Book: A Strange Story, Volume 5.

E >> Edward Bulwer Lytton >> A Strange Story, Volume 5.




"Rise and follow me," said the voice, sounding much nearer than it had
ever done before.

And at those words I rose mechanically, and like a sleepwalker.

"Take up the light."

I took it. The Scin-Laeca glided along the wall towards the threshold,
and motioned me to open the door. I did so. The Shadow flitted on
through the corridor. I followed, with hushed footsteps, down a small
stair into Forman's study. In all my subsequent proceedings, about to be
narrated, the Shadow guided me, sometimes by voice, sometimes by sign. I
obeyed the guidance, not only unresistingly, but without a desire to
resist. I was unconscious either of curiosity or of awe,--only of a calm
and passive indifference, neither pleasurable nor painful. In this
obedience, from which all will seemed extracted, I took into my hands the
staff which I had examined the day before, and which lay on the table,
just where Margrave had cast it on re-entering the house. I unclosed the
shutter to the casement, lifted the sash, and, with the light in my left
hand, the staff in my right, stepped forth into the garden. The night was
still; the flame of the candle scarcely trembled in the air; the Shadow
moved on before me towards the old pavilion described in an earlier part
of this narrative, and of which the mouldering doors stood wide open. I
followed the Shadow into the pavilion, up the crazy stair to the room
above, with its four great blank unglazed windows, or rather arcades,
north, south, east, and west. I halted on the middle of the floor: right
before my eyes, through the vista made by breathless boughs, stood out
from the moonlit air the dreary mausoleum. Then, at the command conveyed
to me, I placed the candle on a wooden settle, touched a spring in the
handle of the staff; a lid flew back, and I drew from the hollow, first a
lump of some dark bituminous substance, next a smaller slender wand of
polished steel, of which the point was tipped with a translucent material,
which appeared to me like crystal. Bending down, still obedient to the
direction conveyed to me, I described on the floor with the lump of
bitumen (if I may so call it) the figure of the pentacle with the
interlaced triangles, in a circle nine feet in diameter, just as I had
drawn it for Margrave the evening before. The material used made the
figure perceptible, in a dark colour of mingled black and red. I applied
the flame of the candle to the circle, and immediately it became lambent
with a low steady splendour that rose about an inch from the floor; and
gradually front this light there emanated a soft, gray, transparent mist
and a faint but exquisite odour. I stood in the midst of the circle, and
within the circle also, close by my side, stood the Scin-Laeca,--no longer
reflected on the wall, but apart from it, erect, rounded into more
integral and distinct form, yet impalpable, and from it there breathed an
icy air. Then lifting the wand, the broader end of which rested in the
palm of my hand, the two forefingers closing lightly over it in a line
parallel with the point, I directed it towards the wide aperture before
me, fronting the mausoleum. I repeated aloud some words whispered to me
in a language I knew not: those words I would not trace on this paper,
could I remember them. As they came to a close, I heard a howl from the
watch-dog in the yard,--a dismal, lugubrious howl. Other dogs in the
distant village caught up the sound, and bayed in a dirge-like chorus; and
the howling went on louder and louder. Again strange words were whispered
to me, and I repeated them in mechanical submission; and when they, too,
were ended, I felt the ground tremble beneath me, and as my eyes looked
straight forward down the vista, that, stretching from the casement, was
bounded by the solitary mausoleum, vague formless shadows seemed to pass
across the moonlight,--below, along the sward, above, in the air; and then
suddenly a terror, not before conceived, came upon me.

And a third time words were whispered; but though I knew no more of their
meaning than I did of those that had preceded them, I felt a repugnance to
utter them aloud. Mutely I turned towards the Scin-Laeca, and the
expression of its face was menacing and terrible; my will became yet more
compelled to the control imposed upon it, and my lips commenced the
formula again whispered into my ear, when I heard distinctly a voice of
warning and of anguish, that murmured "Hold!" I knew the voice; it was
Lilian's. I paused; I turned towards the quarter from which the voice had
come, and in the space afar I saw the features, the form of Lilian. Her
arms were stretched towards me in supplication, her countenance was deadly
pale, and anxious with unutterable distress. The whole image seemed in
unison with the voice,--the look, the attitude, the gesture of one who
sees another in deadly peril, and cries, "Beware!"

This apparition vanished in a moment; but that moment sufficed to free my
mind from the constraint which had before enslaved it. I dashed the wand
to the ground, sprang from the circle, rushed from the place. How I got
into my own room I can remember not,--I know not; I have a vague
reminiscence of some intervening wandering, of giant trees, of shroud-like
moonlight, of the Shining Shadow and its angry aspect, of the blind walls
and the iron door of the House of the Dead, of spectral images,--a
confused and dreary phantasmagoria. But all I can recall with
distinctness is the sight of my own hueless face in the mirror in my own
still room, by the light of the white moon through the window; and,
sinking down, I said to myself, "This, at least, is an hallucination or a
dream!"




CHAPTER LII.

A heavy sleep came over me at daybreak, but I did not undress nor go to
bed. The sun was high in the heavens when, on waking, I saw the servant
who had attended me bustling about the room.

"I beg your pardon, sir, I am afraid I disturbed you; but I have been
three times to see if you were not coming down, and I found you so soundly
asleep I did not like to wake you. Mr. Strahan has finished breakfast,
and gone out riding; Mr. Margrave has left,--left before six o'clock."

