CHAPTER XXVII

_Freedom_.

Honest Wood joined us in the course of a week or two, and has continued

in my service ever since. Nor was it long before Mrs. Blakesley was

likewise added to our household, for she had been instantly dismissed

from the countess’s service on the charge of complicity in Lady Alice’s

abduction.

We lived for some months in a cottage on a hill-side, overlooking one of

the loveliest of the Scotch lakes. Here I was once more tutor to my

Alice. And a quick scholar she was, as ever. Nor, I trust, was I slow in

my part. Her character became yet clearer to me, every day. I understood

her better and better.

She could endure marvellously; but without love and its joy she could

not _live_, in any real sense. In uncongenial society, her whole mental

faculty had frozen; when love came, her mental world, like a garden in

the spring sunshine, blossomed and budded. When she lost me, the Present

vanished, or went by her like an ocean that has no milestones; she

caring only for the Past, living only in the Past, and that reflection

of it in the dim glass of her hope, which prefigured the Future.

We have never again heard the clanking shoe. Indeed, after we had passed

a few months in the absorption of each other’s society, we began to find

that we doubted a great deal of what seemed to have happened to us. It

was as if the gates of the unseen world were closing against us, because

we had shut ourselves up in the world of the present. But we let it go

gladly. We felt that love was the gate to an unseen world infinitely

beyond that region of the psychological in which we had hitherto moved;

for this love was teaching us to love all men, and live for all men. In

fact, we are now, I am glad to say, very much like other people; and

wonder, sometimes, how much of the story of our lives might be accounted

for on the supposition that unusual coincidences had fallen in with

psychological peculiarities. Dr. Ruthwell, who is sometimes our most

welcome guest, has occasionally hinted at the sabre-cut as the key to

all the mysteries of the story, seeing nothing of it was at least

recorded before I came under his charge. But I have only to remind him

of one or two circumstances, to elicit from his honesty and immediate

confession of bewilderment, followed by silence; although he evidently

still clings to the notion that in that sabre-cut lies the solution of

much of the marvel. At all events, he considers me sane enough now, else

he would hardly honour me with so much of his confidence as he does.

Having examined into Lady Alice’s affairs, I claimed the fortune which

she had inherited. Lord Hilton, my former pupil, at once acknowledged

the justice of the claim, and was considerably astonished to find how

much more might have been demanded of him, which had been spent over the

allowance made from her income for her maintenance. But we had enough

without claiming that.

My wife purchased for me the possession of my forefathers, and there we

live in peace and hope. To her I owe the delight which I feel every day

of my life in looking upon the haunts of my childhood as still mine.

They help me to keep young. And so does my Alice’s hair; for although

much grey now mingles with mine, hers is as dark as ever. For her heart,

I know that cannot grow old; and while the heart is young, man may laugh

old Time in the face, and dare him to do his worst.

THE CRUEL PAINTER

Among the young men assembled at the University of Prague, in the year

159--, was one called Karl von Wolkenlicht. A somewhat careless student,

he yet held a fair position in the estimation of both professors and

men, because he could hardly look at a proposition without understanding

it. Where such proposition, however, had to do with anything relating to

the deeper insights of the nature, he was quite content that, for him,

it should remain a proposition; which, however, he laid up in one of his

mental cabinets, and was ready to reproduce at a moment’s notice. This

mental agility was more than matched by the corresponding corporeal

excellence, and both aided in producing results in which his remarkable

strength was equally apparent. In all games depending upon the

combination of muscle and skill, he had scarce rivalry enough to keep

him in practice. His strength, however, was embodied in such a softness

of muscular outline, such a rare Greek-like style of beauty, and

associated with such a gentleness of manner and behaviour, that, partly

from the truth of the resemblance, partly from the absurdity of the

contrast, he was known throughout the university by the diminutive of

the feminine form of his name, and was always called Lottchen.

“I say, Lottchen,” said one of his fellow-students, called Richter,

across the table in a wine-cellar they were in the habit of frequenting,

“do you know, Heinrich Höllenrachen here says that he saw this morning,

with mortal eyes, whom do you think?--Lilith.”

“Adam’s first wife?” asked Lottchen, with an attempt at carelessness,

while his face flushed like a maiden’s.

“None of your chaff!” said Richter. “Your face is honester than your

tongue, and confesses what you cannot deny, that you would give your

chance of salvation--a small one to be sure, but all you’ve got--for one

peep at Lilith. Wouldn’t you now, Lottchen?”

“Go to the devil!” was all Lottchen’s answer to his tormentor; but he

turned to Heinrich, to whom the students had given the surname above

mentioned, because of the enormous width of his jaws, and said with

eagerness and envy, disguising them as well as he could, under the

appearance of curiosity--

“You don’t mean it, Heinrich? You’ve been taking the beggar in! Confess

now.”

“Not I. I saw her with my two eyes.”

“Notwithstanding the different planes of their orbits,” suggested

Richter.

“Yes, notwithstanding the fact that I can get a parallax to any of the

fixed stars in a moment, with only the breadth of my nose for the base,”

answered Heinrich, responding at once to the fun, and careless of the

personal defect insinuated. “She was near enough for even me to see her

perfectly.”

“When? Where? How?” asked Lottchen.

“Two hours ago. In the churchyard of St. Stephen’s. By a lucky chance.

Any more little questions, my child?” answered Höllenrachen.

“What could have taken her there, who is seen nowhere?” said Richter.

“She was seated on a grave. After she left, I went to the place; but it

was a new-made grave. There was no stone up. I asked the sexton about

her. He said he supposed she was the daughter of the woman buried there

last Thursday week. I knew it was Lilith.”

“Her mother dead!” said Lottchen, musingly. Then he thought with

himself--“She will be going there again, then!” But he took care that

this ghost-thought should wander unembodied. “But how did you know her,

Heinrich? You never saw her before.”

“How do you come to be over head and ears in love with her, Lottchen,

and you haven’t seen her at all?” interposed Richter.

“Will you or will you not go to the devil?” rejoined Lottchen, with a

comic crescendo; to which the other replied with a laugh.

“No one could miss knowing her,” said Heinrich.

“Is she so very like, then?”

“It is always herself, her very self.”

A fresh flask of wine, turning out to be not up to the mark, brought the

current of conversation against itself; not much to the dissatisfaction

of Lottchen, who had already resolved to be in the churchyard of St.

Stephen’s at sun-down the following day, in the hope that he too might

be favoured with a vision of Lilith.

This resolution he carried out. Seated in a porch of the church, not

knowing in what direction to look for the apparition he hoped to see,

and desirous as well of not seeming to be on the watch for one, he was

gazing at the fallen rose-leaves of the sunset, withering away upon the

sky; when, glancing aside by an involuntary movement, he saw a woman

seated upon a new-made grave, not many yards from where he sat, with her

face buried in her hands, and apparently weeping bitterly. Karl was in

the shadow of the porch, and could see her perfectly, without much

danger of being discovered by her; so he sat and watched her. She raised

her head for a moment, and the rose-flush of the west fell over it,

shining on the tears with which it was wet, and giving the whole a bloom

which did not belong to it, for it was always pale, and now pale as

death. It was indeed the face of Lilith, the most celebrated beauty of

Prague.

Again she buried her face in her hands; and Karl sat with a strange

feeling of helplessness, which grew as he sat; and the longing to help

her whom he could not help, drew his heart towards her with a trembling

reverence which was quite new to him. She wept on. The western roses

withered slowly away, and the clouds blended with the sky, and the stars

gathered like drops of glory sinking through the vault of night, and the

trees about the churchyard grew black, and Lilith almost vanished in the

wide darkness. At length she lifted her head, and seeing the night

around her, gave a little broken cry of dismay. The minutes had swept

over her head, not through her mind, and she did not know that the dark

had come.

Hearing her cry, Karl rose and approached her. She heard his footsteps,

and started to her feet. Karl spoke--

“Do not be frightened,” he said. “Let me see you home. I will walk behind

you.”

“Who are you?” she rejoined.

“Karl Wolkenlicht.”

“I have heard of you. Thank you. I can go home alone.”

Yet, as if in a half-dreamy, half-unconscious mood, she accepted his

offered hand to lead her through the graves, and allowed him to walk

beside her, till, reaching the corner of a narrow street, she suddenly

bade him good-night and vanished. He thought it better not to follow

her, so he returned her good-night and went home.

How to see her again was his first thought the next day; as, in fact,

how to see her at all had been his first thought for many days. She went

nowhere that ever he heard of; she knew nobody that he knew; she was

never seen at church, or at market; never seen in the street. Her home

had a dreary, desolate aspect. It looked as if no one ever went out or

in. It was like a place on which decay had fallen because there was no

indwelling spirit. The mud of years was baked upon its door, and no

faces looked out of its dusty windows.

