By what means the papers out of which I have made a connected story
came into my hands is the last point which the reader will learn from
these pages. But it is necessary to prefix to my extracts from them a
statement of the form in which I possess them.
They consist, then, partly of a series of collections for a book of
travels, such a volume as was a common product of the forties and
fifties. Horace Marryat’s _Journal of a Residence in Jutland and the
Danish Isles_ is a fair specimen of the class to which I allude. These
books usually treated of some unknown district on the Continent. They
were illustrated with woodcuts or steel plates. They gave details of
hotel accommodation, and of means of communication, such as we now
expect to find in any well-regulated guide-book, and they dealt largely
in reported conversations with intelligent foreigners, racy innkeepers,
and garrulous peasants. In a word, they were chatty.
Begun with the idea of furnishing material for such a book, my papers
as they progressed assumed the character of a record of one single
personal experience, and this record was continued up to the very eve,
almost, of its termination.
The writer was a Mr Wraxall. For my knowledge of him I have to depend
entirely on the evidence his writings afford, and from these I deduce
that he was a man past middle age, possessed of some private means, and
very much alone in the world. He had, it seems, no settled abode in
England, but was a denizen of hotels and boarding-houses. It is
probable that he entertained the idea of settling down at some future
time which never came; and I think it also likely that the Pantechnicon
fire in the early seventies must have destroyed a great deal that would
have thrown light on his antecedents, for he refers once or twice to
property of his that was warehoused at that establishment.
It is further apparent that Mr Wraxall had published a book, and that
it treated of a holiday he had once taken in Brittany. More than this I
cannot say about his work, because a diligent search in bibliographical
works has convinced me that it must have appeared either anonymously or
under a pseudonym.
As to his character, it is not difficult to form some superficial
opinion. He must have been an intelligent and cultivated man. It seems
that he was near being a Fellow of his college at Oxford—Brasenose, as
I judge from the Calendar. His besetting fault was pretty clearly that
of over-inquisitiveness, possibly a good fault in a traveller,
certainly a fault for which this traveller paid dearly enough in the
end.
On what proved to be his last expedition, he was plotting another book.
Scandinavia, a region not widely known to Englishmen forty years ago,
had struck him as an interesting field. He must have alighted on some
old books of Swedish history or memoirs, and the idea had struck him
that there was room for a book descriptive of travel in Sweden,
interspersed with episodes from the history of some of the great
Swedish families. He procured letters of introduction, therefore, to
some persons of quality in Sweden, and set out thither in the early
summer of 1863.
Of his travels in the North there is no need to speak, nor of his
residence of some weeks in Stockholm. I need only mention that some
_savant_ resident there put him on the track of an important collection
of family papers belonging to the proprietors of an ancient manor-house
in Vestergothland, and obtained for him permission to examine them.
The manor-house, or _herrgård_, in question is to be called Råbäck
(pronounced something like Roebeck), though that is not its name. It is
one of the best buildings of its kind in all the country, and the
picture of it in Dahlenberg’s _Suecia antiqua et moderna_, engraved in
1694, shows it very much as the tourist may see it today. It was built
soon after 1600, and is, roughly speaking, very much like an English
house of that period in respect of material—red-brick with stone
facings—and style. The man who built it was a scion of the great house
of De la Gardie, and his descendants possess it still. De la Gardie is
the name by which I will designate them when mention of them becomes
necessary.
They received Mr Wraxall with great kindness and courtesy, and pressed
him to stay in the house as long as his researches lasted. But,
preferring to be independent, and mistrusting his powers of conversing
in Swedish, he settled himself at the village inn, which turned out
quite sufficiently comfortable, at any rate during the summer months.
This arrangement would entail a short walk daily to and from the
manor-house of something under a mile. The house itself stood in a
park, and was protected—we should say grown up—with large old timber.
Near it you found the walled garden, and then entered a close wood
fringing one of the small lakes with which the whole country is pitted.
Then came the wall of the demesne, and you climbed a steep knoll—a knob
of rock lightly covered with soil—and on the top of this stood the
church, fenced in with tall dark trees. It was a curious building to
English eyes. The nave and aisles were low, and filled with pews and
galleries. In the western gallery stood the handsome old organ, gaily
painted, and with silver pipes. The ceiling was flat, and had been
adorned by a seventeenth-century artist with a strange and hideous
“Last Judgement”, full of lurid flames, falling cities, burning ships,
crying souls, and brown and smiling demons. Handsome brass coronae hung
from the roof; the pulpit was like a doll’s-house covered with little
painted wooden cherubs and saints; a stand with three hour-glasses was
hinged to the preacher’s desk. Such sights as these may be seen in many
a church in Sweden now, but what distinguished this one was an addition
to the original building. At the eastern end of the north aisle the
builder of the manor-house had erected a mausoleum for himself and his
family. It was a largish eight-sided building, lighted by a series of
oval windows, and it had a domed roof, topped by a kind of
pumpkin-shaped object rising into a spire, a form in which Swedish
architects greatly delighted. The roof was of copper externally, and
was painted black, while the walls, in common with those of the church,
were staringly white. To this mausoleum there was no access from the
church. It had a portal and steps of its own on the northern side.
