When I became the occupant of the Chateau Blanc, in the neighborhood of
Fontainebleau, I found that my wish for a place of complete seclusion
was likely to be realized to the full. I was not in a state of mind for
society, and I had deliberately given myself three months in which to
fight out a certain battle with myself, for which I needed solitude and
reflection.
When the old woman who acted as keeper and caretaker of the place
took me through it, on a tour of inspection, there were three things
which, in spite of my preoccupation with my own affairs, struck me very
forcibly. The first was the forlorn remnants of the body of a white
swan, which must once have been a creature of splendid size and shape.
My informant told me that this swan had been a great pet of the former
owner of the chateau, until some accident had killed it; after which
it had been stuffed and fastened in its place upon the surface of the
little lake under his window. There it was still—what remained of
it—a mass of weather-beaten and dirty feathers.
Another thing that compelled my strong attention was a certain picture
which hung in the bedroom of the late owner, and which I was informed
was his own portrait, painted by himself. This room, by the way, was
sinister and mysterious in its effect beyond any I had ever entered.
One reason for this was the fact that all the furniture, which was
elaborately carved and which must once have been of beautiful polish
and color, had been ruthlessly covered with a coat of black paint,—the
bed, the table, chairs, wardrobe, chests of drawers, and even the great
leather easy-chair which was placed just under the picture, facing the
opposite wall.
It was a wretched piece of work, that picture, representing a man
dressed in some sort of court dress of the last century, and it would
have seemed ineffectual and amateurish to the last degree but for the
truly marvelous expression of the eyes, which were fixed on a certain
spot in the wall opposite with an earnestness and intensity which made
me feel that there was some hidden significance in this look. The man
not only looked at the spot himself, but he compelled me to do the
same, and forced me, by the insistent command of his eyes, to look
again and again.
And yet there was nothing to see. The wall was perfectly bare in that
place and covered with a meaningless sort of wallpaper, which gave me
no encouragement whatever.
Another thing that I noticed specially, with a feeling of being
imperiously directed to do so, was a large rusty key that hung on the
wall directly under the picture. When I inquired of the old woman what
this key belonged to she answered that she had never known, but that
it had been hung there by the late proprietor and had been undisturbed
since his death. That event had occurred a great many years ago, and
it was owing to the provisions of the will left by him that no one
had ever occupied the house in the interval. The prescribed time had
only just expired, and I was the first person to rent the chateau, the
revenue from which was to go to a nephew, who lived abroad.
The somberness of the black chamber suited my frame of mind, and I
decided on taking it for my room. Besides this, the picture, the key,
and the white swan all interested me, and, as it was the first time
that an outside interest had made any headway against the melancholy
of my own thoughts, these objects, far from cheerful as they were in
themselves, afforded a grateful diversion.
So continually did I wonder why the picture looked always and could
compel me to look at that one spot, and why the key had been hung in
that place and had kept its position so many years undisturbed, as
if some ghostly guardian watched over it, and why, ever and always,
the old white swan compelled me, as if by some irresistible power, to
connect it with these other things, that I kept myself awake at night,
weaving all sorts of stories concerning these objects, and spent half
my days in looking from the picture to the wall, and back again to the
key, and then out of the window at the battered effigy of a noble bird
beneath it, until the confusion of mind thus produced seemed likely to
drive me crazy.
I expended all the ingenuity of which I was master in questioning the
old woman, who had lived here in the time of the former owner, but the
satisfaction of my curiosity in that direction was rather meager.
She told me that her former master had had a wife whom he adored, fair
as an angel, and gifted with a divinely beautiful voice, such as none
had ever heard, before or since. This young wife had been snatched
from him by a sudden and frightful death. The fever which seized her
had been so contagious, the woman said, that every one had fled the
premises, except one woman servant and the master himself. These, with
the help of the doctor, had nursed the young wife through her brief
illness until its end.
My informant had heard it said that the circumstances of her death were
very peculiar,—that, in her delirium, on the very last night of her
illness, those who had ventured to linger about the premises had heard
her singing more gloriously than ever in her life; that it had reminded
them of the great white swan, which but the night before had sung its
last sweet song on the lake, in the moonlight, and had been found dead
in the morning.
The woman who had remained to help the master in his last sad
ministrations to his dying and dead wife had gone away the day after
the funeral, and had never been heard of since.
That funeral, in the quaint old church but a few paces from the house,
had been, from the woman's account, a melancholy affair enough.
