Septimius, pausing involuntarily alone by the little hillock, whose
contents he knew so well. "The grave seems to me a vile pitfall, put right
in our pathway, and catching most of us,--all of us,--causing us to tumble
in at the most inconvenient opportunities, so that all human life is a
jest and a farce, just for the sake of this inopportune death; for I
observe it never waits for us to accomplish anything: we may have the
salvation of a country in hand, but we are none the less likely to die for
that. So that, being a believer, on the whole, in the wisdom and
graciousness of Providence, I am convinced that dying is a mistake, and
that by and by we shall overcome it. I say there is no use in the grave."
"I still adhere to what I said," answered Sibyl Dacy; "and besides, there
is another use of a grave which I have often observed in old English
graveyards, where the moss grows green, and embosses the letters of the
gravestones; and also graves are very good for flower-beds."
Nobody ever could tell when the strange girl was going to say what was
laughable,--when what was melancholy; and neither of Sibyl's auditors knew
quite what to make of this speech. Neither could Septimius fail to be a
little startled by seeing her, as she spoke of the grave as a flower-bed,
stoop down to the little hillock to examine the flowers, which, indeed,
seemed to prove her words by growing there in strange abundance, and of
many sorts; so that, if they could all have bloomed at once, the spot
would have looked like a bouquet by itself, or as if the earth were
richest in beauty there, or as if seeds had been lavished by some florist.
Septimius could not account for it, for though the hill-side did produce
certain flowers,--the aster, the golden-rod, the violet, and other such
simple and common things,--yet this seemed as if a carpet of bright colors
had been thrown down there and covered the spot.
"This is very strange," said he.
"Yes," said Sibyl Dacy, "there is some strange richness in this little spot
of soil."
"Where could the seeds have come from?--that is the greatest wonder," said
Rose. "You might almost teach me botany, methinks, on this one spot."
"Do you know this plant?" asked Sibyl of Septimius, pointing to one not yet
in flower, but of singular leaf, that was thrusting itself up out of the
ground, on the very centre of the grave, over where the breast of the
sleeper below might seem to be. "I think there is no other here like it."
Septimius stooped down to examine it, and was convinced that it was unlike
anything he had seen of the flower kind; a leaf of a dark green, with
purple veins traversing it, it had a sort of questionable aspect, as some
plants have, so that you would think it very likely to be poison, and
would not like to touch or smell very intimately, without first inquiring
who would be its guarantee that it should do no mischief. That it had some
richness or other, either baneful or beneficial, you could not doubt.
"I think it poisonous," said Rose Garfield, shuddering, for she was a
person so natural she hated poisonous things, or anything speckled
especially, and did not, indeed, love strangeness. "Yet I should not
wonder if it bore a beautiful flower by and by. Nevertheless, if I were to
do just as I feel inclined, I should root it up and fling it away."
"Shall she do so?" said Sibyl to Septimius.
"Not for the world," said he, hastily. "Above all things, I desire to see
what will come of this plant."
"Be it as you please," said Sibyl. "Meanwhile, if you like to sit down here
and listen to me, I will tell you a story that happens to come into my
mind just now,--I cannot tell why. It is a legend of an old hall that I
know well, and have known from my childhood, in one of the northern
counties of England, where I was born. Would you like to hear it, Rose?"
"Yes, of all things," said she. "I like all stories of hall and cottage in
the old country, though now we must not call it our country any more."
Sibyl looked at Septimius, as if to inquire whether he, too, chose to
listen to her story, and he made answer:--
"Yes, I shall like to hear the legend, if it is a genuine one that has been
adopted into the popular belief, and came down in chimney-corners with the
smoke and soot that gathers there; and incrusted over with humanity, by
passing from one homely mind to another. Then, such stories get to be
true, in a certain sense, and indeed in that sense may be called true
throughout, for the very nucleus, the fiction in them, seems to have come
out of the heart of man in a way that cannot be imitated of malice
aforethought. Nobody can make a tradition; it takes a century to make
it."
"I know not whether this legend has the character you mean," said Sibyl,
"but it has lived much more than a century; and here it is.
* * * * *
"On the threshold of one of the doors of ---- Hall there is a bloody
footstep impressed into the doorstep, and ruddy as if the bloody foot had
just trodden there; and it is averred that, on a certain night of the
year, and at a certain hour of the night, if you go and look at that
doorstep you will see the mark wet with fresh blood. Some have pretended
to say that this appearance of blood was but dew; but can dew redden a
cambric handkerchief? Will it crimson the fingertips when you touch it?
And that is what the bloody footstep will surely do when the appointed
night and hour come round, this very year, just as it would three hundred
years ago.
