Ghost Stories and Mysteries (5 page)

Saw throned on a flowery rise,

One sitting on a crimson scarf unrolled.

Well, not exactly.

This was a man, and he was sitting in one of the squatter chairs leaning against the slabs, and a curious looking figure he was to see in such a situation. I knew him at once; he was the Genius of Christmas. There he was, holly wreath, white beard, laughing countenance, and all the attributes complete.

I said, “Good day, old man —how are you?” for I felt astonishingly bold somehow. He was reading in a large book, the print of which seemed possessed with life, and to be constantly moving and changing; but when I made this remark he raised his head, and gazed at me with “a countenance more in sorrow than in anger,” but did not speak.

“I know who you are,” I went on; “you’re the Genius of Christmas.”

“I am,” he said.

“And you’re going to show me all manner of pictures and scenes of human life, and I shall awake by-and-by and find that it has all been a dream; and I shall be very good and charitable all the rest of my life.”

“Not you,” said the Spirit; “you couldn’t be charitable if you tried.”

“Spirit,” I said, “that’s very hard, why could I not be charitable if I tried?”

“When you couldn’t show mercy to a poor old ghost who’s been harped upon, and written about, and carolled over,—there, I’ll say no more; but man’s inhumanity to me makes a Christmas Spirit mourn.”

“Spirit,” I said, “you mistake, surely, I who esteem and venerate the Christmas season.”

“You do, do you? Now, answer me truly, were you not trying to compose a Christmas tale as you lay in that hammock?”

“I confess it, I was.”

“And you say you venerate me; pretty veneration I call that, but I’ll be revenged. I’ll stand it no longer. I’ll read Christmas poetry to you for the next three hundred and sixty-five days.”

“Spirit, do not judge me unheard; be calm.”

“Be calm! Who could be calm under such provocation? Listen! We are seven,—that’s Wordsworth isn’t it,—never mind, as I said before, we are seven; seven spirits, one for each day in the week. I’m Saturday. When Christmas Day falls on a Saturday, as it does this year, I have to attend to it. Now every leap year one of us has to do double duty, and as next year is a leap year I am told off for the extra day’s work; but there is a chance for any of us to get out of this extra work, thus,” —he went on as though quoting from some rule or regulation, —“If a Spirit when in the execution of its duty, can find a place upon earth inhabited by Christian, or supposedly Christian people, where no Christmas Literature is to be found upon Christmas Day, he shall be able to claim exemption from extra duty on leap-year, and the Spirit following him shall do his work.”

“Spend your Christmas here,” I cried, starting from the hammock. “Search the house from garret to basement (it was only a two-roomed hut), and see if you can find a Christmas magazine or paper.”

“That Christmas story,” the Spirit sternly replied, “That Christmas story, which shall never see the light, by its mere presence in your idiotic skull has spoilt my chance of a holiday, and I wanted to put Sunday into it”—the long faced sanctimonious hypocrite. “But I will be revenged, revenged!”

“Spirit,” I cried, casting myself at its feet and clutching its robe, “have mercy; I am not strong-nerved. I could not bear to be transported to regions of ice and snow, and see poor people kind and generous to one another, and pretty girls playing at blindman’s-buff, and all the many signs you would show me—have mercy!”

“Can you ask it knowing that during the whole of the past year I have wandered to and fro seeking for a place wherein to rest on this twenty fifth day of December? I marked this spot, noted the dense stolidity, not to say stupidity, visible in your face, and I said here is a place where I shall be safe; nicely situated in a warm comfortable climate, mails always a month late; here I am secure for my holiday. This morning I took a turn through Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, just to see that everything was going on all right, come here to finish my day quietly and peace fully, in the virtuous frame of mind that a Spirit feels in who has done his duty, and I find, what! That you—a being than whom a generation of apes could not produce a greater fool—have dared to compose a Christmas Story; that you have committed two pages of it to paper, and it is even now lying there in your bedroom. Can you deny it?”

