Brodie-Innes J.W. - The Old House in the Canongate

The author, who is very familiar with the old parts of Edinburgh, noticed some time ago, with curious distinctness, the sensation of Spain which he has endeavoured to describe, hanging around a peculiarly squalid close, and finding that other persons quite independently had experienced the same and that no written or well-known oral tradition would account for it, he sought to pursue the subject and get clearer mental pictures. Thus bit by bit the old house, as described, grew up in shadowy form, and here and there sufficiently clear indications came to bear verification from local history and tradition, such as coats of arms of old Scotch houses standing out distinct over the shadowy gateways with dates and initials superadded. In this way a few historic facts were pieced together on which again shadowy pictures built themselves up. These pictures referred obviously to various dates, yet with little to show what was their historic sequence. Wherever verification was possible the story was borne out by recorded facts. Obviously, however, it was utterly impossible to observe any of the ordinary rules of construction in telling such a story; the only thing the author could attempt has been to set down the various pictures in as clear sequence as circumstances admit of. Those who have had similar experiences will recognise the difficulty. It only remains to say that as the portions of the story which were actually verified, involved more than one well-known Scottish family, the names, etc. have been altered, but the reader may rely on it that only absolutely necessary alterations have been made.

I. – THE WRITER’S PROLOGUE.

It was a great many years ago, while still the old town of Edinburgh retained its quaintness and picturesque historic flavour, which the march of civilisation has so largely destroyed of late, that there stood, just off the Canongate and fronting on one of the curious characteristic closes that branch off on either hand, an old house; so old that the very legends of its first foundation were blurred and dim. Bits of carved tracery round a window niched into one angle of the basement indicated ecclesiastical art of a date considerably older than Holyrood, and above this, in strange contrast, was sculptured the coat of arms of a noble Spanish family, whose very name had perished more than two hundred years ago in the land of their birth. The first storey projected on carved beams as in many of the old Edinburgh houses, and above were fantastic gables, pepper-box turrets, and dormer windows, looking like a strange architectural nightmare, wherein the old Scotch baronial style was blended with much of the Moresque. At the time I write of, however, the old house had fallen on evil days, dirt and neglect were over 188it all, for some years it had been shut up altogether, the lower windows boarded over, many of the upper ones broken; previously to this it had been long in the sole custody of an old half-caste servant, who sternly refused admission to any person whatsoever.

At this time I was deeply interested in the history and antiquities of Edinburgh, and priding myself, as I did, on knowing something of every building in the city of any pretension, my curiosity was greatly piqued by this queer old rambling mansion, the inside of which no one seemed to have seen, and whose story no one seemed to know, save that it was commonly rumoured to be “uncanny,” if no worse.

On one special morning in the late autumn, as I was passing down the Canongate, I noticed an unusual stir, and quite a little crowd created about the head of the close I have mentioned, and drawing near enough to gather their remarks I soon learned that the authorities had condemned the old house as unsafe and that it was to be forthwith pulled down. “Now or never!” I said to myself, “if I am to see the inside of that house while it yet exists there’s no time to be lost.” As if in answer to my thought there bustled through the group of idlers Mr. Evan Fraser, the worthy bailie, and probable Lord Provost of no distant date, the man who could procure the realization of my wish if anyone in Edinburgh could; portly and important, rather red in the face, his hat tilted a trifle back, his heavy gold chain and bunch of seals jingling in front across his broad expanse of waistcoat, and panting slightly as he elbowed his path away from the old house; to him I addressed myself.

“See over yon hoose,” he said; “aye! aye! to be sure, weel ye ken, laddie! its no just in my own hands, and the proprietor, he’s no vara fond of letting folk gang through – something no quite the thing aboot the hoose maybe. Oh! I’m no saying anything, mind ye, that should na be said, perhaps it’ll be the drains that’s wrang, or something like that. Still, as the hoose is to be pulled down, and seeing that ye’re interested in a’ that rubbish o’ coats o’ arms and sic like trash, and a’ the world’ll be seeing the inside o’ it in a few days now, I dinna think there can be muckle harm, an’ I’ll write a note to Mr. Dalrymple, that’s the proprietor ye ken, and tell him I’d taken the liberty. Aye! aye! just come ye this way.”

So saying the worthy man turned back with me, and leading the way to the door, he knocked; it was cautiously opened on the chain.

“Open the door, ye donnered auld fule!” said Mr. Fraser. “Have ye no the sense to ken my knock yet? This,” he continued, turning to me, “is Mr. Dalrymple’s servant, who has known this ramshackle auld place ever since he was a boy, haven’t ye, Peter? and knows all the ghosts about it, just as well as he knows the whisky shops in the Canongate.”

“Oh, Mr. Fraser!” said Peter as he closed the door behind us, “for the love of the Lord! dinna ye mak’ fun o’ they? Man and boy I’ve 189been here these sixty years, and they never harmed me yet; but eh, mon, they’re ower near to us to flyte at.”

“Weel, Peter, I canna stay to hear your auld world stories now, but look ye! this young gentleman wants to see all over the auld place before it’s pulled down, and you must just tak’ him round and let him see a’ there is, right away, ye ken, frae the cellars to the attics, and the secret chambers if there are any, and tell him all your auld stories, if he has patience to listen; I will answer to Mr. Dalrymple.”

The door closed on the energetic Bailie, and I was in the entrance-hall of the old house I had so often longed to see. I looked with some curiosity at my companion; notwithstanding his broad Scotch tongue, he had unquestionably more than a dash of foreign blood in his veins; he was tall and slight, with great grace of movement, a sallow olive complexion, hair and moustache grizzled with time, long, restless, taper fingers, and piercingly, black eyes. I had not time, however, for a prolonged scrutiny.

“Come awa’,” he said, “if ye want to see th’ auld hoose, no that there’s muckle to see, its a’ falling to bits noo, but I mind the day when it was a real, bright, bonny hoose, about the time Mr. Dalrymple was married Aye, and before that, when the auld laird was here.”

“I’ve heard Mrs. Dalrymple was very pretty,” I said.

“Aye, was she, puir body; a bonny lass! Folk’ll tell ye,” he said suddenly turning round on me, “that it’s her that walks, don’t ye believe it. I’ve seen them that walks in this hoose, many and many a time, aye, before ever Mr. Dalrymple married, before Mrs. Dalrymple, puir thing, was born, and those that were here before me kenned them, lang ere ever I came to Edinburgh. Na, na, Mrs. Dalrymple lies quiet enough, God rest her soul,” and the old man crossed himself devoutly. “Come awa’!” he said quickly leading the way up the broad uncarpeted stairs, whose rotting and worm-eaten boards looked singularly insecure.

I am bound to say I was disappointed with my tour round the old house; clearly the outside was the most interesting part of it. Suites of rooms that had been handsome once, but decorated in the worst taste of the later Georgian period, and now with all the tawdry plaster wreaths and Cupids crumbling away, the paper hanging in festoons from the walls, and dragging the mouldering plaster with it, some rooms partly furnished, but with carpets and hangings riddled by the moth and falling into rags from very rottenness. Everywhere it was the same, the vulgar commonplace crumbling into sordid decay.

“Mr. Fraser spoke of secret chambers,” I said at last, “do you know of any such?”

