Seven Gothic Tales (53 page)

Count Augustus praised the beauty of the poem and thought the beauty of the little fairy queen charmingly put into words. This boy, he thought, had in him a very strong streak of primitive sensuality which would have to be watched if the tastefulness of his production were not to suffer.

“Beware,” he said smilingly to the Councilor, “of the delights of fairyland. To poor mortals the value of pleasure, surely, lies in its rarity. Did not the sages of old tell us: He is a fool who knows not the half to be more than the whole? Where pleasure goes on forever, we run the risk of becoming blasé, or, according to our young friend, of dying.”

An idea occurred to the Councilor. This green wood, he thought, might do well as the setting for a bit of drama. “The Count,” he said, smiling, to the boy, “smiles at a little secret into which I have taken him. I will make you my confidant as well, Anders; only you must not smile at your old friend. I hope to procure for you, before long, a young patroness to recite to, who may, in the beauty of your fairy queens, dryads and undines, see her own beauty reflected as in a mirror.” As in a dim and silvery mirror, just before sunrise, he thought.

The young man, who was still standing up before the two dark figures on the sea, remained thus for a few moments in silence, as if in deep thought. Then he lifted his hat a little to the Councilor. “I wish you happiness, I am sure,” he said, gravely, looking at him, “and thank you for telling me. When is this going to be?”

“Ah, I do not know. In the time of the roses, Anders,” said the Councilor, taken somewhat aback by the youth’s directness. Anders, after a moment, bade good-by to the Count and to his patron and went away. Count Schimmelmann, who was an observer of men, followed him with his eyes. What! he thought. Did the old conjurer of Hirschholm have at his disposal not only his old familiar spirit and evidently a dryad to make love to, but also a young slave of that tribe of Asra who die when they love?

He felt a little cold, as if left out, not only of life in the abstract, but of some fullness of this particular May evening. He rose from the rustic seat and began to walk back. As, in the conversation with his host, he looked at his face, he noted there a deep, a gently inspired and resolute, look.
“Das,”
thought the Count, who came of a military race, smiling,
“das ist nur die Freude eines Helden den schönen Tod eines Helden zu sehen.”
Later on, however, he thought of these moments.

Now Count Augustus had one real talent and happiness, which other people might well have envied him, but of which he never spoke. He took hashish, and he took a little only, without ever overdoing the pleasure. Somewhere in the world he may have had brothers in hashish who would have given him half of their lives could he have sold them this capacity.

Walking at the Councilor’s side, he thought: What shall I dream tonight? Opium, he reflected, is a brutal person who takes you by the collar. Hashish is an insinuating oriental servant who throws a veil over the world for you, and by experimenting you can arrive at the power of choosing the figures within the web of the veil. He had already been a rajah hunting tigers from the backs of elephants, and watching bayaderes dancing; he had been
the director of the great opera of Paris; and he had been Shamyl, pushing onward with his rebellious freemen, through the towering, snow-clad mountain passes of the Caucasus. But tonight what would he choose to dream? Could he recall the dewy May nights within the festoons of boughs at Ingolstadt? If he choose to, could he?—If he could, would he?

After supper at the Councilor’s house he ordered his magnificent landaulet and his much-envied English pair of horses, and drove away.

As Councilor Mathiesen was preparing to go to La Liberté, a-wooing, the next day, news was brought which proved to be a nut somewhat hard for him to crack. It was served him by his housekeeper, along with his new hat which he had asked her to take out of the box.

This woman, whose name was Abelone, had been in his house for more than fifteen years, but was still a young woman, tall, red-haired, and of an extraordinary physical strength. She had lived all her life at Hirschholm, and there was no particle of the life of the little town that she did not know. It was strange that there should be any mystery about herself, but there were people who told that she had been, as a girl of fifteen, suspected of concealment of birth and infanticide, and had had a narrow escape. The Councilor held her in respect. He had not met her match as an economist, not only in the keeping of his house, but in existence as a whole. To her, waste was probably the one deadly sin and abomination. Everything which came within the circle of her consciousness had to be made use of in one way or another, and nothing, as far as he could see, was ever thrown away by her. If she had had nothing but a rat to make a ragoût of, she would have made a good ragoût of it. In his own intercourse with her he always felt that every word and mood of his was somehow taken stock of, and kept, to be made use of sooner or later.

