When we separated for the night, which we did at eleven o’clock,
Margrave said,--
“Good-night and good-by. I must leave you to-morrow, Strahan, and before
your usual hour for rising. I took the liberty of requesting one of your
men to order me a chaise from L----. Pardon my seeming abruptness, but
I always avoid long leave-takings, and I had fixed the date of my
departure almost as soon as I accepted your invitation.”
“I have no right to complain. The place must be dull indeed to a gay
young fellow like you. It is dull even to me. I am meditating flight
already. Are you going back to L----?”
“Not even for such things as I left at my lodgings. When I settle
somewhere and can give an address, I shall direct them to be sent to me.
There are, I hear, beautiful patches of scenery towards the north, only
known to pedestrian tourists. I am a good walker; and you know, Fenwick,
that I am also a child of Nature. Adieu to you both; and many thanks to
you, Strahan, for your hospitality.”
He left the room.
“I am not sorry he is going,” said Strahan, after a pause, and with a
quick breath as if of relief. “Do you not feel that he exhausts one? An
excess of oxygen, as you would say in a lecture.”
I was alone in my own chamber; I felt indisposed for bed and for sleep;
the curious conversation I had held with Margrave weighed on me. In that
conversation, we had indirectly touched upon the prodigies which I had
not brought myself to speak of with frank courage, and certainly nothing
in Margrave’s manner had betrayed consciousness of my suspicions; on the
contrary, the open frankness with which he evinced his predilection for
mystic speculation, or uttered his more unamiable sentiments, rather
tended to disarm than encourage belief in gloomy secrets or sinister
powers. And as he was about to quit the neighbourhood, he would not
again see Lilian, not even enter the town of L----. Was I to ascribe
this relief from his presence to the promise of the Shadow; or was I
not rather right in battling firmly against any grotesque illusion, and
accepting his departure as a simple proof that my jealous fears had been
amongst my other chimeras, and that as he had really only visited
Lilian out of friendship to me, in my peril, so he might, with his
characteristic acuteness, have guessed my jealousy, and ceased his
visits from a kindly motive delicately concealed? And might not the same
motive now have dictated the words which were intended to assure me
that L---- contained no attractions to tempt him to return to it? Thus,
gradually soothed and cheered by the course to which my reflections led
me, I continued to muse for hours. At length, looking at my watch, I
was surprised to find it was the second hour after midnight. I was just
about to rise from my chair to undress, and secure some hours of sleep,
when the well-remembered cold wind passed through the room, stirring the
roots of my hair; and before me stood, against the wall, the Luminous
Shadow.
“Rise and follow me,” said the voice, sounding much nearer than it had
ever done before.
And at those words I rose mechanically, and like a sleepwalker.
“Take up the light.”
I took it. The Scin-Laeca glided along the wall towards the threshold,
and motioned me to open the door. I did so. The Shadow flitted on
through the corridor. I followed, with hushed footsteps, down a small
stair into Forman’s study. In all my subsequent proceedings, about to be
narrated, the Shadow guided me, sometimes by voice, sometimes by sign.
I obeyed the guidance, not only unresistingly, but without a desire to
resist. I was unconscious either of curiosity or of awe,--only of a
calm and passive indifference, neither pleasurable nor painful. In this
obedience, from which all will seemed extracted, I took into my hands
the staff which I had examined the day before, and which lay on the
table, just where Margrave had cast it on re-entering the house. I
unclosed the shutter to the casement, lifted the sash, and, with the
light in my left hand, the staff in my right, stepped forth into the
garden. The night was still; the flame of the candle scarcely trembled
in the air; the Shadow moved on before me towards the old pavilion
described in an earlier part of this narrative, and of which the
mouldering doors stood wide open. I followed the Shadow into the
pavilion, up the crazy stair to the room above, with its four great
blank unglazed windows, or rather arcades, north, south, east, and west.
I halted on the middle of the floor: right before my eyes, through the
vista made by breathless boughs, stood out from the moonlit air the
dreary mausoleum. Then, at the command conveyed to me, I placed the
candle on a wooden settle, touched a spring in the handle of the staff;
a lid flew back, and I drew from the hollow, first a lump of some dark
bituminous substance, next a smaller slender wand of polished steel, of
which the point was tipped with a translucent material, which appeared
to me like crystal. Bending down, still obedient to the direction
conveyed to me, I described on the floor with the lump of bitumen (if
I may so call it) the figure of the pentacle with the interlaced
triangles, in a circle nine feet in diameter, just as I had drawn it
for Margrave the evening before. The material used made the figure
perceptible, in a dark colour of mingled black and red. I applied the
flame of the candle to the circle, and immediately it became lambent
with a low steady splendour that rose about an inch from the floor; and
gradually front this light there emanated a soft, gray, transparent mist
and a faint but exquisite odour. I stood in the midst of the circle,
and within the circle also, close by my side, stood the Scin-Laeca,--no
longer reflected on the wall, but apart from it, erect, rounded into
more integral and distinct form, yet impalpable, and from it there
breathed an icy air. Then lifting the wand, the broader end of which
rested in the palm of my hand, the two forefingers closing lightly over
it in a line parallel with the point, I directed it towards the wide
aperture before me, fronting the mausoleum. I repeated aloud some words
whispered to me in a language I knew not: those words I would not trace
on this paper, could I remember them. As they came to a close, I heard
a howl from the watch-dog in the yard,--a dismal, lugubrious howl.
Other dogs in the distant village caught up the sound, and bayed in
a dirge-like chorus; and the howling went on louder and louder. Again
strange words were whispered to me, and I repeated them in mechanical
submission; and when they, too, were ended, I felt the ground tremble
beneath me, and as my eyes looked straight forward down the vista, that,
stretching from the casement, was bounded by the solitary mausoleum,
vague formless shadows seemed to pass across the moonlight,--below,
along the sward, above, in the air; and then suddenly a terror, not
before conceived, came upon me.
And a third time words were whispered; but though I knew no more of
their meaning than I did of those that had preceded them, I felt a
repugnance to utter them aloud. Mutely I turned towards the Scin-Laeca,
and the expression of its face was menacing and terrible; my will became
yet more compelled to the control imposed upon it, and my lips commenced
the formula again whispered into my ear, when I heard distinctly a voice
of warning and of anguish, that murmured “Hold!” I knew the voice; it
was Lilian’s. I paused; I turned towards the quarter from which the
voice had come, and in the space afar I saw the features, the form
of Lilian. Her arms were stretched towards me in supplication, her
countenance was deadly pale, and anxious with unutterable distress. The
whole image seemed in unison with the voice,--the look, the attitude,
the gesture of one who sees another in deadly peril, and cries,
“Beware!”
This apparition vanished in a moment; but that moment sufficed to free
my mind from the constraint which had before enslaved it. I dashed the
wand to the ground, sprang from the circle, rushed from the place. How
I got into my own room I can remember not,--I know not; I have a
vague reminiscence of some intervening wandering, of giant trees, of
shroud-like moonlight, of the Shining Shadow and its angry aspect, of
the blind walls and the iron door of the House of the Dead, of spectral
images,--a confused and dreary phantasmagoria. But all I can recall with
distinctness is the sight of my own hueless face in the mirror in my
own still room, by the light of the white moon through the window; and,
sinking down, I said to myself, “This, at least, is an hallucination or
a dream!”