Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories (13 page)

Never did any human face exhibit more poignant anguish. The maiden who sees her betrothed fall suddenly dead by her side, the mother by the empty cradle of her child, Eve seated on the threshold of the gate of Paradise, the miser who finds a stone in place of his treasure, the poet who has accidentally dropped into the fire the only manuscript of his favourite work,—not one of them could look more inconsolable, more stricken to the heart. The blood left her lovely face and she turned pale as marble. Her beautiful arms hung limp by her body as if the muscles had been unknotted, and she leaned against a pillar, for her limbs were giving way under her. As for me, livid, my brow covered with a sweat more bloody than that of Calvary, I staggered towards the church door. I was stifling; the vaulting seemed to press down on me and my hand to upbear alone the weight of the cupola.

As I was about to cross the threshold, a woman’s hand suddenly touched mine. I had never touched one before. It was cold like the skin of a serpent, yet it burned me like the print of a red-hot iron. It was she. “Oh, unfortunate man! Unfortunate man! What have you done?” she whispered; then disappeared in the crowd.

The old bishop passed by. He looked severely at me. My appearance was startlingly strange. I turned pale, blushed red, and flames passed before my eyes. One of my comrades took pity on me and led me away; I was incapable of finding alone the road to the seminary. At the corner of a street, while the young priest happened to look in another direction, a quaintly dressed negro page approached me and without staying his steps handed me a small pocket-book with chased gold corners, signing to me to conceal it. I slipped it into my sleeve and kept it there until I was alone in my cell. I opened it. It contained but two leaves with these words: “Clarimonda, at the Palazzo Concini.” I was then so ignorant of life that I did not know of Clarimonda, in spite of her fame, and I was absolutely ignorant where the Palazzo Concini was situated. I made innumerable conjectures of the most extravagant kind, but the truth is that, provided I could see her again, I cared little what she might be, whether a great lady or a courtesan.

This new-born love of mine was hopelessly rooted within me. I did not even attempt to expel it from my heart, for I felt that that was an impossibility. The woman had wholly seized upon me; a single glance of hers had been sufficient to change me; she had breathed her soul into me, and I no longer lived but in her and through her. I indulged in countless extravagant fancies; I kissed on my hand the spot she had touched, and I repeated her name for hours at a time. All I needed to do to see her as plainly as if she had been actually present was to close my eyes; I repeated the words which she had spoken to me, “Unfortunate man! Unfortunate man! What have you done?” I grasped the full horror of my situation, and the dread, sombre aspects of the state which I had embraced were plainly revealed to me. To be a priest; that is, to remain chaste, never to love, never to notice sex or age; to turn aside from beauty, to voluntarily blind myself, to crawl in the icy shadows of a cloister or a church, to see none but the dying, to watch by strangers’ beds, to wear mourning for myself in the form of the black cassock, a robe that may readily be used to line your coffin.

Meanwhile I felt life rising within me like an internal lake, swelling and overflowing; my blood surged in my veins; my youth, so long suppressed, burst out suddenly like the aloe that blooms but once in a hundred years, and then like a thunder-clap. How could I manage to see Clarimonda again? I could find no pretext to leave the seminary, for I knew no one in town. Indeed, my stay in it was to be very short, for I was merely waiting to be appointed to a parish. I tried to loosen the bars of the window, but it was at a terrific height from the ground, and having no ladder, I had to give up that plan. Besides, I could go out at night only, and how should I ever find my way through the labyrinth of streets? All these difficulties, which would have been slight to other men, were tremendous for me, a poor seminarist, in love since yesterday, without experience, without money, and without clothes.

“Ah, if only I had not been a priest, I might have seen her every day; I might have been her lover, her husband,” I said to myself in my blindness. Instead of being wrapped in my gloomy shroud, I should have worn silk and velvet, chains of gold, a sword and a plume, like handsome young cavaliers. My hair, instead of being dishonoured by a broad tonsure, would have fallen in ringlets around my neck; I should have worn a handsome waxed moustache; I should have been a valiant man. A single hour spent before an altar, a few words scarcely breathed, had cut me off forever from the living; I had myself sealed the stone of my tomb; I had pushed with my own hand the bolts of my prison door.

I looked out of the window. The heavens were wondrously blue, the trees had assumed their springtime livery, nature exhibited ironical joy. The square was full of people coming and going. Young dandies and young beauties in couples were going towards the gardens and the arbours; workmen passed by, singing drinking songs; there was an animation, a life, a rush, a gaiety, which contrasted all the more painfully with my mourning and my solitude. A young mother was playing with her child on the threshold of a door. She kissed its little rosy lips still pearly with drops of milk, and indulged, as she teased it, in those many divine puerilities which mothers alone can invent. The father, who stood a little way off, was smiling gently at the charming group, and his crossed arms pressed his joy to his heart. I could not bear the sight. I closed the window and threw myself on my bed, my heart filled with frightful hatred and jealousy, and I bit my fingers and my coverlet as if I had been a tiger starving for three days.

I know not how long I remained in this condition, but in turning over in a furious spasm, I perceived Father Serapion standing in the middle of the room gazing attentively at me. I was ashamed of myself, and letting fall my head upon my breast, I covered my face with my hands.

“Romualdo, my friend, something extraordinary is taking place in you,” said Serapion after a few moments’ silence. “Your conduct is absolutely inexplicable. You, so pious, so calm, and so gentle, you have been raging in your cell like a wild beast. Beware, my brother, and do not listen to the suggestions of the devil. The evil spirit, angered at your having devoted yourself to the Lord, prowls around you like a ravening wolf, and is making a last effort to draw you to himself. Instead of allowing yourself to be cast down, dear Romualdo, put on the breastplate of prayer, take up the shield of mortification, and valiantly fight the enemy. You will overcome him. Trial is indispensable to virtue, and gold emerges finer from the crucible. Be not dismayed nor discouraged; the best guarded and the strongest souls have passed through just such moments. Pray, fast, meditate, and the evil one will flee from you.”

The father’s discourse brought me back to myself, and I became somewhat calmer. “I was coming,” he said, “to inform you that you are appointed to the parish of C—. The priest who occupied it has just died, and his lordship the Bishop has charged me to install you there. Be ready to-morrow.”

I signed that I would be ready, and the father withdrew.

I opened my breviary and began to read my prayers, but the lines soon became confused; I lost the thread of my thoughts, and the book slipped from my hands without my noticing it.

To leave to-morrow without having seen her again.

To add one more impossibility to all those that already existed between us! To lose forever the hope of meeting her unless a miracle occurred! Even if I were to write to her, how could I send my letter? Considering the sacred functions which I had assumed, to whom could I confide, in whom could I trust? I felt terrible anxiety. Then what Father Serapion had just said to me of the wiles of the devil recurred to my memory. The strangeness of the adventure, the supernatural beauty of Clarimonda, the phosphorescent gleam of her glance, the burning touch of her hand, the trouble into which she had thrown me, the sudden change which had occurred in me, my piety vanished in an instant,—everything went to prove plainly the presence of the devil, and that satin-like hand could only be the glove that covered his claws. These thoughts caused me much terror. I picked up the breviary that had fallen to the ground from my knees, and I again began to pray.

The next day Serapion came for me. Two mules were waiting for us at the door, carrying our small valises. He got on one and I on the other as well as I could. While traversing the streets of the town, I looked at every window and every balcony in the hope of seeing Clarimonda, but it was too early; and the town was not yet awake. My glance tried to pierce through the blinds and curtains of all the palaces in front of which we were passing. No doubt Serapion thought my curiosity was due to the admiration caused in me by the beauty of the architecture, for he slackened his mule’s speed to give me time to look. Finally we reached the city gate and began to ascend the hill. When we reached the top, I turned around once again to gaze at the spot where lived Clarimonda. The shadow of a cloud covered the whole town; the blue and red roofs were harmonized in one uniform half-tint, over which showed, like flecks of foam, the morning smoke. By a singular optical effect there stood out bright under a single beam of light a building that rose far above the neighbouring houses, wholly lost in the mist. Although it was certainly three miles away, it seemed quite close; the smallest detail could be made out,—the turrets, the platforms, the windows, even the swallow-tailed vanes.

“What is that palace yonder lighted by a sunbeam?” I asked Serapion.

He shaded his eyes with his hand, and after having looked, answered: “That is the old palazzo which Prince Concini gave to Clarimonda the courtesan. Fearful things take place there.”

At that moment,—I have never known whether it was a reality or an illusion,—I thought I saw on the terrace a slender white form that gleamed for a second and vanished. It was Clarimonda. Oh! Did she know that at that very moment, from the top of the rough road which was taking me away from her, ardent and restless, I was watching the palace she dwelt in, and which a derisive effect of light seemed to draw near to me as if to invite me to enter it as its master? No doubt she knew it, for her soul was too much in sympathy with mine not to have felt its every emotion, and it was that feeling which had urged her, still wearing her night-dress, to ascend to the terrace in the icy-cold dew of morning.

The shadow reached the palace, and all turned into a motionless ocean of roofs and attics in which nothing was to be distinguished save swelling undulations. Serapion urged on his mule; mine immediately started too, and a turn in the road concealed forever from me the town of S, for I was never to return there. After three days’ travelling through a monotonous country, we saw rising above the trees the weathercock of the steeple of the church to which I had been appointed; and after having traversed some tortuous streets bordered by huts and small gardens, we arrived before the facade, which was not very magnificent. A porch adorned with a few mouldings and two or three sandstone pillars roughly cut, a tiled roof, and buttresses of the same sandstone as the pillars,—that was all. On the left, the cemetery overgrown with grass, with a tall iron cross in the centres to the right, in the shadow of the church, the presbytery, a very plain, poor, but clean house. We entered. A few hens were picking up scattered grain. Accustomed, apparently, to the black dress of ecclesiastics, they were not frightened by our presence, and scarcely moved out of the way. A hoarse bark was heard, and an old dog ran up to us; it was my predecessor’s dog. Its eye was dim, its coat was gray, and it exhibited every symptom of the greatest age a dog can reach. I patted it gently with my hand, and it immediately walked beside me with an air of inexpressible satisfaction. An old woman, who had been housekeeper to the former priest, also came to meet us, and after having shown us into the lower room, asked me if I intended to keep her. I told her that I should do so, and the dog and the hens also, and whatever furniture her master had left her at his death, which caused her a transport of joy, Father Serapion having at once paid her the price she had set upon it.

Having thus installed me, Father Serapion returned to the seminary. I therefore remained alone and without any other help than my own. The thought of Clarimonda again began to haunt me, and in spite of the efforts I made to drive it away, I was not always successful. One evening as I was walking through the box-edged walks of my little garden, I thought I saw through the shrubbery a female form watching my movements, and two sea-green eyes flashing amid the foliage, but it was merely an illusion. Having passed on the other side of the walk, I found only the imprint of a foot on the sand, so small that it looked like a child’s foot. The garden was shut in by very high walls. I visited every nook and corner of it, but found no one. I have never been able to explain the fact, which, for the matter of that, was nothing by comparison with the strange things that were to happen to me.

I had been living in this way for a year, carefully fulfilling all the duties of my profession, praying, fasting, exhorting, and succouring the sick, giving alms even to the extent of depriving myself of the most indispensable necessaries; but I felt within me extreme aridity, and the sources of grace were closed to me. I did not enjoy the happiness which comes of fulfilling a holy mission; my thoughts were elsewhere, and Clarimonda’s words often recurred to me. O my brother, ponder this carefully. Because I had a single time looked at a woman, because I had committed a fault apparently so slight, I suffered for several years the most dreadful agitation and my life was troubled forever.