil beings.
Sometimes I felt myself touched, but not by them; invisible hands
touched me. Once I felt the clutch as of cold, soft fingers at my
throat. I was still equally conscious that if I gave way to fear I
should be in bodily peril, and I concentered all my faculties in the
single focus of resisting, stubborn will. And I turned my sight from the
shadow, above all from those strange serpent eyes—eyes that had now to
redden as if in the air of some though in naught else around me, I was
aware that there was a will, and a will of intense, creative, working
evil, which might crush down my own.
The pale atmosphere in the room began now to redden as if in the air of
some near conflagration. The larvæ grew lurid as things that live in
fire. Again the room vibrated; again were heard the three measured
knocks; and again all things were swallowed up in the darkness of the
dark shadow, as if out of that darkness all had come, into that darkness
all returned.
As the gloom receded, the shadow was wholly gone. Slowly as it had been
withdrawn, the flame grew again into the candles on the table, again
into the fuel in the grate. The whole room came once more calmly,
healthfully into sight.
The two doors were still closed, the door communicating with the
servant’s room still locked. In the corner of the wall, into which he
had convulsively niched himself, lay the dog. I called to him—no
movement; I approached—the animal was dead; his eyes protruded, his
tongue out of his mouth, the froth gathered round his jaws. I took him
in my arms; I brought him to the fire; I felt acute grief for the loss
of my poor favorite, acute self-reproach; I accused myself of his death;
I imagined he had died of fright. But what was my surprise on finding
that his neck was actually broken—actually twisted out at the vertebræ.
Had this been done in the dark? Must it not have been done by a hand
human as mine? Must there not have been a human agency all the while in
that room? Good cause to suspect it. I cannot tell. I cannot do more
than state the fact fairly; the reader may draw his own inference.
Another surprising circumstance—my watch was restored to the table from
which it had been so mysteriously withdrawn; but it had stopped at the
very moment it was so withdrawn; nor, despite all the skill of the
watchmaker, has it ever gone since—that is, it will go in a strange,
erratic way for a few hours, and then comes to a dead stop; it is
worthless.
Nothing more chanced for the rest of the night; nor, indeed, had I long
to wait before the dawn broke. Not till it was broad daylight did I quit
the haunted house. Before I did so I revisited the little blind room in
which my servant and I had been for a time imprisoned.
I had a strong impression, for which I could not account, that from that
room had originated the mechanism of the phenomena, if I may use the
term, which had been experienced in my chamber; and though I entered it
now in the clear day, with the sun peering through the filmy window, I
still felt, as I stood on its floor, the creep of the horror which I had
first experienced there the night before, and which had been so
aggravated by what had passed in my own chamber.
I could not, indeed, bear to stay more than half a minute within those
walls. I descended the stairs, and again I heard the footfall before me;
and when I opened the street-door I thought I could distinguish a very
low laugh. I gained my own home, expecting to find my runaway servant
there. But he had not presented himself; nor did I hear more of him for
three days, when I received a letter from him, dated from Liverpool, to
this effect:
HONORED SIR—I humbly entreat your pardon, though I can scarcely hope
that you will think I deserve it, unless—which heaven forbid!—you saw
what I did. I feel that it will be years before I can recover myself;
and as to being fit for service, It is out of the question. I am
therefore going to my brother-in-law at Melbourne. The ship sails
to-morrow. Perhaps the long voyage may set me up. I do nothing now but
start and tremble, and fancy it is behind me. I humbly beg you,
honored sir, to order my clothes, and whatever wages are due to me, to
be sent to my mother’s, at Walworth: John knows her address.
The letter ended with additional apologies, somewhat incoherent, and
explanatory details as to effects that had been under the writer’s
charge.
This flight may perhaps warrant a suspicion that the man wished to go to
Australia, and had been somehow or other fraudulently mixed up with the
events of the night. I say nothing in refutation of that conjecture;
rather, I suggest it as one that would seem to many persons the most
probable solution of improbable occurrences.