I could only bow my head in guilty assent.

“But vengeance can still be mine—yes, Vengeance! Vengeance!! Vengeance!!!” Here his voice rose to such a shriek that I expected to see the stockman and cook come rushing in to see what was up; but no help came to me, and he raged on.

“I will read to you, commencing with your own wretched two pages,
all the Christmas literature that has been published in the world this season!
” Uttering this awful sentence he leaned back in the chair, and glared furiously at me.”

“Mercy, mercy,” I said faintly.

“No mercy, I know it not; I reckon it will just comfortably occupy us until the end of next year to get through it all.”

“Spirit!” I cried, “I have sinned, but I repent; I will be a new man, Christmas shall be to me a season of mourning and desolation; spare me.”

Its only answer was to open its book and commence reading.

As though its first word was a blow, I fell back spell-bound and motionless, and there I lay whilst the Genius began to read my now detested production of two pages. First he read it in an ordinary colloquial tone, then he gabbled it over, next he sung it, then he tried to chant it. Then he read it in a facetious manner, stopping to laugh every now and then; then he read it in a dismal manner, pretending to cry; then he tried to make blank verse of it, and I tried to stop my ears, but all in vain; over and over again he read the horrid sentences I knew so well, until at last he seemed out of breath, and stopped.

“How do you like it,” he said, “will you ever do it again?”

“Never, never,” I groaned. He chuckled, and turning again to his book, the pages of which produced anything he liked without his having to turn over the leaves, he inflicted the following story upon me:—

THE LADY ERMETTA; OR, THE SLEEPING SECRET— PROLOGUE

Calm in the serene solemnity of their solitude; grand in the outstretched vastness of their extent, and golden in the Pactolean wealth of their beauty, lie the sands of Plimlivon. But what huge, gloomy object is that, the rugged outlines of which mar the tranquil beauty of their level expanse? Like the fossilised form of some gigantic inhabitant of a world long forgotten, or like a Brobdignagian bandbox labelled, “This side up, with care,” stands a mighty isolated rock, and casts upon the otherwise unflecked extent of stainless sand around it, a shadow, weird, gloomy, and mysterious. Why does that rock— that grim, portentous sentinel, challenging the gladsome sunlight, with its ominous “
Qui vive
,” stand there and throw its gruesome shade over sand-grain and pebble that would else be revelling in the glorious radiance of day? Say, why does the shadow of some awful secret crime fall across the otherwise unblotted course of a fair, fresh life, and turn the rich colors of the flowers of life into the sombre hues and tints of death? I know not, gentle reader, but that rock stands there because I intend to use it in the third and last chapter.

Chapter I. THE SECRET

“My daughter,” said the Marquis of Marborough.

“Yes, my father,” replied the Lady Ermetta, who was of a most dutiful disposition, and when she did not say “No” said “Yes” with undeviating regularity.

“The hour has now arrived when I feel it incumbent on me to reveal to you
the secret
—the secret upon which hinges your future welfare and happiness, and is also the central point of interest in this story in which we are two of the principal characters. Therefore, arm yourself with fortitude, and prepare to hear it as becomes a heroine.”

“Very well, my father,” returned the dutiful girl, but will you kindly tell me exactly what to do.”

“Clasp your hands convulsively, lean forwards attentively, and with an expression of anxious horror on your beautiful features, exclaim, ‘Speak, speak, my father; I can bear the worst’”

The Lady Ermetta followed his directions to the eighth part of an affygraffy.

“You know, my child, that in the third and last chapter you are to be married, as becomes a heroine; and you also know that Baron Gadzooks is the bridegroom elect. But you do not know that a dark secret hangs over his birth, a secret which I am now about to reveal, therefore listen attentively.”

“I am all ears,” said the lovely girl.

“My dearest, that is a most irrational remark; now, really, how can you be all ears?”

The Lady Ermetta blushed to the tips of the articles in question, and muttered something that sounded like a request for her father to go and put his boots on.