Past the churchyard the path to the village goes, and not more than
three or four minutes bring you to the inn door.
On the first day of his stay at Råbäck Mr Wraxall found the church door
open, and made those notes of the interior which I have epitomized.
Into the mausoleum, however, he could not make his way. He could by
looking through the keyhole just descry that there were fine marble
effigies and sarcophagi of copper, and a wealth of armorial ornament,
which made him very anxious to spend some time in investigation.
The papers he had come to examine at the manor-house proved to be of
just the kind he wanted for his book. There were family correspondence,
journals, and account-books of the earliest owners of the estate, very
carefully kept and clearly written, full of amusing and picturesque
detail. The first De la Gardie appeared in them as a strong and capable
man. Shortly after the building of the mansion there had been a period
of distress in the district, and the peasants had risen and attacked
several châteaux and done some damage. The owner of Råbäck took a
leading part in supressing the trouble, and there was reference to
executions of ring-leaders and severe punishments inflicted with no
sparing hand.
The portrait of this Magnus de la Gardie was one of the best in the
house, and Mr Wraxall studied it with no little interest after his
day’s work. He gives no detailed description of it, but I gather that
the face impressed him rather by its power than by its beauty or
goodness; in fact, he writes that Count Magnus was an almost
phenomenally ugly man.
On this day Mr Wraxall took his supper with the family, and walked back
in the late but still bright evening.
“I must remember,” he writes, “to ask the sexton if he can let me into
the mausoleum at the church. He evidently has access to it himself, for
I saw him tonight standing on the steps, and, as I thought, locking or
unlocking the door.”
I find that early on the following day Mr Wraxall had some conversation
with his landlord. His setting it down at such length as he does
surprised me at first; but I soon realized that the papers I was
reading were, at least in their beginning, the materials for the book
he was meditating, and that it was to have been one of those
quasi-journalistic productions which admit of the introduction of an
admixture of conversational matter.
His object, he says, was to find out whether any traditions of Count
Magnus de la Gardie lingered on in the scenes of that gentleman’s
activity, and whether the popular estimate of him were favourable or
not. He found that the Count was decidedly not a favourite. If his
tenants came late to their work on the days which they owed to him as
Lord of the Manor, they were set on the wooden horse, or flogged and
branded in the manor-house yard. One or two cases there were of men who
had occupied lands which encroached on the lord’s domain, and whose
houses had been mysteriously burnt on a winter’s night, with the whole
family inside. But what seemed to dwell on the innkeeper’s mind
most—for he returned to the subject more than once—was that the Count
had been on the Black Pilgrimage, and had brought something or someone
back with him.
You will naturally inquire, as Mr Wraxall did, what the Black
Pilgrimage may have been. But your curiosity on the point must remain
unsatisfied for the time being, just as his did. The landlord was
evidently unwilling to give a full answer, or indeed any answer, on the
point, and, being called out for a moment, trotted out with obvious
alacrity, only putting his head in at the door a few minutes afterwards
to say that he was called away to Skara, and should not be back till
evening.
So Mr Wraxall had to go unsatisfied to his day’s work at the
manor-house. The papers on which he was just then engaged soon put his
thoughts into another channel, for he had to occupy himself with
glancing over the correspondence between Sophia Albertina in Stockholm
and her married cousin Ulrica Leonora at Råbäck in the years 1705-1710.
The letters were of exceptional interest from the light they threw upon
the culture of that period in Sweden, as anyone can testify who has
read the full edition of them in the publications of the Swedish
Historical Manuscripts Commission.
In the afternoon he had done with these, and after returning the boxes
in which they were kept to their places on the shelf, he proceeded,
very naturally, to take down some of the volumes nearest to them, in
order to determine which of them had best be his principal subject of
investigation next day. The shelf he had hit upon was occupied mostly
by a collection of account-books in the writing of the first Count
Magnus. But one among them was not an account-book, but a book of
alchemical and other tracts in another sixteenth-century hand. Not
being very familiar with alchemical literature, Mr Wraxall spends much
space which he might have spared in setting out the names and
beginnings of the various treatises: The book of the Phœnix, book of
the Thirty Words, book of the Toad, book of Miriam, Turba
philosophorum, and so forth; and then he announces with a good deal of
circumstance his delight at finding, on a leaf originally left blank
near the middle of the book, some writing of Count Magnus himself
headed “Liber nigræ peregrinationis”. It is true that only a few lines
were written, but there was quite enough to show that the landlord had
that morning been referring to a belief at least as old as the time of
Count Magnus, and probably shared by him. This is the English of what
was written:
“If any man desires to obtain a long life, if he would obtain a
faithful messenger and see the blood of his enemies, it is necessary
that he should first go into the city of Chorazin, and there salute the
prince….” Here there was an erasure of one word, not very thoroughly
done, so that Mr Wraxall felt pretty sure that he was right in reading
it as _aëris_ (“of the air”). But there was no more of the text copied,
only a line in Latin: _Quære reliqua hujus materiei inter secretiora_.
