A Bloodsmoor Romance (86 page)

Ah, how calmly Deirdre of the Shadows lectured her frightened little audience!—how assuredly, how resolutely, she comported herself, in those final days of her mediumship! If the staff of Fairbanks House thought her extraordinary, and not very unlike the spirits with whom she traded, they could not help but think, too, that, in her black silk-and-muslin dress, with its fashionable long bodice, and loosely draped sash of braided satin, she was incontestably
of good breeding:
for all her independence, and rumored eccentricity,
a lady.

“No spirit can harm us—” Deirdre spoke with equanimity—“save with our complicity.”

So she strolled in the rose garden, which did indeed contain a scent—near-imperceptible, but distressing nonetheless—of corruption, and contamination, and grave
wrong.
So sear was this August, in its days of pitiless heat, and no rain, that when she strayed from the tiled path, the earth crumbled beneath her feet; and the many rosebushes, tho' assiduously watered by the bravest of the gardeners, turned limp-petaled and mournful countenances upon her, and seemed hardly blooms, but papier-mâché, molded by a distracted hand.

The sighing grew louder, and was suddenly very close: but Deirdre wisely did not turn, nor even give much indication of awareness. She opened her fan, which was made of fragrant sandalwood, painted in black arabesques, and adorned with tiny puffs of black swansdown: this elegant accoutrement having been a gift from the late Madame Blavatsky, at the peak of Madame's affection for her wayward Lolo. She opened the fan, and fanned herself languidly; and tho' the smallest hairs on the back of her neck did stir, as if of their own volition, she truly felt no alarm, and surely no sense of danger, at the approach of this creature who was neither
living,
nor peaceably
dead!
—the very thought of which, I am bound to confess, fills me with extreme agitation.

Some minutes passed, with a sullen slowness—as, indeed, the entire exorcism would proceed very slowly, requiring, in all, some twenty-five hours of continuous concentration, on the part of the medium: the which doubtless contributed to her emotional collapse. But we must remember that Time evidently possesses no value, and, indeed, no meaning, in Spirit World, and that five minutes, five hours, or five days might very likely seem, from that vantage point, identical. Deirdre of the Shadows was so accustomed to the vagaries of spirit behavior, so familiar with the curious oscillations between reasonable conduct, and totally bizarre conduct, that, it may be, she had become somewhat complacent, as to her ability to determine the contours of an exchange; nor did she take cognizance of these extreme durations of time, as if, in all unconscious vanity, she fancied herself but an ethereal spirit—requiring no rest, no sleep, and no human nourishment.

“I wish you no harm, and come here as a friend,” Deirdre said softly, “for, I have been told, you are greatly unhappy.”

Again some minutes passed, it may have been with coy resistance: and then there was a stirring, to Deirdre's left, and an emanation of dank odoriferous air, which gravely offended Deirdre's fastidious nostrils. She made, of course, no sign of displeasure, but, seating herself on a stone bench, close by the lily pond, continued to fan herself with the handsome black fan, in slow precise motions. Scarcely raising her voice, she repeated her words: her sensitive eyes darting about, yet discerning nothing, save the rosebushes in their pleasingly regular pattern, and the pond, and a stone bench that faced her across the pond, some seven or eight feet away; and the vine-bedecked stone wall beyond.

How many times Deirdre repeated these simple words, I cannot say; but surely they induced a hypnotic calm, in both the spirit and herself, which, tho' disrupted from time to time by a shrill fit of giggling, or an explosion of incoherent curses, did serve to reduce the spirit's suspicion of her, and to establish some modicum of rapport.

“I am your friend,” Deirdre whispered, “your friend, your friend. And I have been told you are greatly unhappy; and that your heart is very bitter. But I come as no enemy, tho' in
their
arrogant hire: I come as a friend.”

Abash'd silence; and ostentatious sighs; and a spell of coughing, which shaded into such a spasm of choking, and gasping, and the unmistakable sounds of suffocation, that Deirdre's impenetrable poise was all but shaken. But then silence returned: and a considerable period of time passed, during which any but so seasoned a medium as Deirdre of the Shadows, would have concluded that the spirit had gone away.