“Silence, Ermetta!” said her father sternly, “such conduct is unbecoming in the heroine of a novel. Now, listen to me— The Baron was changed at birth.”

“Then Baron Gadzooks—”

“Is somebody else.”

“And somebody else?”

“Is the Baron. You now comprehend the situation.”

“Not altogether, my father, you have neglected to inform me who somebody else is.”

“That, my dear child, is a question that even the author could not answer.”

“Then supposing that I marry the Baron, I in fact marry ‘somebody else,’ and as you say that ‘somebody else’ is the Baron, why of course my husband will be the Baron.”

“How the deuce is that?” said the Marquis; “let’s see. If you marry the Baron—, but you can’t marry the Baron, because he’s not the Baron—he was changed at birth,”

“He’s somebody else.”

“Yes, exactly.”

“Then, as he is not the Baron, somebody else is the Baron.”

“Well, yes, I suppose so.”

“Then, again, if I marry Gadzooks, I marry ‘somebody else,’ and somebody else, you say, papa, is the Baron,” said the Lady Ermetta, triumphantly. “Come now,” she added rather maliciously, “I think you are a little irrational now.”

“Really Ermetta, you will look at the matter from only one point of view; don’t you see that he’s not the right somebody else. There are any amount of somebodies else; but let me tell you all about it. This important secret came out in a conversation that was overheard to pass between two servants. One was the nurse of the then infant Gadzooks, the other was a fellow servant. The nurse was heard to make the following remark about her youthful charge:— ‘The blessed dear was a layin in my arms as quiet as a lamb, and smiling like a cherrup, when he
changed
all of a sudden, and has been that cross and frakshus ever since that I ain’t had a minnit’s peace with him.’ The person who overheard this startling disclosure was a devoted friend of the family; he acted with decision and promptitude. The servants were first got rid of—one was strangled, the other hung. He then took the secret, hushed it into a sound sleep, wrapped it carefully in tissue paper, and put it into a box.”

“Then where is the danger to come from?”

“Here lies the danger. When that devoted friend put the secret into the box he made a fatal mistake—he put it into the wrong box, and the secret might awake and find itself.”

“In the wrong box! How truly awful.”

“It is indeed; it might awake at the very moment of your marriage, and forbid the ceremony to proceed. There’s no knowing to what lengths a secret that’s been kept asleep, in the wrong box for many years might proceed when once awakened.”

The Lady Ermetta sobbed deeply. “I can never give up Gadzooks,” she said, “I have never seen him, for he has not been introduced personally into this story yet, but I feel that he has my poor heart.”

“Restrain your feelings, my child; picture to yourself what would be the result if the secret should awake after your marriage, and announce to an astonished world that you had married somebody else; why you might almost be tried for bigamy.”

“Have you the secret, my lord?”

“I have; the two boxes are in my study, but calm your agitation, for you know that Squire Hardpuller will soon be here, and should you bring yourself to think of giving up Gadzooks, why, he is rich, and I do not object to the idea of having him for a son-in-law.” So saying, the Marquis left Ermetta to her tears and lamentations.

Chapter II. THE SECRET DIES

Now that she was alone, Lady Ermetta gave full vent to her grief. “I can never give him up,” she murmured, between her convulsive sobs; “I feel that he is entwined around the very tendrils of my existence. We were to have been married in the third chapter, and now— this is the second, and we are to be separated. And what separates us? A secret! A secret that sleeps. Sleeps, why should it awake, why should it not die:” and uttering these last words in the strange hissing tone used by people who have determined on perpetrating some crime, Ermetta raised her head and stared into vacancy, with a cold hard look stealing over her sweet face.

The tears soon ceased to flow, her hands clenched themselves tightly, and she who might but just now have stood for a statue of the weeping daughter of Tantalus, was transformed into Lady Macbeth, demanding the daggers. Muttering sternly, “It shall be so,” she left the apartment with a step befitting a representative of that strong-minded woman.