“Na, na,” said the old man, “it’s just his duffing; there may perhaps be a passage or so, for the wa’s are gey thick, ye ken, and maybe a hiding-hole or the like, they did queer things in th’ auld times, but nane o’ them’s known at present, and troth those that walk dinna need any hiding-190places or secret chambers; many a time I’ve seen that puir lady coming doon these vera stairs towards me wi’ the black lace over her bonny face, and the cross-hilted dagger in her breast, and many a time when I never saw her, I’ve felt the swish of her satin gown go past me on the stairs, but never past the seventh step from the bottom, she just seemed as though she passed into the wa’ there. Come awa’, sir, ye’ve just seen the whole of it noo.”

“No Peter,” I said, “I haven’t been in there,” and I pointed to a door on the left of the first landing.

“Oh, ye’ve seen that,” he said; “besides, there’s naething there, just a room, the auld laird’s room it was.”

I fancied I detected something in the old man’s tone as though he wished to deter me from entering, and this of course redoubled my anxiety to see the room. I sprang up the stairs again, turned the handle and entered. A commonplace room, sure enough; a huge four-post bed occupied a great part of it, deeply recessed windows gave but scanty light, a huge mirror confronted me, rusty and dim, its silvering largely worn away and its frame broken, some sombre kind of brown patterned paper covered the walls, a dreary room altogether; as I walked into it, the door closed behind me, not with a slam, but slowly, gently, noiselessly, as though some unseen hand were shutting it quietly. Then curiously, notwithstanding the dismal gloominess of the room, I began to be conscious of a strange exhilaration and excitement; my heart beat thick and fast with an emotion distinctly pleasurable, and I became conscious of a faint and almost indescribable odour, recalling at one moment the scent of burning wood, then a subtle aroma as of incense, blended with a suggestion of orange flowers, and through it all an unmistakable whiff of garlic. Where had I smelt that smell before? for it came to me as perfectly familiar, and then in my brain rose clear the memory of an artistic ramble in Spain some years before. Yes, it was Seville, that that strange subtle scent belonged to, and as it permeated my senses, the room I stood in seemed dream-like and unreal, the black-robed priests, the peasants, the dark-eyed donnas of Spain were all around me. In the embrasure of the deep window, or was it in the tall mirror? – I could not say – was reclining a graceful form – amber satin, and a black lace mantilla. My brain seemed growing dim, a clammy perspiration was in the palms of my hands, yet my pulses throbbed with the excitement of a coming adventure. I know not why I murmured the name of “Juanita,” an old sweetheart of the old wandering days in Spain. That instant the door was thrown open and old Peter appeared. “Best come oot o’ there, sir,” he said, “that room’s no’ wholesome.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing! just it’s th’ auld laird’s room. I mean they say it’s over the drains, ye ken, and they say there’s some effluvium.”

“Perhaps what I smell,” I thought, but why these memories of Seville?

191 However, I was glad enough to get out on the landing and draw two or three deep breaths to revive myself. Peter looked at me curiously. “Was I long in the room before you came in?” I said, for to me it had seemed like ages.

“’Deed no, sir! I just followed you as fast as an auld man can follow a young ane!” he said.

At this moment my eye fell on a small picture which I had not previously noticed in the entrance hall; an old, old portrait, as would seem from its frame, the paint almost obliterated by time and dirt, yet it was impossible to disguise the strange, powerful lineaments, the piercing eyes, which, even in its present state of neglect and decay seemed to glow from the canvas and to exert almost a mesmeric influence.

“Who is that?” I asked.

“Sorrow o’ me kens, sir,” he answered, with a queer tremble in his voice. “There was a man came here once – it was soon after Mr. Dalrymple was married, as like that picture as two peas in a pod; Signor Hernandez, I think they called him, and he looked at that picture. ‘Aye, aye,’ he says, ‘that’s my grandfather, or my great-grandfather, or something. Fergusson, his name was, and ought to be mine by rights. Then he gave a little laugh, but I give ye my word, sir, that night that he was here I saw them as walks here, them as I’ve told ye of, sir, just as plain as I see you now, plainer than I ever saw them before or since, and sic’ cruel, wicked looks among them. Puir Mistress Dalrymple, she was ill that night, too, and Mr. Dalrymple was nursing her; I just laid down here in the hall, sir, on a sofa in case I should be wanted, and whenever he came out he just shuddered and gasped like a man going to die. ’Deed, sir, but I was glad when that Signor Hernandez took his leave. If he wasna just Auld Clootie, he was no vara distant kin, o’ that I’m sure.”

I pressed a half-sovereign into Peter’s hand with an intimation that I might, perhaps, be glad to have another look over the old house before it was finally demolished.

“Thank ye, sir,” said Peter, “I’ll be glad to tak’ ye round any time ye like to come; ye’re the first stranger that’s set foot in here for thirty years, forby some o’ the town council, and they don’t count, puir feckless bodies; there’s no ane amang them a’ has wit eneugh to keep himself warm, unless it’s Mr. Fraser.”

So I went back, as the evening was now fast drawing on, to my lodgings in Northumberland Street, where my good landlady had a brisk fire burning, and very soon a comfortable little dinner. Yet for all I could do that vision of Seville haunted my brain; not a thought of the old house, scarce a memory of Peter and his quaint stories, but a constant memory of the sunny streets and the lovely girls of Spain.

“After all,” I said to myself, “it’s the only place for real life, I must go back. Ah! how I should like to see my little Juanita once 192more. I’ll go, as sure as fate, as soon as I can get away from this old country. I’m off for sunny Spain, marry Juanita, turn orange grower, or something.”

I put on my hat, lighted a cigar, and strolled out, humming a Spanish love-song, with my brain full of old memories and fancies, finally turned into bed, and, as might have been expected, dreamt of Spain and Spanish demoiselles, and of kneeling with Juanita before a gorgeous altar, while, the clouds of incense floating upwards veiled the candles and the golden shrine, and then wandering with Juanita under blooming orange trees; then a nightmare, I cannot clearly remember what, but a cross-hilted dagger stood out plain against wreaths of dark, lurid cloud, and I awoke, gasping for breath, and bathed in perspiration.

Next morning came a feeling of strong curiosity about the old house, and I determined to seek out Mr. Dalrymple. Evan Fraser’s chance words had informed me he was in Edinburgh, and to Evan Fraser therefore I betook myself as soon as possible after breakfast.

“Aye, aye, laddie,” he said, “ye’ll find him here in Queen Street.” He gave me the number; “he has a suite o’ apairtments there; just for the time, ye ken. Stay, tak my card, wi’ ye? He’s no vara keen for seeing strangers.”

In ten minutes more, by the passport of good Evan Fraser’s card, I was ushered into the presence of Mr. Dalrymple. A very tall, very thin man, with a face as white as marble and perfectly white hair, kindly hazel eyes of strange brilliance, a very prominent, hooked nose, seeming much too large for his pinched face and sunken cheeks. He stooped terribly, and his clothes seemed to hang loosely on his shrunken frame, and as I entered he raised a handkerchief to his lips, as though to check a fit of asthmatic coughing.

There was a look of kindly interest in his eyes as I told him of my architectural and heraldic studies and my fondness for old Edinburgh, but when I spoke of the old house in the Canongate it grew troubled, as though painful memories were stirred within him. I told him how the outside of the old house had attracted me and how I had at last procured access to it, and what a loss I thought its intended demolition would be to Edinburgh.

“Better so! better so!” he said, “the town council have done well to condemn it, the old house has been a curse to all who have lived there – tell me, did you go into the room on the left of the first landing?”

It was my turn to start now, he looked at me so curiously and intently. “I did,” I answered, “a melancholy room, it would give me the blues to live there.”

“It was not always so,” he said, “I loved that room better than any room in the house forty years ago. My bridal chamber it was.”

