Seven Gothic Tales (35 page)

They did not have to wait long. Just as they had poured out their tea, and were lifting the thin cups to their lips, there was a slight rustle in the quiet room. When they turned their heads a little, they saw their brother standing at the end of the table.

He stood there for a moment and nodded to them, smiling at them. Then he took the third chair and sat down, between them. He placed his hands upon the edge of the table, gently moving them sideward and back again, exactly as he always used to do.

Morten was poorly dressed in a dark gray coat that looked faded and much worn. Still it was clear that he had taken pains about his appearance for the meeting, he had on a white collar and a carefully tied high black stock, and his hair was neatly brushed back. Perhaps he had been afraid, Fanny for a moment thought, that after having lived so long in rough company he should impress his sisters as less refined and well mannered than before. He need not have worried; he would have looked a gentleman on the gallows. He was older than when they had seen him last, but not as old as they. He looked a man of forty.

His face was somehow coarser than before, weather-beaten and very pale. It had, with the dark, always somewhat sunken eyes, that same divine play of light and darkness which had long ago made maidens mad. His large mouth also had its old frankness and sweetness. But to his pure forehead a change had come. It was not that it was now crossed by a multitude of little horizontal lines, for the marble of it was too fine to be marred by such superficial wear. But time had revealed its true character. It was
not the imperial tiara, that once had caught all eyes, above his dark brows. It was the grave and noble likeness to a skull. The radiance of it belonged to the possessor, not of the world, but of the grave and of eternity. Now, as his hair had withdrawn from it, it gave out the truth frankly and simply. Also, as you got, from the face of the brother, the key of understanding to this particular type of family beauty, you would recognize it at once in the appearance of the sisters, even in the two youthful portraits on the wall. The most striking characteristic in the three heads was the generic resemblance to the skull.

All in all, Morten’s countenance was quiet, considerate, and dignified, as it had always been.

“Good evening, little sisters; well met, well met,” he said, “it was very sweet and sisterly of you to come and see me here. You had a—” he stopped a moment, as if searching for his word, as if not in the habit of speaking much with other people—“a nice fresh drive to Elsinore, I should say,” he concluded.

His sisters sat with their faces toward him, as pale as he. Morten had always been wont to speak very lowly, in contrast to themselves. Thus a discussion between the sisters might be carried on with the two speaking at the same time, on the chance of the one shrill voice drowning the other. But if you wanted to hear what Morten said, you had to listen. He spoke in just the same way now, and they had been prepared for his appearance, more or less, but not for his voice.

They listened then as they had done before. But they were longing to do more. As they had set eyes on him they had turned their slim torsos all around in their chairs. Could they not touch him? No, they knew that to be out of the question. They had not been reading ghost stories all their lives for nothing. And this very thing recalled to them the old days, when, for these private supper-parties of theirs, Morten had come in at times, his large cloak soaked with rain and sea water, shining, black and rough like a shark’s skin, or glazed over with snow, or freshly tarred, so that
they had, laughing, held him at arm’s length off their frocks. Oh, how thoroughly had the tunes of thirty years ago been transposed from a major to a minor key! From what blizzards had he come in tonight? With what sort of tar was he tarred?

“How are you, my dears?” he asked. “Do you have as merry a time in Copenhagen as in the old days at Elsinore?”

“And how are you yourself, Morten?” asked Fanny, her voice a full octave higher than his. “You are looking a real, fine privateer captain. You are bringing all the full, spiced, trade winds into our nunnery of Elsinore.”

“Yes, those are fine winds,” said Morten.

“How far away you have been, Morten?” said Eliza, her voice trembling a little. “What a multitude of lovely places you have visited, that we have never seen! How I have wished, how I have wished that I were you.”

Fanny gave her sister a quick strong glance. Had their thoughts gone up in a parallel motion from the snowy parks and streets of Copenhagen? Or did this quiet sister, younger than she, far less brilliant, speak the simple truth of her heart?

“Yes, Lizzie, my duck,” said Morten. “I remember that. I have thought of that—how you used to cry and stamp your little feet and wring your hands shouting, ‘Oh, I wish I were dead.’ ”

“Where do you come from, Morten?” Fanny asked him.

“I come from hell,” said Morten. “I beg your pardon,” he added, as he saw his sister wince. “I have come now, as you see, because the Sound is frozen over. I can come then. That is a rule.”

Oh, how the heart of Fanny flew upward at his words. She felt it herself, as if she had screamed out, in a shout of deliverance, like a woman in the final moment of childbirth. When the Emperor, from Elba, set foot on the soil of France he brought back the old time with him. Forgotten was red-hot Moscow, and the deadly white and black winter marches. The tricolor was up in the air, unfolded, and the old grenadiers threw up their arms and cried once more:
Vive l’Empereur!
Her soul, like they, donned the old
uniform. It was for the benefit of onlookers only, and for the fun of the thing, from now, that she was dressed up in the body of an old woman.

“Are we not looking a pair of old scarecrows, Morten?” she asked, her eyes shining at him. “Were not our old aunts right when they preached to us about our vanity, and the vanity of all things? Indeed, the people who impress on the young that they should purchase, in time, crutches and an ear-trumpet, do carry their point in the end.”

“No, you are looking charming, Fanny,” he said, his eyes shining gently back. “Like a bumblebee-hawkmoth.”—For they used to collect butterflies together in their childhood. “And if you were really looking like a pair of old ladies I should like it very much. There have been few of them where I have been, for many years. Now when grandmamma had her birthday parties at Oregaard, that was where you would see a houseful of fine old ladies. Like a grand aviary, and grandmamma amongst them like a proud cockatoo.”

“Yet you once said,” said, Fanny, “that you would give a year of your existence to be free from spending the afternoon with the old devils.”

“Yes, I did that,” said Morten, “but my ideas about a year of my existence have changed since then. But tell me, seriously, do they still tie weights to
billets-doux
, and throw them into your carriage when you drive home from the balls?”

“Oh!” said Eliza, drawing in her breath.

She was quoting a long-forgotten poem by a long-forgotten lover.

“You are not married, my dears, are you?” said Morten, suddenly
frightened at the absurd possibility of a stranger belonging to his sisters

“Why should we not be married?” asked Fanny. “We both of us have husbands and lovers at each finger-tip. I, I married the Bishop of Sealand—he lost his balance a little in our bridal bed because of his wings.” She could not prevent a delicate thin little laughter coming out of her in small puffs, like steam from a kettle-spout. The Bishop looked, at the distance of forty-eight hours, ridiculously small, like a little doll seen from a tower. “Lizzie married—” she went on, and then stopped herself. When they were children the young De Conincks had lived under a special superstition, which they had from a marionette comedy. It came to this: that the lies which you tell are likely to become truth. On this account they had always been careful in their choice of what lies they would tell. Thus they would never say that they could not pay a Sunday visit to their old aunts because they had a toothache, for they would be afraid that Nemesis might be at their heels, and that they would indeed have a toothache. But they might safely say that their music master had told them not to practice their gavottes any longer, as they already played them with masterly art. The habit was still in their blood.

“No, to speak the truth, Morten,” Fanny said, “we are old maids, all on your account. Nobody would have us. The De Conincks have had a bad name as consorts since you went off and took away the heart and soul and innocence of Adrienne.”

She looked at him to see what he would say to this. She had followed his thoughts. They had been faithful, but he—what had he done? He had encumbered them with a lovely and gentle sister-in-law.