How then could she be the most celebrated beauty of Prague? How then was

it that Heinrich Höllenrachen knew her the moment he saw her? Above all,

how was it that Karl Wolkenlicht had, in fact, fallen in love with her

before ever he saw her? It was thus--

Her father was a painter. Belonging thus to the public, it had taken the

liberty of re-naming him. Every one called him Teufelsbürst, or

Devilsbrush. It was a name with which, to judge from the nature of his

representations, he could hardly fail to be pleased. For, not as a

nightmare dream, which may alternate with the loveliest visions, but as

his ordinary everyday work, he delighted to represent human suffering.

Not an aspect of human woe or torture, as expressed in countenance or

limb, came before his willing imagination, but he bore it straightway to

his easel. In the moments that precede sleep, when the black space

before the eyes of the poet teems with lovely faces, or dawns into a

spirit-landscape, face after face of suffering, in all varieties of

expression, would crowd, as if compelled by the accompanying fiends, to

present themselves, in awful levee, before the inner eye of the

expectant master. Then he would rise, light his lamp, and, with rapid

hand, make notes of his visions; recording, with swift successive sweeps

of his pencil, every individual face which had rejoiced his evil fancy.

Then he would return to his couch, and, well satisfied, fall asleep to

dream yet further embodiments of human ill.

What wrong could man or mankind have done him, to be thus fearfully

pursued by the vengeance of the artist’s hate?

Another characteristic of the faces and form which he drew was, that

they were all beautiful in the original idea. The lines of each face,

however distorted by pain, would have been, in rest, absolutely

beautiful; and the whole of the execution bore witness to the fact that

upon this original beauty the painter had directed the artillery of

anguish to bring down the sky-soaring heights of its divinity to the

level of a hated existence. To do this, he worked in perfect accordance

with artistic law, falsifying no line of the original forms. It was the

suffering, rather than his pencil, that wrought the change. The latter

was the willing instrument to record what the imagination conceived with

a cruelty composed enough to be correct.

To enhance the beauty he had thus distorted, and so to enhance yet

further the suffering that produced the distortion, he would often

represent attendant demons, whom he made as ugly as his imagination

could compass; avoiding, however, all grotesqueness beyond what was

sufficient to indicate that they were demons, and not men. Their

ugliness rose from hate, envy, and all evil passions; amongst which he

especially delighted to represent a gloating exultation over human

distress. And often in the midst of his clouds of demon faces, would

some one who knew him recognise the painter’s own likeness, such as the

mirror might have presented it to him when he was busiest over the

incarnation of some exquisite torture.

But apparently with the wish to avoid being supposed to choose such

representations for their own sakes, he always found a story, often in

the histories of the church, whose name he gave to the painting, and

which he pretended to have inspired the pictorial conception. No one,

however, who looked upon his suffering martyrs, could suppose for a

moment that he honoured their martyrdom. They were but the vehicles for

his hate of humanity. He was the torturer, and not Diocletian or Nero.

But, stranger yet to tell, there was no picture, whatever its subject,

into which he did not introduce one form of placid and harmonious

loveliness. In this, however, his fierceness was only more fully

displayed. For in no case did this form manifest any relation either to

the actors or the endurers in the picture. Hence its very loveliness

became almost hateful to those who beheld it. Not a shade crossed the

still sky of that brow, not a ripple disturbed the still sea of that

cheek. She did not hate, she did not love the sufferers: the painter

would not have her hate, for that would be to the injury of her

loveliness: would not have her love, for he hated. Sometimes she floated

above, as a still, unobservant angel, her gaze turned upward, dreaming

along, careless as a white summer cloud, across the blue. If she looked

down on the scene below, it was only that the beholder might see that

she saw and did not care--that not a feather of her outspread pinions

would quiver at the sight. Sometimes she would stand in the crowd, as if

she had been copied there from another picture, and had nothing to do

with this one, nor any right to be in it at all. Or when the red blood

was trickling drop by drop from the crushed limb, she might be seen

standing nearest, smiling over a primrose or the bloom on a peach. Some

had said that she was the painter’s wife; that she had been false to

him; that he had killed her; and, finding that that was no sufficing

revenge, thus half in love, and half in deepest hate, immortalised his

vengeance. But it was now universally understood that it was his

daughter, of whose loveliness extravagant reports went abroad; though

all said, doubtless reading this from her father’s pictures, that she

was a beauty without a heart. Strange theories of something else

supplying its place were rife among the anatomical students. With the

girl in the pictures, the wild imagination of Lottchen, probably in part

from her apparently absolute unattainableness and her undisputed

heartlessness, had fallen in love, as far as the mere imagination can

fall in love.

But again, how was he to see her? He haunted the house night after

night. Those blue eyes never met his. No step responsive to his came

from that door. It seemed to have been so long unopened that it had

grown as fixed and hard as the stones that held its bolts in their

passive clasp. He dared not watch in the daytime, and with all his

watching at night, he never saw father or daughter or domestic cross the

threshold. Little he thought that, from a shot-window near the door, a

pair of blue eyes, like Lilith’s, but paler and colder, were watching

him just as a spider watches the fly that is likely ere long to fall

into his toils. And into those toils Karl soon fell. For her form

darkened the page; her form stood on the threshold of sleep; and when,

overcome with watching, he did enter its precincts, her form entered

with him, and walked by his side. He must find her; or the world might

go to the bottomless pit for him. But how?

Yes. He would be a painter. Teufelsbürst would receive him as a humble

apprentice. He would grind his colours, and Teufelsbürst would teach him

the mysteries of the science which is the handmaiden of art. Then he

might see her, and that was all his ambition.

In the clear morning light of a day in autumn, when the leaves were

beginning to fall seared from the hand of that Death which has his dance

in the chapels of nature as well as in the cathedral aisles of men--he

walked up and knocked at the dingy door. The spider painter opened it

himself. He was a little man, meagre and pallid, with those faded blue

eyes, a low nose in three distinct divisions, and thin, curveless, cruel

lips. He wore no hair on his face; but long grey locks, long as a

woman’s, were scattered over his shoulders, and hung down on his breast.

When Wolkenlicht had explained his errand, he smiled a smile in which

hypocrisy could not hide the cunning, and, after many difficulties,

consented to receive him as a pupil, on condition that he would become

an inmate of his house. Wolkenlicht’s heart bounded with delight, which

he tried to hide: the second smile of Teufelsbürst might have shown him

that he had ill succeeded. The fact that he was not a native of Prague,

but coming from a distant part of the country, was entirely his own

master in the city, rendered this condition perfectly easy to fulfil;

and that very afternoon he entered the studio of Teufelsbürst as his

scholar and servant.

It was a great room, filled with the appliances and results of art. Many

pictures, festooned with cobwebs, were hung carelessly on the dirty

walls. Others, half finished, leaned against them, on the floor.

Several, in different stages of progress, stood upon easels. But all

spoke the cruel bent of the artist’s genius. In one corner a lay figure

was extended on a couch, covered with a pall of black velvet. Through

its folds, the form beneath was easily discernible; and one hand and

forearm protruded from beneath it, at right angles to the rest of the

frame. Lottchen could not help shuddering when he saw it. Although he

overcame the feeling in a moment, he felt a great repugnance to seating

himself with his back towards it, as the arrangement of an easel, at

which Teufelsbürst wished him to draw, rendered necessary. He contrived

to edge himself round, so that when he lifted his eyes he should see the

figure, and be sure that it could not rise without his being aware of

it. But his master saw and understood his altered position; and under

some pretence about the light, compelled him to resume the position in

which he had placed him at first; after which he sat watching, over the

top of his picture, the expression of his countenance as he tried to

draw; reading in it the horrid fancy that the figure under the pall had

risen, and was stealthily approaching to look over his shoulder. But

Lottchen resisted the feeling, and, being already no contemptible

draughtsman, was soon interested enough to forget it. And then, any

moment _she_ might enter.

Now began a system of slow torture, for the chance of which the painter

had been long on the watch--especially since he had first seen Karl

lingering about the house. His opportunities of seeing physical

suffering were nearly enough even for the diseased necessities of his

art; but now he had one in his power, on whom, his own will fettering

him, he could try any experiments he pleased for the production of a

kind of suffering, in the observation of which he did not consider that

he had yet sufficient experience. He would hold the very heart of the

youth in his hand, and wring it and torture it to his own content. And

lest Karl should be strong enough to prevent those expressions of pain

for which he lay on the watch, he would make use of further means, known

to himself, and known to few besides.