“An unhealthy room, I fancy,” I replied, “it gave me a most curious 193sensation. I suppose it was the closeness or damp, or a drain smell or something, I felt like fainting.”

“What! there’s more than this! tell me what you felt? did you think of any country, of any place? did you dream of anyone?” cried Mr. Dalrymple, strangely moved. “Pardon me. I have a motive for asking.”

“Well, yes,” I said, “I smelt something, a drain perhaps, but it somehow recalled Seville, the drains are not over good out there you know, and then, I suppose from the association, I began to think of Spain till I half fancied I saw a lady in amber satin dress and a black lace mantilla in one of the deep window recesses. ’Pon my word, I’m ashamed to tell you the story, it looks so ridiculous in broad daylight.”

“Not to me! not to me!|^[1]” he said with a heavy sigh. “You must be intensely sensitive. Tell me,” looking straight into my eyes, “What are you thinking of doing for the next few years.”

“Well,” I said, rather taken aback by the suddenness of the question. “I have an idea of trying orange-growing in Spain.”

“Ah! just so,” he murmured, “and of marrying a Spanish lady and settling down for life in the sunny South. ’Tis a lovely dream.”

I stared, his words so exactly followed the current of my own thoughts.

“Tell me,” he continued. “When did you form this project – last night, was it not?”

I could only nod again. I was too astonished to speak.

“Ah!” he said, “the old curse of the house – it’s terrible! it’s terrible! Stay a moment, sit down where you are.”

We had been standing by the fire all this time. As he spoke he pointed to a large arm-chair. I could not resist, almost without my will as it seemed I sank into it. Mr. Dalrymple laid a cool hand on my forehead, and his thin white fingers seemed to touch my hair caressingly, a grateful sense of coolness flowed through my brain, my thoughts grew clear and luminous, the feverish haze which haunted me melted away.

“Well!” he said, “what do you think of orange-growing?”

“Oh!” I answered, “a lovely dream, as you said just now, but I don’t fancy the reality would be so charming. I’ve been in Spain and it’s a fine country for a holiday, when you’re young and have nothing to do, but I don’t care to go back.”

“Nor to marry a Spanish lady?” he queried with a slight smile.

“Oh dear no!” I said, “that is a lovely dream too, but Heaven forfend it should be more.”

“Yet,” said Mr. Dalrymple, slowly and impressively, “that very thing you would have done if Providence had not sent you in the nick of time to me. Look here, my young friend, I never saw you before, I may never see you again, but for the sake of my dear old friend Evan Fraser I take a great interest in you, and therefore I warn you, there are 194influences all round us, of which the bulk of mankind, happily for themselves, are wholly ignorant, and which they only feel very vaguely, and when they do probably ascribe them to indigestion or drains or some such thing. You are abnormally sensitive, and it may embitter your whole life as it has done mine. Now will you light a cigar and sit down and listen patiently to an old man’s garrulity, and I will tell you as well as I can the story of my own life, and of the old house in the Canongate, which, please God! I will never enter again. Mind you! I can’t explain it; I can only tell you literally my own experiences, which I would never have told anyone but that I see in you a person even more sensitive than I was myself, and I believe you might develop into a spirit medium of the kind they call under-control, from which may God in His mercy preserve you, and all other sane men.”

Heartily I thanked him, and lighting an excellent cigar disposed myself to listen to Mr. Dalrymple’s story, which ran thus:

282

Mr. Dalrymple’s Story of the Old House.

“The house has belonged to my family for many generations, in fact it used to be called Dalrymple House some hundred years ago, though this name seems to have been dropped since. I don’t quite know why. No one knows its earliest history; there are legends in the family about some monastic foundation; you know the corner window looking up towards the Canongate, well, that is said to be the remains of some very old ecclesiastical building, older than anything else in Edinburgh, founded on the site of some Druid altar or temple. I never had much turn for archæology myself, so I can’t tell you much about it; my own personal experiences I can tell you, and perhaps you may be able to interpret them. My father never lived in the old house. I question whether he ever set foot within it; he was a merchant much engaged in the Indian trade, but as he died soon after I was born, all my knowledge of him is but hearsay. I was sent to school in France, then brought home and sent to school in England, then to Oxford where I took a fair degree, but until I was two and twenty I never was in Edinburgh, and, beyond the fact that my family possessed a town house there, I knew nothing whatever of the old house in the Canongate.

“During my minority it was inhabited, that is when it was inhabited at all, by my uncle, a bachelor and a man who was generally looked upon as a mauvais sujet in the family; though my father had confidence enough in him to nominate him as my guardian. Except however for paying for my education and keeping me liberally supplied with pocket money, my uncle did little for me, and thus it chanced that until I was twenty-two I knew but little either of the house or my uncle. After I had taken my degree, however, I determined to go North, and take possession of my property, and make myself familiar with the old traditions of my race, and the places with which for so many generations we had been associated.

“My uncle was always called, and I believe is called still, the Auld Laird, but he never had more than an ample income left him by my father in recognition of his trust on my behalf.

“I was just twenty-two at the time I begin my story, as happy a stripling as you often see, with magnificent health, ample fortune, and not a care in the world. I had just taken a good degree, I had troops of friends, I was engaged to a sweet girl, the daughter of my old College coach. My first wish on leaving Oxford was to know more about this old Edinburgh house, the most curious bit of my possessions, as I gathered from some notes left my father, relating to my grandfather who had lived there. It was a cold night in January when I first arrived 283in Edinburgh, but my uncle’s welcome was warm and boisterous. ‘Welcome to your own home, my boy,’ he cried, his jolly old red face beaming with pleasure, ‘you’re master here now. By gad, Sir! I’m glad to hand over the reins to you, but if you’ll let me have a corner in the old place, I’ll be obliged to you, for I’ve got fond of it, and an old man’s like an old tree, suffers if it’s transplanted you know.’ ‘Indeed, Uncle,’ I said, ‘I hope you’ll stay here all your life.’ ‘Well, until you’re married, my boy!’ he answered, ‘and look here, I’ve told them to put you in your proper place, in the Laird’s room; I’ve been sleeping there myself lately, but only to keep it warm for you.’ Talking like this he led me upstairs to that room we were speaking of just now at the left hand side of the first landing; a cheerful fire burnt in the grate, but that huge bed with its dark hangings made me think of a hearse somehow. “There was tapestry on the wall then, and that old mirror was new. By the way, did you notice the little door leading out of the room, up one step, a queer looking door?” I had not noticed it. “Well, it’s there,” continued Mr. Dalrymple, “if you go again, go through it, it opens on a little landing; there was some lumber piled there the night I’m speaking of and a pile of old books; there’s a narrow stair leads up and down from that landing; so much I saw, but I hadn’t time to explore further; the place might have been damp, at any rate it gave me the shivers, so I picked up a book thinking if I were wakeful I could read myself to sleep as I often did, and returned to the fire; at that moment I heard the clock chiming a quarter to six, and six was the dinner hour; no time to be lost; I pitched the book on to the table by the bed and rid myself of my travel-stained garments and put on an evening suit with all the haste I could muster. My uncle and I dined alone that night, and I am bound to say I found him capital company. I wanted to hear about the old house, but not a word would he tell me; time enough to explore in daylight, he said, and I should probably live there a great deal in the future, and come to know it all by heart. So he discoursed generally and genially about his travels, and about books and famous men whom he had known, and the time slipped by till bed time. I retired to the stately old room, very handsome I thought it then, for the hangings and decorations, though not new, were fresh and in excellent preservation. I sat down by the fire intending to write to Edith Challoner, my fiancée, and I commenced a letter; but never, since we were engaged, had my words flowed so sluggishly; measured and commonplace sentences such as one might write to the merest acquaintance were all I could frame and even these with difficulty; what a contrast to the free outpouring of thought and feeling of my letters to her of only a week ago.