On this pleasant May day she proceeded to report to him the behavior, on the previous night, of his young clerk, whom she
had until then taken into possession as an article of inventory of the household, and treated kindly.

This young man had been part of a company at the inn. As the beer had come to an end, he had promised his convives that he would give them something better, and being, as the Councilor knew, in possession of the keys to the church, where he had been going through the parochial registers, he had fetched from the sacristy four bottles of communion wine, with which he had regaled the party. He had not been in the least drunk, but quiet in his manner, as usual. He had, Abelone added, proposed the Councilor’s health in this wine.

While she was narrating, the Councilor was looking at himself in the glass, for he had decided, with the slight nervousness suitable in a suitor, to put on another stock, and was now tying it with solicitude. It is not too much to say that Abelone’s tale frightened him. This was, in a Hirschholm format, Lucifer storming heaven. In what words had his own toast been drunk?

He came to look at Abelone, behind him, in the mirror. Something in her manner, more than in her broad, stagnant face, which was ever like the locked door behind which was kept her rich store of material to be made use of, gave him the impression that she, too, was frightened, or deeply moved. There was more here, then, than met the eye. Abelone was by no means a gossip. Whatever she knew about other people she did not let out—she probably knew of a better recipe for making use of it—and four bottles of communion wine would be no more to her than four bottles. If she would not let the devil have the boy, was it that she wanted him herself? Was he the rat out of which she was to make her ragoût?

He turned back to his own face, and met the eyes of a good councilor. To be a spectator when Lucifer was storming heaven might be a highly interesting experience; more interesting still if one could succeed in putting a spoke in the wheel for him.

“My good Abelone,” he said, smiling, “Hirschholm seems to
have a little talent for scandal. I myself instructed Mr. Anders to take away the wine from the sacristy. I have reason to believe that it was, by mistake, mixed with rum, which, not being made from the grape, can hardly be suitable for the transubstantiation. Mr. Anders will see to it that it is replaced.”

Thereupon he drove off to La Liberté with much stuff for thought, most of it, curiously enough, about his housekeeper. It was not till he turned up the poplar avenue that his mind turned again toward his future.

On his arrival he did not find the young lady in, and had to wait for a little while in the garden-room. On a little console table Fransine had put a large bunch of jessamine in a vase. The sweet and bitter scent was strong, nearly stifling, in the cool room. He was a little nervous about his own appearance in the rôle of a suitor, not about her answer. For she would accept him. She was pretty sure to do, in life, as she was told. He wondered whether, when he should be driving away again from La Liberté as her accepted wooer, she would occupy herself at all with the thought of her future as his wife. That it would be he, who, later in life, would be told how things were to turn out under her hands, that was a different matter.

It seemed to him, while he was waiting, that he was coming into a closer understanding with the furniture in the sky-blue room. The spinet, the musical box, and the chairs had withdrawn a little, with their backs to the wall, as if uneasy about him, like the furniture of a doll’s house, frightened at the intrusion of a grown-up person. Would the time for games be over now? He tried to set them at ease. “I have not come,” he said to them all, “to destroy, but to fulfill. The best games are to come.”

At this, as if actually soothed into existence again, young Madame Lerche came into the room in a pink frock with flounces, followed by her maid who carried the samovar and tea tablecloth for the guest. He could, after a bit of pleasant conversation, begin his proposal.

Fransine always gave him the impression of being anxious, or pleased, to have done with what she had taken on. For what reason he knew not, for there was nothing else on which she seemed at all keen to get started. She did not, he thought, run the risk of Faust in asking the moment to stay because of its loveliness. She pushed all her moments on as quickly as a little nun of Italy, who counts her rosary, pushes on the beads. As he now talked to her of his love and audacious hopes, she grew a little paler and moved her slim figure slightly in the big chair. Her dark eyes met his and looked away again. She was pleased when it was over. She accepted him as he had thought, even with a little emotion, as a refuge in life. The Councilor kissed her hand, and she was pleased to have that over.

