The Ghost Feeler (5 page)

‘“No; for I fear for your Excellency's ague. The air there is excessively damp.”

‘“The more reason you should no longer be exposed to it; and to prevent the intemperance of your zeal I will at once make the place inaccessible.”

‘The Duchess at this fell on her knees on the slab, weeping excessively and lifting her hands to Heaven.

“Oh” she cried, “you are cruel, sir, to deprive me of access to the sacred relics that have enabled me to support with resignation the solitude to which your Excellency's duties have condemned me; and if prayer and meditation give me any authority to pronounce on such matters, suffer me to warn you, sir, that I fear the blessed Saint Blandina will punish us for thus abandoning her venerable remains!”

‘The Duke at this seemed to pause, for he was a pious man, and my grandmother thought she saw him exchange a glance with the chaplain; who, stepping timidly forward, with his eyes on the ground, said; “There is indeed much wisdom in her Excellency's words, but I would suggest, sir, that her pious wish might be met, and the saint more conspicuously honoured, by transferring the relics from the crypt to a place beneath the altar.”

‘“True!” cried the Duke, “and it shall be done at once.”

‘But thereat the Duchess rose to her feet with a terrible look.

‘“No,” she cried, “by the body of God! For it shall not be said that, after your Excellency has chosen to deny every request I addressed to him, I owe his consent to the solicitation of another!”

‘The chaplain turned red and the Duke yellow, and for a moment neither spoke.

‘Then the Duke said, “Here are words enough, Madam. Do you wish the relics brought up from the crypt?”

‘“I wish nothing that I owe to another's intervention!”

‘“Put the image in place then,” says the Duke furiously; and handed her Grace to a chair.

‘She sat there, my grandmother said, straight as an arrow, her hands locked, her head high, her eyes on the Duke, while the statue was dragged to its place; then she stood up and turned away. As she passed by Nencia, “Call me Antonio,” she whispered; but before the words were out of her mouth the Duke stepped between them.

‘“Madam,” says he, all smiles now, “I have travelled straight from Rome to bring you the sooner this proof of my esteem. I lay last night at Monselice, and have been on the road since daybreak. Will you not invite me to supper?”

‘“Surely, my Lord,” said the Duchess. “It shall be laid in the dining-parlour within the hour.”

‘“Why not in your chamber and at once, Madam? Since I believe it is your custom to sup there.”

‘“In my chamber?” says the Duchess, in disorder.

‘“Have you anything against it?” he asked.

‘“Assuredly not, sir, if you will give me time to prepare myself.”

‘“I will wait in your cabinet,” said the Duke.

‘At that, said my grandmother, the Duchess gave one look, as the souls in hell may have looked when the gates closed on our Lord; then she called Nencia and passed to her chamber.

‘What happened there my grandmother could never learn, but that the Duchess, in great haste, dressed herself with extraordinary splendour, powdering her hair with gold, painting her face and bosom, and covering herself with jewels till she shone like our Lady of Loretto; and hardly were these preparations complete when the Duke entered from the cabinet, followed by the servants carrying supper. Thereupon the Duchess dismissed Nencia, and what follows my grandmother learned from a pantry-lad who brought up the dishes and waited in the cabinet; for only the Duke's body-servant entered the bedchamber.

‘Well, according to this boy, sir, who was looking and listening with his whole body, as it were, because he had never before been suffered so near the Duchess, it appears that the noble couple sat down in great good humour, the Duchess playfully reproving her husband for his long absence, while the Duke swore that to look so beautiful was the best way of punishing him. In this tone the talk continued, with such gay sallies on the part of the Duchess, such tender advances on the Duke's, that the lad declared they were for all the world like a pair of lovers courting on a summer's night in the vineyard; and so it went till the servant brought in the mulled wine.

‘“Ah,” the Duke was saying at that moment, “this agreeable evening repays me for the many dull ones I have spent away from you; nor do I remember to have enjoyed such laughter since the afternoon last year when we drank chocolate in the gazebo with my cousin Ascanio. And that reminds me,” he said, “is my cousin in good health?”

‘“I have no reports of it,” says the Duchess. “But your Excellency should taste these figs stewed in malmsey —”

‘“I am in the mood to taste whatever you offer,” said he; and as she helped him to the figs, he added, “if my enjoyment were not complete as it is, I could almost wish my cousin Ascanio were with us. The fellow is rare good company at supper. What do you say, Madam? I hear he's still in the country; shall we send for him to join us?”

‘“Ah,” said the Duchess, with a sigh and a languishing look, “I see your Excellency wearies of me already.”

‘“I, Madam? Ascanio is a capital good fellow, but to my mind his chief merit at this moment is his absence. It inclines me so tenderly to him that, by God, I could empty a glass to his good health.”

‘With that the Duke caught up his goblet and signed to the servant to fill the Duchess's.

‘“Here's to the cousin,” he cried, standing, “who has the good taste to stay away when he's not wanted. I drink to his very long life — and you, Madam?”

‘At this the Duchess, who had sat staring at him with a changed face, rose also and lifted her glass to her lips.

‘“And I to his happy death,” says she in a wild voice; and as she spoke the empty goblet dropped from her hand and she fell down on the floor.

‘The Duke shouted to her women that she had swooned, and they came and lifted her to the bed ... She suffered horribly all night, Nencia said, twisting herself like a heretic at the stake, but without a word escaping her. The Duke watched by her, and toward daylight sent for the chaplain; but by then she was unconscious, and, her teeth being locked, our Lord's body could not be passed through them.

