Seven Gothic Tales (42 page)

“But the heart of my friend Waldemar, when he met her, melted as quickly as a lump of sugar in a cup of hot coffee.

“ ‘Arvid,’ he said to me, ‘I have never met such a woman, and I know that it was the will of fate that I should meet her. For as you know my name is Night-and-Day, and my arms two-parted in black and white. Therefore she is meant for me—or I for her. For this Madame Rosalba has in her more life than any person I have ever met. She is a saint of the first magnitude, and she uses in being a saint as much vigor as a commander in storming a citadel. She sits like a fresh, full flower in the circle of old dry perisperms. She is a swan in the lake of life everlasting. That is the white half of my shield. And at the same time there is death about her somewhere, and that is the black half of the Nat-og-Dag arms. This I can only explain to you by a metaphor, which presented itself to me as I was looking at her.

“ ‘We have heard much of wine growing since we came here, and have learned, too, how, to obtain perfection in the special white wine of this district, they leave the grapes on the vines longer than for other wines. In this way they dry up a little, become over-ripe and very sweet. Furthermore, they develop a peculiar condition which is called in French
pourriture noble
, and in German,
Edelfaule
, and which gives the flavor to the wine. In the atmosphere of Rosalba, Arvid, there is a flavor which there is about no other woman. It may be the true odor of sanctity, or it may be the noble putrefaction, the royal corrodent rust of a strong and rare wine. Or, Arvid, my friend, it may be both, in a soul two-parted white and black, a Nat-og-Dag soul.’

“On the following Sunday—in May, it was—I managed to be introduced to Madame Rosalba, after mass, at dinner in the house of an old friend of mine.

“These old aristocrats, in the midst of their ruin, kept a fairly good table, and did not despise a bottle of wine. But the younger woman ate lentils and dry bread, with a glass of water, and did this with such a sweet and frank demureness that the diet seemed very noble, and nobody would have thought of offering her anything else. After dinner, in the fresh, darkened salon, she entertained the company, with the same frankness and modesty, by describing a vision which she had lately had. She had found herself, she said, in a vast flowery meadow, with a great flock of young children, each of whom had around its head a small halo, as clear as the flame of a little candle. St. Joseph himself had come to her there, to inform her that this was paradise, and that she was to act as nurse to the children. These, he explained, were none other than those first of all martyrs, the babes of Bethlehem murdered by Herod. He pointed out to her what a sweet task was hers, inasmuch as, just as the Lord had suffered and died in the stead of humanity, so had these children suffered and died in the stead of the Lord. A great felicity had at his words come upon her, she said, and sighing with bliss she had declared that she should never
want anything of all eternity but to look after and play with the martyrized children.

“I am not a great believer in visions or in paradise, but as this young woman told her tale I had no doubt that she had really seen with her own eyes what she described, or that she had been chosen for paradise. She had so much life in her that she made one feel how well the choice had been made; the little martyrs would have a great deal of fun.

“Once, while she was talking, she lifted her eyes. Good God, what a pair of eyes to have! They were, indeed, of the greatest power; and when she gave you one of her thirty-pound glances—puff!

“Now, as I was listening demurely myself and looking around at her happy circle of old disciples, I became convinced that somewhere in all this stuff there was a very bold piece of deceit. Rosalba might very well be a saint of the first water. She might also be heaping benefactions on rich and poor, out of a horn of plenty. And she might have loved the General Zumala Carregui, in which case the general was to be envied. But she had not loved him only in all the world, and she was not living now for his memory alone. Monogamy—for it does exist, and I have myself been loved by women of a monogamous disposition—shows in a woman. You may confound the nun and the whore, but those ladies who in India, I am told, beg to be committed to the flames of their husbands’ funeral pyres, you know when you see them. Either, I thought, this white swan Rosalba can count the names of her lovers with the beads of her rosary, or she is some perverse old maid—for as a maid she was not young; she had passed her thirtieth year—who, out of desperation, poses to my Legitimists as the mistress of a general.