(See the rest of this matter among the more private things.)
It could not be denied that this threw a rather lurid light upon the
tastes and beliefs of the Count; but to Mr Wraxall, separated from him
by nearly three centuries, the thought that he might have added to his
general forcefulness alchemy, and to alchemy something like magic, only
made him a more picturesque figure; and when, after a rather prolonged
contemplation of his picture in the hall, Mr Wraxall set out on his
homeward way, his mind was full of the thought of Count Magnus. He had
no eyes for his surroundings, no perception of the evening scents of
the woods or the evening light on the lake; and when all of a sudden he
pulled up short, he was astonished to find himself already at the gate
of the churchyard, and within a few minutes of his dinner. His eyes
fell on the mausoleum.
“Ah,” he said, “Count Magnus, there you are. I should dearly like to
see you.”
“Like many solitary men,” he writes, “I have a habit of talking to
myself aloud; and, unlike some of the Greek and Latin particles, I do
not expect an answer. Certainly, and perhaps fortunately in this case,
there was neither voice nor any that regarded: only the woman who, I
suppose, was cleaning up the church, dropped some metallic object on
the floor, whose clang startled me. Count Magnus, I think, sleeps sound
enough.”
That same evening the landlord of the inn, who had heard Mr Wraxall say
that he wished to see the clerk or deacon (as he would be called in
Sweden) of the parish, introduced him to that official in the inn
parlour. A visit to the De la Gardie tomb-house was soon arranged for
the next day, and a little general conversation ensued.
Mr Wraxall, remembering that one function of Scandinavian deacons is to
teach candidates for Confirmation, thought he would refresh his own
memory on a Biblical point.
“Can you tell me,” he said, “anything about Chorazin?”
The deacon seemed startled, but readily reminded him how that village
had once been denounced.
“To be sure,” said Mr Wraxall; “it is, I suppose, quite a ruin now?”
“So I expect,” replied the deacon. “I have heard some of our old
priests say that Antichrist is to be born there; and there are tales—”
“Ah! what tales are those?” Mr Wraxall put in.
“Tales, I was going to say, which I have forgotten,” said the deacon;
and soon after that he said good night.
The landlord was now alone, and at Mr Wraxall’s mercy; and that
inquirer was not inclined to spare him.
“Herr Nielsen,” he said, “I have found out something about the Black
Pilgrimage. You may as well tell me what you know. What did the Count
bring back with him?”
Swedes are habitually slow, perhaps, in answering, or perhaps the
landlord was an exception. I am not sure; but Mr Wraxall notes that the
landlord spent at least one minute in looking at him before he said
anything at all. Then he came close up to his guest, and with a good
deal of effort he spoke:
“Mr Wraxall, I can tell you this one little tale, and no more—not any
more. You must not ask anything when I have done. In my grandfather’s
time—that is, ninety-two years ago—there were two men who said: ‘The
Count is dead; we do not care for him. We will go tonight and have a
free hunt in his wood’—the long wood on the hill that you have seen
behind Råbäck. Well, those that heard them say this, they said: ‘No, do
not go; we are sure you will meet with persons walking who should not
be walking. They should be resting, not walking.’ These men laughed.
There were no forestmen to keep the wood, because no one wished to live
there. The family were not here at the house. These men could do what
they wished.
“Very well, they go to the wood that night. My grandfather was sitting
here in this room. It was the summer, and a light night. With the
window open, he could see out to the wood, and hear.
“So he sat there, and two or three men with him, and they listened. At
first they hear nothing at all; then they hear someone—you know how far
away it is—they hear someone scream, just as if the most inside part of
his soul was twisted out of him. All of them in the room caught hold of
each other, and they sat so for three-quarters of an hour. Then they
hear someone else, only about three hundred ells off. They hear him
laugh out loud: it was not one of those two men that laughed, and,
indeed, they have all of them said that it was not any man at all.
After that they hear a great door shut.
“Then, when it was just light with the sun, they all went to the
priest. They said to him:
“‘Father, put on your gown and your ruff, and come to bury these men,
Anders Bjornsen and Hans Thorbjorn.’
“You understand that they were sure these men were dead. So they went
to the wood—my grandfather never forgot this. He said they were all
like so many dead men themselves. The priest, too, he was in a white
fear. He said when they came to him:
“‘I heard one cry in the night, and I heard one laugh afterwards. If I
cannot forget that, I shall not be able to sleep again.’