All that day Karl saw nothing of Lilith; but he heard her voice

once--and that was enough for one day. The next, she was sitting to her

father the greater part of the day, and he could see her as often as he

dared glance up from his drawing. She had looked at him when she

entered, but had shown no sign of recognition; and all day long she took

no further notice of him. He hoped, at first, that this came of the

intelligence of love; but he soon began to doubt it. For he saw that,

with the holy shadow of sorrow, all that distinguished the expression of

her countenance from that which the painter so constantly reproduced,

had vanished likewise. It was the very face of the unheeding angel whom,

as often as he lifted his eyes higher than hers, he saw on the wall

above her, playing on a psaltery in the smoke of the torment ascending

for ever from burning Babylon.--The power of the painter had not merely

wrought for the representation of the woman of his imagination; it had

had scope as well in realising her.

Karl soon began to see that communication, other than of the eyes, was

all but hopeless; and to any attempt in that way she seemed altogether

indisposed to respond. Nor if she had wished it, would it have been

safe; for as often as he glanced towards her, instead of hers, he met

the blue eyes of the painter gleaming upon him like winter lightning.

His tones, his gestures, his words, seemed kind: his glance and his

smile refused to be disguised.

The first day he dined alone in the studio, waited upon by an old woman;

the next he was admitted to the family table, with Teufelsbürst and

Lilith. The room offered a strange contrast to the study. As far as

handicraft, directed by a sumptuous taste, could construct a

house-paradise, this was one. But it seemed rather a paradise of demons;

for the walls were covered with Teufelsbürst’s paintings. During the

dinner, Lilith’s gaze scarcely met that of Wolkenlicht; and once or

twice, when their eyes did meet, her glance was so perfectly

unconcerned, that Karl wished he might look at her for ever without the

fear of her looking at him again. She seemed like one whose love had

rushed out glowing with seraphic fire, to be frozen to death in a more

than wintry cold: she now walked lonely without her love. In the

evenings, he was expected to continue his drawing by lamplight; and at

night he was conducted by Teufelsbürst to his chamber. Not once did he

allow him to proceed thither alone, and not once did he leave him there

without locking and bolting the door on the outside. But he felt nothing

except the coldness of Lilith.

Day after day she sat to her father, in every variety of costume that

could best show the variety of her beauty. How much greater that beauty

might be, if it ever blossomed into a beauty of soul, Wolkenlicht never

imagined; for he soon loved her enough to attribute to her all the

possibilities of her face as actual possessions of her being. To account

for everything that seemed to contradict this perfection, his brain was

prolific in inventions; till he was compelled at last to see that she

was in the condition of a rose-bud, which, on the point of blossoming,

had been chilled into a changeless bud by the cold of an untimely frost.

For one day, after the father and daughter had become a little more

accustomed to his silent presence, a conversation began between them,

which went on until he saw that Teufelsbürst believed in nothing except

his art. How much of his feeling for that could be dignified by the name

of belief, seeing its objects were such as they were, might have been

questioned. It seemed to Wolkenlicht to amount only to this: that,

amidst a thousand distastes, it was a pleasant thing to reproduce on the

canvas the forms he beheld around him, modifying them to express the

prevailing feelings of his own mind.

A more desolate communication between souls than that which then passed

between father and daughter could hardly be imagined. The father spoke

of humanity and all its experiences in a tone of the bitterest scorn. He

despised men, and himself amongst them; and rejoiced to think that the

generations rose and vanished, brood after brood, as the crops of corn

grew and disappeared. Lilith, who listened to it all unmoved, taking

only an intellectual interest in the question, remarked that even the

corn had more life than that; for, after its death, it rose again in the

new crop. Whether she meant that the corn was therefore superior to man,

forgetting that the superior can produce being without losing its own,

or only advanced an objection to her father’s argument, Wolkenlicht

could not tell. But Teufelsbürst laughed like the sound of a saw, and

said: “Follow out the analogy, my Lilith, and you will see that man is

like the corn that springs again after it is buried; but unfortunately

the only result we know of is a vampire.”

Wolkenlicht looked up, and saw a shudder pass through the frame, and

over the pale thin face of the painter. This he could not account for.

But Teufelsbürst could have explained it, for there were strange

whispers abroad, and they had reached his ear; and his philosophy was

not quite enough for them. But the laugh with which Lilith met this

frightful attempt at wit, grated dreadfully on Wolkenlicht’s feeling.

With her, too, however, a reaction seemed to follow. For, turning round

a moment after, and looking at the picture on which her father was

working, the tears rose in her eyes, and she said: “Oh! father, how like

my mother you have made me this time!” “Child!” retorted the painter

with a cold fierceness, “you have no mother. That which is gone out is

gone out. Put no name in my hearing on that which is not. Where no

substance is, how can there be a name?”

Lilith rose and left the room. Wolkenlicht now understood that Lilith

was a frozen bud, and could not blossom into a rose. But pure love lives

by faith. It loves the vaguely beheld and unrealised ideal. It dares

believe that the loved is not all that she ever seemed. It is in virtue

of this that love loves on. And it was in virtue of this, that

Wolkenlicht loved Lilith yet more after he discovered what a grave of

misery her unbelief was digging for her within her own soul. For her

sake he would bear anything--bear even with calmness the torments of his

own love; he would stay on, hoping and hoping.--The text, that we know

not what a day may bring forth, is just as true of good things as of

evil things; and out of Time’s womb the facts must come.

But with the birth of this resolution to endure, his suffering abated;

his face grew more calm; his love, no less earnest, was less imperious;

and he did not look up so often from his work when Lilith was present.

The master could see that his pupil was more at ease, and that he was

making rapid progress in his art. This did not suit his designs, and he

would betake himself to his further schemes.

For this purpose he proceeded first to simulate a friendship for

Wolkenlicht, the manifestations of which he gradually increased, until,

after a day or two, he asked him to drink wine with him in the evening.

Karl readily agreed. The painter produced some of his best; but took

care not to allow Lilith to taste it; for he had cunningly prepared and

mingled with it a decoction of certain herbs and other ingredients,

exercising specific actions upon the brain, and tending to the

inordinate excitement of those portions of it which are principally

under the rule of the imagination. By the reaction of the brain during

the operation of these stimulants, the imagination is filled with

suggestions and images. The nature of these is determined by the

prevailing mood of the time. They are such as the imagination would

produce of itself, but increased in number and intensity. Teufelsbürst,

without philosophising about it, called his preparation simply a

love-philtre, a concoction well known by name, but the composition of

which was the secret of only a few. Wolkenlicht had, of course, not the

least suspicion of the treatment to which he was subjected.

Teufelsbürst was, however, doomed to fresh disappointment. Not that his

potion failed in the anticipated effect, for now Karl’s real sufferings

began; but that such was the strength of Karl’s will, and his fear of

doing anything that might give a pretext for banishing him from the

presence of Lilith, that he was able to conceal his feelings far too

successfully for the satisfaction of Teufelsbürst’s art. Yet he had to

fetter himself with all the restraints that self-exhortation could load

him with, to refrain from falling at the feet of Lilith and kissing the

hem of her garment. For that, as the lowliest part of all that

surrounded her, itself kissing the earth, seemed to come nearest within

the reach of his ambition, and therefore to draw him the most.

No doubt the painter had experience and penetration enough to perceive

that he was suffering intensely; but he wanted to see the suffering

embodied in outward signs, bringing it within the region over which his

pencil held sway. He kept on, therefore, trying one thing after another,

and rousing the poor youth to agony; till to his other sufferings were

added, at length, those of failing health; a fact which notified itself

evidently enough even for Teufelsbürst, though its signs were not of the

sort he chiefly desired. But Karl endured all bravely.

Meantime, for various reasons, he scarcely ever left the house.

I must now interrupt the course of my story to introduce another

element.

A few years before the period of my tale, a certain shoemaker of the

city had died under circumstances more than suggestive of suicide. He

was buried, however, with such precautions, that six weeks elapsed

before the rumour of the facts broke out; upon which rumour, not before,

the most fearful reports began to be circulated, supported by what

seemed to the people of Prague incontestable evidence.--A _spectrum_ of

the deceased appeared to multitudes of persons, playing horrible pranks,

and occasioning indescribable consternation throughout the whole town.

This went on till at last, about eight months after his burial, the

magistrates caused his body to be dug up; when it was found in just the

condition of the bodies of those who in the eastern countries of Europe

are called _vampires_. They buried the corpse under the gallows; but

neither the digging up nor the reburying were of avail to banish the

spectre. Again the spade and pick-axe were set to work, and the dead man

being found considerably improved in _condition_ since his last

interment, was, with various horrible indignities, burnt to ashes,

“after which the _spectrum_ was never seen more.”

And a second epidemic of the same nature had broken out a little before

the period to which I have brought my story.