“Rosalba had not looked at me more than once, but she was aware of me. She and I, for all that we were placed far apart, were as much in contact as if we had been performing a
pas-de-deux
upon the center of a stage, with the aged
corps du ballet
grouped
around us. When she went to the window to look for her carriage, the folds of her white dress and the tresses of her dark hair moved and floated all for my benefit.

“I thought: I have never in my life had a dead rival. Let us see now what the General Zumala is capable of. At Easter I had to listen to a sermon on St. Mary Magdalen—this holy Mary, would she have been more difficult to seduce than any of the others of the name; or easier? The old war horse, we are told, raises its head to the war trumpet.

“I soon became a frequent visitor at Madame Rosalba’s château. I do not know whether the old aristocratic community of the town had any idea of the peril of its saint. I was accepted as her companion on her visits to the poor and the sick. In the beginning I consulted her much upon my soul. I confessed to her many of my sins, and none of them seemed to impress her much. They might well have appeared familiar to her. I think that she really gave me good advice, and that if I had meant to reform I should have done well to follow it. She had the same earnest and sweet manner, and seemed to like me, but in our amorous
pas-de-deux
she was slow of movement. I, on my side, was patient. I had to keep my young friend Waldemar in view, and I knew that I had a pleasant surprise for her at the end of the dance.

“One thing was strange to me in that house. I have been brought up a Lutheran, and taken to church on Christmas Day by my good grandmother. I have heard many sermons, and I know the difference between saintliness and sin as well as old Pastor Methodius himself, even if we disagreed a little as to our personal tastes in the matter. But upon my honor as a guardsman, with her it was difficult to know which was which. She preached theology with as much voluptuousness as if the table of the Lord was the one real treat to a gourmet, and when we talked about love she would make it look like a pastime in a kindergarten. This I did not like. I had a nurse who believed in witches, and at times, in Rosalba’s society, I remembered the dark tales of old Maja-Lisa. Even so,
such a holy witch and wanton saint I had not come across before.

“In the end, however, I obtained from Rosalba the promise of a rendezvous in her house late on a Friday afternoon. On that day all the people were going to the funeral of a maréchal’s widow, who had been a hundred years old. This was late in June. By then I was bored with her dallying, and I thought, It is to be on Friday, or I will never make love to a woman again.

“All this, I can tell you, might have ended up in a different way, had not something else happened in Saumur. But it came to pass that a very rich old Jewish gentleman—in the style of the Jew of your tale, Fritz—stopped there for a week on his way from Spain. He had everything of the best. His coach, his servants, and his diamonds were much talked of. But what struck our riding school to the heart was a pair of Andalusian horses which he brought with him. They were, particularly the one of them, the finest that had been seen in France. Even at my regiment in Sweden there were hardly any like that. Moreover they had been trained in the royal
manège
at Madrid, and it was a shame that they should be in the hands of a Jew, and a civilian.

“Because of these horses I neglected Madame Rosalba for a few days, so much talk was there about them. Few of us would have been rich enough to buy them, and still we thought it a point of honor with us that they should not leave Saumur. In the end Baron Clootz, who was a millionaire and a young nobleman of much wit, one evening after dinner made a proposition to five of us who had been for a long time his closest friends and associates. He promised that he would buy the horse of the Jew, and put it up as the prize in a competition in which we were to show what we were worth. The rule of this competition was that we were to ride, within one day, three French miles, drink three bottles of the wine of the district, and make love to three ladies in the course. In what order we would take the events it was for our own judgment to decide, but the Jew’s horse was to belong to that one
of us who arrived first at Baron Clootz’s house after having fulfilled the conditions.

“His proposition was a great success, and I was already in my mind arranging the consecutive order of the items, and going through my circle of acquaintances amongst the pretty women of the district, when I found that the day chosen for the contest was the day of my rendezvous with Madame Rosalba. The day had been chosen for both purposes from the same reason: because the élite of the town would be occupied, and not able to poke their noses into our affairs.