“‘Pshaw!’ I thought, ‘I am overtired, or the champagne was too good or something. I must just turn in, I shall be all right after a night’s rest.’ I jumped into bed and blew out the candle, but no sooner had I done so than a most unreasoning fear of that door on to the little stair came over 284me; an apprehension growing to certainty that something would come out from there made me sit up and strain my eyes at the door, and as I did so the feeling lessened and almost vanished. I must say here that I was not previously imaginative. I had never known any sensations of this kind before, though I had slept in so-called haunted houses, and had laughed to scorn what seemed to me superstitious fears. No sooner did I close my eyes again than the same idea came before me; something gruesome and horrible was behind that door and would open it Physically, I was no coward. I was afraid of nothing I had ever seen – of nothing I could imagine. I was afraid that some new shape of a horror I had never dreamt of, would appear to me – the tension was growing unbearable. I jumped up – plunged my head in cold water and the feeling vanished as soon as I was broad awake; I put on my silk-lined dressing-gown and sat down by the fire, taking up mechanically the volume I had brought out of the landing with me – by a strange chance it was Don Quixote. I read and read, and the scenes grew more and more vivid. Spain seemed to lie all round me. So clear was it that I actually thought I saw the waving boughs of an olive tree, till I realized that it was only the dark green arras stirred by a passing breath of wind.

“I looked up from my book and my eye fell upon that long mirror with a start and a tremble as I saw what seemed to be a dim figure faintly outlined in its depths – amber drapery and black lace – clearer and clearer it grew, till I saw, or thought I saw, a pale lovely face, with great limpid black eyes raised half piteously, half coquettishly to mine. That face burnt itself into my brain as no living face had ever done, yet when I looked again there was nothing there but the reflexion of one of the figures on the tapestry.

“‘This won’t do,’ I said to myself, ‘my brain is getting out of gear. I’ve been working too hard I suspect.’ But while I thought this, an irresistible drowsiness passed over me – my eyes would not keep open – my brain refused to act . .

“When I awoke I was lying in the great funereal bed; how I got there I never knew, the sun was streaming in at the window, it was near eleven o’clock.

“My uncle did not fail to chaff me on my late appearance, and asked me in a bantering tone if any of the old Lairds’ ghosts had disturbed me; but not wishing to be ridiculed as a superstitious dreamer, I kept my own counsel, though half resolving to leave Edinburgh that day on any excuse rather than face another night in that room. As evening drew on however my thoughts changed. I began to feel an intense interest in the lady of the mirror, a feeling like that of a lover who has a tryst with his mistress. My better nature reproached me with disloyalty to Edith, but I put the thought aside, saying to myself: ‘What nonsense, why it is but a shadow!’ Nevertheless I knew that the memories of Edith were 285growing very thin and pale and that the shadow was to me a far more substantial reality.

“That night I sat again by the fire reading Don Quixote, and ever and anon glancing in the mirror I saw the reflexion of the figure on the tapestry, but nothing else. However towards the early hours of the morning a faint rustle seemed to come behind me like the very light trail of silk over the carpet, a faint odour as of sandal wood and a cold air as the rustling sound seemed to pass me. My heart beat fast. ‘She is there,’ I thought. ‘Come to me, darling!’ I said half aloud, stretching my arms. And I thought I felt a warm breath on my cheek, and then the same drowsiness as on the previous night.

“I must have been in a parlous state of mind and brain at this time, for my whole waking thoughts seemed to turn on these experiences, and whatever questions I had to decide on the most trivial matters of business connected with my property were mentally referred to this. Since that first night, I saw the form in the mirror sometimes, but never so clear again – often I was conscious of the frou-frou of the sweeping dress, passing over the carpet, the cold air and the scent of sandal wood – sometimes it passed me on the stair, once it seemed to linger beside me in the hall, when I stood looking at that picture of Hernandez. I had projected a trip abroad, now I thought with dread of any separation from the dream lady. I was obliged to visit my estates in Ross-shire, the night before I left I was wretched. I sat by the fire as usual and heard the silken rustle. ‘My darling,’ I whispered, ‘shall I hear from you while I’m away?’ I fancied a soft ‘yes’ breathed on my cheek, and I went away half consoled. When I reached the market town, I stopped to order some toilet necessaries I had forgotten to be sent out to me. I was to stay at the factor’s house. The parcel did not arrive till next morning. When it came it was brought up to my room with my shaving water. I opened it carelessly enough, but as I did so the well-known scent of sandal wood came on my senses, and a tiny scrap of pink paper fluttered down. I seized it eagerly. It bore simply written or lithographed the word ‘Mercédes’ – nothing else in the parcel had the scent of sandal wood – but as I inhaled the sweet fragrance from the scrap of paper I seemed to know that my lady of the mirror had kept her promise – and more – for she had revealed her name. ‘Mercédes! my darling!’ I murmured, ‘true love! when shall I meet and know you?’

“I must stop for one moment here to say that no single thing ha happened to me which plain and common-sense people would not have accounted for by the most commonplace of reasoning; whatever of the supernatural there was, if there was any, came from within and was quite personal to myself; this may perhaps throw a good deal of light on the state of my mind at the time.

“We were living then much as the bulk of well-to-do Edinburgh folk lived; my uncle and I went out to dinners, heavy, stiff and formal, and 286heavy, stiff, formal people came to dine with us, and often drank a great deal more than was good for them. My uncle, however, was very abstemious, much to my surprise, for I had heard he was terribly dissipated in early life. We knew many people whose names are household words now, but with these I do not trouble you, nor did I trouble myself at the time. I was deeply in love with a shadow. I still wrote fitfully to Edith Challoner, and now and then had pricks of conscience, but ordinarily my dream love monopolized all my thoughts and fancies. I should say here that never since that first night had I any return of the feeling of shrinking horror from the little door on to the stair that I have mentioned, save once, when I felt the presence of Mercédes, as I had now learned to call her, at that side of the room; but it was not the stately sweep of the dress like a queen moving through her throne-room, rather the fluttered and excited rush of a terrified woman fleeing from danger. My own heart was strongly stirred and agitated, alarm for her rather than myself moved me, but all that night I had that vague terror of that door. I could not take my eyes off it, once or twice it actually seemed bulging as though pushed from the other side with enormous force. I felt sure something wicked was behind it. I longed to go and look and reassure myself, yet – coward as I must appear to you – I dared not. Next morning the bright sunlight drove away these visions and the little landing looked commonplace as usual, but a strange thing happened, for I dropped a sleeve-link and feeling about for it on the floor I came upon a loose board in the wainscot, and pulling it away I saw something glitter behind it; I pulled it out and found a cross-hilted dagger, or rather stiletto. See here it is, I never part from it.”

Mr. Dalrymple as he spoke drew from the breast of his waistcoat a tiny dagger, hilt and all about eight or nine inches long; the hilt was of old fashioned silver work of Moresque pattern, shaped like a cross, the point of the blade broken off, some strange characters were engraved on the blade which I could not see. He kissed it devoutly, as a Catholic might the relic of a Saint, and softly murmured the name “Mercédes.”