My own theory remained unshaken. I returned in the evening to the house,
to bring away in a hack cab the things I had left there, with my poor
dog’s body. In this task I was not disturbed, nor did any incident worth
note befall me, except that still, on ascending and descending the
stairs, I heard the same footfall in advance. On leaving the house, I
went to Mr. J——‘s. He was at home. I returned him the keys, told him
that my curiosity was sufficiently gratified, and was about to relate
quickly what had passed, when he stopped me and said, though with much
politeness, that he had no longer any interest in a mystery which none
had ever solved.
I determined at least to tell him of the two letters I had read, as well
as of the extraordinary manner in which they had disappeared; and I then
inquired if he thought they had been addressed to the woman who had died
in the house, and if there were anything in her early history which
could possibly confirm the dark suspicions to which the letters gave
rise.
Mr. J—— seemed startled, and after musing a few moments, answered:
“I know but little of the woman’s earlier history, except, as I before
told you, that her family were known to mine. But you revive some vague
reminiscences to her prejudice. I will make inquiries, and inform you of
their result. Still, even if we could admit the popular superstition
that a person who had been either the perpetrator or the victim of dark
crimes in life could revisit, as a restless spirit, the scene in which
those crimes had been committed, I should observe that the house was
infested by strange sights and sounds before the old woman died. You
smile; what would you say?”
“I would say this: that I am convinced, if we could get to the bottom of
these mysteries, we should find a living, human agency.”
“What! you believe it is all an imposture? For what object?”
“Not an imposture, in the ordinary sense of the word. If suddenly I were
to sink into a deep sleep, from which you could not awake me, but in
that deep sleep could answer questions with an accuracy which I could
not pretend to when awake—tell you what money you had in your pocket,
nay, describe your very thoughts—it is not necessarily an imposture, any
more than it is necessarily supernatural. I should be, unconsciously to
myself, under a mesmeric influence, conveyed to me from a distance by a
human being who had acquired power over me by previous _rapport_.”
“Granting mesmerism, so far carried, to be a fact, you are right. And
you would infer from this that a mesmerizer might produce the
extraordinary effects you and others have witnessed over inanimate
objects—fill the air with sights and sounds?”
“Or impress our senses with the belief in them, we never having been _en
rapport_ with the person acting on us? No. What is commonly called
mesmerism could not do this; but there may be a power akin to mesmerism
and superior to it—the power that in the old days was called magic. That
such a power may extend to all inanimate objects of matter, I do not
say; but if so, it would not be against nature, only a rare power in
nature, which might be given to constitutions with certain
peculiarities, and cultivated by practise to an extraordinary degree.
“That such a power might extend over the dead—that is, over certain
thoughts and memories that the dead may still retain—and compel, not
that which ought properly to be called the SOUL, and which is far beyond
human reach, but rather a fantom of what has been most earth-stained on
earth, to make itself apparent to our senses—is a very ancient though
obsolete theory, upon which I will hazard no opinion. But I do not
conceive the power would be supernatural.
“Let me illustrate what I mean, from an experiment which Paracelsus
describes as not difficult, and which the author of the ‘Curiosities of
Literature’ cites as credible: A flower perishes; you burn it. Whatever
were the elements of that flower while it lived are gone, dispersed, you
know not whither; you can never discover nor re-collect them. But you
can, by chemistry, out of the burnt dust of that flower, raise a
spectrum of the flower, just as it seemed in life.
“It may be the same with a human being. The soul has as much escaped you
as the essence or elements of the flower. Still you may make a spectrum
of it. And this fantom, though in the popular superstition it is held to
be the soul of the departed, must not be confounded with the true soul;
it is but the eidolon of the dead form.
“Hence, like the best-attested stories of ghosts or spirits, the thing
that most strikes us is the absence of what we hold to be soul—that is,
of superior, emancipated intelligence. They come for little or no
object; they seldom speak, if they do come; they utter no ideas above
those of an ordinary person on earth. These American spirit-seers have
published volumes of communications in prose and verse, which they
assert to be given in the names of the most illustrious
dead—Shakespeare, Bacon, heaven knows whom.
