Shivers for Christmas (10 page)

‘Fasted thrice with souls of men,

Stands the tower of Wolverden;

Fasted thrice with maidens’ blood,

A thousand years of fire and flood

Shall see it stand as erst it stood.’

She paused a moment, then, raising one skinny hand towards the brand-new stone, she went on in the same voice, but with malignant fervour—

‘A thousand years the tower shall stand

Till ill assailed by evil hand;

By evil hand in evil hour,

Fasted thrice with warlock’s power,

Shall fall the stanes of Wulfhere’s tower.’

She tottered off as she ended, and took her seat on the edge of a depressed vault in the churchyard close by, still eyeing Maisie Llewelyn with a weird and curious glance, almost like the look which a famishing man casts upon the food in a shop-window.

‘Who is she?’ Maisie asked, shrinking away in undefined terror.

‘Oh, old Bessie,’ Mrs. West answered, looking more apologetic (for the parish) than ever. ‘She’s always hanging about here. She has nothing else to do, and she’s an outdoor pauper. You see, that’s the worst of having the church in one’s grounds, which is otherwise picturesque and romantic and baronial; the road to it’s public; you must admit all the world; and old Bessie
will
come here. The servants are afraid of her. They say she’s a witch. She has the evil eye, and she drives girls to suicide. But they cross her hand with silver all the same, and she tells them their fortunes—gives them each a butler. She’s full of dreadful stories about Wolverden Church—stories to make your blood run cold, my dear, compact with old superstitions and murders, and so forth. And they’re true, too, that’s the worst of them. She’s quite a character. Mr. Blaydes, the antiquary, is really attached to her; he says she’s now the sole living repository of the traditional folklore and history of the parish. But I don’t care for it myself. It ‘gars one greet,’ as we say in Scotland. Too much burying alive in it, don’t you know, my dear, to quite suit
my
fancy.’

They turned back as she spoke towards the carved wooden lychgate, one of the oldest and most exquisite of its class in England. When they reached the vault by whose doors old Bessie was seated, Maisie turned once more to gaze at the pointed lancet windows of the Early English choir, and the still more ancient dog-tooth ornament of the ruined Norman Lady Chapel.

‘How solidly it’s built!’ she exclaimed, looking up at the arches which alone survived the fury of the Puritan. ‘It really looks as if it would last for ever.’

Old Bessie had bent her head, and seemed to be whispering something at the door of the vault. But at the sound she raised her eyes, and, turning her wizened face towards the lady of the manor, mumbled through her few remaining fang-like teeth an old local saying, ‘Bradbury for length, Wolverden for strength, and Church Hatton for beauty!

‘Three brothers builded churches three;

And fasted thrice each church shall be:

Fasted thrice with maidens’ blood,

To make them safe from fire and flood;

Fasted thrice with souls of men,

Hatton, Bradbury, Wolverden!’

‘Come away,’ Maisie said, shuddering. ‘I’m afraid of that woman. Why was she whispering at the doors of the vault down there? I don’t like the look of her.’

‘My dear,’ Mrs. West answered, in no less terrified a tone, ‘I will confess I don’t like the look of her myself. I wish she’d leave the place. I’ve tried to make her. The Colonel offered her fifty pounds down and a nice cottage in Surrey if only she’d go—she frightens me so much; but she wouldn’t hear of it. She said she must stop by the bodies of her dead—that’s her style, don’t you see: a sort of modern ghoul, a degenerate vampire—and from the bodies of her dead in Wolverden Church no living soul should ever move her.’

For dinner Maisie wore her white satin Empire dress, high-waisted, low-necked, and cut in the bodice with a certain baby-like simplicity of style which exactly suited her strange and uncanny type of beauty. She was very much admired. She felt it, and it pleased her. The young man who took her in, a subaltern of engineers, had no eyes for any one else; while old Admiral Wade, who sat opposite her with a plain and skinny dowager, made her positively uncomfortable by the persistent way in which he stared at her simple pearl necklet.

After dinner, the tableaux. They had been designed and managed by a famous Royal Academician, and were mostly got up by the members of the house-party. But two or three actresses from London had been specially invited to help in a few of the more mythological scenes; for, indeed, Mrs. West had prepared the entire entertainment with that topsy-turvy conscientiousness and scrupulous sense of responsibility to society which pervaded her view of millionaire morality. Having once decided to offer the county a set of tableaux, she felt that millionaire morality absolutely demanded of her the sacrifice of three weeks’ time and several hundred pounds’ money in order to discharge her obligations to the county with becoming magnificence.