Scarcely any one dared to come to it, so malignant had been this
fever, and it was feared that the few men who were willing to act as
pall-bearers would not be equal to the task; but the poor lady had
always been slight and fairy-like in figure, and so wasted was she
from this consuming fever that the bearers declared that her weight
was scarcely more than that of an empty coffin. The woman further said
that, as the small funeral cortege was leaving the church, it had
surprised every one to see the husband, who was directly behind the
coffin, pause abruptly under a statue of the Virgin, and single out,
from the great bunch of white ribbons which hung there, the long strip
which his young wife had placed there on the day of her marriage to
him, less than a year before. It was an old custom connected with this
church. Every girl ever married there had conformed to it, and some of
the ribbons were yellow with time and almost dropping to pieces. The
longest and freshest bit of all had been put there by the beautiful and
beloved young creature now lying dead in the flower of her youth and
loveliness.
No one ever knew, the woman went on to say, how the master spent his
days after the funeral was over. He had forbidden every servant to
return, and turned a deaf ear to the rings and knocks of visitors.
Months had passed, and no one held speech with him. They knew he was
alive, because people who had looked through the palings had seen him
walking in the garden, and one person reported having seen him carry
from the house the stuffed body of the great swan and fasten it in its
place on the lake, where it could be plainly seen from his window. He
must have embalmed or stuffed it himself, the old woman said, for he
was known to have remarkable knowledge and skill in such strange arts,
and had once had a great room filled with birds and beasts, which he
had preserved by methods studied in foreign lands.
As was inevitable, after hearing all this, my interest in the picture,
and swan, and the key deepened sensibly. There was certainly a spell of
the supernatural about these things for me. I had only to stand near
the spot on which the eyes of the picture were fastened to experience
the strangest, the most overwhelmingly significant sensations I had
ever known. The spot was haunted by a _presence_ for me, and as often
as I stood there I would feel my heart throb and cease throbbing, my
breath pant and cease panting, my very flesh turn cold and moist with
consciousness and apprehension. I tried to account for all this on
natural grounds, but I found it was quite impossible to do so.
One day—it was the 19th of August—a hot, sultry, close, indescribably
gloomy day, when the heavy clouds that lowered seemed only to darken
the whole earth without giving forth one drop of moisture, the old
woman came to my room and chanced to mention that it was the time of
the death of the young mistress of the Chateau Blanc. She had died, it
appeared, just at midnight between the 19th and 20th of August. After
giving me this information, she said good-evening and left me to the
reflections which it aroused.
I can scarcely call them reflections. They took the form, rather, of
a sort of compulsion that was laid upon me to obey a certain force by
which I felt myself suddenly dominated.
It was the picture that did it; this was certain, for, as often as
I faltered, one look into that insistent, commanding, coercing face
compelled me to go on. In obedience to its bidding, I did as follows:—
I went to an old desk in the room, and took from it some simple
carpenters' tools, with which I deliberately cut through, first, the
wall-papering, and then a thin boarding, which covered all the space
between a door and window opposite the picture. When this was done I
saw—I cannot say whether most to my satisfaction or my horror, that I
stood opposite a door,—a regular, ordinary door, with panels, hinges,
and, more than all, a keyhole. I glanced at the picture. It seemed to
me that the canvas positively lived with expression.
The eyes commanded me to get the rusty key. I got it, fitted it in
the lock, in which it turned with difficulty, and then, with my heart
almost choking me with its throbs, my knees shaking under me, my body
covered with a cold sweat, and my tongue dry in my mouth, I opened the
door.
As it creaked on its rusty hinges, I saw, by the light of the candle
which I held in my hand, a mass of cobwebs, heavily weighted with the
dust of years, and, through these, a woman's figure.
It was clad—for I obeyed the eyes, which commanded me to examine it,
though my heart was cold with terror—in what I made out to be a white
silk gown, above which was the face, withered and awfully livid, as
I had heard the faces of embalmed corpses appear years after death.
Still, it was recognizable as a real human face, and was surrounded
by masses of yellow hair, which, even through the dust and cobwebs,
gleamed with the brightness of gold. The hands held something in their
shrunken fingers,—a white ribbon, with the date of her marriage and
death upon it, her husband's name and her own, and these words, which,
under the compelling eyes of the picture, I laboriously studied out:—
"I have been able to keep you near me, even in death. I have never been
separated from you, or from what was you to me once. But when death
shall come to me you will have no power over my body, and they will
take me from you. That I am unable to help. I think only of this: you
cannot suffer for it, since you have so long ceased to be, and by that
time my suffering also will be over. I shall put my spirit into the
eyes of my picture, which will watch over you still."
I looked from the paper to the picture. It seemed dull and
inexpressive,—mere canvas and paint. The power of the eyes was gone.
Their spell over me was broken.
Suddenly I felt within me a long-absent yearning for human
companionship,—for life and love. I had come to this place impelled
by a morbid and unhealthy desire for solitude, and my experiences here
had made me more morbid and unhealthy still. They had culminated now
in this awful revelation of disappointment and death, which threw into
brilliant contrast the bright possibilities which still remained to me,
and I resolved to go back into the world and do my best to deserve and
win these.
[Illustration]
Miss Wood,—Stenographer.