About midnight, after a calm frosty day, for it was now winter, a

terrible storm of wind and snow came on. The tempest howled frightfully

about the house of the painter, and Wolkenlicht found some solace in

listening to the uproar, for his troubled thoughts would not allow him

to sleep. It raged on all the next three days, till about noon on the

fourth day, when it suddenly fell, and all was calm. The following

night, Wolkenlicht, lying awake, heard unaccountable noises in the next

house, as of things thrown about, of kicking and fighting horses, and of

opening and shutting gates. Flinging wide his lattice and looking out,

the noise of howling dogs came to him from every quarter of the town.

The moon was bright and the air was still. In a little while he heard

the sounds of a horse going at full gallop round the house, so that it

shook as if it would fall; and flashes of light shone into his room. How

much of this may have been owing to the effect of the drugs on poor

Lottchen’s brain, I leave my readers to determine. But when the family

met at breakfast in the morning, Teufelsbürst, who had been already out

of doors, reported that he had found the marks of strange feet in the

snow, all about the house and through the garden at the back; stating,

as his belief, that the tracks must be continued over the roofs, for

there was no passage otherwise. There was a wicked gleam in his eye as

he spoke; and Lilith believed that he was only trying an experiment on

Karl’s nerves. He persisted that he had never seen any footprints of the

sort before. Karl informed him of his experiences during the night; upon

which Teufelsbürst looked a little graver still, and proceeded to tell

them that the storm, whose snow was still covering the ground, had

arisen the very moment that their next door neighbour died, and had

ceased as suddenly the moment he was buried, though it had raved

furiously all the time of the funeral, so that “it made men’s bodies

quake and their teeth chatter in their heads.” Karl had heard that the

man, whose name was John Kuntz, was dead and buried. He knew that he had

been a very wealthy, and therefore most respectable, alderman of the

town; that he had been very fond of horses; and that he had died in

consequence of a kick received from one of his own, as he was looking at

his hoof. But he had not heard that, just before he died, a black cat

“opened the casement with her nails, ran to his bed, and violently

scratched his face and the bolster, as if she endeavoured by force to

remove him out of the place where he lay. But the cat afterwards was

suddenly gone, and she was no sooner gone, but he breathed his last.”

So said Teufelsbürst, as the reporter of the town talk. Lilith looked

very pale and terrified; and it was perhaps owing to this that the

painter brought no more tales home with him. There were plenty to bring,

but he heard them all and said nothing. The fact was that the

philosopher himself could not resist the infection of the fear that was

literally raging in the city; and perhaps the reports that he himself

had sold himself to the devil had sufficient response from his own evil

conscience to add to the influence of the epidemic upon him. The whole

place was infested with the presence of the dead Kuntz, till scarce a

man or woman would dare to be alone. He strangled old men; insulted

women; squeezed children to death; knocked out the brains of dogs

against the ground; pulled up posts; turned milk into blood; nearly

killed a worthy clergyman by breathing upon him the intolerable airs of

the grave, cold and malignant and noisome; and, in short, filled the

city with a perfect madness of fear, so that every report was believed

without the smallest doubt or investigation.

Though Teufelsbürst brought home no more of the town talk, the old

servant was a faithful purveyor, and frequented the news-mart

assiduously. Indeed she had some nightmare experiences of her own that

she was proud to add to the stock of horrors which the city enjoyed with

such a hearty community of goods. For those regions were not far removed

from the birthplace and home of the vampire. The belief in vampires is

the quintessential concentration and embodiment of all the passion of

fear in Hungary and the adjacent regions. Nor, of all the other

inventions of the human imagination, has there ever been one so perfect

in crawling terror as this. Lilith and Karl were quite familiar with the

popular ideas on the subject. It did not require to be explained to

them, that a vampire was a body retaining a kind of animal life after

the soul had departed. If any relation existed between it and the

vanished ghost, it was only sufficient to make it restless in its grave.

Possessed of vitality enough to keep it uncorrupted and pliant, its only

instinct was a blind hunger for the sole food which could keep its awful

life persistent--living human blood. Hence it, or, if not it, a sort of

semi-material exhalation or essence of it, retaining its form and

material relations, crept from its tomb, and went roaming about till it

found some one asleep, towards whom it had an attraction, founded on old

affection. It sucked the blood of this unhappy being, transferring so

much of its life to itself as a vampire could assimilate. Death was the

certain consequence. If suspicion conjectured aright, and they opened

the proper grave, the body of the vampire would be found perfectly fresh

and plump, sometimes indeed of rather florid complexion;--with grown

hair, eyes half open, and the stains of recent blood about its greedy,

leech-like lips. Nothing remained but to consume the corpse to ashes,

upon which the vampire would show itself no more. But what added

infinitely to the horror was the certainty that whoever died from the

mouth of the vampire, wrinkled grandsire or delicate maiden, must in

turn rise from the grave, and go forth a vampire, to suck the blood of

the dearest left behind. This was the generation of the vampire brood.

Lilith trembled at the very name of the creature. Karl was too much in

love to be afraid of anything. Yet the evident fear of the unbelieving

painter took a hold of his imagination; and, under the influence of the

potions of which he still partook unwittingly, when he was not thinking

about Lilith, he was thinking about the vampire.

Meantime, the condition of things in the painter’s household continued

much the same for Wolkenlicht--work all day; no communication between

the young people; the dinner and the wine; silent reading when work was

done, with stolen glances many over the top of the book, glances that

were never returned; the cold good-night; the locking of the door; the

wakeful night and the drowsy morning. But at length a change came, and

sooner than any of the party had expected. For, whether it was that the

impatience of Teufelsbürst had urged him to yet more dangerous

experiments, or that the continuance of those he had been so long

employing had overcome at length the vitality of Wolkenlicht--one

afternoon, as he was sitting at his work, he suddenly dropped from his

chair, and his master hurrying to him in some alarm, found him rigid and

apparently lifeless. Lilith was not in the study when this took place.

In justice to Teufelsbürst, it must be confessed that he employed all

the skill he was master of, which for beneficent purposes was not very

great, to restore the youth; but without avail. At last, hearing the

footsteps of Lilith, he desisted in some consternation; and that she

might escape being shocked by the sight of a dead body where she had

been accustomed to see a living one, he removed the lay figure from the

couch, and laid Karl in its place, covering him with a black velvet

pall. He was just in time. She started at seeing no one in Karl’s place

and said--

“Where is your pupil, father?”

“Gone home,” he answered, with a kind of convulsive grin.

She glanced round the room, caught sight of the lay figure where it had

not been before, looked at the couch, and saw the pall yet heaved up

from beneath, opened her eyes till the entire white sweep around the

iris suggested a new expression of consternation to Teufelsbürst, though

from a quarter whence he did not desire or look for it; and then,

without a word, sat down to a drawing she had been busy upon the day

before. But her father, glancing at her now, as Wolkenlicht had used to

do, could not help seeing that she was frightfully pale. She showed no

other sign of uneasiness. As soon as he released her, she withdrew, with

one more glance, as she passed, at the couch and the figure blocked out

in black upon it. She hastened to her chamber, shut and locked the door,

sat down on the side of the couch, and fell, not a-weeping, but

a-thinking. Was he dead? What did it matter? They would all be dead

soon. Her mother was dead already. It was only that the earth could not

bear more children, except she devoured those to whom she had already

given birth. But what if they had to come back in another form, and live

another sad, hopeless, love-less life over again?--And so she went on

questioning, and receiving no replies; while through all her thoughts

passed and repassed the eyes of Wolkenlicht, which she had often felt to

be upon her when she did not see them, wild with repressed longing, the

light of their love shining through the veil of diffused tears, ever

gathering and never overflowing. Then came the pale face, so

worshipping, so distant in its self-withdrawn devotion, slowly dawning

out of the vapours of her reverie. When it vanished, she tried to see it

again. It would not come when she called it; but when her thoughts left

knocking at the door of the lost, and wandered away, out came the pale,

troubled, silent face again, gathering itself up from some unknown nook

in her world of phantasy, and once more, when she tried to steady it by

the fixedness of her own regard, fading back into the mist. So the

phantasm of the dead drew near and wooed, as the living had never

dared.--What if there were any good in loving? What if men and women did

not die all out, but some dim shade of each, like that pale, mind-ghost

of Wolkenlicht, floated through the eternal vapours of chaos? And what

if they might sometimes cross each other’s path, meet, know that they

met, love on? Would not that revive the withered memory, fix the

fleeting ghost, give a new habitation, a body even, to the poor,

unhoused wanderers, frozen by the eternal frosts, no longer thinking

beings, but thoughts wandering through the brain of the “Melancholy

Mass?” Back with the thought came the face of the dead Karl, and the

maiden threw herself on her bed in a flood of bitter tears. She could

have loved him if he had only lived: she did love him, for he was dead.

But even in the midst of the remorse that followed--for had she not

killed him?--life seemed a less hard and hopeless thing than before. For

it is love itself and not its responses or results that is the soul of

life and its pleasures.