“So they went to the wood, and they found these men on the edge of the
wood. Hans Thorbjorn was standing with his back against a tree, and all
the time he was pushing with his hands—pushing something away from him
which was not there. So he was not dead. And they led him away, and
took him to the house at Nykjoping, and he died before the winter; but
he went on pushing with his hands. Also Anders Bjornsen was there; but
he was dead. And I tell you this about Anders Bjornsen, that he was
once a beautiful man, but now his face was not there, because the flesh
of it was sucked away off the bones. You understand that? My
grandfather did not forget that. And they laid him on the bier which
they brought, and they put a cloth over his head, and the priest walked
before; and they began to sing the psalm for the dead as well as they
could. So, as they were singing the end of the first verse, one fell
down, who was carrying the head of the bier, and the others looked
back, and they saw that the cloth had fallen off, and the eyes of
Anders Bjornsen were looking up, because there was nothing to close
over them. And this they could not bear. Therefore the priest laid the
cloth upon him, and sent for a spade, and they buried him in that
place.”
The next day Mr Wraxall records that the deacon called for him soon
after his breakfast, and took him to the church and mausoleum. He
noticed that the key of the latter was hung on a nail just by the
pulpit, and it occurred to him that, as the church door seemed to be
left unlocked as a rule, it would not be difficult for him to pay a
second and more private visit to the monuments if there proved to be
more of interest among them than could be digested at first. The
building, when he entered it, he found not unimposing. The monuments,
mostly large erections of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
were dignified if luxuriant, and the epitaphs and heraldry were
copious. The central space of the domed room was occupied by three
copper sarcophagi, covered with finely-engraved ornament. Two of them
had, as is commonly the case in Denmark and Sweden, a large metal
crucifix on the lid. The third, that of Count Magnus, as it appeared,
had, instead of that, a full-length effigy engraved upon it, and round
the edge were several bands of similar ornament representing various
scenes. One was a battle, with cannon belching out smoke, and walled
towns, and troops of pikemen. Another showed an execution. In a third,
among trees, was a man running at full speed, with flying hair and
outstretched hands. After him followed a strange form; it would be hard
to say whether the artist had intended it for a man, and was unable to
give the requisite similitude, or whether it was intentionally made as
monstrous as it looked. In view of the skill with which the rest of the
drawing was done, Mr Wraxall felt inclined to adopt the latter idea.
The figure was unduly short, and was for the most part muffled in a
hooded garment which swept the ground. The only part of the form which
projected from that shelter was not shaped like any hand or arm. Mr
Wraxall compares it to the tentacle of a devil-fish, and continues: “On
seeing this, I said to myself, ‘This, then, which is evidently an
allegorical representation of some kind—a fiend pursuing a hunted
soul—may be the origin of the story of Count Magnus and his mysterious
companion. Let us see how the huntsman is pictured: doubtless it will
be a demon blowing his horn.”’ But, as it turned out, there was no such
sensational figure, only the semblance of a cloaked man on a hillock,
who stood leaning on a stick, and watching the hunt with an interest
which the engraver had tried to express in his attitude.
Mr Wraxall noted the finely-worked and massive steel padlocks—three in
number—which secured the sarcophagus. One of them, he saw, was
detached, and lay on the pavement. And then, unwilling to delay the
deacon longer or to waste his own working-time, he made his way onward
to the manor-house.
“It is curious,” he notes, “how, on retracing a familiar path, one’s
thoughts engross one to the absolute exclusion of surrounding objects.
Tonight, for the second time, I had entirely failed to notice where I
was going (I had planned a private visit to the tomb-house to copy the
epitaphs), when I suddenly, as it were, awoke to consciousness, and
found myself (as before) turning in at the churchyard gate, and, I
believe, singing or chanting some such words as, ‘Are you awake, Count
Magnus? Are you asleep, Count Magnus?’ and then something more which I
have failed to recollect. It seemed to me that I must have been
behaving in this nonsensical way for some time.”
He found the key of the mausoleum where he had expected to find it, and
copied the greater part of what he wanted; in fact, he stayed until the
light began to fail him.
“I must have been wrong,” he writes, “in saying that one of the
padlocks of my Count’s sarcophagus was unfastened; I see tonight that
two are loose. I picked both up, and laid them carefully on the
window-ledge, after trying unsuccessfully to close them. The remaining
one is still firm, and, though I take it to be a spring lock, I cannot
guess how it is opened. Had I succeeded in undoing it, I am almost
afraid I should have taken the liberty of opening the sarcophagus. It
is strange, the interest I feel in the personality of this, I fear,
somewhat ferocious and grim old noble.”