“Yes,” he continued, “it was that morning I found this and put it in my pocket as a curiosity; as I pushed the board back it creaked and I suppose there must be some hollow spaces behind, for the creak echoed down below, like the wild laugh of a mocking fiend, or so it seemed to my excited imagination. I started in horror, broad daylight as it was, all my veins running cold, for that moment, the floor, the walls, the whole landing seemed to be oozing forth some ghastly exhalation hostile to human life; a stain on the wall with which I was perfectly familiar, appeared like a great splash of blood. I turned and fled hastily, slamming the door behind me, and rushed into my uncle’s room. ‘Look here, uncle,’ I said. ‘what I’ve found!’ He turned the dagger over curiously, poising it in a strange way point upwards between his fingers, then he pressed it on his forehead. ‘Very wonderful!’ he said 287at last. ‘Tell me, nephew, have you studied the occult sciences at all?’ ‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘Clearly from that question you haven’t,’ he said. ‘Well, look here! I’m a bit of a conjurer and this dagger can do strange things, I fancy; just give me your hands a moment.’ I gave him my hands, the dagger was lying on a little round ebony table between us. In an instant I felt an intense vibration run through both hands and up my arms, a thrill like that of an electric shock; my uncle raised his hands and mine, holding them above the dagger, which to my intense surprise began to move, and at last stood up as it were balanced on its point, swaying its cross hilt to every movement of our hands.

“Such phenomena are now the stock-in-trade of every spirit medium, and are scarcely deemed even startling; but at this time no such things as mediums were known as public performers, and I was deeply impressed and slightly alarmed. I felt, however, that, in some strange way, a magnetic attraction raying forth from our linked hands was the cause of the motion of the dagger, but I was more astonished to see its point moving, apparently by its own volition, and tracing geometric figures of a kind new to me, on the polished surface of the table. I have the table still with the cuttings on it, the import of which I understand now. As the designs grew complete, it seemed to me as though the black surface of the table was like a well of clear water of infinite depth, through which, deep down, I could see strange, fantastic forms; gradually one image detached itself as though floating upwards, white and still, and as it grew clearer and clearer I saw the face of Mercédes – but pale as ashes – clearer still and I saw it was the face of death; and would to God it were death only – for that white face floated up almost to the surface with a more awful expression of extreme agony than I ever conceived or dreamt could have been on any human face. I gave one shriek and wrenched my hands away from my uncle’s and that instant the dread white face vanished – the dagger fell with a clatter on the floor, and my uncle, angry for a moment, exclaimed, ‘You pitiful young fool! do you know you might have killed us both by such an absurd caper?’ ‘Rather that,’ I said, ‘than see again what I saw just now.’ ‘See!’ he said, ‘you don’t mean to tell me you saw anything, you poor ignoramus – the place was full of lovely forms – lovelier than any women of earth, but no untrained eye like yours could see them. Come! come!’ he added in a gentler tone, ‘you’re overwrought – you want a little distraction. Lady Scott’s ball is to-night you know; we’ll go!’ I was on the point of saying I would do no such thing, but some undefined impulse of the moment prompted me to assent. I stooped to pick up my dagger – it was burning hot – too hot to hold. ‘Ah,’ said my uncle, ‘the magnetism is in it yet,’ and he passed his hands over it once and handed it back to me, now cold as well-conducted metal should be.”

368 “I was not sorry to go to the ball that night, if only to escape the horrible associations which the former night and that morning had left about the little landing.

“Lady Scott’s house was sumptuous; every appointment beyond praise, she herself an ideal hostess. The ball-room, with its exquisite decorations and masses of tropic flowers and ferns (then far less common even among the wealthy than they are now), was .a dream of beauty. You may perhaps have heard of Sir Robert Scott; he claimed some kinship with Michael Scott, the wizard; he had been knighted for some service or other in the East, where he acquired fabulous wealth. And so they blazed the comets of a season in Edinburgh. The chief attraction of their house, to me, was a noble library, arranged on the best of all systems, the cellular, with a low vaulted roof and rows of small compartments, wherein one could bury oneself in one’s favourite authors, without fear of disturbance. But I am wandering away from the ball. I danced a good deal and for the time forgot altogether the strange experiences of the last few weeks (it was then, I think, only six or seven weeks since I first came to Edinburgh).

“The evening was wearing on; heated and somewhat tired, I walked out into the entrance-hall for a breath of fresh air. Suddenly my pulses stood still a second, then every vein in my body throbbed at express speed; through the foliage of a great magnclia that grew in a large wooden box at the foot of the marble staircase, I caught a gleam of amber satin and black lace, and the well-remembered and now to me almost sacred odour of sandal wood, floated on my senses. In an instant it was gone, but something whispered me to follow. The library lay in that direction. I hurried into its cool, dimly lighted recesses, the seventh on the right hand had been on previous visits my favourite haunt, containing Spanish books, mainly of a mystic character. To this recess instinctively I bent my steps, and so highly strung was my mind, that I was scarcely surprised to see there, half reclining in the semi-darkness, the same form I had seen in the mirror at the old house; the same amber satin and black lace, only now with the addition of a ruby-coloured fan, and now no shadow, no phantasm, but a warm, living, breathing reality. I sprang forward. ‘Mercédes!’ at last, I cried; she drew back slightly, the fan pressed close to her lips, while she extended the other hand towards me; for my life I could not have ventured nearer to her, I sank on one knee and covered her hand with kisses. ‘I expected you,’ she said softly, ‘but not here, not thus do we meet or part. Come to me in the Cathedral, at Seville, two months from to-day; you can do me a great service, which no one else can do; 369now adios, remember!’ She withdrew her hand and stately as a queen she glided out of the recess. I turned to follow, but she was gone. Not among the guests that night, nor anywhere in Edinburgh at that time, did I again see my beautiful Mercédes.

“Needless to say I resolved at once that, come what might, I would not fail of the tryst. Two months seemed an interminable time to wait, yet as I sat half dreaming before the fire in the stately old room, I thought, or rather I felt, that the spirit of Mercédes was close beside me there, but that if I went away I should be separated from her. My uncle too grew more confidential and I was surprised to find in him an amount of knowledge and scientific research I had not suspected in that avowed viveur and man of the world. Spain was evidently very familiar to him, especially Salamanca. ‘’Twas there,’ he said, ‘I met my dear friend Hernandez, a connection of ours I think.’ My eyes turned instinctively on the portrait, you remember it, hanging in the hall. ‘Aye,’ said my uncle, interpreting my glance, ‘it’s very like him, that’s his great grandfather though, Fergus Fergusson. He was one of our family and lived here, I believe, somewhere in the seventeenth century or sixteenth or something. Then he or his son went to Spain and changed the name to Hernandez – why, I can’t tell you, I never knew much of these old family stories – however, I met Hernandez at Salamanca, he was a professor when I was a student; he’s coming here to Edinburgh and I want you to ask him to come here.’

“‘Why, of course. Any friend of ours is welcome. But he must be old.’

“‘Old, bless the boy, he’s about 40!’

“‘O come, uncle, if he was a professor when you were a student, he must be older than you at any rate, and you’re a good 65, I know!’

“‘God bless me, you’re right,’ said my uncle, ‘I never thought of that. I suppose he is; I can’t think of him as past 40 though. Why hang it! he must be 75 if he’s a day, wonderful man, wonderful!

“I didn’t see that a man of 75 was necessarily wonderful, but I held my peace.

“One day my uncle asked to see my little dagger again. I brought it from where I kept it, for I didn’t carry it about with me.

“‘It’s a pretty toy,’ he said, looking closely at the handle, and as he spoke he touched the extreme end of the handle which seemed to tremble under his finger; he pressed it and the strange carved work of the hilt parted into an egg-shaped garland, then into a perfect circle. My uncle held it up in triumph, then pointing to the characters on the blade he read them off. I will not weary you now with all he told me of the use of this dagger and the symbolism wrought into its handle and written on its blade, and the faiths of old archaic nations which were, as it were, crystallized in this curious old weapon, legends of Isis, of Ashtoreth and Aphrodite, and of the great temple of Cyprus, for my uncle was 370a man of wide culture and extensive travel. I was glad to some extent to hear him talk, for his words partly dispelled the feeling of superstitious dread with which I had regarded the dagger since the vision in the ebony table. At some points, however, I must have smiled incredulously, for my uncle said, ‘Come now, let us put it to the proof.’ I dreaded any further visions in my uncle’s company after the last, but somehow I was unable to make any resistance, and I followed my uncle into his little sanctum, by the way, that queer ecclesiastical-looking window belongs to it. I had never been in here before – my uncle seemed greatly averse to intrusion – and I had always desired to humour all his whims. It is a queer stone-vaulted little room, but it looked like a bric-a-brac shop, so thickly was it hung and strewn with curios of all kinds, but what most attracted my notice was a series of seven silken curtains of the seven prismatic colours, which as the full sun shone in seemed to dazzle my eyes, till I almost seemed to fancy a strange mist between me and them, like the appearance of the white of an egg dropped into a tumbler of water.

“My uncle lighted a small lamp, notwithstanding that it was broad noonday, and set it on a little geometrically-shaped table, and soon a rich heavy sensuous perfume filled the room. My uncle laid the dagger in the palm of his right hand, and directed me to place the palm of my right hand over it, while his left hand and mine rested on a little table which stood between; very shortly I felt my hand and arm begin to burn and tingle, the heavy scent stole up to my brain, sensuous images began to rise in my thoughts. My uncle grasped my hand closer and murmured some kind of Hebrew or Arabic chant, the prismatic curtains seemed swayed by some breeze which we could not feel, and the opalescent mist moved and stirred and coagulated, forming itself gradually into lovely forms of women, floating, gliding here and there. My senses were entranced with a wild rapture, though I felt at the same moment as though all my vitality were being drained away. Momently I was growing weaker; with a violent effort of will at last I said to myself ‘this won’t do. What can be happening to me? I shall faint in another moment.’ I drew in a long deep breath, shut my teeth and my lips hard and held my breath a moment, as I looked steadily and firmly at the fleeting shapes, and wherever I looked, there then were none of them, a void hole as it were, with circling forms all round; through one of these voids I saw the amber of one of the curtains, and as it were a simulacrum of black lace over it. Instantly I became conscious of a new power in the force of my will. I put forth all its strength, commanding the obscene herd to disappear. As I did so I felt my uncle’s hand grow cold and clammy; he loosened his grasp and the dagger fell to the floor; he was panting and utterly exhausted. I filled a glass of liqueur from a small silver tray that stood on a side table, and in a few moments after swallowing it he was himself again. But 371for me, never again did I pass the door of that little room without a shudder.

“A few days later Señor Hernandez arrived. I have seen this remarkable man often since, but never can I forget the first impression made upon me: my uncle’s account had prepared me for an elderly gentleman, instead I saw a man apparently in the prime of life; not a grey thread in his jet black hair, not a wrinkle in his clear olive-hued face, the finely-cut features of which might have been wrought in metal so impassive were they. I tried hard to greet him as an ordinary guest, but the curious mixture of terrified repulsion and yet a curiosity amounting almost to attraction was such as I had never felt before, and made it impossible to treat him as a simple casual acquaintance. He looked hard at me with piercing eyes which seemed to dazzle all my senses, and made me feel as in a trance. ‘So you are the owner of this old place now,’ he said. ‘Well, many have come and gone since my – my ancestor’s – portrait yonder was painted here. You ought to have some powers – eh? Clairvoyant I should think, perhaps you might tell me some things I want to know.’ But the experiences of the past with my uncle had warned me, and I replied that I would never play with such subjects. Señor Hernandez, still looking fixedly at me, said it was a wise resolve. We were standing all this time together in the hall. ‘Your grandfather wished he had made such a resolution,’ he said, ‘before he brought that Spanish bride of his home.’ I started, I could not help it – so there was Spanish blood in my own veins then – I had not known of this before. ‘Oh, yes,’ said Señor Hernandez, ‘a lovely girl she was – by the way, you are going to Spain, I may see you there. You wonder how I know. Thought travels quicker than light, and there are those who can read thoughts, even as far off as Spain.’ I thought to myself that this man was a very transparent humbug pretending to extraordinary powers, and that he had somehow heard of my intended journey, and made the most of the information. But as I stood talking to him a most strange faintness came over me, a great swell of magnificent organ harmonies seemed surging through my brain, I gasped for breath, my eyes grew blinded; all at once I became conscious that Hernandez was holding his right hand opposite my forehead, and that innumerable threads as it were of pale blue luminous gossamer were streaming from it into my brain. Faint and dim and far away I heard his voice – I was just conscious of sinking into an arm-chair – I heard the distant voice enquiring what I saw, and then, clear as a picture, came the vision of a desolate ridge of a hill with a precipice on either hand, and, mistily outlined in the background, the familiar form of Arthur’s Seat: on the midmost point of the ridge stood a species of cromlech, and at its base, a large flat stone, a troop of wild men and women with gipsy faces and wild matted hair pressed around, a form bound with seemingly interminable networks of linen bands interlaced 372with swaiths of willow was laid on the stone, an old man with flowing white hair and beard, and a crown of green leaves on his head, raised a large knife; then to my horror I saw the victim was a young girl – a mist came over the altar stone – I could see that it was raised – but I could see no more, save that cruel ghastly rills of blood rippled round it; then, as it faded, the face of Hernandez showed through the mists with a diabolical expression of triumph.

“Again the mists seemed building themselves into pictures, and now I heard the swell of a Christian hymn, and I saw a little chapel with kneeling worshippers, all draped in dark-coloured, coarse woollen clothes of no particular shape, all rough and fierce-looking, both men and women, yet bending in humble adoration. To my intense surprise, I recognised the mouldings of that little room which formed, as I have told you, my uncle’s sanctum. I know not how, but in some strange way I was conscious that under the altar there was a hollow, and that into this hollow I ought to see.

“It seemed, also, as though Hernandez stood beside me, saying, ‘Look below the altar’; but ever that strange, blinding mist floated there and baffled my best endeavours; but as I strained my eyes, a form seemed to float between me and the altar – a kneeling figure, amber silk and black lace – and the faint perfume of sandal-wood floated towards me instead of incense, and in a second all my senses rallied. Some hellish art had overcome my will, and forced me into a trance condition, but I would break from it, even though the effort should tear every nerve. I strove with might and main to free myself, to cast off the heavy cloud that seemed resting on my brain. It felt as though ten thousand tiny filaments all embedded and entangled in the sensitive mass of the brain were being slowly dragged out, each with a separate pang, but the unreal vision vanished; I felt as though awaking from a heavy sleep, and at that moment I heard the voice of Hernandez saying, ‘A thousand devils! the boy’s too strong for me!’ Far away the voice sounded. With a great gasp I came to myself; I was sitting in a big arm-chair in the hall, my uncle and Señor Hernandez standing over me, the former, with a glass of water in his hand. ‘Why, nephew,’ he said, ‘what on earth has come to you? What do you mean by going off in a dead faint like that and scaring us out of our wits?’

“Hernandez said nothing, but a faint smile, more sinister than ever, came round his mouth, but moved no other feature of his face.

“There were but a few days left before my departure for Spain; in those days of slow travelling and probable delays I resolved to allow at least a month, lest by any chance I might miss the tryst at the Cathedral of Seville. Of those few days I remember little, save that the old house seemed more eerie than ever, and the forms, whose presence I dimly felt sometimes on stairs or landing, appeared more palpable, and charged with a magnetism whose evil influence sometimes 373almost dominated my will, strive as I would. The image of Mercédes, too, seemed now to press close beside me, as though seeking protection, but two days before my departure it disappeared altogether. Left alone in the old haunted house (for my uncle and Hernandez almost lived in the little sanctum, save at meal times), you may guess I was glad enough when I embarked at the Port of Leith for the sunny South.

466

III. – THE WRITER REVISITS THE OLD HOUSE.

Mr. DALRYMPLE paused, and rising from his chair, said, “I fear I must have wearied you, and you must think it strange that I should thus disclose the deepest and most sacred history of my life to a complete stranger – a history which has never passed my lips before. The cause is simple; you are, whether you know it or not, a natural sensitive, gifted with abnormal powers, and you are the first individual for many years who has penetrated into that old house. Hence you are exposed to dangers you have not the least idea of, and to me, the duty of warning you is as clear as it would be to lead a blind man whom I might find ignorantly straying into a nest of robbers and cut-throats, or wandering on the brink of hideous precipices. The duty is made still plainer by the fact that the house is mine, and therefore I am morally as responsible for the evil caused by it as though I kept a man-eating tiger. True, it was by no will of mine you were admitted, still you have been there, the influence has seized you to some extent, and I must protect you if I can, and I can do so only by telling you my own story, painful and gruesome as it is. I see, however, that my time is up for the present. Will you pardon me now, and come again to-morrow, if you are not over-wearied with an old man’s tale, which no doubt sounds to you much like the wanderings of a superstitious dreamer lapsing into dotage.

I hastened to assure him that, on the contrary, I had listened with the utmost interest, and longed to hear the end of a tale more wonderful than anything I had ever read. Meantime I begged that I might be allowed to visit the old house once more.

“Yes!” he said, “there can be no objection now you have been once, only beware; keep your will active and your senses about you; there are many influences and they are evil. Allow them no foothold, yield not for an instant; the house is accursed, and the dwellers therein will be restless so long as one stone remains on another.”

He bowed and was gone, and I slowly walked out into the bright sunshine, with a strange eerie feeling of having been in some other existence and of some great change having come over one. It was past midday, and I made my way as quickly as possible to the old house, determined to lose no chance of exploring it while it yet stood, and before the workmen had begun to despoil and ruin the old-world 467flavour of it. The temporary excitement of the previous day seemed to have departed, only the ordinary High Street loafers were prowling about, the old house stood grim and secretive as ever, looking as though a whole world of secret wickedness were hidden behind its dull heavy walls. Strange, I thought, as I looked at it, that Mr. Dalrymple’s experience should so curiously tally with my own, or rather that the influence, which evidently had dominated all his life, should have been felt by me, a total stranger, and felt at once on entering the house for the first time. Strange, too, that as he half indicated, his experience should be in a way the repetition of that of his grandfather; the whole thing seemed weird whatever way you turned it, and though at that time I always wanted, if possible, a material explanation, and strove hard to find one in this case, the complicated chain of coincidences appeared almost greater than the mind could grasp; yet I could not lay my finger on any one point in the story and say it was supernatural; everything might be explained by coincidence, nightmare or hallucination, allowing of course some latitude for imposture. It was the extraordinary hanging together of it all that made it seem the most improbable of all possible theories to attempt a materialistic interpretation.

With these thoughts in my head I knocked at the door; once more it was cautiously opened by old Peter, who looked cautiously out, and seeing who it was took down the heavy door-chain which he had kept up meanwhile and admitted me.

“Eh, sirs,” he said, “but ye’re sune back. Hae ye seen Mr. Dalrymple?”

I replied that I had and he had given me permission to come to the house as often as I pleased.

“Weel, weel,” said the old man, “it’s the first time I ever heard o’ the master doing the like o’ that; however I suppose it’s all right, but tak’ ye heed, young sir! ye cam’ unco near seeing some o’ them that walks here the last time ye were through the hoose, and min’ ye though yon puir leddy, that folk say is Mrs. Dalrymple, is harmless eneugh, there’s other’s that’s aboot as wicked as old Clootie himsel’; no’ that I’ve ever seen them, they never interfered wi’ me, and I dinna heed them, but I ken far awa’ doon among the foundations somewhere, there’s that that a man shouldna name.”

“Nonsense, Peter,” I said, “down among the foundations I expect there are some beastly rotten drains, that ought to be dug out and disinfected as soon as possible.”

The old man shook his head and muttered low:

“Aye! aye! Youth thinks it knows everything.”

“Now Peter,” I said, “I want to explore a bit, by Mr. Dalrymple’s leave, and I won’t trouble you; it’s just this little room beside the hall, and what you call the Auld Laird’s room that I particularly want to look at.”

468 “Gude save us!” said Peter, “the verra twa places that ye’d better let alone. Weel! weel! Wilful youth maun hae its way; but see ye, if anything flegs ye, just ye cry on to me. I’ll no be very far awa’.”

So saying he gravely and solemnly withdrew to the back premises, and I walked eagerly towards the little room with the strang ecclesiastical mouldings; as I did so a strange scent came floating towards me, at first the musty smell common to all old houses, a smell of dust and decaying wood, yet withal faintly aromatic; the aromatic quality increased as I laid my hand on the carven door; it was a subtle, sleepy, sensuous perfume, suggesting luxurious vice, immorality in trappings of purple and fine linen. I opened the door; the light was dim, a fragment of what once had been a rose-coloured silk curtain hung over part of the window, the lower part had been boarded, a tiny bit of stained glass filled one space of the curious tracery. I suppose the dust and dirt and decay were as conspicuous here as in other parts of the house, but in the dim light they were not so visible; in fact the miscellaneous litter and rubbish of the room assumed strange, quaint and beautiful shapes. Still that curious perfume, which reminded me somewhat of patchouli and of musk, but was not gross as these are, but rather the inner soul of the scent as it were. Something moved on the wall – I started – it was only an enormous spider; the room felt hot, probably from the fact that the afternoon sun now just caught one angle, shining full on two of its outside walls, and one ray penetrating through a broken pane shot clear across the room, making a strange track of light on the floating dust and motes, and gleaming full on a strange-shaped brass implement, the like whereof I had never seen before, engraved with curious figures, and something like Hebrew letters within a double circle. I sank into a tattered arm-chair to try and take in the curious scene. Old Peter had carefully kept me out of this room on my previous visit. As I did so a fresh cloud of dust rose from the ancient cushions and circled round my head, gleaming in the sun and vanishing in the shade like living things, and all charged strongly with that strange clinging perfume. My eye fell on a torn scrap of writing close to my hand. I picked it up and tried to gather its contents; it was in a woman’s hand and seemed to contain passionate pleadings by the writer, to some person of whom she stood in great awe, not to drive her to the commission of a crime.

“Is it not enough,” so ran one passage, “that you have forced me again and again to go through the same horrible scenes – must I in yet another body expiate the old sin? Let me expiate it and go. I cannot and will not do that horrible thing again. The centuries that sap your forces have given me a new birth and increased strength.”