Two hours passed ere she could again show herself to her father, from

whom she seemed in some new way divided by the new feeling in which he

did not, and could not share. But at last, lest he should seek her, and

finding her, should suspect her thoughts, she descended and sought

him.--For there is a maidenliness in sorrow, that wraps her garments

close around her.--But he was not to be seen; the door of the study was

locked. A shudder passed through her as she thought of what her father,

who lost no opportunity of furthering his all but perfect acquaintance

with the human form and structure, might be about with the figure which

she knew lay dead beneath that velvet pall, but which had arisen to

haunt the hollow caves and cells of her living brain. She rushed away,

and up once more to her silent room, through the darkness which had now

settled down in the house; threw herself again on her bed, and lay

almost paralysed with horror and distress.

But Teufelsbürst was not about anything so frightful as she supposed,

though something frightful enough. I have already implied that

Wolkenlicht was, in form, as fine an embodiment of youthful manhood as

any old Greek republic could have provided one of its sculptors with as

model for an Apollo. It is true, that to the eye of a Greek artist he

would not have been more acceptable in consequence of the regimen he had

been going through for the last few weeks; but the emaciation of

Wolkenlicht’s frame, and the consequent prominence of the muscles,

indicating the pain he had gone through, were peculiarly attractive to

Teufelsbürst.--He was busy preparing to take a cast of the body of his

dead pupil, that it might aid to the perfection of his future labours.

He was deep in the artistic enjoyment of a form, at the same time so

beautiful and strong, yet with the lines of suffering in every limb and

feature, when his daughter’s hand was laid on the latch. He started,

flung the velvet drapery over the body, and went to the door. But Lilith

had vanished. He returned to his labours. The operation took a long

time, for he performed it very carefully. Towards midnight, he had

finished encasing the body in a close-clinging shell of plaster, which,

when broken off, and fitted together, would be the matrix to the form of

the dead Wolkenlicht. Before leaving it to harden till the morning, he

was just proceeding to strengthen it with an additional layer all over,

when a flash of lightning, reflected in all its dazzle from the snow

without, almost blinded him. A peal of long-drawn thunder followed; the

wind rose; and just such a storm came on as had risen some time before

at the death of Kuntz, whose spectre was still tormenting the city. The

gnomes of terror, deep hidden in the caverns of Teufelsbürst’s nature,

broke out jubilant. With trembling hands he tried to cast the pall over

the awful white chrysalis,--failed, and fled to his chamber. And there

lay the studio naked to the eyes of the lightning, with its tortured

forms throbbing out of the dark, and quivering, as with life, in the

almost continuous palpitations of the light; while on the couch lay the

motionless mass of whiteness, gleaming blue in the lightning, almost

more terrible in its crude indications of the human form, than that

which it enclosed. It lay there as if dropped from some tree of chaos,

haggard with the snows of eternity--a huge mis-shapen nut, with a corpse

for its kernel.

But the lightning would soon have revealed a more terrible sight still,

had there been any eyes to behold it. At midnight, while a peal of

thunder was just dying away in the distance, the crust of death flew

asunder, rending in all directions; and, pale as his investiture,

staring with ghastly eyes, the form of Karl started up sitting on the

couch. Had he not been far beyond ordinary men in strength, he could not

thus have rent his sepulchre. Indeed, had Teufelsbürst been able to

finish his task by the additional layer of gypsum which he contemplated,

he must have died the moment life revived; although, so long as the

trance lasted, neither the exclusion from the air, nor the practical

solidification of the walls of his chest, could do him any injury. He

had lain unconscious throughout the operations of Teufelsbürst, but now

the catalepsy had passed away, possibly under the influence of the

electric condition of the atmosphere. Very likely the strength he now

put forth was intensified by a convulsive reaction of all the powers of

life, as is not infrequently the case in sudden awakenings from similar

interruptions of vital activity. The coming to himself and the bursting

of his case were simultaneous. He sat staring about him, with, of all

his mental faculties, only his imagination awake, from which the

thoughts that occupied it when he fell senseless had not yet faded.

These thoughts had been compounded of feelings about Lilith, and

speculations about the vampire that haunted the neighbourhood; and the

fumes of the last drug of which he had partaken, still hovering in his

brain, combined with these thoughts and fancies to generate the delusion

that he had just broken from the embrace of his coffin, and risen, the

last-born of the vampire race. The sense of unavoidable obligation to

fulfil his doom, was yet mingled with a faint flutter of joy, for he

knew that he must go to Lilith. With a deep sigh, he rose, gathered up

the pall of black velvet, flung it around him, stepped from the couch,

and left the study to find her.

Meantime, Teufelsbürst had sufficiently recovered to remember that he

had left the door of the studio unfastened, and that any one entering

would discover in what he had been engaged, which, in the case of his

getting into any difficulty about the death of Karl, would tell

powerfully against him. He was at the farther end of a long passage,

leading from the house to the studio, on his way to make all secure,

when Karl appeared at the door, and advanced towards him. The painter,

seized with invincible terror, turned and fled. He reached his room, and

fell senseless on the floor. The phantom held on its way, heedless.

Lilith, on gaining her room the second time, had thrown herself on her

bed as before, and had wept herself into a troubled slumber. She lay

dreaming--and dreadful dreams. Suddenly she awoke in one of those peals

of thunder which tormented the high regions of the air, as a storm

billows the surface of the ocean. She lay awake and listened. As it died

away, she thought she heard, mingling with its last muffled murmurs, the

sound of moaning. She turned her face towards the room in keen terror.

But she saw nothing. Another light, long-drawn sigh reached her ear, and

at the same moment a flash of lightning illumined the room. In the

corner farthest from her bed, she spied a white face, nothing more. She

was dumb and motionless with fear. Utter darkness followed, a darkness

that seemed to enter into her very brain. Yet she felt that the face was

slowly crossing the black gulf of the room, and drawing near to where

she lay. The next flash revealed, as it bended over her, the ghastly

face of Karl, down which flowed fresh tears. The rest of his form was

lost in blackness. Lilith did not faint, but it was the very force of

her fear that seemed to keep her alive. It became for the moment the

atmosphere of her life. She lay trembling and staring at the spot in the

darkness where she supposed the face of Karl still to be. But the next

flash showed her the face far off, looking at her through the panes of

her lattice-window.

For Lottchen, as soon as he saw Lilith, seemed to himself to go through

a second stage of awaking. Her face made him doubt whether he could be a

vampire after all; for instead of wanting to bite her arm and suck the

blood, he all but fell down at her feet in a passion of speechless love.

The next moment he became aware that his presence must be at least very

undesirable to her; and in an instant he had reached her window, which

he knew looked upon a lower roof that extended between two different

parts of the house, and before the next flash came, he had stepped

through the lattice and closed it behind him.

Believing his own room to be attainable from this quarter, he proceeded

along the roof in the direction he judged best. The cold winter air by

degrees restored him entirely to his right mind, and he soon

comprehended the whole of the circumstances in which he found himself.

Peeping through a window he was passing, to see whether it belonged to

his room, he spied Teufelsbürst, who, at the very moment, was lifting

his head from the faint into which he had fallen at the first sight of

Lottchen. The moon was shining clear, and in its light the painter saw,

to his horror, the pale face staring in at his window. He thought it had

been there ever since he had fainted, and dropped again in a deeper

swoon than before. Karl saw him fall, and the truth flashed upon him

that the wicked artist took him for what he had believed himself to be

when first he recovered from his trance--namely, the vampire of the

former Karl Wolkenlicht. The moment he comprehended it, he resolved to

keep up the delusion if possible. Meantime he was innocently preparing a

new ingredient for the popular dish of horrors to be served at the

ordinary of the city the next day. For the old servant’s were not the

only eyes that had seen him besides those of Teufelsbürst. What could be

more like a vampire, dragging his pall after him, than this apparition

of poor, half-frozen Lottchen, crawling across the roof? Karl remembered

afterwards that he had heard the dogs howling awfully in every

direction, as he crept along; but this was hardly necessary to make

those who saw him conclude that it was the same phantasm of John Kuntz,

which had been infesting the whole city, and especially the house next

door to the painter’s, which had been the dwelling of the respectable

alderman who had degenerated into this most disreputable of moneyless

vagabonds. What added to the consternation of all who heard of it, was

the sickening conviction that the extreme measures which they had

resorted to in order to free the city from the ghoul, beyond which

nothing could be done, had been utterly unavailing, successful as they

had proved in every other known case of the kind. For, urged as well by

various horrid signs about his grave, which not even its close proximity

to the altar could render a place of repose, they had opened it, had

found in the body every peculiarity belonging to a vampire, had pulled

it out with the greatest difficulty on account of a quite supernatural

ponderosity; which rendered the horse which had killed him--a strong

animal--all but unable to drag it along, and had at last, after cutting

it in pieces, and expending on the fire two hundred and sixteen great

billets, succeeded in conquering its incombustibleness, and reducing it

to ashes. Such, at least, was the story which had reached the painter’s

household, and was believed by many; and if all this did not compel the

perturbed corpse to rest, what more could be done?