"Ah, he said he was going early."

"Yes, sir; and he seemed so cross when he went. I could never have
supposed so pleasant a gentleman could put himself into such a passion!"

"What was the matter?"

"Why, his walking-stick could not be found; it was not in the hall. He
said he had left it in the study; we could not find it there. At last he
found it himself in the old summerhouse, and said--I beg pardon--he said
he was sure you had taken it there: that some one, at all events, had been
meddling with it. However, I am very glad it was found, since he seems to
set such store on it."

"Did Mr. Margrave go himself into the summer-house to look for it?"

"Yes, sir; no one else would have thought of such a place; no one likes to
go there, even in the daytime."

"Why?"

"Why, sir, they say it is haunted since poor Sir Philip's death; and,
indeed, there are strange noises in every part of the house. I am afraid
you had a bad night, sir," continued the servant, with evident curiosity,
glancing towards the bed, which I had not pressed, and towards the
evening-dress which, while he spoke, I was rapidly changing for that which
I habitually wore in the morning. "I hope you did not feel yourself ill?"

"No! but it seems I fell asleep in my chair."

"Did you hear, sir, how the dogs howled about two o'clock in the morning?
They woke me. Very frightful!"

"The moon was at her full. Dogs will bay at the moon."

I felt relieved to think that I should not find Strahan in the
breakfast-room; and hastening through the ceremony of a meal which I
scarcely touched, I went out into the park unobserved, and creeping round
the copses and into the neglected gardens, made my way to the pavilion. I
mounted the stairs; I looked on the floor of the upper room; yes, there
still was the black figure of the pentacle, the circle. So, then, it was
not a dream! Till then I had doubted. Or might it not still be so far a
dream that I had walked in my sleep, and with an imagination preoccupied
by my conversations with Margrave,--by the hieroglyphics on the staff I
had handled, by the very figure associated with superstitious practices
which I had copied from some weird book at his request, by all the strange
impressions previously stamped on my mind,--might I not, in truth, have
carried thither in sleep the staff, described the circle, and all the rest
been but visionary delusion? Surely, surely, so common-sense, and so
Julius Faber would interpret the riddles that perplexed me! Be that as it
may, my first thought was to efface the marks on the floor. I found this
easier than I had ventured to hope. I rubbed the circle and the pentacle
away from the boards with the sole of my foot, leaving but an
undistinguishable smudge behind. I know not why, but I felt the more
nervously anxious to remove all such evidences of my nocturnal visit to
that room, because Margrave had so openly gone thither to seek for the
staff, and had so rudely named me to the servant as having meddled with
it. Might he not awake some suspicion against me? Suspicion, what of? I
knew not, but I feared!

The healthful air of day gradually nerved my spirits and relieved my
thoughts. But the place had become hateful to me. I resolved not to wait
for Strahan's return, but to walk back to L----, and leave a message for
my host. It was sufficient excuse that I could not longer absent myself
from my patients; accordingly I gave directions to have the few things
which I had brought with me sent to my house by any servant who might be
going to L----, and was soon pleased to find myself outside the park-gates
and on the high-road.

I had not gone a mile before I met Strahan on horseback. He received my
apologies for not waiting his return to bid him farewell without
observation, and, dismounting, led his horse and walked beside me on my
road. I saw that there was something on his mind; at last he said,
looking down,--

"Did you hear the dogs howl last night?"

"Yes! the full moon!"

"You were awake, then, at the time. Did you hear any other sound? Did
you see anything?"

"What should I hear or see?"

Strahan was silent for some moments; then he said, with great
seriousness,--

"I could not sleep when I went to bed last night; I felt feverish and
restless. Somehow or other, Margrave got into my head, mixed up in some
strange way with Sir Philip Derval. I heard the dogs howl, and at the
same time, or rather a few minutes later, I felt the whole house tremble,
as a frail corner-house in London seems to tremble at night when a
carriage is driven past it. The howling had then ceased, and ceased as
suddenly as it had begun. I felt a vague, superstitious alarm; I got up,
and went to my window, which was unclosed (it is my habit to sleep with my
windows open); the moon was very bright, and I saw, I declare I saw along
the green alley that leads from the old part of the house to the
mausoleum--No, I will not say what I saw or believed I saw,--you would
ridicule me, and justly. But, whatever it might be, on the earth without
or in the fancy within my brain, I was so terrified, that I rushed back to
my bed, and buried my face in my pillow. I would have come to you; but I
did not dare to stir. I have been riding hard all the morning in order to
recover my nerves. But I dread sleeping again under that roof, and now
that you and Margrave leave me, I shall go this very day to London. I
hope all that I have told you is no bad sign of any coming disease; blood
to the head, eh?"

"No; but imagination overstrained can produce wondrous effects. You do
right to change the scene. Go to London at once, amuse yourself, and--"

"Not return, till the old house is razed to the ground. That is my
resolve. You approve? That's well. All success to you, Fenwick. I will
canter back and get my portmanteau ready and the carriage out, in time for
the five o'clock train."

So then he, too, had seen--what? I did not dare and I did not desire to
ask him. But he, at least, was not walking in his sleep! Did we both
dream, or neither?

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