‘The Duke announced to his relations that his lady had died after partaking too freely of spiced wine and an omelette of carp's roe, at a supper she had prepared in honour of his return; and the next year he brought home a new Duchess, who gave him a son and five daughters ...'

V

The sky had turned to a steel grey, against which the villa stood out sallow and inscrutable. A wind strayed through the gardens, loosening here and there a yellow leaf from the sycamores; and the hills across the valley were purple as thunder clouds.

* * *

‘And the statue —?' I asked.

‘Ah, the statue. Well, sir, this is what my grandmother told me, here on this very bench where we're sitting. The poor child, who worshipped the Duchess as a girl of her years will worship a beautiful kind mistress, spent a night of horror, you may fancy, shut out from her lady's room, hearing the cries that came from it, and seeing, as she crouched in her corner, the women rush to and fro with wild looks, the Duke's lean face in the door, and the chaplain skulking in the antechamber with his eyes on his breviary. No one minded her that night or the next morning; and towards dusk, when it became known the Duchess was no more, the poor girl felt the pious wish to say a prayer for her dead mistress. She crept to the chapel and stole in unobserved. The place was empty and dim, but as she advanced she heard a low moaning, and coming in front of the statue she saw that its face, the day before so sweet and smiling, had the look on it that you know – and the moaning seemed to come from its lips. My grandmother turned cold, but something she said afterward, kept her from calling or shrieking out, and she turned and ran from the place. In the passage she fell in a swoon; and when she came to her senses, in her own chamber, she heard that the Duke had locked the chapel door and forbidden any to set foot there ... The place was never opened again till the Duke died, some ten years later; and then it was that the other servants, going in with the new heir, saw for the first time the horror that my grandmother had kept in her bosom ...'

‘And the crypt?' I asked. ‘Has it never been opened?'

‘Heaven forbid, sir!' cried the old man, crossing himself. ‘Was it not the Duchess's express wish that the relics should not be disturbed?'

The Fullness of Life

I

For hours she had lain in a kind of gentle torpor, not unlike that sweet lassitude which masters one in the hush of a midsummer noon, when the heat seems to have silenced the very birds and insects, and, lying sunk in the tasselled meadowgrasses, one looks up through a level roofing of maple-leaves at the vast, shadowless, and unsuggestive blue. Now and then, at ever-lengthening intervals, a flash of pain darted through her, like the ripple of sheet-lightning across such a midsummer sky; but it was too transitory to shake her stupor, that calm, delicious, bottomless stupor into which she felt herself sinking more and more deeply, without a disturbing impulse of resistance, an effort of reattachment to the vanishing edges of consciousness.

The resistance, the effort, had known their hour of violence; but now they were at an end. Through her mind, long harried by grotesque visions, fragmentary images of the life that she was leaving, tormenting lines of verse, obstinate presentiments of pictures once beheld, indistinct impressions of rivers, towers, and cupolas, gathered in the length of journeys half forgotten – through her mind there now only moved a few primal sensations of colourless well-being; a vague satisfaction in the thought that she had swallowed her noxious last draught of medicine ... and that she should never again hear the creaking of her husband's boots – those horrible boots – and that no one would come to bother her about the next day's dinner ... or the butcher's book ...

At last even these dim sensations spent themselves in the thickening obscurity which enveloped her; a dusk now filled with pale geometric roses, circling softly, interminably before her, now darkened to a uniform blue-blackness, the hue of a summer night without stars. And into this darkness she felt herself sinking, sinking, with the gentle sense of security of one upheld from beneath. Like a tepid tide it rose around her, gliding ever higher and higher, folding in its velvety embrace her relaxed and tired body, now submerging her breast and shoulders, now creeping gradually, with soft inexorableness, over her throat to her chin, to her ears, to her mouth Ah, now it was rising too high; the impulse to struggle was renewed; ... her mouth was full; ... she was choking ... Help!

‘It is all over,' said the nurse, drawing down the eyelids with official composure.

The clock struck three. They remembered it afterwards. Someone opened the window and let in a blast of that strange, neutral air which walks the earth between darkness and dawn; someone else led the husband into another room. He walked vaguely, like a blind man, on his creaking boots.

II

She stood, as it seemed, on a threshold, yet no tangible gateway was in front of her. Only a wide vista of light, mild yet penetrating as the gathered glimmer of innumerable stars, expanded gradually before her eyes, in blissful contrast to the cavernous darkness from which she had of late emerged.

She stepped forward, not frightened, but hesitating, and as her eyes began to grow more familiar with the melting depths of light about her, she distinguished the outlines of landscape, at first swimming in the opaline uncertainty of Shelley's vaporous creations, then gradually resolved into distincter shape – the vast unrolling of a sunlit plain, aerial forms of mountains, and presently the silver crescent of a river in the valley, and a blue stencilling of trees along its curve – something suggestive in its ineffable hue of an azure background of Leonardo's, strange, enchanting, mysterious, leading on the eye and the imagination into regions of fabulous delight. As she gazed, her heart beat with a soft and rapturous surprise; so exquisite a promise she read in the summons of that hyaline distance.

‘And so death is not the end after all,' in sheer gladness she heard herself exclaiming aloud. ‘I always knew that it couldn't be. I believed in Darwin, of course. I do still; but then Darwin himself said that he wasn't sure about the soul – at least, I think he did – and Wallace was a spiritualist; and then there was St George Mivart —'