Book: Short Stories

V >> Various >> Short Stories




The Jew's exhibition had scarcely concluded, when a great, elderly
dog--who seemed to be his own master, as no person in the company laid
claim to him--saw fit to render himself the object of public notice.
Hitherto, he had shown himself a very quiet, well-disposed old dog,
going round from one to another, and, by way of being sociable,
offering his rough head to be patted by any kindly hand that would
take so much trouble. But now, all of a sudden, this grave and
venerable quadruped, of his own mere motion, and without the slightest
suggestion from anybody else, began to run round after his tail,
which, to heighten the absurdity of the proceeding, was a great deal
shorter than it should have been. Never was seen such headlong
eagerness in pursuit of an object that could not possibly be attained;
never was heard such a tremendous outbreak of growling, snarling,
barking, and snapping,--as if one end of the ridiculous brute's body
were at deadly and most unforgivable enmity with the other. Faster and
faster, round about went the cur; and faster and still faster fled the
unapproachable brevity of his tail; and louder and fiercer grew his
yells of rage and animosity; until, utterly exhausted, and as far from
the goal as ever, the foolish old dog ceased his performance as
suddenly as he had begun it. The next moment he was as mild, quiet,
sensible, and respectable in his deportment, as when he first scraped
acquaintance with the company.

As may be supposed, the exhibition was greeted with universal
laughter, clapping of hands, and shouts of encore, to which the canine
performer responded by wagging all that there was to wag of his tail,
but appeared totally unable to repeat his very successful effort to
amuse the spectators.

Meanwhile, Ethan Brand had resumed his seat upon the log, and moved,
it might be, by a perception of some remote analogy between his own
case and that of this self-pursuing cur, he broke into the awful
laugh, which, more than any other token, expressed the condition of
his inward being. From that moment, the merriment of the party was at
an end; they stood aghast, dreading lest the inauspicious sound should
be reverberated around the horizon, and that mountain would thunder it
to mountain, and so the horror be prolonged upon their ears. Then,
whispering one to another that it was late,--that the moon was almost
down,--that the August night was growing chill,--they hurried
homewards, leaving the lime-burner and little Joe to deal as they
might with their unwelcome guest. Save for these three human beings,
the open space on the hillside was a solitude, set in a vast gloom of
forest. Beyond that darksome verge, the firelight glimmered on the
stately trunks and almost black foliage of pines, intermixed with the
lighter verdure of sapling oaks, maples, and poplars, while here and
there lay the gigantic corpses of dead trees, decaying on the
leaf-strewn soil. And it seemed to little Joe--a timorous and
imaginative child--that the silent forest was holding, its breath,
until some fearful thing should happen.

Ethan Brand thrust more wood into the fire, and closed the door of the
kiln; then looking over his shoulder at the lime-burner and his son,
he bade, rather than advised, them to retire to rest.

"For myself, I cannot sleep." said he, "I have matters that it
concerns me to meditate upon. I will watch the fire, as I used to do
in the old time."

"And call the Devil out of the furnace to keep you company, I
suppose," muttered Bartram, who had been making intimate acquaintance
with the black bottle above mentioned. "But watch, if you like, and
call as many devils as you like! For my part, I shall be all the
better for a snooze. Come, Joe!"

As the boy followed his father into the hut, he looked back at the
wayfarer, and the tears came into his eyes, for his tender spirit had
an intuition of the bleak and terrible loneliness in which this man
had enveloped himself.

When they had gone, Ethan Brand sat listening to the crackling of the
kindled wood, and looking at the little spirits of fire that issued
through the chinks of the door. These trifles, however, once so
familiar, had but the slightest hold of his attention, while deep
within his mind he was reviewing the gradual but marvellous change
that had been wrought upon him by the search to which he had devoted
himself. He remembered how the night dew had fallen upon him,--how the
dark forest had whispered to him,--how the stars had gleamed upon
him,--a simple and loving man, watching his fire in the years gone by,
and ever musing as it burned. He remembered with what tenderness, with
what love and sympathy for mankind, and what pity for human guilt and
woe, he had first begun to contemplate those ideas which afterwards
became the inspiration of his life; with what reverence he had then
looked into the heart of man, viewing it as a temple originally
divine, and, however desecrated, still to be held sacred by a brother;
with what awful fear he had deprecated the success of his pursuit, and
prayed that the Unpardonable Sin might never be revealed to him. Then
ensued that vast intellectual development, which, in its progress,
disturbed the counterpoise between his mind and heart. The Idea that
possessed his life had operated as a means of education; it had gone
on cultivating his powers to the highest point of which they were
susceptible; it had raised him from the level of an unlettered laborer
to stand on a starlit eminence, whither the philosophers of the earth,
laden with the lore of universities, might vainly strive to clamber
after him. So much for the intellect! But where was the heart? That,
indeed, had withered,--had contracted.--had hardened,--had perished!
It had ceased to partake of the universal throb, He had lost his hold
of the magnetic chain of humanity. He was no longer a brother-man,
opening the chambers of the dungeons of our common nature by the key
of holy sympathy, which gave him a right to share in all its secrets;
he was now a cold observer, looking on mankind as the subject of his
experiment, and, at length, converting man and woman to be his
puppets, and pulling the wires that moved them to such degrees of
crime as were demanded for his study.

Thus Ethan Brand became a fiend. He began to be so from the moment
that his moral nature had ceased to keep the pace of improvement with
his intellect. And now, as his highest effort and inevitable
development,--as the bright and gorgeous flower, and rich, delicious
fruit of his life's labor,--he had produced the Unpardonable Sin!

"What more have I to seek? what more to achieve?" said Ethan Brand to
himself, "My task Is done, and well done!"

Starting from the log with a certain alacrity in his gait and
ascending the hillock of earth that was raised against the stone
circumference of the lime-kiln, he thus reached the top of the
structure. It was a space of perhaps ten feet across, from edge to
edge, presenting a view of the upper surface of the immense mass of
broken marble with which the kiln was heaped. All these innumerable
blocks and fragments of marble were red-hot and vividly on fire,
sending up great spouts of blue flame, which quivered aloft and danced
madly, as within a magic circle, and sank and rose again, with
continual and multitudinous activity. As the lonely man bent forward
over this terrible body of fire, the blasting heat smote up against
his person with a breath that, it might be supposed, would have
scorched and shrivelled him up in a moment.

Ethan Brand stood erect, and raised his arms on high. The blue flames
played upon his face, and imparted the wild and ghastly light which
alone could have suited its expression; it was that of a fiend on the
verge of plunging into his gulf of intensest torment.

"O Mother Earth," cried he, "who art no more my Mother, and into whose
bosom this frame shall never be resolved! O mankind, whose brotherhood
I have cast off, and trampled thy great heart beneath my feet! O stars
of heaven, that shone on me of old, as if to light me onward and
upward!--farewell all, and forever. Come, deadly element of
Fire,--henceforth my familiar frame! Embrace me, as I do thee!"

That night the sound of a fearful peal of laughter rolled heavily
through the sleep of the lime-burner and his little son; dim shapes of
horror and anguish haunted their dreams, and seemed still present in
the rude hovel, when they opened their eyes to the daylight.

"Up, boy, up!" cried the lime-burner, staring about him. "Thank
Heaven, the night is gone, at last; and rather than pass such another,
I would watch, my lime-kiln, wide awake, for a twelvemonth. This Ethan
Brand, with his humbug of an Unpardonable Sin, has done me no such
mighty favor, in taking my place!"

He issued from the hut, followed by little Joe, who kept fast hold, of
his father's hand. The early sunshine was already pouring its gold
upon the mountain tops; and though the valleys were still in shadow,
they smiled cheerfully in the promise of the bright day that was
hastening onward. The village, completely shut in by hills, which
swelled away gently about it, looked as if it had rested peacefully in
the hollow of the great hand of Providence. Every dwelling was
distinctly visible; the little spires of the two churches pointed
upwards, and caught a fore-glimmering of brightness from the sun-gilt
skies upon their gilded weathercocks. The tavern was astir, and the
figure of the old, smoke-dried stage-agent, cigar in mouth, was seen
beneath the stoop. Old Graylock was glorified with a golden cloud upon
his head. Scattered likewise over the breasts of the surrounding
mountains, there were heaps of hoary mist, in fantastic shapes, some
of them far down into the valley, others high up towards the summits,
and still others, of the same family of mist or cloud, hovering in the
gold radiance of the upper atmosphere. Stepping from one to another of
the clouds that rested on the hills, and thence to the loftier
brotherhood that sailed in air, it seemed almost as if a mortal man
might thus ascend into the heavenly regions. Earth was so mingled with
sky that it was a day-dream to look at it.

To supply that charm of the familiar and homely, which Nature so
readily adopts into a scene like this, the stage-coach was rattling
down the mountain road, and the driver sounded his horn, while echo
caught up the notes, and intertwined them into a rich and varied and
elaborate harmony, of which the original performer could lay claim to
little share. The great hills played a concert among themselves, each
contributing a strain of airy sweetness.

Little Joe's face brightened at once.

"Dear father," cried he, skipping cheerily to and fro, "that strange
man is gone, and the sky and the mountains all seem glad of it!"

"Yes," growled the lime-burner, with an oath, "but he has let the fire
go down, and no thanks to him if five hundred bushels of lime are not
spoiled. If I catch the fellow hereabouts again, I shall feel like
tossing him into the furnace!"

With his long pole in his hand, he ascended to the top of the kiln.
After a moment's pause, he called to his son.

"Come up here, Joe!" said he.

So little Joe ran up the hillock, and stood by his father's side. The
marble was all burnt into perfect, snow-white lime. But on its
surface, in the midst of the circle,--snow-white too, and thoroughly
converted into lime,--lay a human skeleton, in the attitude of a
person who, after long toil, lies down to long repose. Within the
ribs--strange to say--was the shape of a human heart.

"Was the fellow's heart made of marble?" cried Bartram, in some
perplexity at this phenomenon. "At any rate, it is burnt into what
looks like special good lime; and, taking all the bones together, my
kiln is half a bushel the richer for him."

So saying, the rude lime-burner lifted his pole, and, letting it fall
upon the skeleton, the relics of Ethan Brand were crumbled into
fragments.


NOTES

[1] Written in 1848; published in Holden's _Dollar Magazine_ in 1851.

[2] 182:26 Delectable Mountains. A range of mountains referred to in
Bunyan's _Pilgrim's Progress_.

[3] 190:22 ubiquitous. Being present everywhere.

[4] 194:29 diorama. A series of paintings arranged for exhibition. See
dictionary.

[5] 195:30 Titanic. Characteristic of the Titans; therefore large.

COLLATERAL READINGS

_The Scarlet Letter_, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

_The House of Seven Gables_, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

_The Marble Faun_, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

_The Gray Champion_, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

_The Wedding Knell_, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

_The Great Carbuncle_, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

_Dr. Heidegger's Experiment_, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

_The Haunted Mind_, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

_Feathertop_, Nathaniel Hawthorne.

_Rip Van Winkle_, Washington Irving.

_The Elixir of Life_, Honore de Balzac.

_The Leather Funnel_, A. Conan Doyle.

_The Return of Imray's Ghost_, Rudyard Kipling.

_A Gentle Ghost_, Mary Wilkins Freeman.



THE SIRE DE MALETROIT'S DOOR[1]

_By Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894)_


Denis de Beaulieu was not yet two-and-twenty, but he counted himself a
grown man, and a very accomplished cavalier into the bargain. Lads
were early formed in that rough, warfaring epoch; and when one has
been in a pitched battle and a dozen raids, has killed one's man in an
honorable fashion, and knows a thing or two of strategy and mankind, a
certain swagger in the gait is surely to be pardoned. He had put up
his horse with due care, and supped with due deliberation; and then,
in a very agreeable frame of mind, went out to pay a visit in the gray
of the evening. It was not a very wise proceeding on the young man's
part. He would have done better to remain beside the fire or go
decently to bed. For the town was full of the troops of Burgundy and
England under a mixed command; and though Denis was there on
safe-conduct, his safe-conduct was like to serve him little on a
chance encounter.

It was September, 1429; the weather had fallen sharp; a flighty piping
wind, laden with showers, beat about the township; and the dead leaves
ran riot along the streets. Here and there a window was already
lighted up; and the noise of men-at-arms making merry over supper
within came forth in fits and was swallowed up and carried away by the
wind. The night fell swiftly: the flag of England, fluttering on the
spire top, grew ever fainter and fainter against the flying clouds--a
black speck like a swallow in the tumultuous, leaden chaos of the sky.
As the night fell the wind rose, and began to hoot under archways and
roar amid the tree-tops in the valley below the town.

Denis de Beaulieu walked fast and was soon knocking at his friend's
door; but though he promised himself to stay only a little while and
make an early return, his welcome was so pleasant, and he found so
much to delay him, that it was already long past midnight before he
said good-by upon the threshold. The wind had fallen again in the
meanwhile; the night was as black as the grave; not a star, nor a
glimmer of moonshine, slipped through the canopy of cloud. Denis was
ill-acquainted with the intricate lanes of Chateau Landon; even by
daylight he had found some trouble in picking his way; and in this
absolute darkness he soon lost it altogether. He was certain of one
thing only--to keep mounting the hill; for his friend's house lay at
the lower end, or tail, of Chateau Landon, while the inn was up at the
head, under the great church spire. With this clew to go upon he
stumbled and groped forward, now breathing more freely in the open
places where there was a good slice of sky overhead, now feeling along
the wall in stifling closes. It is an eerie and mysterious position to
be thus submerged in opaque blackness in an almost unknown town. The
silence is terrifying in its possibilities. The touch of cold window
bars to the exploring hand startles the man like the touch of a toad;
the inequalities of the pavement shake his heart into his mouth; a
piece of denser darkness threatens an ambuscade or a chasm in the
pathway; and where the air is brighter, the houses put on strange and
bewildering appearances, as if to lead him further from his way. For
Denis, who had to regain his inn without attracting notice, there was
real danger as well as mere discomfort in the walk; and he went warily
and boldly at once, and at every corner paused to make an observation.

He had been for some time threading a lane so narrow that he could
touch a wall with either hand, when it began to open out and go
sharply downward. Plainly this lay no longer in the direction of his
inn; but the hope of a little more light tempted him forward to
reconnoitre. The lane ended in a terrace with a bartizan[2] wall,
which gave an outlook between high houses, as out of an embrasure,
into the valley lying dark and formless several hundred feet below.
Denis looked down, and could discern a few tree-tops waving and a
single speck of brightness where the river ran across a weir. The
weather was clearing up, and the sky had lightened, so as to show the
outline of the heavier clouds and the dark margin of the hills. By the
uncertain glimmer, the house on his left hand should be a place of
some pretensions; it was surmounted by several pinnacles and
turret-tops; the round stern of a chapel, with a fringe of flying
buttresses, projected boldly from the main block; and the door was
sheltered under a deep porch carved with figures and overhung by two
long gargoyles[3]. The windows of the chapel gleamed through their
intricate tracery with a light as of many tapers, and threw out the
buttresses and the peaked roof in a more intense blackness against the
sky. It was plainly the hotel of some great family of the
neighborhood; and as it reminded Denis of a town house of his own at
Bourges, he stood for some time gazing up at it and mentally gauging
the skill of the architects and the consideration of the two families.

There seemed to be no issue to the terrace but the lane by which he
had reached it; he could only retrace his steps, but he had gained
some notion of his whereabouts, and hoped by this means to hit the
main thoroughfare and speedily regain the inn. He was reckoning
without that chapter of accidents which was to make this night
memorable above all others in his career; for he had not gone back
above a hundred yards before he saw a light coming to meet him, and
heard loud voices speaking together in the echoing narrows of the
lane. It was a party of men-at-arms going the night round with
torches. Denis assured himself that they had all been making free with
the wine bowl, and were in no mood to be particular about
safe-conducts or the niceties of chivalrous war. It, was as like as
not that they would kill him like a dog and leave him where he fell.
The situation was inspiriting but nervous. Their own torches would
conceal him from sight, he reflected; and he hoped that they would
drown the noise of his footsteps with their own empty voices. If he
were but fleet and silent, he might evade their notice altogether.

Unfortunately, as he turned to beat a retreat, his foot rolled upon a
pebble; he fell against the wall with an ejaculation, and his sword
rang loudly on the stones. Two or three voices demanded who went
there--some in French, some in English; but Denis made no reply, and
ran the faster down the lane. Once upon the terrace, he paused to look
back. They still kept calling after him, and just then began to double
the pace in pursuit, with a considerable clank of armor, and great
tossing of the torchlight to and fro in the narrow jaws of the
passage.

Denis cast a look around and darted into the porch. There he might
escape observation, or--if that were too much to expect--was in a
capital posture whether for parley or defence. So thinking, he drew
his sword and tried to set his back against the door. To his surprise
it yielded behind his weight; and though he turned in a moment,
continued to swing back on oiled and noiseless hinges until it stood
wide open on a black interior. When things fall out opportunely for
the person concerned, he is not apt to be critical about the how or
why, his own immediate personal convenience seeming a sufficient
reason for the strangest oddities and revolutions in our sublunary
things; and so Denis, without a moment's hesitation, stepped within
and partly closed the door behind him to conceal his place of refuge.
Nothing was further from his thoughts than to close it altogether; but
for some inexplicable reason--perhaps by a spring or a weight--the
ponderous mass of oak whipped itself out of his fingers and clanked
to, with a formidable rumble and a noise like the falling of an
automatic bar.