The day following was, as it turned out, the last of Mr Wraxall’s stay
at Råbäck. He received letters connected with certain investments which
made it desirable that he should return to England; his work among the
papers was practically done, and travelling was slow. He decided,
therefore, to make his farewells, put some finishing touches to his
notes, and be off.
These finishing touches and farewells, as it turned out, took more time
than he had expected. The hospitable family insisted on his staying to
dine with them—they dined at three—and it was verging on half past six
before he was outside the iron gates of Råbäck. He dwelt on every step
of his walk by the lake, determined to saturate himself, now that he
trod it for the last time, in the sentiment of the place and hour. And
when he reached the summit of the churchyard knoll, he lingered for
many minutes, gazing at the limitless prospect of woods near and
distant, all dark beneath a sky of liquid green. When at last he turned
to go, the thought struck him that surely he must bid farewell to Count
Magnus as well as the rest of the De la Gardies. The church was but
twenty yards away, and he knew where the key of the mausoleum hung. It
was not long before he was standing over the great copper coffin, and,
as usual, talking to himself aloud. “You may have been a bit of a
rascal in your time, Magnus,” he was saying, “but for all that I should
like to see you, or, rather—”
“Just at that instant,” he says, “I felt a blow on my foot. Hastily
enough I drew it back, and something fell on the pavement with a clash.
It was the third, the last of the three padlocks which had fastened the
sarcophagus. I stooped to pick it up, and—Heaven is my witness that I
am writing only the bare truth—before I had raised myself there was a
sound of metal hinges creaking, and I distinctly saw the lid shifting
upwards. I may have behaved like a coward, but I could not for my life
stay for one moment. I was outside that dreadful building in less time
than I can write—almost as quickly as I could have said—the words; and
what frightens me yet more, I could not turn the key in the lock. As I
sit here in my room noting these facts, I ask myself (it was not twenty
minutes ago) whether that noise of creaking metal continued, and I
cannot tell whether it did or not. I only know that there was something
more than I have written that alarmed me, but whether it was sound or
sight I am not able to remember. What is this that I have done?”
Poor Mr Wraxall! He set out on his journey to England on the next day,
as he had planned, and he reached England in safety; and yet, as I
gather from his changed hand and inconsequent jottings, a broken man.
One of several small note-books that have come to me with his papers
gives, not a key to, but a kind of inkling of, his experiences. Much of
his journey was made by canal-boat, and I find not less than six
painful attempts to enumerate and describe his fellow-passengers. The
entries are of this kind:
24. Pastor of village in Skåne. Usual black coat and soft black hat.
25. Commercial traveller from Stockholm going to Trollhättan. Black
cloak, brown hat.
26. Man in long black cloak, broad-leafed hat, very old-fashioned.
This entry is lined out, and a note added: “Perhaps identical with No.
13. Have not yet seen his face.” On referring to No. 13, I find that he
is a Roman priest in a cassock.
The net result of the reckoning is always the same. Twenty-eight people
appear in the enumeration, one being always a man in a long black cloak
and broad hat, and another a “short figure in dark cloak and hood”. On
the other hand, it is always noted that only twenty-six passengers
appear at meals, and that the man in the cloak is perhaps absent, and
the short figure is certainly absent.
On reaching England, it appears that Mr Wraxall landed at Harwich, and
that he resolved at once to put himself out of the reach of some person
or persons whom he never specifies, but whom he had evidently come to
regard as his pursuers. Accordingly he took a vehicle—it was a closed
fly—not trusting the railway and drove across country to the village of
Belchamp St Paul. It was about nine o’clock on a moonlight August night
when he neared the place. He was sitting forward, and looking out of
the window at the fields and thickets—there was little else to be
seen—racing past him. Suddenly he came to a cross-road. At the corner
two figures were standing motionless; both were in dark cloaks; the
taller one wore a hat, the shorter a hood. He had no time to see their
faces, nor did they make any motion that he could discern. Yet the
horse shied violently and broke into a gallop, and Mr Wraxall sank back
into his seat in something like desperation. He had seen them before.
Arrived at Belchamp St Paul, he was fortunate enough to find a decent
furnished lodging, and for the next twenty-four hours he lived,
comparatively speaking, in peace. His last notes were written on this
day. They are too disjointed and ejaculatory to be given here in full,
but the substance of them is clear enough. He is expecting a visit from
his pursuers—how or when he knows not—and his constant cry is “What has
he done?” and “Is there no hope?” Doctors, he knows, would call him
mad, policemen would laugh at him. The parson is away. What can he do
but lock his door and cry to God?