The first tableau, Maisie learned from the gorgeous programme, was ‘Jephthah’s Daughter’. The subject was represented at the pathetic moment when the doomed virgin goes forth from her father’s house with her attendent maidens to bewail her virginity for two months upon the mountains, before the fulfilment of the awful vow which bound her father to offer her up for a burnt offering. Maisie thought it too solemn and tragic a scene for a festive occasion. But the famous R. A. had a taste for such themes, and his grouping was certainly most effectively dramatic.

‘A perfect symphony in white and grey,’ said Mr. Wills, the art critic.

‘How awfully affecting!’ said most of the young girls.

‘Reminds me a little too much, my dear, of old Bessie’s stories,’ Mrs. West whispered low, leaning from her seat across two rows to Maisie.

A piano stood a little on one side of the platform, just in front of the curtain. The intervals between the pieces were filled up with songs, which, however, had been evidently arranged in keeping with the solemn and half-mystical tone of the tableaux. It is the habit of amateurs to take a long time in getting their scenes in order, so the interposition of the music was a happy thought as far as its prime intention went. But Maisie wondered they could not have chosen some livelier song for Christmas Eve than ‘Oh, Mary, go and call the cattle home, and call the cattle home, and call the cattle home, across the sands of Dee.’ Her own name was Mary when she signed it officially, and the sad lilt of the last line, ‘But never home came she,’ rang unpleasantly in her ear through the rest of the evening.

The second tableau was the ‘Sacrifice of Iphigenia’. It was admirably rendered. The cold and dignified father, standing, apparently unmoved, by the pyre; the cruel faces of the attendant priests; the shrinking form of the immolated princess; the mere blank curiosity and inquiring interest of the helmeted heroes looking on, to whom this slaughter of a virgin victim was but an ordinary incident of the Achaean religion—all these had been arranged by the Academical director with consummate skill and pictorial cleverness. But the group that attracted Maisie most among the components of the scene was that of the attendant maidens, more conspicuous here in their flowing white chitons that even they had been when posed as companions of the beautiful and ill-fated Hebrew victim. Two in particular excited her close attention—two very graceful and spiritual-looking girls, in long white robes of no particular age or country, who stood at the very end near the right edge of the picture. ‘How lovely they are, the two last on the right!’ Maisie whispered to her neighbour—an Oxford undergraduate with a budding moustache. ‘I do so admire them!’

‘Do you?’ he answered, fondling the moustache with one dubious finger. ‘Well, now, do you know, I don’t think I do. They’re rather coarse-looking. And besides, I don’t quite like the way they’ve got their hair done up in bunches; too fashionable, isn’t it?—too much of the present day? I don’t care to see a girl in a Greek costume, with her coiffure so evidently turned out by Truefitt’s!’

‘Oh, I don’t mean those two,’ Maisie answered, a little shocked he should think she had picked out such meretricious faces; ‘I mean the two beyond them again—the two with their hair so simply and sweetly done—the ethereal-looking dark girls.’

The undergraduate opened his mouth, and stared at her in blank amazement for a moment. ‘Well, I don’t see—’ he began, and broke off suddenly. Something in Maisie’s eye seemed to give him pause. He fondled his moustache, hesitated, and was silent.

‘How nice to have read the Greek and know what it all means!’ Maisie went on, after a minute. ‘It’s a human sacrifice, of course; but, please, what is the story?’

The undergraduate hummed and hawed. ‘Well, it’s in Euripides, you know,’ he said, trying to look impressive, ‘and— er—and I haven’t taken up Euripides for my next examination. But I
think
it’s like this. Iphigenia was a daughter of Agamemnon’s, don’t you know, and he had offended Artemis or somebody—some other goddess; and he vowed to offer up to her the most beautiful thing that should be born that year, by way of reparation—just like Jephthah. Well, Iphigenia was considered the most beautiful product of the particular twelve-month—don’t look at me like that, please! you—you make me nervous—and so, when the young woman grew up—well, I don’t quite recollect the ins and outs of the details, but it’s a human sacrifice business, don’t you see; and they’re just going to kill her, though I
believe
a hind was finally substituted for the girl, like the ram for Isaac; but I must confess I’ve a very vague recollection of it.’ He rose from his seat uneasily. ‘I’m afraid,’ he went on, shuffling about for an excuse to move, ‘these chairs are too close. I seem to be incommoding you.’