“Those communications, taking the best, are certainly not of a whit
higher order than would be communications from living persons of fair
talent and education; they are wondrously inferior to what Bacon,
Shakespeare, and Plato said and wrote when on earth. Nor, what is more
notable, do they ever contain an idea that was not on the earth before.
“Wonderful, therefore, as such phenomena may be (granting them to be
truthful), I see much that philosophy may question, nothing that it is
incumbent on philosophy to deny, namely, nothing supernatural. They are
but ideas conveyed somehow or other (we have not yet discovered the
means) from one mortal brain to another. Whether in so doing tables walk
of their own accord, or fiend-like shapes appear in a magic circle, or
bodiless hands rise and remove material objects, or a thing of darkness,
such as presented itself to me, freeze our blood—still am I persuaded
that these are but agencies conveyed, as by electric wires, to my own
brain from the brain of another.
In some constitutions there is a natural chemistry, and those may
produce chemic wonders; in others a natural fluid, call it electricity,
and these produce electric wonders. But they differ in this from normal
science: they are alike objectless, purposeless, puerile, frivolous.
They lead on to no grand results, and therefore the world does not heed,
and true sages have not cultivated them. But sure I am, that of all I
saw or heard, a man, human as myself, was the remote originator; and, I
believe, unconsciously to himself as to the exact effects produced, for
this reason: no two persons, you say, have ever told you that they
experienced exactly the same thing; well, observe, no two persons ever
experience exactly the same dream.
“If this were an ordinary imposture, the machinery would be arranged for
results that would but little vary; if it were a supernatural agency
permitted by the Almighty, it would surely be for some definite end.
These phenomena belong to neither class. My persuasion is that they
originate in some brain now far distant; that that brain had no distinct
volition in anything that occurred; that what does occur reflects but
its devious, motley, ever-shifting, half-formed thoughts; in short, that
it has been but the dreams of such a brain put into action and invested
with a semi-substance.
“That this brain is of immense power, that it can set matter into
movement, that it is malignant and destructive, I believe. Some material
force must have killed my dog; it might, for aught I know, have sufficed
to kill myself, had I been as subjugated by terror as the dog—had my
intellect or my spirit given me no countervailing resistance in my
will.”
“It killed your dog! that is fearful! Indeed, it is strange that no
animal can be induced to stay in that house; not even a cat. Rats and
mice are never found in it.”
“The instincts of the brute creation detect influences deadly to their
existence. Man’s reason has a sense less subtle, because it has a
resisting power more supreme. But enough; do you comprehend my theory?”
“Yes, though imperfectly; and I accept any crotchet (pardon the word),
however odd, rather than embrace at once the notion of ghosts and
hobgoblins we imbibed in our nurseries. Still, to my unfortunate house
the evil is the same. What on earth can I do with the house?”
“I will tell you what I would do. I am convinced from my own internal
feelings that the small unfurnished room, at right angles to the door of
the bedroom which I occupied, forms a starting-point or receptacle for
the influences which haunt the house; and I strongly advise you to have
the walls opened, the floor removed, nay, the whole room pulled down. I
observe that it is detached from the body of the house, built over the
small back-yard, and could be removed without injury to the rest of the
building.”
“And you think that if I did that——”
“You would cut off the telegraph-wires. Try it. I am so persuaded that I
am right that I will pay half the expense if you will allow me to direct
the operations.”
“Nay, I am well able to afford the cost; for the rest, allow me to write
to you.”
About ten days afterward I received a letter from Mr. J——, telling me
that he had visited the house since I had seen him; that he had found
the two letters I had described replaced in the drawer from which I had
taken them; that he had read them with misgivings like my own; that he
had instituted a cautious inquiry about the woman to whom I rightly
conjectured they had been written.