When Karl had reached his room, and was dressing himself, the thought

struck him that something might be made of the report of the extreme

weight of the body of old Kuntz, to favour the continuance of the

delusion of Teufelsbürst, although he hardly knew yet to what use he

could turn this delusion. He was convinced that he would have made no

progress however long he might have remained in his house; and that he

would have more chance of favour with Lilith if he were to meet her in

any other circumstances whatever than those in which he invariably saw

her--namely, surrounded by her father’s influences, and watched by her

father’s cold blue eyes.

As soon as he was dressed, he crept down to the studio, which was now

quiet enough, the storm being over, and the moon filling it with her

steady shine. In the corner lay in all directions the fragments of the

mould which his own body had formed and filled. The bag of plaster and

the bucket of water which the painter had been using stood beside.

Lottchen gathered all the pieces together, and then making his way to an

outhouse where he had seen various odds and ends of rubbish lying, chose

from the heap as many pieces of old iron and other metal as he could

find. To these he added a few large stones from the garden. When he had

got all into the studio, he locked the door, and proceeded to fit

together the parts of the mould, filling up the hollow as he went on

with the heaviest things he could get into it, and solidifying the whole

by pouring in plaster; till, having at length completed it, and

obliterated, as much as possible, the marks of joining, he left it to

harden, with the conviction that now it would make a considerable

impression on Teufelsbürst’s imagination, as well as on his muscular

sense. He then left everything else as nearly undisturbed as he could;

and, knowing all the ways of the house, was soon in the street, without

leaving any signs of his exit.

Karl soon found himself before the house in which his friend

Höllenrachen resided. Knowing his studious habits, he had hoped to see

his light still burning, nor was he disappointed. He contrived to bring

him to his window, and a moment after, the door was cautiously opened.

“Why, Lottchen, where do you come from?”

“From the grave, Heinrich, or next door to it.”

“Come in, and tell me all about it. We thought the old painter had made

a model of you, and tortured you to death.”

“Perhaps you were not far wrong. But get me a horn of ale, for even a

vampire is thirsty, you know.”

“A vampire!” exclaimed Heinrich, retreating a pace, and involuntarily

putting himself upon his guard.

Karl laughed.

“My hand was warm, was it not, old fellow?” he said. “Vampires are cold,

all but the blood.”

“What a fool I am!” rejoined Heinrich. “But you know we have been

hearing such horrors lately that a fellow may be excused for shuddering

a little when a pale-faced apparition tells him at two o’clock in the

morning that he is a vampire, and thirsty, too.”

Karl told him the whole story; and the mental process of regarding it

for the sake of telling it, revealed to him pretty clearly some of the

treatment of which he had been unconscious at the time. Heinrich was

quite sure that his suspicions were correct. And now the question was,

what was to be done next?

“At all events,” said Heinrich, “we must keep you out of the way for

some time. I will represent to my landlady that you are in hiding from

enemies, and her heart will rule her tongue. She can let you have a

garret-room, I know; and I will do as well as I can to bear you company.

We shall have time then to invent some plan of operation.”

To this proposal Karl agreed with hearty thanks, and soon all was

arranged. The only conclusion they could yet arrive at was, that somehow

or other the old demon-painter must be tamed.

Meantime, how fared it with Lilith? She too had no doubt that she had

seen the body-ghost of poor Karl, and that the vampire had, according to

rule, paid her the first visit because he loved her best. This was

horrible enough if the vampire were not really the person he

represented; but if in any sense it were Karl himself, at least it gave

some expectation of a more prolonged existence than her father had

taught her to look for; and if love anything like her mother’s still

lasted, even along with the habits of a vampire, there was something to

hope for in the future. And then, though he had visited her, he had not,

as far as she was aware, deprived her of a drop of blood. She could not

be certain that he had not bitten her, for she had been in such a

strange condition of mind that she might not have felt it, but she

believed that he had restrained the impulses of his vampire nature, and

had left her, lest he should yet yield to them. She fell fast asleep;

and, when morning came, there was not, as far as she could judge, one of

those triangular leech-like perforations to be found upon her whole

body. Will it be believed that the moment she was satisfied of this, she

was seized by a terrible jealousy, lest Karl should have gone and bitten

some one else? Most people will wonder that she should not have gone out

of her senses at once; but there was all the difference between a visit

from a real vampire and a visit from a man she had begun to love, even

although she took him for a vampire. All the difference does _not_ lie

in a name. They were very different causes, and the effects must be very

different.

When Teufelsbürst came down in the morning, he crept into the studio

like a murderer. There lay the awful white block, seeming to his eyes

just the same as he had left it. What was to be done with it? He dared

not open it. Mould and model must go together. But whither? If inquiry

should be made after Wolkenlicht, and this were discovered anywhere on

his premises, would it not be enough to bring him at once to the

gallows? Therefore it would be dangerous to bury it in the garden, or in

the cellar.

“Besides,” thought he, with a shudder, “that would be to fix the vampire

as a guest for ever.”--And the horrors of the past night rushed back

upon his imagination with renewed intensity. What would it be to have

the dead Karl crawling about his house for ever, now inside, now out,

now sitting on the stairs, now staring in at the windows?

He would have dragged it to the bottom of his garden, past which the

Moldau flowed, and plunged it into the stream; but then, should the

spectre continue to prove troublesome, it would be almost impossible to

reach the body so as to destroy it by fire; besides which, he could not

do it without assistance, and the probability of discovery. If, however,

the apparition should turn out to be no vampire, but only a respectable

ghost, they might manage to endure its presence, till it should be weary

of haunting them.

He resolved at last to convey the body for the meantime into a concealed

cellar in the house, seeing something must be done before his daughter

came down. Proceeding to remove it, his consternation as greatly

increased when he discovered how the body had grown in weight since he

had thus disposed of it, leaving on his mind scarcely a hope that it

could turn out not to be a vampire after all. He could scarcely stir it,

and there was but one whom he could call to his assistance--the old

woman who acted as his housekeeper and servant.

He went to her room, roused her, and told her the whole story. Devoted

to her master for many years, and not quite so sensitive to fearful

influences as when less experienced in horrors, she showed immediate

readiness to render him assistance. Utterly unable, however, to lift the

mass between them, they could only drag and push it along; and such a

slow toil was it that there was no time to remove the traces of its

track, before Lilith came down and saw a broad white line leading from

the door of the studio down the cellarstairs. She knew in a moment what

it meant; but not a word was uttered about the matter, and the name of

Karl Wolkenlicht seemed to be entirely forgotten.

But how could the affairs of a house go on all the same when every one

of the household knew that a dead body lay in the cellar?--nay more,

that, although it lay still and dead enough all day, it would come half

alive at nightfall, and, turning the whole house into a sepulchre by its

presence, go creeping about like a cat all over it in the dark--perhaps

with phosphorescent eyes? So it was not surprising that the painter

abandoned his studio early, and that the three found themselves together

in the gorgeous room formerly described, as soon as twilight began to

fall.

Already Teufelsbürst had begun to experience a kind of shrinking from

the horrid faces in his own pictures, and to feel disgusted at the

abortions of his own mind. But all that he and the old woman now felt

was an increasing fear as the night drew on, a kind of sickening and

paralysing terror. The thing down there would not lie quiet--at least

its phantom in the cellars of their imagination would not. As much as

possible, however, they avoided alarming Lilith, who, knowing all they

knew, was as silent as they. But her mind was in a strange state of

excitement, partly from the presence of a new sense of love, the

pleasure of which all the atmosphere of grief into which it grew could

not totally quench. It comforted her somehow, as a child may comfort

when his father is away.

Bedtime came, and no one made a move to go. Without a word spoken on the

subject, the three remained together all night; the elders nodding and

slumbering occasionally, and Lilith getting some share of repose on a

couch. All night the shape of death might be somewhere about the house;

but it did not disturb them. They heard no sound, saw no sight; and when

the morning dawned, they separated, chilled and stupid, and for the time

beyond fear, to seek repose in their private chambers. There they

remained equally undisturbed.