Their uncle, Fernand De Coninck, he who had helped Morten to get his ship, had in the old days lived in France during the Revolution. That was the place and the time for a De Coninck to live in. Also he had never got quite out of them again, not even
when he had been an old bachelor in Elsinore, and he never felt quite at home in a peaceful life. He had been full of anecdotes and songs of the period, and when they had been children the brother and the sisters had known them by heart from him. After a moment Morten slowly and in a low voice began to quote one of Uncle Fernand’s ditties. This had been made on a special occasion, when the old aunts of the King of France had been leaving the country, and the revolutionary police had ordered all their boxes to be opened and examined at the frontier, for fear of treachery.

He said:

Fanny’s face immediately reflected the expression of her brother’s. Without searching her memory more than a moment she followed him with the next verse of the song. This time it is the King’s old aunts speaking:

And Eliza took up the thread after her, laughing a little:

With these words the brother and the sisters lightened their hearts and washed their hands forever of fair, unhappy Adrienne Rosenstand.

“But you were married, Morten?” said Eliza kindly, the laughter still in her voice.

“Yes,” said Morten, “I had five wives. The Spanish are lovely women, you know, like a mosaic of jewels. One of them was a dancer, too. When she danced it was really like a swarm of butterflies whirling round, and being drawn into, the little central flame; you did not know what was up and what was down, and that seemed to me then, when I was young, a charming quality in a wife. One was an English skipper’s daughter, an honest girl, and she will never have forgotten me. One was the young widow of a rich planter. She was a real lady. All her thoughts had some sort of long train trailing after them. She bore me two children. One was a Negress, and her I liked best.”

“Did they go on board your ship?” Eliza asked.

“No, none of them ever came on board my ship,” said Morten.

“And tell us,” said Fanny, “which, out of all the things that you had, you liked the best?”

Morten thought her question over for a moment. “Out of all lives,” he said, “the life of a pirate is the best.”

“Finer than that of a privateer captain in the Sound?” asked Fanny.

“Yes, it is that,” said Morten, “inasmuch as you are in the open sea.

“But what made you decide to become a pirate?” asked Fanny, much intrigued, for this was really like a book of romance and adventure.

“The heart, the heart,” said Morten, “that which throws us into all our disasters. I fell in love. It was the
coup de foudre
of which Uncle Fernand spoke so much. He himself knew it to be no laughing matter. And she was somebody else’s, so I could not have her without cheating law and order a little. She was built in Genoa,
had been used by the French as a dispatch-carrier, and was known to be the quickest schooner that ever flew over the Atlantic. She was run ashore at the coast of the island of St. Martin, which is half French and half Dutch, and was sold by the Dutch at Philippsburg. Old Van Zandten, the ship-owner, who employed me then and loved me as a son, sent me to Philippsburg to buy her for him. She was the loveliest, yes, by far the loveliest thing I ever saw. She was like a swan. When she came along, carrying the press of her sails, she was light, gallant, noble, a great lady—like one of grandmamma’s swans at Oregaard, when we teased them—pure, loyal, like a Damascene blade. And then, my dears, she was a little like
Fortuna II
. She had, like her, a very small foresail with an unusually large mainsail and high boom.

“I took all old Van Zandten’s money then and bought her for myself, and after that we had, she and I, to keep off the respectable people of the country. What are you to do when love sets to at you? I made her a faithful lover, and she had a fine time with her loyal crew, adored and petted like a dainty lady who has her toe nails polished with henna. With me she became the fear of the Caribbean Sea, the little sea-eaglet who kept the tame birds on the stir. So I do not know for certain whether I did right or wrong. Shall not he have the fair woman who loves her most?”

“And was she in love with you as well?” asked Eliza, laughing.

“But who shall ask a woman if she is in love with him?” said Morten. “The question to ask about woman is this: ‘What is her price, and will you pay it?’ We should not cheat them, but should ask them courteously and pay with a good grace, whether it be cash, love, marriage, or our life or honor which they charge us; or else, if we are poor people and cannot pay, take off our hats to them and leave them for the wealthier man. That has been sound moral Latin with men and women since the world began. As to their loving us—for one thing, Can they love us?”