It seemed that thirty-six years ago (a year before the date of the
letters) she had married, against the wish of her relatives, an American
of very suspicious character; in fact, he was generally believed to have
been a pirate. She herself was the daughter of very respectable
tradespeople, and had served in the capacity of nursery governess before
her marriage. She had a brother, a widower, who was considered wealthy,
and who had one child about six years old. A month after the marriage
the body of this brother was found in the Thames, near London Bridge;
there seemed some marks of violence about his throat, but they were not
deemed sufficient to warrant the inquest in any other verdict than that
of “found drowned.”
The American and his wife took charge of the little boy, the deceased
brother having by his will left his sister the guardian of his only
child, and in the event of the child’s death the sister inherited. The
child died about six months afterward; it was supposed to have been
neglected and ill-treated. The neighbors deposed to have heard it shriek
at night.
The surgeon who had examined it after death said that it was emaciated
as if from want of nourishment, and the body was covered with livid
bruises. It seemed that one winter night the child had sought to escape;
had crept out into the back-yard, tried to scale the wall, fallen back
exhausted, and had been found at morning on the stones in a dying state.
But though there was some evidence of cruelty, there was none of murder;
and the aunt and her husband had sought to palliate cruelty by alleging
the exceeding stubbornness and perversity of the child, who was declared
to be half-witted. Be that as it may, at the orphan’s death the aunt
inherited her brother’s fortune.
Before the first wedded year was out, the American quitted England
abruptly, and never returned to it. He obtained a cruising vessel, which
was lost in the Atlantic two years afterward. The widow was left in
affluence; but reverses of various kinds had befallen her; a bank broke,
an investment failed, she went into a small business and became
insolvent, then she entered into service, sinking lower and lower, from
housekeeper down to maid-of-all-work, never long retaining a place,
though nothing peculiar against her character was ever alleged.
She was considered sober, honest, and peculiarly quiet in her ways;
still nothing prospered with her. And so she had dropped into the
workhouse, from which Mr. J—— had taken her, to be placed in charge of
the very house which she had rented as mistress in the first year of her
wedded life.
Mr. J—— added that he had passed an hour alone in the unfurnished room
which I had urged him to destroy, and that his impressions of dread
while there were so great, though he had neither heard nor seen
anything, that he was eager to have the walls bared and the floors
removed, as I had suggested. He had engaged persons for the work, and
would commence any day I would name.
The day was accordingly fixed. I repaired to the haunted house; we went
into the blind, dreary room, took up the skirting, and then the floors.
Under the rafters, covered with rubbish, was found a trapdoor, quite
large enough to admit a man. It was closely nailed down with clamps and
rivets of iron. On removing these we descended into a room below, the
existence of which had never been suspected.
In this room there had been a window and a flue, but they had been
bricked over, evidently for many years. By the help of candles we
examined this place; It still retained some moldering furniture—three
chairs, an oak settee, a table—all of the fashion of about eighty years
ago.
There was a chest of drawers against the wall, in which we found, half
rotted away, old-fashioned articles of a man’s dress, such as might have
been worn eighty or a hundred years ago, by a gentleman of some rank;
costly steel buckles and buttons, like those yet worn in court-dresses,
a handsome court-sword; in a waistcoat which had once been rich with
gold-lace, but which was now blackened and foul with damp, we found five
guineas, a few silver coins, and an ivory ticket, probably for some
place of entertainment long since passed away.
But our main discovery was in a kind of iron safe fixed to the wall, the
lock of which it cost us much trouble to get picked.
In this safe were three shelves and two small drawers. Ranged on the
shelves were several small bottles of crystal, hermetically stopped.
They contained colorless volatile essences, of what nature I shall say
no more than that they were not poisons; phosphor and ammonia entered
into some of them. There were also some very curious glass tubes, and a
small pointed rod of iron, with a large lump of rock crystal, and
another of amber, also a lodestone of great power.
In one of the drawers we found a miniature portrait set in gold, and
retaining the freshness of its colors most remarkably, considering the
length of time it had probably been there. The portrait was that of a
man who might be somewhat advanced in middle life, perhaps forty-seven
or forty-eight.