Afterward, as the betrothed couple were having tea together, Fransine presiding on the sofa behind the tall samovar, to affect a little importance the Councilor told her of Anders and the communion wine. Here he nearly got more than he had bargained for, for it made a terrible impression upon her. She looked as if she wanted to sink into the ground to get away from such abomination. When she could speak, she asked him, deadly pale, whether the pastor knew it. The Councilor had not expected such a profound awe of sacred things in her. It was an amiable quality, but there was more here, a fear of ghosts, or a ghost itself. He reassured her, and told her how he had decided to free the young clerk from the consequences of his folly. Upon this she gave him a great luminous glance, so languishing and alive in its deep dark sweetness that it filled all the room, like the perfume of the jessamine, and made him feel powerful and benevolent.

“I ought,” said the Councilor, “to frighten the boy for his own sake. Why, if I had not helped him to this job, he would be starving.” At this last word Fransine again grew pale. “And still you know, my dear,” the Councilor went on, “he has a great career in front of him. This is a sad thing: to see a thoughtless boy, a vagabond, ruin the future of a great man. And to me it is somewhat
my future too, as if he were my son. But I am afraid to awaken in him an obstinacy which I shall not be able to subdue. The gentle touch of a woman might appeal to his better feelings. He is, surely, the type of human who ought to have a guardian angel, and it would be noble in you if you would assist me in saving him by reading him a little sermon.”

So it was arranged that Fransine should accompany the Councilor to Hirschholm to preach to Anders Kube. She quickly put on a pink bonnet through which the sun heightened the color of her face to the glow of a rose. It was a little unusual for a young woman to drive out alone with a gentleman. Even with Kresten on the back seat, the Councilor thought that the passers-by would conclude upon their engagement, and he enjoyed the drive. Fransine, by his side, looked at the trotting horse and seemed happy to be getting it over with.

The Councilor and his young bride, who was to act the part of a guardian angel, arm in arm ascended the narrow stair to Anders’s small rooms behind the big, newly unfolded lime tree, and found his sister, who was the wife of a merchant captain of Elsinore, and her little boy with him. This made the young woman’s errand more complicated, but eased her heart. She felt that she might pass a peaceful and pleasing hour in this company. The sister and brother were much alike, and when the child looked at her, the heart of Fransine ceased to beat, for here was a bambino such as she had known in the churches of Naples—a cherub with Anders’s eyes, showing the poet’s personality as might a little mirror in heaven.

Fransine had come, in her elegant shawl, as a patroness to the poor and erroneous. She stood now, dark-eyed and stock-still, with the face of Rachel as she said to Jacob: “Give me children or else I die.” She wanted to kneel down to hold the child against her, but was doubtful about the correctness of such a move. Then it occurred to her that she might obtain the same result by lifting him to her level. She placed him upon a chair, first to look out of
the window, then to play with her fingers in their black mittens. The child stared at her. He had never seen such ringlets as hers, and poked his little hand into them. To amuse him she took off her bonnet and shook the whole mass of dark tresses forward. They fell like clouds around her face, and the child laughed and pulled at them with both hands. She held him against her bosom, lightly, laughing, looking into his face, and felt for a moment his heart, like a small clock, beating against her own. As the others looked at them she blushed. Waves of deep color washed over her face, but still she could not help smiling.

The Councilor began to converse with the young mother, who sat down on the sofa, in her neat white fluted cap, with the little boy on her lap, and the two young people were left at the window in a tête-à-tête. Fransine felt that the time had come for her to enter upon her mission.

“Mr. Anders,” she said, “the Councilor—my fiancé”—she corrected herself, “has told me with much regret that he has had reason to be disappointed, to be angry with you. It is not right; you must not let it be so. You do not know, perhaps, in Hirschholm, how much evil and misery there is in the world. But I pray you, Mr. Anders, do not do these things which bring people into perdition.”