People still remembered last year at Belchamp St Paul how a strange
gentleman came one evening in August years back; and how the next
morning but one he was found dead, and there was an inquest; and the
jury that viewed the body fainted, seven of ’em did, and none of ’em
wouldn’t speak to what they see, and the verdict was visitation of God;
and how the people as kep’ the ’ouse moved out that same week, and went
away from that part. But they do not, I think, know that any glimmer of
light has ever been thrown, or could be thrown, on the mystery. It so
happened that last year the little house came into my hands as part of
a legacy. It had stood empty since 1863, and there seemed no prospect
of letting it; so I had it pulled down, and the papers of which I have
given you an abstract were found in a forgotten cupboard under the
window in the best bedroom.
“OH, WHISTLE, AND I’LL COME TO YOU, MY LAD”
“I suppose you will be getting away pretty soon, now Full Term is over,
Professor,” said a person not in the story to the Professor of
Ontography, soon after they had sat down next to each other at a feast
in the hospitable hall of St James’s College.
The Professor was young, neat, and precise in speech.
“Yes,” he said; “my friends have been making me take up golf this term,
and I mean to go to the East Coast—in point of fact to Burnstow—(I dare
say you know it) for a week or ten days, to improve my game. I hope to
get off tomorrow.”
“Oh, Parkins,” said his neighbour on the other side, “if you are going
to Burnstow, I wish you would look at the site of the Templars’
preceptory, and let me know if you think it would be any good to have a
dig there in the summer.”
It was, as you might suppose, a person of antiquarian pursuits who said
this, but, since he merely appears in this prologue, there is no need
to give his entitlements.
“Certainly,” said Parkins, the Professor: “if you will describe to me
whereabouts the site is, I will do my best to give you an idea of the
lie of the land when I get back; or I could write to you about it, if
you would tell me where you are likely to be.”
“Don’t trouble to do that, thanks. It’s only that I’m thinking of
taking my family in that direction in the Long, and it occurred to me
that, as very few of the English preceptories have ever been properly
planned, I might have an opportunity of doing something useful on
off-days.”
The Professor rather sniffed at the idea that planning out a preceptory
could be described as useful. His neighbour continued:
“The site—I doubt if there is anything showing above ground—must be
down quite close to the beach now. The sea has encroached tremendously,
as you know, all along that bit of coast. I should think, from the map,
that it must be about three-quarters of a mile from the Globe Inn, at
the north end of the town. Where are you going to stay?”
“Well, _at_ the Globe Inn, as a matter of fact,” said Parkins; “I have
engaged a room there. I couldn’t get in anywhere else; most of the
lodging-houses are shut up in winter, it seems; and, as it is, they
tell me that the only room of any size I can have is really a
double-bedded one, and that they haven’t a corner in which to store the
other bed, and so on. But I must have a fairly large room, for I am
taking some books down, and mean to do a bit of work; and though I
don’t quite fancy having an empty bed—not to speak of two—in what I may
call for the time being my study, I suppose I can manage to rough it
for the short time I shall be there.”
“Do you call having an extra bed in your room roughing it, Parkins?”
said a bluff person opposite. “Look here, I shall come down and occupy
it for a bit; it’ll be company for you.”
The Professor quivered, but managed to laugh in a courteous manner.
“By all means, Rogers; there’s nothing I should like better. But I’m
afraid you would find it rather dull; you don’t play golf, do you?”
“No, thank Heaven!” said rude Mr Rogers.
“Well, you see, when I’m not writing I shall most likely be out on the
links, and that, as I say, would be rather dull for you, I’m afraid.”
“Oh, I don’t know! There’s certain to be somebody I know in the place;
but, of course, if you don’t want me, speak the word, Parkins; I shan’t
be offended. Truth, as you always tell us, is never offensive.”
Parkins was, indeed, scrupulously polite and strictly truthful. It is
to be feared that Mr Rogers sometimes practised upon his knowledge of
these characteristics. In Parkins’s breast there was a conflict now
raging, which for a moment or two did not allow him to answer. That
interval being over, he said:
“Well, if you want the exact truth, Rogers, I was considering whether
the room I speak of would really be large enough to accommodate us both
comfortably; and also whether (mind, I shouldn’t have said this if you
hadn’t pressed me) you would not constitute something in the nature of
a hindrance to my work.”
Rogers laughed loudly.
“Well done, Parkins!” he said. “It’s all right. I promise not to
interrupt your work; don’t you disturb yourself about that. No, I won’t
come if you don’t want me; but I thought I should do so nicely to keep
the ghosts off.” Here he might have been seen to wink and to nudge his
next neighbour. Parkins might also have been seen to become pink. “I
beg pardon, Parkins,” Rogers continued; “I oughtn’t to have said that.
I forgot you didn’t like levity on these topics.”
“Well,” Parkins said, “as you have mentioned the matter, I freely own
that I do _not_ like careless talk about what you call ghosts. A man in
my position,” he went on, raising his voice a little, “cannot, I find,
be too careful about appearing to sanction the current beliefs on such
subjects. As you know, Rogers, or as you ought to know; for I think I
have never concealed my views—”
“No, you certainly have not, old man,” put in Rogers _sotto voce._
“—I hold that any semblance, any appearance of concession to the view
that such things might exist is equivalent to a renunciation of all
that I hold most sacred. But I’m afraid I have not succeeded in
securing your attention.”