But Deirdre remained where she was, immobile save for the slow, sombre, mesmerizing motion of her fan; and the heat of the afternoon began at last to slacken, in its ferocity; and the first intimations of dusk heralded themselves. “Your friend, your friend,” Deirdre intoned, her eyes somewhat glazed with the strain of this long vigil, and her throat hoarse, “your friend who wishes you no harm; but only to alleviate your suffering.”

As twilight deepened, Deirdre's vision grew more acute: and, as the minutes passed, she began to see the spirit, or at any rate a brooding, motionless form, on the stone bench which faced her, across the dark pond. This figure had not the irregular density of the ectoplasm that ofttimes materializes itself, at séances, and which has been, in fact, photographed: it was rather to be characterized as a
uniformly dark aura,
transparent, yet unmistakable: and unmistakable, too, as the figure of a young girl.

At this materialization Deirdre noted in herself the
involuntary
physical responses that might have belonged to a less courageous, or a less practic'd individual: the subtle raising of the hairs on the back of her neck, and an acceleration in her pulse. (For so we respond in the presence of the
uncanny
—whether there is actual danger to us, or no.) Yet she indicated no alarm, and sat quietly, her gaze avidly affixed to the vaporous, and darkly pale, countenance of the spirit, which defined itself with exasperating slowness, yet withal a regularity, moment by moment, and minute by minute, until it was as substantial as the laws of nature would allow it to become. “Ah!” Deirdre exclaimed; and, startl'd, she allowed the fan to slip from her loos'd fingers, and to clatter to the stone beneath her feet.

For this girl, or, rather, the materialized spirit of the girl, seated directly across the pond from her, no more than eight feet away, seemed to her distressingly familiar, tho' clearly a stranger: a
stranger,
yet a
sister:
and one whose palely glowering, brooding, petulant countenance could not fail to strike her as sympathetic.

Whereupon an interview ensued, of a strained, awkward nature, during which Deirdre repeated her declaration—that she was a friend, that she meant no harm—innumerable times, as if speaking to a very small child; and in a hoarse reproachful voice the girl replied, enunciating her words with a curious intonation—shy, yet bold, untutor'd, yet genteel and affected.

Deirdre was now hunched forward in her seat, and stared with amazed, and undisguisèd, interest, at this long-dead female adolescent, who told a halting, disjointed, and probably quite false tale, of having been a kitchen maid “cruelly used” by one of the Fairbanks sons, and thereafter shunned by him, until, in desperation, that he might take pity on her, or at least acknowledge her, she scaled the garden wall—and threw herself into the pond—and succeeded in drowning herself, her weakened physical condition, and the great weight of her water-soaked petticoats and skirts, preventing her flailing limbs from saving her.

“A suicide!—ah yes,” Deirdre breathed. “It could not be otherwise.”

Our repugnance for so extreme a sinner, and for so shameless a liar (it being quite questionable, that a scion of the great Fairbanks family should behave in an ungentlemanly fashion, or even consort with a female of the servant class in this wise), should not prevent any natural upsurge of pity; for, indeed, the drowned creature
was
pitiable, the more so that her face was so pinched, and her pallid complexion so unwholesomely roughened, as if with smallpox scars; and her plaited and banded hair was disheveled, and sluttishly frizzled, giving off an odor, after more than one hundred years, of stagnant damp! Her small, bright, suspicious eyes were set deep in her narrow face, and so shadowed by indentations in the bone, she appeared rather more like a woman of advanced, and ravaged, age, than a mere girl of eighteen or nineteen. Her reedy voice whined and droned, as she recited her tale, to a most unfortunate effect; tho' she held herself stiffly, observing very poor posture, she could not prevent spasms of near-convulsive shivering from passing over her thin frame. The gray cotton dress she wore, and the torn and soiled apron, would have been quite appropriate for one of her station, had the vain creature not sought to prettify it by a most pathetic and sickly assortment of ill-matched ribbons: all of which, I hardly need say, had become markedly shabby, with the passage of years.

Nonetheless, this sorry personage held Deirdre's rapt attention, as she recounted her story, the doubtful tale o'erleaping itself, and twisting back, and offering embellishments, and contradictions; and then it was interrupted by a spasm of angry sobbing; and then by a spasm of laughter that greatly resembled sobbing. All of which Deirdre attended to, scarce allowing herself to breathe.

A tale so jumbled and incoherent, and fraught with libel, does not require summary here, in a chronicle determined from its outset to Truth: yet it may be helpful to note that the suicide (who not once, in the course of more than twenty-four babbling hours, was to show proper remorse for her sin) died, by her own spiteful efforts, on a moonlit night in the summer of 1787, so very long ago, our noble General Washington had not yet been elected to the Presidency, and our proud states not yet united, under the Constitution. Alas, that bitterness, and every kind of ill-feeling, and a mean-hearted
lack of Christian charity,
should pursue so young a woman, into the grave and beyond! And that a shameless disregard for her own failure of chastity should give rise to audacious sentiments, and still more audacious charges, leveled against such illustrious personages as the Fairbanks, those gentlemen who were the trusted associates—nay, the intimate friends—of such Founders of our nation as John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, and General Schuyler, and Washington himself!

Yet it is foolish indeed, to expect from so gross a sinner, as one who has died by her own hand, in blasphemous defiance of God's will, any modicum of rational behavior, let alone moral scruples: so the drowned girl raved on, with no sense of her violation of propriety, and very little concern that she exposed herself, with every churlish innuendo, and vulgar accusation. Perhaps it is to her credit, that Deirdre of the Shadows, practic'd in her intercourse with Spirit World, did not once seek to interrupt this stream of foul babble, tho' hour upon hour passed, with excruciating slowness, by human measurement: perhaps it is a reflection of her waning judgment, and the accelerated frailty of her nerves, the which she had been straining to the limits of endurance, well before consenting to journey to Fishkill.

“A suicide—by drowning—yes—yes of course—it could not be otherwise.” So the fatigued medium murmured, gazing all the while at her scurrilous communicator, whose spectral form, in the ghastly pallor of moonlight, seemed of nearly as much substance as her own: and cast a faint reflection in the turbid pool of water that lay between them.

After a most protracted spell, the drowned girl lapsed into silence, and Deirdre, with the greatest semblance of composure, again repeated her simple words, and went on, to speak of the “Earth Plane” and “Spirit World” and the vastitude of space, in which “deceased souls” were reunited with their loved ones, in a communion too mysterious to elucidate, and too evident to doubt. It was both
mistaken,
and
self-injurious,
to refuse to “pass over” into Spirit World, at death: a volitional act that brings with it unforeseen consequences, quite in excess of all anticipation. For, if the homeless (and bodiless) spirit imagines he will exact revenge upon those who have injured him, it is more often the case that revenge so contaminates the aggressor, he becomes blinded to his circumstances, and fails even to notice the ineluctable passage of
earthly
time—with the remarkable result that his “revenge” falls upon totally innocent persons, as one generation succeeds another. “That there is some small pleasure in the exercise of
revenge,
for
revenge's
pristine sake,” Deirdre said uncertainly, her throat grown hoarse, “I cannot doubt, and would not deny: and yet, I am bound to instruct you, your imagin'd transgressor, or transgressors, has long since ‘passed over,' and has not dwelt here at Fairbanks House for a very many decades. Indeed, my dear Florette”—for so the affected young baggage had called herself—“indeed, it is the case that those whom you
love,
as well as those whom you
hate,
have all passed over into the other plane—and are waiting with great impatience, and infinite compassion, for you to join them.”

This speech, falteringly uttered, yet impeccable in its logic, did not evoke any immediate response in the drowned girl, who, it may be, had for so long been isolated from all human discourse, that she had difficulty in the simple comprehension of commonplace words and diction: but Deirdre tirelessly repeated it, and expanded upon it, pointing out that Christian charity obliges us to forgive our enemies, and to love them, despite the wrongs they have inflicted upon us, and the hardness of their hearts. If one's cheek is harshly slapped, one must, in imitation of Our Saviour, bravely turn the other cheek: for such is the mystery of the Crucifixion, that it brings about the Resurrection, in the flesh as well as the spirit: and this is
a mystery pertaining to all mortals
—to all Christian mortals, that is, who embrace Jesus Christ as their Saviour.