“I had, however, confidence in myself, and as I walked away arm in arm with young Waldemar I thought it a good joke. He was still worshiping Rosalba from the footstep of her pedestal, so much so as to want to change his religion for her sake, even, I believe, and become a monk. I often had to listen to his panegyrics upon her. Still after some argument we had persuaded him to come into our contest. I think that he meant to show himself to Rosalba on the Spanish horse, for he was a tolerably good horseman.

“I was, without vanity, punctual at my rendezvous at the white château of Rosalba on that Friday afternoon. By her own maid—for there was not another soul in the house; they had all gone to the funeral—I was taken to her boudoir in the tower, and at the top of a long stone stair. The shutters were closed, the room was half dark, and, when you came from outside, as cool as a church. There were a great many white lilies, so that the air was heavy with their scent. Upon a table were glasses, and a bottle of the best wine that I have ever tasted, a dry Château Yquem. This made my third bottle of the day.

“Rosalba also was there. She was as ever very plainly attired, but she had shaken herself, with one shake, into very great beauty.

“If what happened to me in this tower seems somehow wild and fantastical, and more like a fairy tale or a ghost story than a romance, the fault is not mine. It is true that the day was hot; a
thunderstorm followed it in the night; and that as I came in from the white road, heavy in my riding boots, I was not too sure of my head. I may even have been more in love with her than I myself knew, for everything seemed to me to turn on her, and my bottles and my wildly galloped races to be only the reasonably fit initiatory ceremonies to this great moment of love-making. But I remember well all that happened.

“I had not much time to give away. Light-headed as I was, with the room swinging up and down before my eyes, my words came easily to me, and I had her in my arms pretty soon, her clothes disheveled. She was like a lily in a thunderstorm herself, white and swaying, her face wet. But she held me back with her outstretched arms. ‘Listen for one moment,’ she said. ‘Here we are all alone. There is no one in the house but we and my maid who brought you here, that pretty girl. Are you not afraid?

“ ‘Arvid,’ she said, ‘have you ever heard the story of Don Giovanni?’ She looked at me so intently that I had to answer that I had even heard that opera about him. ‘Do you remember, then,’ she said, ‘the scene in which the statue of the Commandante comes for him? Such a statue there is on the tomb of the General Zumala, in Spain.’ I said, ‘Oh, let it keep him down in it, then.’

“ ‘Wait,’ said Rosalba. ‘Rosalba belonged to General Zumala Carregui. When she betrays him, poor Rosalba must disappear. But then, an opera must have a fifth act to it sooner or later. And you, my star of the north, are to be the hero of it. You have your honor in the matter, as if you were a woman. You would have no mercy on St. Mary of Magdala. Rosalba was such a shining bubble, and when you break her, a little bit of wet will be all that you get out of it. But it was time that she went. The people, and her creator even, were becoming too fond of her. You give her her great tragic end. No other man in the world, I think, could have done that so well. You are well worthy of coming in.’

“ ‘Let me come in, then,’ I gasped.

“ ‘You have no pity on poor Rosalba at all?’ she asked. ‘That
she should lose her last refuge, and be haunted and doomed forever—that means nothing to you?’

“ ‘You yourself have no pity on me,’ I cried.

“ ‘Ah, how much you are mistaken,’ she exclaimed. ‘For you, Arvid, I am worried, I am terribly sorry. An awful future awaits you—waste, a desert—oh, tortures! If I could help you, I would; but that is impossible to me. The thought of Rosalba will never be any good to you; her example cannot help you. The thought of this hour might, afterward, do you some good, but even that is not certain. Oh, my lover, if to save you I made you a present of a lovely horse, all saddled within my stable, fiery enough to carry you away in a gallop from this terrible fall and the perdition of us both, and if I sent my maid, that pretty girl who showed you up here, with you to find him, would you not go?

“ ‘For soon,’ she said, drawing herself up to her full height, her hand still on my breast, as mine in hers, and speaking in the manner of a sibyl, ‘it may be too late, and we shall hear the fatal step on the stair, marble upon marble.’

“In our agitation her dark hair, which used to hang down in ringlets on both sides of her face, was flung back, and I saw that she had indeed the brand of the witch upon her. From her left ear to her collar bone a deep scar ran, like a little white snake–”