simultaneously a shriek, so awful, so despairing, so blood-curdling that
I felt my senses leaving me again as I sank crouching on the floor by
the bed.
And then began the awful duel, the duel of invisible, audible shapes;
of things that shrieked and raved, mingling thin, feminine cries with
low, stifled curses and indistinguishable words. Round and round the
room, footsteps chasing footsteps in the ghastly night, now away by
Tom's bed, now rushing swiftly down the great room until I felt the
flash of swirling drapery on my hard lips. Round and round, turning and
twisting till my brain whirled with the mad cries.
They were coming nearer. I felt the jar of their feet on the floor
beside me. Came one long, gurgling moan close over my head, and then,
crushing down upon me, the weight of a collapsing body; there was long
hair over my face, and in my staring eyes; and as awful silence
succeeded the less awful tumult, life went out, and I fell unfathomable
miles into nothingness.
The gray dawn was sifting through the chinks in the shutters when I
opened my eyes again. I lay stunned and faint, staring up at the mouldy
frescoes on the ceiling, struggling to gather together my wandering
senses and knit them into something like consciousness. But now as I
pulled myself little by little together there was no thought of dreams
before me. One after another the awful incidents of that unspeakable
night came back, and I lay incapable of movement, of action, trying to
piece together the whirling fragments of memory that circled dizzily
around me.
Little by little it grew lighter in the room. I could see the pallid
lines struggling through the shutters behind me, grow stronger along the
broken and dusty floor. The tarnished mirrors reflected dirtily the
growing daylight; a door closed, far away, and I heard the crowing of a
cock; then by and by the whistle of a passing train.
Years seemed to have passed since I first came into this terrible room.
I had lost the use of my tongue, my voice refused to obey my
panic-stricken desire to cry out; once or twice I tried in vain to force
an articulate sound through my rigid lips; and when at last a broken
whisper rewarded my feverish struggles, I felt a strange sense of great
victory. How soundly he slept! Ordinarily, rousing him was no easy task,
and now he revolted steadily against being awakened at this untimely
hour. It seemed to me that I had called him for ages almost, before I
heard him grunt sleepily and turn in bed.
"Tom," I cried weakly, "Tom, come and help me!"
"What do you want? what is the matter with you?"
"Don't ask, come and help me!"
"Fallen out of bed I guess;" and he laughed drowsily.
My abject terror lest he should go to sleep again gave me new strength.
Was it the actual physical paralysis born of killing fear that held me
down? I could not have raised my head from the floor on my life; I could
only cry out in deadly fear for Tom to come and help me.
"Why don't you get up and get into bed?" he answered, when I implored
him to come to me. "You have got a bad nightmare; wake up!"
But something in my voice roused him at last, and he came chuckling
across the room, stopping to throw open two of the great shutters and
let a burst of white light into the room. He climbed up on the bed and
peered over jeeringly. With the first glance the laugh died, and he
leaped the bed and bent over me.
"My God, man, what is the matter with you? You are hurt!"
"I don't know what is the matter; lift me up, get me away from here, and
I'll tell you all I know."
"But, old chap, you must be hurt awfully; the floor is covered with
blood!"
He lifted my head and held me in his powerful arms. I looked down: a
great red stain blotted the floor beside me.
But, apart from the black bruise on my head, there was no sign of a
wound on my body, nor stain of blood on my lips. In as few words as
possible I told him the whole story.
"Let's get out of this," he said when I had finished; "this is no place
for us. Brigands I can stand, but--"
He helped me to dress, and as soon as possible we forced open the heavy
door, the door I had seen turn so softly on its hinges only a few hours
before, and came out into the great circular hall, no less strange and
mysterious now in the half light of dawn than it had been by firelight.
The room was empty, for it must have been very early, although a fire
already blazed in the fireplace. We sat by the fire some time, seeing no
one. Presently slow footsteps sounded in the stairway, and the old man
entered, silent as the night before, nodding to us civilly, but showing
by no sign any surprise which he may have felt at our early rising. In
absolute silence he moved around, preparing coffee for us; and when at
last the frugal breakfast was ready, and we sat around the rough table
munching coarse bread and sipping the black coffee, he would reply to
our overtures only by monosyllables.
Any attempt at drawing from him some facts as to the history of the
villa was received with a grave and frigid repellence that baffled us;
and we were forced to say _addio_ with our hunger for some explanation
of the events of the night still unsatisfied.
But we saw the temples by sunrise, when the mistlike lambent opals
bathed the bases of the tall columns salmon in the morning light! It was
a rhapsody in the pale and unearthly colors of Puvis de Chavannes
vitalized and made glorious with splendid sunlight; the apotheosis of
mist; a vision never before seen, never to be forgotten. It was so
beautiful that the memory of my ghastly night paled and faded, and it
was Tom who assailed the station-master with questions while we waited
for the train from Agropoli.
Luckily he was more than loquacious, he was voluble under the
ameliorating influence of the money we forced upon him; and this, in few
words, was the story he told us while we sat on the platform smoking,
marvelling at the mists that rose to the east, now veiling, now
revealing the lavender Apennines.
"Is there a story of _La Villa Bianca_?"
"Ah, Signori, certainly; and a story very strange and very terrible. It
was much time ago, a hundred,--two hundred years; I do not know. Well,
the Duca di San Damiano married a lady so fair, so most beautiful that
she was called _La Luna di Pesto_; but she was of the people,--more, she
was of the banditti: her father was of Calabria, and a terror of the
Campagna. But the Duke was young, and he married her, and for her built
the white villa; and it was a wonder throughout Campania,--you have
seen? It is splendid now, even if a ruin. Well, it was less than a year
after they came to the villa before the Duke grew jealous,--jealous of
the new captain of the banditti who took the place of the father of _La
Luna_, himself killed in a great battle up there in the mountains. Was
there cause? Who shall know? But there were stories among the people of
terrible things in the villa, and how _La Luna_ was seen almost never
outside the walls. Then the Duke would go for many days to Napoli,
coming home only now and then to the villa that was become a fortress,
so many men guarded its never-opening gates. And once--it was in the
spring--the Duke came silently down from Napoli, and there, by the three
poplars you see away towards the north, his carriage was set upon by
armed men, and he was almost killed; but he had with him many guards,
and after a terrible fight the brigands were beaten off; but before him,
wounded, lay the captain,--the man whom he feared and hated. He looked
at him, lying there under the torchlight, and in his hand saw _his own
sword_. Then he became a devil: with the same sword he ran the brigand
through, leaped in the carriage, and, entering the villa, crept to the
chamber of _La Luna_, and killed her with the sword she had given to her
lover.
"This is all the story of the White Villa, except that the Duke came
never again to Pesto. He went back to the king at Napoli, and for many
years he was the scourge of the banditti of Campania; for the King made
him a general, and San Damiano was a name feared by the lawless and
loved by the peaceful, until he was killed in a battle down by Mormanno.
"And _La Luna_? Some say she comes back to the villa, once a year, when
the moon is full, in the month when she was slain; for the Duke buried
her, they say, with his own hands, in the garden that was once under the
window of her chamber; and as she died unshriven, so was she buried
without the pale of the Church. Therefore she cannot sleep in
peace,--_non e vero_? I do not know if the story is true, but this is
the story, Signori, and there is the train for Napoli. _Ah, grazie!
Signori, grazie tanto! A rivederci! Signori, a rivederci!_"
SISTER MADDELENA.
Sister Maddelena.
Across the valley of the Oreto from Monreale, on the slopes of the
mountains just above the little village of Parco, lies the old convent
of Sta. Catarina. From the cloister terrace at Monreale you can see its
pale walls and the slim campanile of its chapel rising from the crowded
citron and mulberry orchards that flourish, rank and wild, no longer
cared for by pious and loving hands. From the rough road that climbs the
mountains to Assunto, the convent is invisible, a gnarled and ragged
olive grove intervening, and a spur of cliffs as well, while from
Palermo one sees only the speck of white, flashing in the sun,
indistinguishable from the many similar gleams of desert monastery or
pauper village.
Partly because of this seclusion, partly by reason of its extreme
beauty, partly, it may be, because the present owners are more than
charming and gracious in their pressing hospitality, Sta. Catarina seems
to preserve an element of the poetic, almost magical; and as I drove
with the Cavaliere Valguanera one evening in March out of Palermo, along
the garden valley of the Oreto, then up the mountain side where the warm
light of the spring sunset swept across from Monreale, lying golden and
mellow on the luxuriant growth of figs, and olives, and orange-trees,
and fantastic cacti, and so up to where the path of the convent swung
off to the right round a dizzy point of cliff that reached out gaunt and
gray from the olives below,--as I drove thus in the balmy air, and saw
of a sudden a vision of creamy walls and orange roofs, draped in
fantastic festoons of roses, with a single curving palm-tree stuck black
and feathery against the gold sunset, it is hardly to be wondered at
that I should slip into a mood of visionary enjoyment, looking for a
time on the whole thing as the misty phantasm of a summer dream.
The Cavaliere had introduced himself to us,--Tom Rendel and me,--one
morning soon after we reached Palermo, when, in the first bewilderment
of architects in this paradise of art and color, we were working nobly
at our sketches in that dream of delight, the Capella Palatina. He was
himself an amateur archaeologist, he told us, and passionately devoted to
his island; so he felt impelled to speak to any one whom he saw
appreciating the almost--and in a way fortunately--unknown beauties of
Palermo. In a little time we were fully acquainted, and talking like the
oldest friends. Of course he knew acquaintances of Rendel's,--some one
always does: this time they were officers on the tubby U. S. S.
"Quinebaug," that, during the summer of 1888, was trying to uphold the
maritime honor of the United States in European waters. Luckily for us,
one of the officers was a kind of cousin of Rendel's, and came from
Baltimore as well, so, as he had visited at the Cavaliere's place, we
were soon invited to do the same. It was in this way that, with the luck
that attends Rendel wherever he goes, we came to see something of
domestic life in Italy, and that I found myself involved in another of
those adventures for which I naturally sought so little.
I wonder if there is any other place in Sicily so faultless as Sta.
Catarina? Taormina is a paradise, an epitome of all that is beautiful in
Italy,--Venice excepted. Girgenti is a solemn epic, with its golden
temples between the sea and hills. Cefalu is wild and strange, and
Monreale a vision out of a fairy tale; but Sta. Catarina!--
Fancy a convent of creamy stone and rose-red brick perched on a ledge of
rock midway between earth and heaven, the cliff falling almost sheer to
the valley two hundred feet and more, the mountain rising behind
straight towards the sky; all the rocks covered with cactus and dwarf
fig-trees, the convent draped in smothering roses, and in front a
terrace with a fountain in the midst; and then--nothing--between you and
the sapphire sea, six miles away. Below stretches the Eden valley, the
Concha d'Oro, gold-green fig orchards alternating with smoke-blue
olives, the mountains rising on either hand and sinking undulously away
towards the bay where, like a magic city of ivory and nacre, Palermo
lies guarded by the twin mountains, Monte Pellegrino and Capo Zafferano,
arid rocks like dull amethysts, rose in sunlight, violet in shadow:
lions couchant, guarding the sleeping town.
Seen as we saw it for the first time that hot evening in March, with the
golden lambent light pouring down through the valley, making it in
verity a "shell of gold," sitting in Indian chairs on the terrace, with
the perfume of roses and jasmines all around us, the valley of the
Oreto, Palermo, Sta. Catarina, Monreale,--all were but parts of a dreamy
vision, like the heavenly city of Sir Percivale, to attain which he
passed across the golden bridge that burned after him as he vanished in
the intolerable light of the Beatific Vision.
It was all so unreal, so phantasmal, that I was not surprised in the
least when, late in the evening after the ladies had gone to their
rooms, and the Cavaliere, Tom, and I were stretched out in chairs on the
terrace, smoking lazily under the multitudinous stars, the Cavaliere
said, "There is something I really must tell you both before you go to
bed, so that you may be spared any unnecessary alarm."
"You are going to say that the place is haunted," said Rendel, feeling
vaguely on the floor beside him for his glass of Amaro: "thank you; it
is all it needs."
The Cavaliere smiled a little: "Yes, that is just it. Sta. Catarina is
really haunted; and much as my reason revolts against the idea as
superstitious and savoring of priestcraft, yet I must acknowledge I see
no way of avoiding the admission. I do not presume to offer any
explanations, I only state the fact; and the fact is that to-night one
or other of you will, in all human--or unhuman--probability, receive a
visit from Sister Maddelena. You need not be in the least afraid, the
apparition is perfectly gentle and harmless; and, moreover, having seen
it once, you will never see it again. No one sees the ghost, or whatever
it is, but once, and that usually the first night he spends in the
house. I myself saw the thing eight--nine years ago, when I first bought
the place from the Marchese di Muxaro; all my people have seen it,
nearly all my guests, so I think you may as well be prepared."
"Then tell us what to expect," I said; "what kind of a ghost is this
nocturnal visitor?"
"It is simple enough. Some time to-night you will suddenly awake and see
before you a Carmelite nun who will look fixedly at you, say distinctly
and very sadly, 'I cannot sleep,' and then vanish. That is all, it is
hardly worth speaking of, only some people are terribly frightened if
they are visited unwarned by strange apparitions; so I tell you this
that you may be prepared."
"This was a Carmelite convent, then?" I said.
"Yes; it was suppressed after the unification of Italy, and given to the
House of Muxaro; but the family died out, and I bought it. There is a
story about the ghostly nun, who was only a novice, and even that
unwillingly, which gives an interest to an otherwise very commonplace
and uninteresting ghost."
"I beg that you will tell it us," cried Rendel.
"There is a storm coming," I added. "See, the lightning is flashing
already up among the mountains at the head of the valley; if the story
is tragic, as it must be, now is just the time for it. You will tell it,
will you not?"
The Cavaliere smiled that slow, cryptic smile of his that was so
unfathomable.
"As you say, there is a shower coming, and as we have fierce tempests
here, we might not sleep; so perhaps we may as well sit up a little
longer, and I will tell you the story."
The air was utterly still, hot and oppressive; the rich, sick odor of
the oranges just bursting into bloom came up from the valley in a gently
rising tide. The sky, thick with stars, seemed mirrored in the rich
foliage below, so numerous were the glow-worms under the still trees,
and the fireflies that gleamed in the hot air. Lightning flashed
fitfully from the darkening west; but as yet no thunder broke the heavy
silence.
The Cavaliere lighted another cigar, and pulled a cushion under his head
so that he could look down to the distant lights of the city. "This is
the story," he said.
"Once upon a time, late in the last century, the Duca di Castiglione was
attached to the court of Charles III., King of the Two Sicilies, down at
Palermo. They tell me he was very ambitious, and, not content with
marrying his son to one of the ladies of the House of Tuscany, had
betrothed his only daughter, Rosalia, to Prince Antonio, a cousin of the
king. His whole life was wrapped up in the fame of his family, and he
quite forgot all domestic affection in his madness for dynastic glory.
His son was a worthy scion, cold and proud; but Rosalia was, according
to legend, utterly the reverse,--a passionate, beautiful girl, wilful
and headstrong, and careless of her family and the world.
"The time had nearly come for her to marry Prince Antonio, a typical
_roue_ of the Spanish court, when, through the treachery of a servant,
the Duke discovered that his daughter was in love with a young military
officer whose name I don't remember, and that an elopement had been
planned to take place the next night. The fury and dismay of the old
autocrat passed belief; he saw in a flash the downfall of all his hopes
of family aggrandizement through union with the royal house, and,
knowing well the spirit of his daughter, despaired of ever bringing her
to subjection. Nevertheless, he attacked her unmercifully, and, by
bullying and threats, by imprisonment, and even bodily chastisement, he
tried to break her spirit and bend her to his indomitable will. Through
his power at court he had the lover sent away to the mainland, and for
more than a year he held his daughter closely imprisoned in his palace
on the Toledo,--that one, you may remember, on the right, just beyond
the Via del Collegio dei Gesuiti, with the beautiful iron-work grilles
at all the windows, and the painted frieze. But nothing could move her,
nothing bend her stubborn will; and at last, furious at the girl he
could not govern, Castiglione sent her to this convent, then one of the
few houses of barefoot Carmelite nuns in Italy. He stipulated that she
should take the name of Maddelena, that he should never hear of her
again, and that she should be held an absolute prisoner in this
conventual castle.
"Rosalia--or Sister Maddelena, as she was now--believed her lover dead,
for her father had given her good proofs of this, and she believed him;
nevertheless she refused to marry another, and seized upon the convent
life as a blessed relief from the tyranny of her maniacal father.
"She lived here for four or five years; her name was forgotten at court
and in her father's palace. Rosalia di Castiglione was dead, and only
Sister Maddelena lived, a Carmelite nun, in her place.
"In 1798 Ferdinand IV. found himself driven from his throne on the
mainland, his kingdom divided, and he himself forced to flee to Sicily.
With him came the lover of the dead Rosalia, now high in military honor.
He on his part had thought Rosalia dead, and it was only by accident
that he found that she still lived, a Carmelite nun. Then began the
second act of the romance that until then had been only sadly
commonplace, but now became dark and tragic. Michele--Michele
Biscari,--that was his name; I remember now--haunted the region of the
convent, striving to communicate with Sister Maddelena; and at last,
from the cliffs over us, up there among the citrons--you will see by the
next flash of lightning--he saw her in the great cloister, recognized
her in her white habit, found her the same dark and splendid beauty of
six years before, only made more beautiful by her white habit and her
rigid life. By and by he found a day when she was alone, and tossed a
ring to her as she stood in the midst of the cloister. She looked up,
saw him, and from that moment lived only to love him in life as she had
loved his memory in the death she had thought had overtaken him.
"With the utmost craft they arranged their plans together. They could
not speak, for a word would have aroused the other inmates of the
convent. They could make signs only when Sister Maddelena was alone.
Michele could throw notes to her from the cliff,--a feat demanding a
strong arm, as you will see, if you measure the distance with your
eye,--and she could drop replies from the window over the cliff, which
he picked up at the bottom. Finally he succeeded in casting into the
cloister a coil of light rope. The girl fastened it to the bars of one
of the windows, and--so great is the madness of love--Biscari actually
climbed the rope from the valley to the window of the cell, a distance
of almost two hundred feet, with but three little craggy resting-places
in all that height. For nearly a month these nocturnal visits were
undiscovered, and Michele had almost completed his arrangements for
carrying the girl from Sta. Catarina and away to Spain, when
unfortunately one of the sisters, suspecting some mystery, from the
changed face of Sister Maddelena, began investigating, and at length
discovered the rope neatly coiled up by the nun's window, and hidden
under some clinging vines. She instantly told the Mother Superior; and
together they watched from a window in the crypt of the chapel,--the
only place, as you will see to-morrow, from which one could see the
window of Sister Maddelena's cell. They saw the figure of Michele
daringly ascending the slim rope; watched hour after hour, the Sister
remaining while the Superior went to say the hours in the chapel, at
each of which Sister Maddelena was present; and at last, at prime, just
as the sun was rising, they saw the figure slip down the rope, watched
the rope drawn up and concealed, and knew that Sister Maddelena was in
their hands for vengeance and punishment,--a criminal.
"The next day, by the order of the Mother Superior, Sister Maddelena was
imprisoned in one of the cells under the chapel, charged with her guilt,
and commanded to make full and complete confession. But not a word would
she say, although they offered her forgiveness if she would tell the
name of her lover. At last the Superior told her that after this fashion
would they act the coming night: she herself would be placed in the
crypt, tied in front of the window, her mouth gagged; that the rope
would be lowered, and the lover allowed to approach even to the sill of
her window, and at that moment the rope would be cut, and before her
eyes her lover would be dashed to death on the ragged cliffs. The plan
was feasible, and Sister Maddelena knew that the Mother was perfectly
capable of carrying it out. Her stubborn spirit was broken, and in the
only way possible; she begged for mercy, for the sparing of her lover.
The Mother Superior was deaf at first; at last she said, 'It is your
life or his. I will spare him on condition that you sacrifice your own
life.' Sister Maddelena accepted the terms joyfully, wrote a last
farewell to Michele, fastened the note to the rope, and with her own
hands cut the rope and saw it fall coiling down to the valley bed far
below.