It was a most peculiar face, a most impressive face. If you could fancy
some mighty serpent transformed into man, preserving in the human
lineaments the old serpent type, you would have a better idea of that
countenance than long descriptions can convey; the width and flatness of
frontal, the tapering elegance of contour, disguising the strength of
the deadly jaw; the long, large, terrible eye, glittering and green as
the emerald, and withal a certain ruthless calm, as if from the
consciousness of an immense power.
The strange thing was this: the instant I saw the miniature I recognized
a startling likeness to one of the rarest portraits in the world; the
portrait of a man of rank only below that of royalty, who in his own day
had made a considerable noise. History says little or nothing of him;
but search the correspondence of his contemporaries, and you find
reference to his wild daring, his bold profligacy, his restless spirit,
his taste for the occult sciences.
While still in the meridian of life he died and was buried, so say the
chronicles, in a foreign land. He died in time to escape the grasp of
the law; for he was accused of crimes which would have given him to the
headsman. After his death the portraits of him, which had been numerous,
for he had been a munificent encourager of art, were bought up and
destroyed, it was supposed by his heirs, who might have been glad could
they have razed his very name from their splendid line.
He had enjoyed vast wealth; a large portion of this was believed to have
been embezzled by a favorite astrologer or soothsayer; at all events, it
had unaccountably vanished at the time of his death. One portrait alone
of him was supposed to have escaped the general destruction; I had seen
it in the house of a collector some months before. It had made on me a
wonderful impression, as it does on all who behold it—a face never to be
forgotten; and there was that face in the miniature that lay within my
hand. True that in the miniature the man was a few years older than in
the portrait I had seen, or than the original was even at the time of
his death. But a few years!—why, between the date in which flourished
that direful noble and the date in which the miniature was evidently
painted there was an interval of more than two centuries. While I was
thus gazing, silent and wondering, Mr. J—— said:
“But is it possible? I have known this man.”
“How? where?” cried I.
“In India. He was high in the confidence of the Rajah of ——, and
well-nigh drew him into a revolt which would have lost the Rajah his
dominions. The man was a Frenchman; his name De V——; clever, bold,
lawless; we insisted on his dismissal and banishment. It must be the
same man, no two faces like his, yet this miniature seems nearly a
hundred years old.”
Mechanically I turned round the miniature to examine the back of it, and
on the back was engraved a pentacle; in the middle of the pentacle a
ladder, and the third step of the ladder was formed by the date 1765.
Examining still more minutely, I detected a spring; this, on being
pressed, opened the back of the miniature as a lid.
Within-side the lid were engraved: “Mariana, to thee. Be faithful in
life and in death to ——.”
Here follows a name that I will not mention, but it was not unfamiliar
to me. I had heard it spoken of by old men in my childhood as the name
borne by a dazzling charlatan, who had made a great sensation in London
for a year or so, and had fled the country on the charge of a double
murder within his own house—that of his mistress and his rival. I said
nothing of this to Mr. J——, to whom reluctantly I resigned the
miniature.
We had found no difficulty in opening the first drawer within the iron
safe; we found great difficulty in opening the second: it was not
locked, but it resisted all efforts, till we inserted in the chinks the
edge of a chisel. When we had thus drawn it forth we found a very
singular apparatus, in the nicest order.
Upon a small, thin book, or rather tablet, was placed a saucer of
crystal; this saucer was filled with a clear liquid; on that liquid
floated a kind of compass, with a needle shifting rapidly round; but
instead of the usual points of a compass, were seven strange characters,
not very unlike those used by astrologers to denote the planets.
A very peculiar, but not strong nor displeasing odor came from this
drawer, which was lined with a wood that we afterward discovered to be
hazel. Whatever the cause of this odor, it produced a material effect on
the nerves. We all felt it, even the two workmen who were in the room; a
creeping, tingling sensation, from the tips of the fingers to the roots
of the hair.
Impatient to examine the tablet, I removed the saucer. As I did so, the
needle of the compass went round and round with exceeding swiftness, and
I felt a shock that ran through my whole frame, so that I dropped the
saucer on the floor. The liquid was spilt, the saucer was broken, the
compass rolled to the end of the room, and at that instant the walls
shook to and fro as it a giant had swayed and rocked them.
