CHAPTER LI.
When we separated for the night, which we did at eleven o'clock, Margrave
said,--
"Good-night and good-by. I must leave you to-morrow, Strahan, and before
your usual hour for rising. I took the liberty of requesting one of your
men to order me a chaise from L----. Pardon my seeming abruptness, but I
always avoid long leave-takings, and I had fixed the date of my departure
almost as soon as I accepted your invitation."
"I have no right to complain. The place must be dull indeed to a gay
young fellow like you. It is dull even to me. I am meditating flight
already. Are you going back to L----?"
"Not even for such things as I left at my lodgings. When I settle
somewhere and can give an address, I shall direct them to be sent to me.
There are, I hear, beautiful patches of scenery towards the north, only
known to pedestrian tourists. I am a good walker; and you know, Fenwick,
that I am also a child of Nature. Adieu to you both; and many thanks to
you, Strahan, for your hospitality."
He left the room.
"I am not sorry he is going," said Strahan, after a pause, and with a
quick breath as if of relief. "Do you not feel that he exhausts one? An
excess of oxygen, as you would say in a lecture."
I was alone in my own chamber; I felt indisposed for bed and for sleep;
the curious conversation I had held with Margrave weighed on me. In that
conversation, we had indirectly touched upon the prodigies which I had not
brought myself to speak of with frank courage, and certainly nothing in
Margrave's manner had betrayed consciousness of my suspicions; on the
contrary, the open frankness with which he evinced his predilection for
mystic speculation, or uttered his more unamiable sentiments, rather
tended to disarm than encourage belief in gloomy secrets or sinister
powers. And as he was about to quit the neighbourhood, he would not again
see Lilian, not even enter the town of L----. Was I to ascribe this
relief from his presence to the promise of the Shadow; or was I not
rather right in battling firmly against any grotesque illusion, and
accepting his departure as a simple proof that my jealous fears had been
amongst my other chimeras, and that as he had really only visited Lilian
out of friendship to me, in my peril, so he might, with his characteristic
acuteness, have guessed my jealousy, and ceased his visits from a kindly
motive delicately concealed? And might not the same motive now have
dictated the words which were intended to assure me that L---- contained
no attractions to tempt him to return to it? Thus, gradually soothed and
cheered by the course to which my reflections led me, I continued to muse
for hours. At length, looking at my watch, I was surprised to find it was
the second hour after midnight. I was just about to rise from my chair
to undress, and secure some hours of sleep, when the well-remembered cold
wind passed through the room, stirring the roots of my hair; and before me
stood, against the wall, the Luminous Shadow.
"Rise and follow me," said the voice, sounding much nearer than it had
ever done before.
And at those words I rose mechanically, and like a sleepwalker.
"Take up the light."
I took it. The Scin-Laeca glided along the wall towards the threshold,
and motioned me to open the door. I did so. The Shadow flitted on
through the corridor. I followed, with hushed footsteps, down a small
stair into Forman's study. In all my subsequent proceedings, about to be
narrated, the Shadow guided me, sometimes by voice, sometimes by sign. I
obeyed the guidance, not only unresistingly, but without a desire to
resist. I was unconscious either of curiosity or of awe,--only of a calm
and passive indifference, neither pleasurable nor painful. In this
obedience, from which all will seemed extracted, I took into my hands the
staff which I had examined the day before, and which lay on the table,
just where Margrave had cast it on re-entering the house. I unclosed the
shutter to the casement, lifted the sash, and, with the light in my left
hand, the staff in my right, stepped forth into the garden. The night was
still; the flame of the candle scarcely trembled in the air; the Shadow
moved on before me towards the old pavilion described in an earlier part
of this narrative, and of which the mouldering doors stood wide open. I
followed the Shadow into the pavilion, up the crazy stair to the room
above, with its four great blank unglazed windows, or rather arcades,
north, south, east, and west. I halted on the middle of the floor: right
before my eyes, through the vista made by breathless boughs, stood out
from the moonlit air the dreary mausoleum. Then, at the command conveyed
to me, I placed the candle on a wooden settle, touched a spring in the
handle of the staff; a lid flew back, and I drew from the hollow, first a
lump of some dark bituminous substance, next a smaller slender wand of
polished steel, of which the point was tipped with a translucent material,
which appeared to me like crystal. Bending down, still obedient to the
direction conveyed to me, I described on the floor with the lump of
bitumen (if I may so call it) the figure of the pentacle with the
interlaced triangles, in a circle nine feet in diameter, just as I had
drawn it for Margrave the evening before. The material used made the
figure perceptible, in a dark colour of mingled black and red. I applied
the flame of the candle to the circle, and immediately it became lambent
with a low steady splendour that rose about an inch from the floor; and
gradually front this light there emanated a soft, gray, transparent mist
and a faint but exquisite odour. I stood in the midst of the circle, and
within the circle also, close by my side, stood the Scin-Laeca,--no longer
reflected on the wall, but apart from it, erect, rounded into more
integral and distinct form, yet impalpable, and from it there breathed an
icy air. Then lifting the wand, the broader end of which rested in the
palm of my hand, the two forefingers closing lightly over it in a line
parallel with the point, I directed it towards the wide aperture before
me, fronting the mausoleum. I repeated aloud some words whispered to me
in a language I knew not: those words I would not trace on this paper,
could I remember them. As they came to a close, I heard a howl from the
watch-dog in the yard,--a dismal, lugubrious howl. Other dogs in the
distant village caught up the sound, and bayed in a dirge-like chorus; and
the howling went on louder and louder. Again strange words were whispered
to me, and I repeated them in mechanical submission; and when they, too,
were ended, I felt the ground tremble beneath me, and as my eyes looked
straight forward down the vista, that, stretching from the casement, was
bounded by the solitary mausoleum, vague formless shadows seemed to pass
across the moonlight,--below, along the sward, above, in the air; and then
suddenly a terror, not before conceived, came upon me.
And a third time words were whispered; but though I knew no more of their
meaning than I did of those that had preceded them, I felt a repugnance to
utter them aloud. Mutely I turned towards the Scin-Laeca, and the
expression of its face was menacing and terrible; my will became yet more
compelled to the control imposed upon it, and my lips commenced the
formula again whispered into my ear, when I heard distinctly a voice of
warning and of anguish, that murmured "Hold!" I knew the voice; it was
Lilian's. I paused; I turned towards the quarter from which the voice had
come, and in the space afar I saw the features, the form of Lilian. Her
arms were stretched towards me in supplication, her countenance was deadly
pale, and anxious with unutterable distress. The whole image seemed in
unison with the voice,--the look, the attitude, the gesture of one who
sees another in deadly peril, and cries, "Beware!"
This apparition vanished in a moment; but that moment sufficed to free my
mind from the constraint which had before enslaved it. I dashed the wand
to the ground, sprang from the circle, rushed from the place. How I got
into my own room I can remember not,--I know not; I have a vague
reminiscence of some intervening wandering, of giant trees, of shroud-like
moonlight, of the Shining Shadow and its angry aspect, of the blind walls
and the iron door of the House of the Dead, of spectral images,--a
confused and dreary phantasmagoria. But all I can recall with
distinctness is the sight of my own hueless face in the mirror in my own
still room, by the light of the white moon through the window; and,
sinking down, I said to myself, "This, at least, is an hallucination or a
dream!"