"Well; but how did it come there? I know not precisely in what age it was,
but long ago, when light was beginning to shine into what were called the
dark ages, there was a lord of ---- Hall who applied himself deeply to
knowledge and science, under the guidance of the wisest man of that
age,--a man so wise that he was thought to be a wizard; and, indeed, he
may have been one, if to be a wizard consists in having command over
secret powers of nature, that other men do not even suspect the existence
of, and the control of which enables one to do feats that seem as
wonderful as raising the dead. It is needless to tell you all the strange
stories that have survived to this day about the old Hall; and how it is
believed that the master of it, owing to his ancient science, has still a
sort of residence there, and control of the place; and how, in one of the
chambers, there is still his antique table, and his chair, and some rude
old instruments and machinery, and a book, and everything in readiness,
just as if he might still come back to finish some experiment. What it is
important to say is, that one of the chief things to which the old lord
applied himself was to discover the means of prolonging his own life, so
that its duration should be indefinite, if not infinite; and such was his
science, that he was believed to have attained this magnificent and awful
purpose.
"So, as you may suppose, the man of science had great joy in having done
this thing, both for the pride of it, and because it was so delightful a
thing to have before him the prospect of endless time, which he might
spend in adding more and more to his science, and so doing good to the
world; for the chief obstruction to the improvement of the world and the
growth of knowledge is, that mankind cannot go straightforward in it, but
continually there have to be new beginnings, and it takes every new man
half his life, if not the whole of it, to come up to the point where his
predecessor left off. And so this noble man--this man of a noble
purpose--spent many years in finding out this mighty secret; and at last,
it is said, he succeeded. But on what terms?
"Well, it is said that the terms were dreadful and horrible; insomuch that
the wise man hesitated whether it were lawful and desirable to take
advantage of them, great as was the object in view.
"You see, the object of the lord of ---- Hall was to take a life from the
course of Nature, and Nature did not choose to be defrauded; so that,
great as was the power of this scientific man over her, she would not
consent that he should escape the necessity of dying at his proper time,
except upon condition of sacrificing some other life for his; and this was
to be done once for every thirty years that he chose to live, thirty years
being the account of a generation of man; and if in any way, in that time,
this lord could be the death of a human being, that satisfied the
requisition, and he might live on. There is a form of the legend which
says, that one of the ingredients of the drink which the nobleman brewed
by his science was the heart's blood of a pure young boy or girl. But this
I reject, as too coarse an idea; and, indeed, I think it may be taken to
mean symbolically, that the person who desires to engross to himself more
than his share of human life must do it by sacrificing to his selfishness
some dearest interest of another person, who has a good right to life, and
may be as useful in it as he.
"Now, this lord was a just man by nature, and if he had gone astray, it was
greatly by reason of his earnest wish to do something for the poor,
wicked, struggling, bloody, uncomfortable race of man, to which he
belonged. He bethought himself whether he would have a right to take the
life of one of those creatures, without their own consent, in order to
prolong his own; and after much arguing to and fro, he came to the
conclusion that he should not have the right, unless it were a life over
which he had control, and which was the next to his own. He looked round
him; he was a lonely and abstracted man, secluded by his studies from
human affections, and there was but one human being whom he cared
for;--that was a beautiful kinswoman, an orphan, whom his father had
brought up, and, dying, left her to his care. There was great kindness and
affection--as great as the abstracted nature of his pursuits would
allow--on the part of this lord towards the beautiful young girl; but not
what is called love,--at least, he never acknowledged it to himself. But,
looking into his heart, he saw that she, if any one, was to be the person
whom the sacrifice demanded, and that he might kill twenty others without
effect, but if he took the life of this one, it would make the charm
strong and good.
"My friends, I have meditated many a time on this ugly feature of my
legend, and am unwilling to take it in the literal sense; so I conceive
its spiritual meaning (for everything, you know, has its spiritual
meaning, which to the literal meaning is what the soul is to the
body),--its spiritual meaning was, that to the deep pursuit of science we
must sacrifice great part of the joy of life; that nobody can be great,
and do great things, without giving up to death, so far as he regards his
enjoyment of it, much that he would gladly enjoy; and in that sense I
choose to take it. But the earthly old legend will have it that this mad,
high-minded, heroic, murderous lord did insist upon it with himself that
he must murder this poor, loving, and beloved child.
"I do not wish to delay upon this horrible matter, and to tell you how he
argued it with himself; and how, the more and more he argued it, the more
reasonable it seemed, the more absolutely necessary, the more a duty that
the terrible sacrifice should be made. Here was this great good to be done
to mankind, and all that stood in the way of it was one little delicate
life, so frail that it was likely enough to be blown out, any day, by the
mere rude blast that the rush of life creates, as it streams along, or by
any slightest accident; so good and pure, too, that she was quite unfit
for this world, and not capable of any happiness in it; and all that was
asked of her was to allow herself to be transported to a place where she
would be happy, and would find companions fit for her,--which he, her only
present companion, certainly was not. In fine, he resolved to shed the
sweet, fragrant blood of this little violet that loved him so.