But when the painter approached his easel a few hours after, looking

more pale and haggard still than he was wont, from the fears of the

night, a new bewilderment took possession of him. He had been busy with

a fresh embodiment of his favourite subject, into which he had sketched

the form of the student as the sufferer. He had represented poor

Wolkenlicht as just beginning to recover from a trance, while a group of

surgeons, unaware of the signs of returning life, were absorbed in a

minute dissection of one of the limbs. At an open door he had painted

Lilith passing, with her face buried in a bunch of sweet peas. But when

he came to the picture, he found, to his astonishment and terror, that

the face of one of the group was now turned towards that of the victim,

regarding his revival with demoniac satisfaction, and taking pains to

prevent the others from discovering it. The face of this prince of

torturers was that of Teufelsbürst himself. Lilith had altogether

vanished, and in her place stood the dim vampire reiteration of the body

that lay extended on the table, staring greedily at the assembled

company. With trembling hands the painter removed the picture from the

easel, and turned its face to the wall.

Of course this was the work of Lottchen. When he left the house, he took

with him the key of a small private door, which was so seldom used that,

while it remained closed, the key would not be missed, perhaps for many

months. Watching the windows, he had chosen a safe time to enter, and

had been hard at work all night on these alterations. Teufelsbürst

attributed them to the vampire, and left the picture as he found it, not

daring to put brush to it again.

The next night was passed much after the same fashion. But the fear had

begun to die away a little in the hearts of the women, who did not know

what had taken place in the studio on the previous night. It burrowed,

however, with gathered force in the vitals of Teufelsbürst. But this

night likewise passed in peace; and before it was over, the old woman

had taken to speculating in her own mind as to the best way of disposing

of the body, seeing it was not at all likely to be troublesome. But when

the painter entered his studio in trepidation the next morning, he found

that the form of the lovely Lilith was painted out of every picture in

the room. This could not be concealed; and Lilith and the servant became

aware that the studio was the portion of the house in haunting which the

vampire left the rest in peace.

Karl recounted all the tricks he had played to his friend Heinrich, who

begged to be allowed to bear him company the following night. To this

Karl consented, thinking it would be considerably more agreeable to have

a companion. So they took a couple of bottles of wine and some

provisions with them, and before midnight found themselves snug in the

studio. They sat very quiet for some time, for they knew that if they

were seen, two vampires would not be so terrible as one, and might

occasion discovery. But at length Heinrich could bear it no longer.

“I say, Lottchen, let’s go and look; for your dead body. What has the

old beggar done with it?”

“I think I know. Stop; let me peep out. All right! Come along.”

With a lamp in his hand, he led the way to the cellars, and after

searching about a little they discovered it.

“It looks horrid enough,” said Heinrich, “but think a drop or two of

wine would brighten it up a little.”

So he took a bottle from his pocket, and after they had had a glass

apiece, he dropped a third in blots all over the plaster. Being red

wine, it had the effect Höllenrachen desired.

“When they visit it next, they will know that the vampire can find the

food he prefers,” said he.

In a corner close by the plaster, they found the clothes Karl had worn.

“Hillo!” said Heinrich, “we’ll make something of this find.”

So he carried them with him to the studio. There he got hold of the

lay-figure.

“What are you about, Heinrich?”

“Going to make a scarecrow to keep the ravens off old Teufel’s

pictures,” answered Heinrich, as he went on dressing the lay-figure in

Karl’s clothes. He next seated the creature at an easel with its back to

the door, so that it should be the first thing the painter should see

when he entered. Karl meant to remove this before he went, for it was

too comical to fall in with the rest of his proceedings. But the two sat

down to their supper, and by the time they had finished the wine, they

thought they should like to go to bed. So they got up and went home, and

Karl forgot the lay-figure, leaving it in busy motionlessness all night

before the easel. When Teufelsbürst saw it, he turned and fled with a

cry that brought his daughter to his help. He rushed past her, able only

to articulate:

“The vampire! The vampire! Painting!”

Far more courageous than he, because her conscience was more peaceful,

Lilith passed on to the studio. She too recoiled a step or two when she

saw the figure; but with the sight of the back of Karl, as she supposed

it to be, came the longing to see the face that was on the other side.

So she crept round and round by the wall, as far off as she could. The

figure remained motionless. It was a strange kind of shock that she

experienced when she saw the face, disgusting from its inanity. The

absurdity next struck her; and with the absurdity flashed into her mind

the conviction that this was not the doing of a vampire; for of all

creatures under the moon, he could not be expected to be a humorist. A

wild hope sprang up in her mind that Karl was not dead. Of this she soon

resolved to make herself sure.

She closed the door of the studio; in the strength of her new hope

undressed the figure, put it in its place, concealed the garments--all

the work of a few minutes; and then, finding her father just recovering

from the worst of his fear, told him there was nothing in the studio but

what ought to be there, and persuaded him to go and see. He not only saw

no one, but found that no further liberties had been taken with his

pictures. Reassured, he soon persuaded himself that the spectre in this

case had been the offspring of his own terror-haunted brain. But he had

no spirit for painting now. He wandered about the house, himself

haunting it like a restless ghost.

When night came, Lilith retired to her own room. The waters of fear had

begun to subside in the house; but the painter and his old attendant did

not yet follow her example.

As soon, however, as the house was quite still, Lilith glided

noiselessly down the stairs, went into the studio, where as yet there

assuredly was no vampire, and concealed herself in a corner.

As it would not do for an earnest student like Heinrich to be away from

his work very often, he had not asked to accompany Lottchen this time.

And indeed Karl himself, a little anxious about the result of the

scarecrow, greatly preferred going alone.

While she was waiting for what might happen, the conviction grew upon

Lilith, as she reviewed all the past of the story, that these phenomena

were the work of the real Karl, and of no vampire. In a few moments she

was still more sure of this. Behind the screen where she had taken

refuge, hung one of the pictures out of which her portrait had been

painted the night before last. She had taken a lamp with her into the

studio, with the intention of extinguishing it the moment she heard any

sign of approach; but as the vampire lingered, she began to occupy

herself with examining the picture beside her. She had not looked at it

long, before she wetted the tip of her forefinger, and began to rub away

at the obliteration. Her suspicions were instantly confirmed: the

substance employed was only a gummy wash over the paint. The delight she

experienced at the discovery threw her into a mischievous humour.

“I will see,” she said to herself, “whether I cannot match Karl

Wolkenlicht at this game.”

In a closet in the room hung a number of costumes, which Lilith had at

different times worn for her father. Among them was a large white

drapery, which she easily disposed as a shroud. With the help of some

chalk, she soon made herself ghastly enough, and then placing her lamp

on the floor behind the screen, and setting a chair over it, so that it

should throw no light in any direction, she waited once more for the

vampire. Nor had she much longer to wait. She soon heard a door move,

the sound of which she hardly knew, and then the studio door opened. Her

heart beat dreadfully, not with fear lest it should be a vampire after

all, but with hope that it was Karl. To see him once more was too great

joy. Would she not make up to him for all her coldness! But would he

care for her now? Perhaps he had been quite cured of his longing for a

hard heart like hers. She peeped. It was he sure enough, looking as

handsome as ever. He was holding his light to look at her last work, and

the expression of his face, even in regarding her handiwork, was enough

to let her know that he loved her still. If she had not seen this, she

dared not have shown herself from her hiding-place. Taking the lamp in

her hand, she got upon the chair, and looked over the screen, letting

the light shine from below upon her face. She then made a slight noise

to attract Karl’s attention. He looked up, evidently rather startled,

and saw the face of Lilith in the air: He gave a stifled cry threw

himself on his knees with his arms stretched towards her, and moaned--

“I have killed her! I have killed her!”

Lilith descended, and approached him noiselessly. He did not move. She

came close to him and said--

“Are you Karl Wolkenlicht?”

His lips moved, but no sound came.

“If you are a vampire, and I am a ghost,” she said--but a low happy

laugh alone concluded the sentence.

Karl sprang to his feet. Lilith’s laugh changed into a burst of sobbing

and weeping, and in another moment the ghost was in the arms of the

vampire.

Lilith had no idea how far her father had wronged Karl, and though, from

thinking over the past, he had no doubt that the painter had drugged

him, he did not wish to pain her by imparting this conviction. But

Lilith was afraid of a reaction of rage and hatred in her father after

the terror was removed; and Karl saw that he might thus be deprived of

all further intercourse with Lilith, and all chance of softening the old

man’s heart towards him; while Lilith would not hear of forsaking him

who had banished all the human race but herself. They managed at length

to agree upon a plan of operation.

The first thing they did was to go to the cellar where the plaster mass

lay, Karl carrying with him a great axe used for cleaving wood. Lilith

shuddered when she saw it, stained as it was with the wine Heinrich had

spilt over it, and almost believed herself the midnight companion of a

vampire after all, visiting with him the terrible corpse in which he

lived all day. But Karl soon reassured her; and a few good blows of the

axe revealed a very different core to that which Teufelsbürst supposed

to be in it. Karl broke it into pieces, and with Lilith’s help, who

insisted on carrying her share, the whole was soon at the bottom of the

Moldau and every trace of its ever having existed removed. Before

morning, too, the form of Lilith had dawned anew in every picture. There

was no time to restore to its former condition the one Karl had first

altered; for in it the changes were all that they seemed; nor indeed was

he capable of restoring it in the master’s style; but they put it quite

out of the way, and hoped that sufficient time might elapse before the

painter thought of it again.

When they had done, and Lilith, for all his entreaties, would remain

with him no longer, Karl took his former clothes with him, and having

spent the rest of the night in his old room, dressed in them in the

morning. When Teufelsbürst entered his studio next day, there sat Karl,

as if nothing had happened, finishing the drawing on which he had been

at work when the fit of insensibility came upon him. The painter

started, stared, rubbed his eyes, thought it was another spectral

illusion, and was on the point of yielding to his terror, when Karl

rose, and approached him with a smile. The healthy, sunshiny countenance

of Karl, let him be ghost or goblin, could not fail to produce somewhat

of a tranquillising effect on Teufelsbürst. He took his offered hand

mechanically, his countenance utterly vacant with idiotic bewilderment.

Karl said--

“I was not well, and thought it better to pay a visit to a friend for a

few days; but I shall soon make up for lost time, for I am all right

now.”

He sat down at once, taking no notice of his master’s behaviour, and

went on with his drawing. Teufelsbürst stood staring at him for some

minutes without moving, then suddenly turned and left the room. Karl

heard him hurrying down the cellar stairs. In a few moments he came up

again. Karl stole a glance at him. There he stood in the same spot, no

doubt more full of bewilderment than ever, but it was not possible that

his face should express more. At last he went to his easel, and sat down

with a long-drawn sigh as if of relief. But though he sat at his easel,

he painted none that day; and as often as Karl ventured a glance, he saw

him still staring at him. The discovery that his pictures were restored

to their former condition aided, no doubt, in leading him to the same

conclusion as the other facts, whatever that conclusion might

be--probably that he had been the sport of some evil power, and had been

for the greater part of a week utterly bewitched. Lilith had taken care

to instruct the old woman, with whom she was all-powerful; and as

neither of them showed the smallest traces of the astonishment which

seemed to be slowly vitrifying his own brain, he was at last perfectly

satisfied that things had been going on all right everywhere but in his

inner man; and in this conclusion he certainly was not far wrong, in

more senses than one. But when all was restored again to the old

routine, it became evident that the peculiar direction of his art in

which he had hitherto indulged had ceased to interest him. The shock had

acted chiefly upon that part of his mental being which had been so

absorbed. He would sit for hours without doing anything, apparently

plunged in meditation.--Several weeks elapsed without any change, and

both Lilith and Karl were getting dreadfully anxious about him. Karl

paid him every attention; and the old man, for he now looked much older

than before, submitted to receive his services as well as those of

Lilith. At length, one morning, he said in a slow thoughtful tone--

“Karl Wolkenlicht, I should like to paint you.”

“Certainly, sir,” answered Karl, jumping up, “where would you like me to

sit?”

So the ice of silence and inactivity was broken, and the painter drew

and painted; and the spring of his art flowed once more; and he made a

beautiful portrait of Karl--a portrait without evil or suffering. And as

soon as he had finished Karl, he began once more to paint Lilith; and

when he had painted her, he composed a picture for the very purpose of

introducing them together; and in this picture there was neither

ugliness nor torture, but human feeling and human hope instead. Then

Karl knew that he might speak to him of Lilith; and he spoke, and was

heard with a smile. But he did not dare to tell him the truth of the

vampire story till one day that Teufelsbürst was lying on the floor of a

room in Karl’s ancestral castle, half smothered in grandchildren; when

the only answer it drew from the old man was a kind of shuddering laugh

and the words “Don’t speak of it, Karl, my boy!”

THE CASTLE

On the top of a high cliff, forming part of the base of a great

mountain, stood a lofty castle. When or how it was built, no man knew;

nor could any one pretend to understand its architecture. Every one who

looked upon it felt that it was lordly and noble; and where one part

seemed not to agree with another, the wise and modest dared not to call

them incongruous, but presumed that the whole might be constructed on

some higher principle of architecture than they yet understood. What

helped them to this conclusion was, that no one had ever seen the whole

of the edifice; that, even of the portion best known, some part or other

was always wrapped in thick folds of mist from the mountain; and that,

when the sun shone upon this mist, the parts of the building that

appeared through the vaporous veil were strangely glorified in their

indistinctness, so that they seemed to belong to some aerial abode in

the land of the sunset; and the beholders could hardly tell whether they

had ever seen them before, or whether they were now for the first time

partially revealed.

Nor, although it was inhabited, could certain information be procured as

to its internal construction. Those who dwelt in it often discovered

rooms they had never entered before--yea, once or twice,--whole suites

of apartments, of which only dim legends had been handed down from

former times. Some of them expected to find, one day, secret places,

filled with treasures of wondrous jewels; amongst which they hoped to

light upon Solomon’s ring, which had for ages disappeared from the

earth, but which had controlled the spirits, and the possession of which

made a man simply what a man should be, the king of the world. Now and

then, a narrow, winding stair, hitherto untrodden, would bring them

forth on a new turret, whence new prospects of the circumjacent country

were spread out before them. How many more of these there might be, or

how much loftier, no one could tell. Nor could the foundations of the

castle in the rock on which it was built be determined with the smallest

approach to precision. Those of the family who had given themselves to

exploring in that direction, found such a labyrinth of vaults and

passages, and endless successions of down-going stairs, out of one

underground space into a yet lower, that they came to the conclusion

that at least the whole mountain was perforated and honeycombed in this

fashion. They had a dim consciousness, too, of the presence, in those

awful regions, of beings whom they could not comprehend. Once they came

upon the brink of a great black gulf, in which the eye could see nothing

but darkness: they recoiled with horror; for the conviction flashed upon

them that that gulf went down into the very central spaces of the earth,

of which they had hitherto been wandering only in the upper crust; nay,

that the seething blackness before them had relations mysterious, and

beyond human comprehension, with the far-off voids of space, into which

the stars dare not enter.

At the foot of the cliff whereon the castle stood, lay a deep lake,

inaccessible save by a few avenues, being surrounded on all sides with

precipices which made the water look very black, although it was pure as

the nightsky. From a door in the castle, which was not to be otherwise

entered, a broad flight of steps, cut in the rock, went down to the

lake, and disappeared below its surface. Some thought the steps went to

the very bottom of the water.

Now in this castle there dwelt a large family of brothers and sisters.

They had never seen their father or mother. The younger had been

educated by the elder, and these by an unseen care and ministration,

about the sources of which they had, somehow or other, troubled

themselves very little--for what people are accustomed to, they regard

as coming from nobody; as if help and progress and joy and love were the

natural crops of Chaos or old Night. But Tradition said that one day--it

was utterly uncertain _when_--their father would come, and leave them no

more; for he was still alive, though where he lived nobody knew. In the

meantime all the rest had to obey their eldest brother, and listen to

his counsels.

But almost all the family was very fond of liberty, as they called it;

and liked to run up and down, hither and thither, roving about, with

neither law nor order, just as they pleased. So they could not endure

their brother’s tyranny, as they called it. At one time they said that

he was only one of themselves, and therefore they would not obey him; at

another, that he was not like them, and could not understand them, and

_therefore_ they would not obey him. Yet, sometimes, when he came and

looked them full in the face, they were terrified, and dared not

disobey, for he was stately and stern and strong. Not one of them loved

him heartily, except the eldest sister, who was very beautiful and

silent, and whose eyes shone as if light lay somewhere deep behind them.

Even she, although she loved him, thought him very hard sometimes; for

when he had once said a thing plainly, he could not be persuaded to

think it over again. So even she forgot him sometimes, and went her own

ways, and enjoyed herself without him. Most of them regarded him as a

sort of watchman, whose business it was to keep them in order; and so

they were indignant and disliked him. Yet they all had a secret feeling

that they ought to be subject to him; and after any particular act of

disregard, none of them could think, with any peace, of the old story

about the return of their father to his house. But indeed they never

thought much about it, or about their father at all; for how could those

who cared so little for their brother, whom they saw every day, care for

their father whom they had never seen?--One chief cause of complaint

against him was that he interfered with their favourite studies and

pursuits; whereas he only sought to make them give up trifling with

earnest things, and seek for truth, and not for amusement, from the many

wonders around them. He did not want them to turn to other studies, or

to eschew pleasures; but, in those studies, to seek the highest things

most, and other things in proportion to their true worth and nobleness.

This could not fail to be distasteful to those who did not care for what

was higher than they. And so matters went on for a time. They thought

they could do better without their brother; and their brother knew they

could not do at all without him, and tried to fulfil the charge

committed into his hands.