“Your _undivided_ attention, was what Dr Blimber actually _said_,”[4]
Rogers interrupted, with every appearance of an earnest desire for
accuracy. “But I beg your pardon, Parkins: I’m stopping you.”
[4] Mr Rogers was wrong, _vide Dombey and Son_, chapter xii.
“No, not at all,” said Parkins. “I don’t remember Blimber; perhaps he
was before my time. But I needn’t go on. I’m sure you know what I
mean.”
“Yes, yes,” said Rogers, rather hastily—“just so. We’ll go into it
fully at Burnstow, or somewhere.”
In repeating the above dialogue I have tried to give the impression
which it made on me, that Parkins was something of an old woman—rather
henlike, perhaps, in his little ways; totally destitute, alas! of the
sense of humour, but at the same time dauntless and sincere in his
convictions, and a man deserving of the greatest respect. Whether or
not the reader has gathered so much, that was the character which
Parkins had.
On the following day Parkins did, as he had hoped, succeed in getting
away from his college, and in arriving at Burnstow. He was made welcome
at the Globe Inn, was safely installed in the large double-bedded room
of which we have heard, and was able before retiring to rest to arrange
his materials for work in apple-pie order upon a commodious table which
occupied the outer end of the room, and was surrounded on three sides
by windows looking out seaward; that is to say, the central window
looked straight out to sea, and those on the left and right commanded
prospects along the shore to the north and south respectively. On the
south you saw the village of Burnstow. On the north no houses were to
be seen, but only the beach and the low cliff backing it. Immediately
in front was a strip—not considerable—of rough grass, dotted with old
anchors, capstans, and so forth; then a broad path; then the beach.
Whatever may have been the original distance between the Globe Inn and
the sea, not more than sixty yards now separated them.
The rest of the population of the inn was, of course, a golfing one,
and included few elements that call for a special description. The most
conspicuous figure was, perhaps, that of an _ancien militaire_,
secretary of a London club, and possessed of a voice of incredible
strength, and of views of a pronouncedly Protestant type. These were
apt to find utterance after his attendance upon the ministrations of
the Vicar, an estimable man with inclinations towards a picturesque
ritual, which he gallantly kept down as far as he could out of
deference to East Anglian tradition.
Professor Parkins, one of whose principal characteristics was pluck,
spent the greater part of the day following his arrival at Burnstow in
what he had called improving his game, in company with this Colonel
Wilson: and during the afternoon—whether the process of improvement
were to blame or not, I am not sure—the Colonel’s demeanour assumed a
colouring so lurid that even Parkins jibbed at the thought of walking
home with him from the links. He determined, after a short and furtive
look at that bristling moustache and those incarnadined features, that
it would be wiser to allow the influences of tea and tobacco to do what
they could with the Colonel before the dinner-hour should render a
meeting inevitable.
“I might walk home tonight along the beach,” he reflected—“yes, and
take a look—there will be light enough for that—at the ruins of which
Disney was talking. I don’t exactly know where they are, by the way;
but I expect I can hardly help stumbling on them.”
This he accomplished, I may say, in the most literal sense, for in
picking his way from the links to the shingle beach his foot caught,
partly in a gorse-root and partly in a biggish stone, and over he went.
When he got up and surveyed his surroundings, he found himself in a
patch of somewhat broken ground covered with small depressions and
mounds. These latter, when he came to examine them, proved to be simply
masses of flints embedded in mortar and grown over with turf. He must,
he quite rightly concluded, be on the site of the preceptory he had
promised to look at. It seemed not unlikely to reward the spade of the
explorer; enough of the foundations was probably left at no great depth
to throw a good deal of light on the general plan. He remembered
vaguely that the Templars, to whom this site had belonged, were in the
habit of building round churches, and he thought a particular series of
the humps or mounds near him did appear to be arranged in something of
a circular form. Few people can resist the temptation to try a little
amateur research in a department quite outside their own, if only for
the satisfaction of showing how successful they would have been had
they only taken it up seriously. Our Professor, however, if he felt
something of this mean desire, was also truly anxious to oblige Mr
Disney. So he paced with care the circular area he had noticed, and
wrote down its rough dimensions in his pocket-book. Then he proceeded
to examine an oblong eminence which lay east of the centre of the
circle, and seemed to his thinking likely to be the base of a platform
or altar. At one end of it, the northern, a patch of the turf was
gone—removed by some boy or other creature _feraæ naturæ_. It might, he
thought, be as well to probe the soil here for evidences of masonry,
and he took out his knife and began scraping away the earth. And now
followed another little discovery: a portion of soil fell inward as he
scraped, and disclosed a small cavity. He lighted one match after
another to help him to see of what nature the hole was, but the wind
was too strong for them all. By tapping and scratching the sides with
his knife, however, he was able to make out that it must be an
artificial hole in masonry. It was rectangular, and the sides, top, and
bottom, if not actually plastered, were smooth and regular. Of course
it was empty. No! As he withdrew the knife he heard a metallic clink,
and when he introduced his hand it met with a cylindrical object lying
on the floor of the hole. Naturally enough, he picked it up, and when
he brought it into the light, now fast fading, he could see that it,
too, was of man’s making—a metal tube about four inches long, and
evidently of some considerable age.