He moved away with a furtive air. At the end of the tableau one or two of the characters who were not needed in succeeding pieces came down from the stage and joined the body of spectators, as they often do, in their character-dresses—a good opportunity, in point of fact, for retaining through the evening the advantages conferred by theatrical costume, rouge, and pearl-powder. Among them the two girls Maisie had admired so much glided quietly toward her and took the two vacant seats on either side, one of which had just been quitted by the awkward undergraduate. They were not only beautiful in face and figure, on a closer view, but Maisie found them from the first extremely sympathetic. They burst into talk with her, frankly and at once, with charming ease and grace of manner. They were ladies in the grain, in instinct and breeding. The taller of the two, whom the other addressed as Yolande, seemed particularly pleasing. The very name charmed Maisie. She was friends with them at once. They both possessed a certain nameless attraction that constitutes in itself the best possible introduction. Maisie hesitated to ask them whence they came, but it was clear from their talk they knew Wolverden intimately.

After a minute the piano struck up once more. A famous Scotch vocalist, in a diamond necklet and a dress to match, took her place on the stage, just in front of the footlights. As chance would have it, she began singing the song Maisie most of all hated. It was Scott’s ballad of ‘Proud Maisie’, set to music by Carlo Ludovici—

‘Proud Maisie is in the wood,

Walking so early;

Sweet Robin sits on the bush,

Singing so rarely.

“Tell me, thou bonny bird

When shall I marry me?”

“When six braw gentlemen

Kirkward shall carry ye.”

“Who makes the bridal bed,

Birdie, say truly?”

“The grey-headed sexton

That delves the grave duly.

“The glow-worm o’er grave and stone

Shall light thee steady;

The owl from the steeple sing,

‘Welcome, proud lady.”’

Maisie listened to the song with grave discomfort. She had never liked it, and to-night it appalled her. She did not know that just at that moment Mrs. West was whispering in a perfect fever of apology to a lady by her side, ‘Oh dear! oh dear! what a dreadful thing of me ever to have permitted that song to be sung here to-night! It was horribly thoughtless! Why, now I remember, Miss Llewelyn’s name, you know, is Maisie!—and there she is listening to it with a face like a sheet! I shall never forgive myself!’

The tall, dark girl by Maisie’s side, whom the other called Yolande, leaned across to her sympathetically. ‘You don’t like that song?’ she said, with just a tinge of reproach in her voice as she said it.

‘I hate it!’ Maisie answered, trying hard to compose herself.

‘Why so?’ the tall, dark girl asked, in a tone of calm and singular sweetness. ‘It’s sad, perhaps; but it’s lovely—and natural!’

‘My own name is Maisie,’ her new friend replied, with an ill-repressed shudder. ‘And somehow that song pursues me through life. I seem always to hear the horrid ring of the words, “When six braw gentlemen kirkward shall carry ye.” I wish to Heaven my people had never called me Maisie!’

‘And yet
why?
’ the tall, dark girl asked again, with a sad, mysterious air. ‘Why this clinging to life—this terror of death—this inexplicable attachment to a world of misery? And with such eyes as yours, too! Your eyes are like mine’—which was a compliment, certainly, for the dark girl’s own pair were strangely deep and lustrous. ‘People with eyes such as those, that can look into futurity, ought not surely to shrink from a mere gate like death! For death is but a gate—the gate of life in its fullest beauty. It is written over the door, ‘“Mors janua vitae.”’

‘What door?’ Maisie asked—for she remembered having read those selfsame words, and tried in vain to translate them, that very day, though the meaning was now clear to her.

The answer electrified her: ‘The gate of the vault in Wolverden churchyard.’

She said it very low, but with pregnant expression.

‘Oh, how dreadful!’ Maisie exclaimed, drawing back. The tall, dark girl half frightened her.

‘Not at all,’ the girl answered. ‘This life is so short, so vain, so transitory! And beyond it is peace—eternal peace—the calm of rest—the joy of the spirit.’