The two workmen were so frightened that they ran up the ladder by which
we had descended from the trapdoor; but, seeing that nothing more
happened, they were easily induced to return.
Meanwhile I had opened the tablet; it was bound in plain red leather,
with a silver clasp; it contained but one sheet of thick vellum, and on
that sheet were inscribed, within a double pentacle, words in old
monkish Latin, which are literally to be translated thus:
On all that it can reach within these walls, sentient or inanimate,
living or dead, as moves the needle, so works my will! Accursed be the
house, and restless the dwellers therein.
We found no more. Mr. J—— burned the tablet and its anathema. He razed
to the foundation the part of the building containing the secret room,
with the chamber over it. He had then the courage to inhabit the house
himself for a month, and a quieter, better conditioned house could not
be found in all London. Subsequently he let it to advantage, and his
tenant has made no complaints.
But my story is not yet done. A few days after Mr. J—— had removed into
the house, I paid him a visit. We were standing by the open window and
conversing. A van containing some articles of furniture which he was
moving from his former house was at the door.
I had just urged on him my theory that all those phenomena regarded as
supermundane had emanated from a human brain; adducing the charm, or
rather curse we had found and destroyed, in support of my theory.
Mr. J—— was observing in reply, “that even if mesmerism, or whatever
analogous power it might be called, could really thus work in the
absence of the operator, and produce effects so extraordinary, still
could those effects continue when the operator himself was dead? and if
the spell had been wrought, and, indeed, the room walled up, more than
seventy years ago, the probability was that the operator had long since
departed this life”—Mr. J——, I say, was thus answering, when I caught
hold of his arm and pointed to the street below.
A well-dressed man had crossed from the opposite side, and was accosting
the carrier in charge of the van. His face, as he stood, was exactly
fronting our window. It was the face of the miniature we had discovered;
it was the face of the portrait of the noble three centuries ago.
“Good heavens!” cried Mr. J——; “that is the face of De V——, and scarcely
a day older than when I saw it in the Rajah’s court in my youth!”
Seized by the same thought, we both hastened down-stairs; I was first in
the street, but the man had already gone. I caught sight of him,
however, not many yards in advance, and in another moment I was by his
side.
I had resolved to speak to him, but when I looked into his face I felt
as if it were impossible to do so. That eye—the eye of the serpent—fixed
and held me spellbound. And withal, about the man’s whole person there
was a dignity, an air of pride and station and superiority that would
have made any one, habituated to the usages of the world, hesitate long
before venturing upon a liberty or impertinence.
And what could I say? What was it I could ask?
Thus ashamed of my first impulse, I fell a few paces back, still,
however, following the stranger, undecided what else to do. Meanwhile he
turned the corner of the street; a plain carriage was in waiting with a
servant out of livery, dressed like a _valet de place_, at the carriage
door. In another moment he had stepped into the carriage, and it drove
off. I returned to the house.
Mr. J—— was still at the street-door. He had asked the carrier what the
stranger had said to him.
“Merely asked whom that house now belonged to.”
The same evening I happened to go with a friend to a place in town
called the Cosmopolitan Club, a place open to men of all countries, all
opinions, all degrees. One orders one’s coffee, smokes one’s cigar. One
is always sure to meet agreeable, sometimes remarkable persons.
I had not been two minutes in the room before I beheld at table,
conversing with an acquaintance of mine, whom I will designate by the
initial G——, the man, the original of the miniature. He was now without
his hat, and the likeness was yet more startling, only I observed that
while he was conversing there was less severity in the countenance;
there was even a smile, though a very quiet and very cold one. The
dignity of mien I had acknowledged in the street was also more striking;
a dignity akin to that which invests some prince of the East, conveying
the idea of supreme indifference and habitual, indisputable, indolent
but resistless power.
G—— soon after left the stranger, who then took up a scientific journal,
which seemed to absorb his attention.