By the time Parkins had made sure that there was nothing else in this
odd receptacle, it was too late and too dark for him to think of
undertaking any further search. What he had done had proved so
unexpectedly interesting that he determined to sacrifice a little more
of the daylight on the morrow to archaeology. The object which he now
had safe in his pocket was bound to be of some slight value at least,
he felt sure.
Bleak and solemn was the view on which he took a last look before
starting homeward. A faint yellow light in the west showed the links,
on which a few figures moving towards the club-house were still
visible, the squat martello tower, the lights of Aldsey village, the
pale ribbon of sands intersected at intervals by black wooden
groynings, the dim and murmuring sea. The wind was bitter from the
north, but was at his back when he set out for the Globe. He quickly
rattled and clashed through the shingle and gained the sand, upon
which, but for the groynings which had to be got over every few yards,
the going was both good and quiet. One last look behind, to measure the
distance he had made since leaving the ruined Templars’ church, showed
him a prospect of company on his walk, in the shape of a rather
indistinct personage, who seemed to be making great efforts to catch up
with him, but made little, if any, progress. I mean that there was an
appearance of running about his movements, but that the distance
between him and Parkins did not seem materially to lessen. So, at
least, Parkins thought, and decided that he almost certainly did not
know him, and that it would be absurd to wait until he came up. For all
that, company, he began to think, would really be very welcome on that
lonely shore, if only you could choose your companion. In his
unenlightened days he had read of meetings in such places which even
now would hardly bear thinking of. He went on thinking of them,
however, until he reached home, and particularly of one which catches
most people’s fancy at some time of their childhood. “Now I saw in my
dream that Christian had gone but a very little way when he saw a foul
fiend coming over the field to meet him.” “What should I do now,” he
thought, “if I looked back and caught sight of a black figure sharply
defined against the yellow sky, and saw that it had horns and wings? I
wonder whether I should stand or run for it. Luckily, the gentleman
behind is not of that kind, and he seems to be about as far off now as
when I saw him first. Well, at this rate, he won’t get his dinner as
soon as I shall; and, dear me! it’s within a quarter of an hour of the
time now. I must run!”
Parkins had, in fact, very little time for dressing. When he met the
Colonel at dinner, Peace—or as much of her as that gentleman could
manage—reigned once more in the military bosom; nor was she put to
flight in the hours of bridge that followed dinner, for Parkins was a
more than respectable player. When, therefore, he retired towards
twelve o’clock, he felt that he had spent his evening in quite a
satisfactory way, and that, even for so long as a fortnight or three
weeks, life at the Globe would be supportable under similar
conditions—“especially,” thought he, “if I go on improving my game.”
As he went along the passages he met the boots of the Globe, who
stopped and said:
“Beg your pardon, sir, but as I was a-brushing your coat just now there
was somethink fell out of the pocket. I put it on your chest of
drawers, sir, in your room, sir—a piece of a pipe or somethink of that,
sir. Thank you, sir. You’ll find it on your chest of drawers, sir—yes,
sir. Good night, sir.”
The speech served to remind Parkins of his little discovery of that
afternoon. It was with some considerable curiosity that he turned it
over by the light of his candles. It was of bronze, he now saw, and was
shaped very much after the manner of the modern dog-whistle; in fact it
was—yes, certainly it was—actually no more nor less than a whistle. He
put it to his lips, but it was quite full of a fine, caked-up sand or
earth, which would not yield to knocking, but must be loosened with a
knife. Tidy as ever in his habits, Parkins cleared out the earth on to
a piece of paper, and took the latter to the window to empty it out.
The night was clear and bright, as he saw when he had opened the
casement, and he stopped for an instant to look at the sea and note a
belated wanderer stationed on the shore in front of the inn. Then he
shut the window, a little surprised at the late hours people kept at
Burnstow, and took his whistle to the light again. Why, surely there
were marks on it, and not merely marks, but letters! A very little
rubbing rendered the deeply-cut inscription quite legible, but the
Professor had to confess, after some earnest thought, that the meaning
of it was as obscure to him as the writing on the wall to Belshazzar.
There were legends both on the front and on the back of the whistle.
The one read thus: