Dracula's Guest: A Connoisseur's Collection of Victorian Vampire Stories (43 page)

“Have you made any discovery that teaches you to prolong human life—any elixir—any mode of treatment? I want my life prolonged, young man. That man there has been my physician for thirty years. He does all he can to keep me alive—after his lights. He studies all the new theories of all the scientists—but he is old; he gets older every day—his brainpower is going—he is bigoted—prejudiced—can’t receive new ideas—can’t grapple with new systems. He will let me die if I am not on my guard against him.”

“You are of an unbelievable ingratitude, Ecclenza,” said Parravicini.

“Oh, you needn’t complain. I have paid you thousands to keep me alive. Every year of my life has swollen your hoards; you know there is nothing to come to you when I am gone. My whole fortune is left to endow a home for indigent women of quality who have reached their ninetieth year. Come, Mr. Stafford, I am a rich woman. Give me a few years more in the sunshine, a few years more aboveground, and I will give you the price of a fashionable London practice—I will set you up at the West-End.”

“How old are you, Lady Ducayne?”

“I was born the day Louis XVI was guillotined.”

“Then I think you have had your share of the sunshine and the pleasures of the earth, and that you should spend your few remaining days in repenting your sins and trying to make atonement for the young lives that have been sacrificed to your love of life.”

“What do you mean by that, sir?”

“Oh, Lady Ducayne, need I put your wickedness and your physician’s still greater wickedness in plain words? The poor girl who is now in your employment has been reduced from robust health to a condition of absolute danger by Dr. Parravicini’s experimental surgery; and I have no doubt those other two young women who broke down in your service were treated by him in the same manner. I could take upon myself to demonstrate—by most convincing evidence, to a jury of medical men—that Dr. Parravicini has been bleeding Miss Rolleston after putting her under chloroform, at intervals, ever since she has been in your service. The deterioration in the girl’s health speaks for itself; the lancet marks upon the girl’s arms are unmistakable; and her description of a series of sensations, which she calls a dream, points unmistakably to the administration of chloroform while she was sleeping. A practice so nefarious, so murderous, must, if exposed, result in a sentence only less severe than the punishment of murder.”

“I laugh,” said Parravicini, with an airy motion of his skinny fingers; “I laugh at once at your theories and at your threats. I, Parravicini Leopold, have no fear that the law can question anything I have done.”

“Take the girl away, and let me hear no more of her,” cried Lady Ducayne, in the thin, old voice, which so poorly matched the energy and fire of the wicked old brain that guided its utterances. “Let her go back to her mother—I want no more girls to die in my service. There are girls enough and to spare in the world, God knows.”

“If you ever engage another companion—or take another English girl into your service, Lady Ducayne, I will make all England ring with the story of your wickedness.”

“I want no more girls. I don’t believe in his experiments. They have been full of danger for me as well as for the girl—an air bubble, and I should be gone. I’ll have no more of his dangerous quackery. I’ll find some new man—a better man than you, sir, a discoverer like Pasteur, or Virchow, a genius—to keep me alive. Take your girl away, young man. Marry her if you like. I’ll write a check for a thousand pounds, and let her go and live on beef and beer, and get strong and plump again. I’ll have no more such experiments. Do you hear, Parravicini?” she screamed, vindictively, the yellow, wrinkled face distorted with fury, the eyes glaring at him.

T
HE
S
TAFFORDS CARRIED
B
ELLA
Rolleston off to Varese next day, she very loath to leave Lady Ducayne, whose liberal salary afforded such help for the dear mother. Herbert Stafford insisted, however, treating Bella as coolly as if he had been the family physician, and she had been given over wholly to his care.

“Do you suppose your mother would let you stop here to die?” he asked. “If Mrs. Rolleston knew how ill you are, she would come post haste to fetch you.”

“I shall never be well again till I get back to Walworth,” answered Bella, who was low-spirited and inclined to tears this morning, a reaction after her good spirits of yesterday.

“We’ll try a week or two at Varese first,” said Stafford. “When you can walk halfway up Monte Generoso without palpitation of the heart, you shall go back to Walworth.”

“Poor mother, how glad she will be to see me, and how sorry that I’ve lost such a good place.”

This conversation took place on the boat when they were leaving Bellaggio. Lotta had gone to her friend’s room at seven o’clock that morning, long before Lady Ducayne’s withered eyelids had opened to the daylight, before even Francine, the French maid, was astir, and had helped to pack a Gladstone bag with essentials, and hustled Bella downstairs and out of doors before she could make any strenuous resistance.

“It’s all right,” Lotta assured her. “Herbert had a good talk with Lady Ducayne last night, and it was settled for you to leave this morning. She doesn’t like invalids, you see.”

“No,” sighed Bella, “she doesn’t like invalids. It was very unlucky that I should break down, just like Miss Tomson and Miss Blandy.”

“At any rate, you are not dead, like them,” answered Lotta, “and my brother says you are not going to die.”

I
T SEEMED RATHER A
dreadful thing to be dismissed in that offhand way, without a word of farewell from her employer.

“I wonder what Miss Torpinter will say when I go to her for another situation,” Bella speculated, ruefully, while she and her friends were breakfasting on board the steamer.

“Perhaps you may never want another situation,” said Stafford.

“You mean that I may never be well enough to be useful to anybody?”

“No, I don’t mean anything of the kind.”

It was after dinner at Varese, when Bella had been induced to take a whole glass of Chianti, and quite sparkled after that unaccustomed stimulant, that Mr. Stafford produced a letter from his pocket.

“I forgot to give you Lady Ducayne’s letter of adieu!” he said.

“What, did she write to me? I am so glad—I hated to leave her in such a cool way; for after all she was very kind to me, and if I didn’t like her it was only because she was too dreadfully old.”

She tore open the envelope. The letter was short and to the point:—

Goodbye, child. Go and marry your doctor. I enclose a farewell gift for your trousseau.

—
A
DELINE
D
UCAYNE

“A hundred pounds, a whole year’s salary—no—why, it’s for a—a check for a thousand!” cried Bella. “What a generous old soul! She really is the dearest old thing.”

“She just missed being very dear to you, Bella,” said Stafford.

He had dropped into the use of her Christian name while they were on board the boat. It seemed natural now that she was to be in his charge till they all three went back to England.

“I shall take upon myself the privileges of an elder brother till we land at Dover,” he said; “after that—well, it must be as you please.”

The question of their future relations must have been satisfactorily settled before they crossed the Channel, for Bella’s next letter to her mother communicated three startling facts.

First, that the inclosed check for £1,000 was to be invested in debenture stock in Mrs. Rolleston’s name, and was to be her very own, income and principal, for the rest of her life.

Next, that Bella was going home to Walworth immediately.

And last, that she was going to be married to Mr. Herbert Stafford in the following autumn.

“And I am sure you will adore him, mother, as much as I do,” wrote Bella.

“It is all good Lady Ducayne’s doing. I never could have married if I had not secured that little nest-egg for you. Herbert says we shall be able to add to it as the years go by, and that wherever we live there shall be always a room in our house for you. The word
mother-in-law
has no terrors for him.”

Augustus Hare

(1834–1903)

B
ORN IN
R
OME AND
educated at Harrow and Oxford, Augustus John Cuthbert Hare grew up in the village of Hurstmonceaux in East Sussex. He was an impressionable child and his nutty family provided him with plenty of material to write about. For a while, every Sunday, he was locked in the vestry of the local Hurstmonceaux Church between services. He spent his time crawling across the tombs of the Lords Dacre, although terrified by their supine effigies, and trying to avoid returning the stare of the two cautionary skulls that grinned upon the tombs (until Hare’s aunt buried them despite their alleged provenance as founders of the church). “In the winter holidays,” Hare recalled, “the intense cold of the unwarmed church made me so ill, that it led to my miserable penance being remitted.”

One would think that such experiences would have driven him straight into confessional fiction, but instead Hare wrote rather admiring volumes about his family members and a long line of travel books, including
Walks in London, Days near Rome, Wanderings in Spain.
They are full of admiring but not particularly exciting sentences such as this one: “It is in its secluded valleys, or its deep orange-groves, along the hanks of its torrents, or amid the heights of the wild mountain-chain which forms its background, that the principal charm of Mentone is to be found.” He was also a lover of art. His will comprised mainly bequests of paintings and prints to various friends.

In his autobiography, cleverly titled
The Story of My Life
, Hare recounted a vampire story that he said had been told to him by one Captain Fisher. It appears in the fourth of the six volumes, which were published between 1896 and 1900.

And the Creature Came In

F
ISHER MAY SOUND A
very plebeian name, but this family is of a very ancient lineage, and for many hundreds of years they have possessed a very curious old place in Cumberland, which bears the weird name of Croglin Grange. The great characteristic of the house is that never at any period of its very long existence has it been more than one story high, but it has a terrace from which large grounds sweep away towards the church in the hollow, and a fine distant view.

When, in lapse of years, the Fishers outgrew Croglin Grange in family and fortune, they were wise enough not to destroy the long-standing characteristic of the place by adding another story to the house, but they went away to the south, to reside at Thorncombe near Guildford, and they let Croglin Grange.

They were extremely fortunate in their tenants, two brothers and a sister. They heard their praises from all quarters. To their poorer neighbours they were all that is most kind and beneficent, and their neighbours of a higher class spoke of them as a most welcome addition to the little society of the neighbourhood. On their part, the tenants were greatly delighted with their new residence. The arrangement of the house, which would have been a trial to many, was not so to them. In every respect Croglin Grange was exactly suited to them.

The winter was spent most happily by the new inmates of Croglin Grange, who shared in all the little social pleasures of the district, and made themselves very popular. In the following summer there was one day which was dreadfully, annihilatingly hot. The brothers lay under the trees with their books, for it was too hot for any active occupation. The sister sat in the veranda and worked, or tried to work, for in the intense sultriness of that summer day, work was next to impossible. They dined early, and after dinner they still sat out on the veranda, enjoying the cool air which came with the evening, and they watched the sun set, and the moon rise over the belt of trees which separated the grounds from the churchyard, seeing it mount the heavens till the whole lawn was bathed in silver light, across which the long shadows from the shrubbery fell as if embossed, so vivid and distinct were they.

When they separated for the night, all retiring to their rooms on the ground floor (for, as I said, there was no upstairs in that house), the sister felt that the heat was still so great that she could not sleep, and having fastened her window, she did not close the shutters—in that very quiet place it was not necessary—and, propped against the pillows, she still watched the wonderful, the marvellous beauty of that summer night. Gradually she became aware of two lights, two lights which flickered in and out in the belt of trees which separated the lawn from the churchyard, and, as her gaze became fixed upon them, she saw them emerge, fixed in a dark substance, a definite ghastly something, which seemed every moment to become nearer, increasing in size and substance as it approached. Every now and then it was lost for a moment in the long shadows which stretched across the lawn from the trees, and then it emerged larger than ever, and still coming on. As she watched it, the most uncontrollable horror seized her. She longed to get away, but the door was close to the window, and the door was locked on the inside, and while she was unlocking it she must be for an instant nearer to it. She longed to scream, but her voice seemed paralysed, her tongue glued to the roof of her mouth.

Suddenly—she could never explain why afterwards—the terrible object seemed to turn to one side, seemed to be going round the house, not to be coming to her at all, and immediately she jumped out of bed and rushed to the door, but as she was unlocking it she heard scratch, scratch, scratch upon the window, and saw a hideous brown face with flaming eyes glaring in at her. She rushed back to the bed, but the creature continued to scratch, scratch, scratch upon the window.

She felt a sort of mental comfort in the knowledge that the window was securely fastened on the inside. Suddenly the scratching sound ceased, and a kind of pecking sound took its place. Then, in her agony, she became aware that the creature was unpicking the lead! The noise continued, and a diamond pane of glass fell into the room. Then a long bony finger of the creature came in and turned the handle of the window, and the window opened, and the creature came in; and it came across the room, and her terror was so great that she could not scream, and it came up to the bed, and it twisted its long, bony fingers into her hair, and it dragged her head over the side of the bed, and—it bit her violently in the throat.

As it bit her, her voice was released, and she screamed with all her might and main. Her brothers rushed out of their rooms, but the door was locked on the inside. A moment was lost while they got a poker and broke it open. Then the creature had already escaped through the window, and the sister, bleeding violently from a wound in the throat, was lying unconscious over the side of the bed. One brother pursued the creature, which fled before him through the moonlight with gigantic strides, and eventually seemed to disappear over the wall into the churchyard. Then he rejoined his brother by the sister’s bedside. She was dreadfully hurt, and her wound was a very definite one, but she was of strong disposition, not even given to romance or superstition, and when she came to herself she said, “What has happened is most extraordinary and I am very much hurt. It seems inexplicable, but of course there is an explanation, and we must wait for it. It will turn out that a lunatic has escaped from some asylum and found his way here.” The wound healed, and she appeared to get well, but the doctor who was sent for to her would not believe that she could bear so terrible a shock so easily, and insisted that she must have change, mental and physical; so her brothers took her to Switzerland.

Being a sensible girl, when she went abroad she threw herself at once into the interests of the country she was in. She dried plants, she made sketches, she went up mountains, and as autumn came on, she was the person who urged that they should return to Croglin Grange. “We have taken it,” she said, “for seven years, and we have only been there one; and we shall always find it difficult to let a house which is only one story high, so we had better return there; lunatics do not escape every day.” As she urged it, her brothers wished nothing better, and the family returned to Cumberland. From there being no upstairs in the house it was impossible to make any great change in their arrangements. The sister occupied the same room, but it is unnecessary to say she always closed the shutters, which, however, as in many old houses, always left one top pane of the window uncovered. The brothers moved, and occupied a room together, exactly opposite that of their sister, and they always kept loaded pistols in their room.

The winter passed most peacefully and happily. In the following March, the sister was suddenly awakened by a sound she remembered only too well—scratch, scratch, scratch upon the window, and, looking up, she saw, climbed up to the topmost pane of the window, the same hideous brown shrivelled face, with glaring eyes, looking in at her. This time she screamed as loud as she could. Her brothers rushed out of their room with pistols, and out of the front door.

The creature was already scudding away across the lawn. One of the brothers fired and hit it in the leg, but still with the other leg it continued to make way, scrambled over the wall into the churchyard, and seemed to disappear into a vault which belonged to a family long extinct.

The next day the brothers summoned all the tenants of Croglin Grange, and in their presence the vault was opened. A horrible scene revealed itself. The vault was full of coffins; they had been broken open, and their contents, horribly mangled and distorted, were scattered over the floor. One coffin alone remained intact. Of that the lid had been lifted, but still lay loose upon the coffin. They raised it, and there, brown, withered, shrivelled, mummified, but quite entire, was the same hideous figure which had looked in at the windows of Croglin Grange, with the marks of a recent pistol-shot in the leg: and they did the only thing that can lay a vampire—they burnt it.