"Well; let us hurry over this part of the story as fast as we can. He did
slay this pure young girl; he took her into the wood near the house, an
old wood that is standing yet, with some of its magnificent oaks; and then
he plunged a dagger into her heart, after they had had a very tender and
loving talk together, in which he had tried to open the matter tenderly to
her, and make her understand that, though he was to slay her, it was
really for the very reason that he loved her better than anything else in
the world, and that he would far rather die himself, if that would answer
the purpose at all. Indeed, he is said to have offered her the alternative
of slaying him, and taking upon herself the burden of indefinite life, and
the studies and pursuits by which he meant to benefit mankind. But she, it
is said,--this noble, pure, loving child,--she looked up into his face and
smiled sadly, and then snatching the dagger from him, she plunged it into
her own heart. I cannot tell whether this be true, or whether she waited
to be killed by him; but this I know, that in the same circumstances I
think I should have saved my lover or my friend the pain of killing me.
There she lay dead, at any rate, and he buried her in the wood, and
returned to the house; and, as it happened, he had set his right foot in
her blood, and his shoe was wet in it, and by some miraculous fate it left
a track all along the wood-path, and into the house, and on the stone
steps of the threshold, and up into his chamber, all along; and the
servants saw it the next day, and wondered, and whispered, and missed the
fair young girl, and looked askance at their lord's right foot, and turned
pale, all of them, as death.
"And next, the legend says, that Sir Forrester was struck with horror at
what he had done, and could not bear the laboratory where he had toiled so
long, and was sick to death of the object that he had pursued, and was
most miserable, and fled from his old Hall, and was gone full many a day.
But all the while he was gone there was the mark of a bloody footstep
impressed upon the stone doorstep of the Hall. The track had lain all
along through the wood-path, and across the lawn, to the old Gothic door
of the Hall; but the rain, the English rain, that is always falling, had
come the next day, and washed it all away. The track had lain, too, across
the broad hall, and up the stairs, and into the lord's study; but there it
had lain on the rushes that were strewn there, and these the servants had
gathered carefully up, and thrown them away, and spread fresh ones. So
that it was only on the threshold that the mark remained.
"But the legend says, that wherever Sir Forrester went, in his wanderings
about the world, he left a bloody track behind him. It was wonderful, and
very inconvenient, this phenomenon. When he went into a church, you would
see the track up the broad aisle, and a little red puddle in the place
where he sat or knelt. Once he went to the king's court, and there being a
track up to the very throne, the king frowned upon him, so that he never
came there any more. Nobody could tell how it happened; his foot was not
seen to bleed, only there was the bloody track behind him, wherever he
went; and he was a horror-stricken man, always looking behind him to see
the track, and then hurrying onward, as if to escape his own tracks; but
always they followed him as fast.
"In the hall of feasting, there was the bloody track to his chair. The
learned men whom he consulted about this strange difficulty conferred with
one another, and with him, who was equal to any of them, and pished and
pshawed, and said, 'Oh, there is nothing miraculous in this; it is only a
natural infirmity, which can easily be put an end to, though, perhaps, the
stoppage of such an evacuation will cause damage to other parts of the
frame.' Sir Forrester always said, 'Stop it, my learned brethren, if you
can; no matter what the consequences.' And they did their best, but
without result; so that he was still compelled to leave his bloody track
on their college-rooms and combination-rooms, the same as elsewhere; and
in street and in wilderness; yes, and in the battle-field, they said, his
track looked freshest and reddest of all. So, at last, finding the notice
he attracted inconvenient, this unfortunate lord deemed it best to go back
to his own Hall, where, living among faithful old servants born in the
family, he could hush the matter up better than elsewhere, and not be
stared at continually, or, glancing round, see people holding up their
hands in terror at seeing a bloody track behind him. And so home he came,
and there he saw the bloody track on the doorstep, and dolefully went into
the hall, and up the stairs, an old servant ushering him into his chamber,
and half a dozen others following behind, gazing, shuddering, pointing
with quivering fingers, looking horror-stricken in one another's pale
faces, and the moment he had passed, running to get fresh rushes, and to
scour the stairs. The next day, Sir Forrester went into the wood, and by
the aged oak he found a grave, and on the grave he beheld a beautiful
crimson flower; the most gorgeous and beautiful, surely, that ever grew;
so rich it looked, so full of potent juice. That flower he gathered; and
the spirit of his scientific pursuits coming upon him, he knew that this
was the flower, produced out of a human life, that was essential to the
perfection of his recipe for immortality; and he made the drink, and drank
it, and became immortal in woe and agony, still studying, still growing
wiser and more wretched in every age. By and by he vanished from the old
Hall, but not by death; for, from generation to generation, they say that
a bloody track is seen around that house, and sometimes it is tracked up
into the chambers, so freshly that you see he must have passed a short
time before; and he grows wiser and wiser, and lonelier and lonelier, from
age to age. And this is the legend of the bloody footstep, which I myself
have seen at the Hall door. As to the flower, the plant of it continued
for several years to grow out of the grave; and after a while, perhaps a
century ago, it was transplanted into the garden of ---- Hall, and
preserved with great care, and is so still. And as the family attribute a
kind of sacredness, or cursedness, to the flower, they can hardly be
prevailed upon to give any of the seeds, or allow it to be propagated
elsewhere, though the king should send to ask it. It is said, too, that
there is still in the family the old lord's recipe for immortality, and
that several of his collateral descendants have tried to concoct it, and
instil the flower into it, and so give indefinite life; but
unsuccessfully, because the seeds of the flower must be planted in a fresh
grave of bloody death, in order to make it effectual."
* * * * *
So ended Sibyl's legend; in which Septimius was struck by a certain analogy
to Aunt Keziah's Indian legend,--both referring to a flower growing out of
a grave; and also he did not fail to be impressed with the wild
coincidence of this disappearance of an ancestor of the family long ago,
and the appearance, at about the same epoch, of the first known ancestor
of his own family, the man with wizard's attributes, with the bloody
footstep, and whose sudden disappearance became a myth, under the idea
that the Devil carried him away. Yet, on the whole, this wild tradition,
doubtless becoming wilder in Sibyl's wayward and morbid fancy, had the
effect to give him a sense of the fantasticalness of his present pursuit,
and that in adopting it, he had strayed into a region long abandoned to
superstition, and where the shadows of forgotten dreams go when men are
done with them; where past worships are; where great Pan went when he died
to the outer world; a limbo into which living men sometimes stray when
they think themselves sensiblest and wisest, and whence they do not often
find their way back into the real world. Visions of wealth, visions of
fame, visions of philanthropy,--all visions find room here, and glide
about without jostling. When Septimius came to look at the matter in his
present mood, the thought occurred to him that he had perhaps got into
such a limbo, and that Sibyl's legend, which looked so wild, might be all
of a piece with his own present life; for Sibyl herself seemed an
illusion, and so, most strangely, did Aunt Keziah, whom he had known all
his life, with her homely and quaint characteristics; the grim doctor,
with his brandy and his German pipe, impressed him in the same way; and
these, altogether, made his homely cottage by the wayside seem an
unsubstantial edifice, such as castles in the air are built of, and the
ground he trod on unreal; and that grave, which he knew to contain the
decay of a beautiful young man, but a fictitious swell, formed by the
fantasy of his eyes. All unreal; all illusion! Was Rose Garfield a
deception too, with her daily beauty, and daily cheerfulness, and daily
worth? In short, it was such a moment as I suppose all men feel (at least,
I can answer for one), when the real scene and picture of life swims,
jars, shakes, seems about to be broken up and dispersed, like the picture
in a smooth pond, when we disturb its tranquil mirror by throwing in a
stone; and though the scene soon settles itself, and looks as real as
before, a haunting doubt keeps close at hand, as long as we live, asking,
"Is it stable? Am I sure of it? Am I certainly not dreaming? See; it
trembles again, ready to dissolve."
* * * * *
Applying himself with earnest diligence to his attempt to decipher and
interpret the mysterious manuscript, working with his whole mind and
strength, Septimius did not fail of some flattering degree of success.
A good deal of the manuscript, as has been said, was in an ancient English
script, although so uncouth and shapeless were the characters, that it was
not easy to resolve them into letters, or to believe that they were
anything but arbitrary and dismal blots and scrawls upon the yellow paper;
without meaning, vague, like the misty and undefined germs of thought as
they exist in our minds before clothing themselves in words. These,
however, as he concentrated his mind upon them, took distincter shape,
like cloudy stars at the power of the telescope, and became sometimes
English, sometimes Latin, strangely patched together, as if, so accustomed
was the writer to use that language in which all the science of that age
was usually embodied, that he really mixed it unconsciously with the
vernacular, or used both indiscriminately. There was some Greek, too, but
not much. Then frequently came in the cipher, to the study of which
Septimius had applied himself for some time back, with the aid of the
books borrowed from the college library, and not without success. Indeed,
it appeared to him, on close observation, that it had not been the
intention of the writer really to conceal what he had written from any
earnest student, but rather to lock it up for safety in a sort of coffer,
of which diligence and insight should be the key, and the keen
intelligence with which the meaning was sought should be the test of the
seeker's being entitled to possess the secret treasure.