The round, at that very moment, debouched[4] upon the terrace and
proceeded to summon him with shouts and curses. He heard them
ferreting in the dark corners; the stock of a lance even rattled along
the outer surface of the door behind which he stood; but these
gentlemen were in too high a humor to be long delayed, and soon made
off down a corkscrew pathway which had escaped Denis' observation, and
passed out of sight and hearing along the battlements of the town.

Denis breathed again. He gave them a few minutes' grace for fear of
accidents, and then groped about for some means of opening the door
and slipping forth again. The inner surface was quite smooth, not a
handle, not a moulding, not a projection of any sort. He got his
finger nails round the edges and pulled, but the mass was immovable.
He shook it, it was as firm as a rock, Denis de Beaulieu frowned, and
gave vent to a little noiseless whistle. What ailed the door? he
wondered. Why was it open? How came it to shut so easily and so
effectually after him? There was something obscure and underhand about
all this, that was little to the young man's fancy. It looked like a
snare, and yet who could suppose a snare in such a quiet by-street and
in a house of so prosperous and even noble an exterior? And yet--snare
or no snare, intentionally or unintentionally--here he was, prettily
trapped; and for the life of him he could see no way out of it again.
The darkness began to weigh upon him. He gave ear; all was silent
without, but within and close by he seemed to catch a faint sighing, a
faint sobbing rustle, a little stealthy creak--as though many persons
were at his side, holding themselves quite still, and governing even
their respiration with the extreme of slyness. The idea went to his
vitals with a shock, and he faced about suddenly as if to defend his
life. Then, for the first time, he became aware of a light about the
level of his eyes and at some distance in the interior of the house--a
vertical thread of light, widening toward the bottom, such as might
escape between two wings of arras over a doorway.

To see anything was a relief to Denis; it was like a piece of solid
ground to a man laboring in a morass; his mind seized upon it with
avidity; and he stood staring at it and trying to piece together some
logical conception of his surroundings. Plainly there was a flight of
steps ascending from his own level to that of this illuminated
doorway, and indeed he thought he could make out another thread of
light, as fine as a needle and as faint as phosphorescence, which
might very well be reflected along the polished wood of a handrail.
Since he had begun to suspect that he was not alone, his heart had
continued to beat with smothering violence, and an intolerable desire
for action of any sort had possessed itself of his spirit. He was in
deadly peril, he believed. What could be more natural than to mount
the staircase, lift the curtain, and confront his difficulty at once?
At least he would be dealing with something tangible; at least he
would be no longer in the dark. He stepped slowly forward with
outstretched hands, until his foot struck the bottom step; then he
rapidly scaled the stairs, stood for a moment to compose his
expression, lifted the arras and went in.

He found himself in a large apartment of polished stone. There were
three doors, one on each of three sides, all similarly curtained with
tapestry. The fourth side was occupied by two large windows and a
great stone chimney-piece, carved with the arms of the Maletroits.
Denis recognized the bearings, and was gratified to find himself in
such good hands. The room was strongly illuminated; but it contained
little furniture except a heavy table and a chair or two; the hearth
was innocent of fire, and the pavement was but sparsely strewn with
rushes clearly many days old.

On a high chair beside the chimney, and directly facing Denis as he
entered, sat a little old gentleman in a fur tippet. He sat with his
legs crossed and his hands folded, and a cup of spiced wine stood by
his elbow on a bracket on the wall. His countenance had a strong
masculine cast; not properly human, but such as we see in the bull,
the goat, or the domestic boar; something equivocal and wheedling,
something greedy, brutal and dangerous. The upper lip was inordinately
full, as though swollen by a blow or a toothache; and the smile, the
peaked eyebrows, and the small, strong eyes were quaintly and almost
comically evil in expression. Beautiful white hair hung straight all
round his head, like a saint's, and fell in a single curl upon the
tippet. His beard and mustache were the pink of venerable sweetness.
Age, probably in consequence of inordinate precautions, had left no
mark upon his hands; and the Maletroit hand was famous. It would be
difficult to imagine anything at once so fleshy and so delicate in
design; the taper, sensual fingers were like those of one of
Leonardo's[5] women; the fork of the thumb made a dimpled protuberance
when closed; the nails were perfectly shaped, and of a dead,
surprising whiteness. It rendered his aspect tenfold more redoubtable,
that a man with hands like these should keep them devoutly folded like
a virgin martyr--that a man with so intent and startling an expression
of face should sit patiently on his seat and contemplates people with
an unwinking stare, like a god, or a god's statue. His quiescence
seemed ironical and treacherous, it fitted so poorly with his looks.

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