Here the writer broke off into some incoherent phrases of Spanish, and as I was trying to master these I felt my hands tingle as though from an electric battery. The shock seemed to run right up both arms, 469nearly paralysing them, and at the same moment a sensation like a cool delicate hand grasping my right wrist, and a distinct attempt to pull the paper from its grasp. I had almost lapsed into a state of dream, but this experience roused all my energies. I remembered Mr. Dalrymple’s injunction, to allow no foothold to the influences, and with a great effort I shook off the sleepy feeling and got to my feet. I suppose I must have been half dreaming, and perhaps my arms resting on the elbows of the chair had got cramped, but when I got up I felt just as though I were waking from a troubled dream, with a half remembrance of having seen troops of beautiful ladies dancing in gaily decorated halls. Still there was the paper in my hand, and I carried it off with me. Sooth to say, I was afraid to stay in that queer little room any longer. As I passed out through the hall, my eyes fell on the picture said to be like Signor Hernandez; a ray of brilliant light from the now low westering sun fell upon it, and it gleamed with a strange distinctness, every line seeming to be thrown into strong relief, and at the same moment came across me the memory that in my dream in the little room that face had bent over me, while the beautiful ladies were dancing behind, those cruel sneering eyes had dominated my will, but how? or why? for I had never seen the original and until this moment his features had never appeared plainly to me. A dreamy feeling was coming over me which I did not like at all. I drew several deep breaths to try and banish it, but, instead of the renewed vigour I expected and looked for, I experienced a very curious sensation, as though with such breath the old house became more and more part of me – or I of it – I could not clearly tell which it was; my consciousness seemed, as it were, to pervade every hole and corner of it, till I thought I could see every room, every passage, at once, and feel and touch them all; those who have ever experienced the feeling will know what I mean; those who have not will never realize it from any amount of description; this, however would not do; it was plainly morbid and unhealthy, moreover I felt like falling asleep or into a trance; instinctively I doubled my fists and struck out several times as though boxing; anyone who had seen me would have thought me a lunatic, but it had the desired effect, I became calm and reasonable and wide awake again, and went upstairs to pursue my investigations. It was the room off the first landing that I naturally went to first, the Auld Laird’s room as they called it, all just the same as when I was there before, and the same subtle aroma which even more instantly than yesterday suggested Spain to me; but in the rusty old mirror all was dim, no Spanish demoiselle now reclined there, or in the room.

I recalled Mr. Dalrymple’s story, and resolved to open the little door which was in the corner beyond the bed, on the other side from the one by which I had entered, the looking-glass being in the opposite corner diagonally. Never in my life had I felt such repugnance to anything as I now did even to go near that door. I would have given almost anything 470to turn and flee out of the house altogether, only pride kept me from doing so. Something horrible was there I felt; an exhalation as it were exuded from it and while it made my flesh quiver, and stirred the roots of my hair, yet it drew me with a certain ghastly fascination; I obeyed, and bracing myself as though for a supreme effort in a race, I went to the door and opened it. I was surprised, and if you will a little disappointed, to see nothing – a little landing, an old wooden stairway going down to the kitchens or offices probably, a few shelves with some worthless tattered books – novels of fifty years ago and the like – a little window looking on a sort of back green, such as was not quite unknown in Edinburgh at the time I write of, the whole papered in a dull sombre brown; but as I stood looking down a strange feeling of sinking or floating away came over me, a feeling that my body was too light, such as I once felt when under the influence of opium, and then I became vaguely aware of a figure descending the steps. I did not see it with mortal eyes but just became aware of it, as sometimes one becomes aware that a person has entered the room, though one’s back is to the door. Immediately all my senses became vividly alive, and my attention was fixed with a concentration, which had in it something of horror and apprehension, on the descending figure, and the impression of it became more and more clear, till I seemed quite certain that it was myself who was going down into the unknown depths. This strange duality I had felt before in dreams, when I sometimes seemed to stand apart and look at my body with curious pitying eyes, but never when broad awake before; at the same time I felt icy cold, and as though all my vitality were being drained from me, the palms of my hands grew clammy, and I felt my hair growing moist. Still that figure, that was myself, descended the stairs, and still my consciousness followed it, though to the eye the lower part of the stair was invisible. At the foot of the stair was a large flat stone, part of the stone paving of the offices, and this seemed to the eye of my waking dream to grow transparent, as though its scarred and stained surface were but slightly tinted glass. It was a curious effect, which dreamers may perhaps recognize, but few others – at the top of the stair just inside the door from the Auld Laird’s room stood I, myself, that is to the ordinary eye of the world, and I suppose any friend who had been there would have said that beyond all question I was there in as full material presence as I had walked down the High Street an hour ago; but far down below, and at that moment passing through the flagstone, as though it had been but a magic-lantern image thrown on smoke, was this phantasm of myself, my Doppelganger as I suppose the Germans would call it, and to my own consciousness what seemed I myself was conscious of both, of the material body leaning helpless in semi-trance condition against the door, with wide-open staring eyes, a body which, though I saw and knew every portion of it, I was utterly powerless for the moment to affect or control, and that strange phantasm which was my 471body too, descending those dreary depths, drawn by I know not what horrible fascination, and with a growing terror, which seemed to react on the material body, whose cheek blanched, and a terrified cry seemed strangled in its throat. It was a horrible nightmare, intensified by the broad waking consciousness, but such as I am persuaded we sometimes go through in sleep, when we wake exhausted and terrified, yet mercifully oblivious of what we have been through. Vainly I strove to regain control of my body, to move, to cry out. Vainly I tried to recall that strange projected phantasm which seemed to have sucked out my vital force – my will was paralysed, only perception was enormously more acute and the horrid dream, if dream it were, went on.

18 DOWN! down! by a corkscrew stair below the flag stone, clean and dry at first, but soon becoming dank and slimy, full of odours of death and loathsome creeping things. Down! down! now the stair became a species of cleft in the solid rock, through the sides of which black waters oozed and glistened on the surface; eyeless, almost formless reptiles tangled in hideous knots; on and on; my consciousness more and more seeming to unite with the phantasm which was drawn by some grisly magnetism into these fearsome places, and the more I became as it were conscious through the phantasm, the more did the living rocks that seemed to prison us grow transparent, and this increased the horror; for though they formed an impermeable prison, which not even the Doppelganger could now pass through, they allowed us to see all the hideous deformities and shapes of corruption and decay, looking like incarnate pestilence and sin and death. The Doppelganger too seemed to be growing more material and tangible, and I thought with horror that my actual corporeal body was giving off its atoms and particles in some strange way to materialize the phantasm; and the strange thought came to me that perhaps my whole mortal frame might thus be sucked down and reunited into a waking life, or say rather a ghastly and horrible death, in this awful place. I was powerless to avert it, and the nightmare dream went on. Through the solid rock and the streaks of sodden clay that filled its interstices, now grown transparent, then seemed floating as it were strange black objects, long and narrow, over each of which a green phosphorescent light gleamed fitfully; my attention, in spite of myself, was rivetted on these, and instantly I knew them for coffins, of great antiquity probably. Among others some bore Spanish names. At this moment I became conscious again, as in a flash, of my material body, away up in that little landing, bloodless and pale, as though dying or dead: it seemed in the very act of falling to the ground. My horror then was realised, and here in this living grave, among these ancient coffins, and unclean and hateful things, I must drag a material existence till death relieved me. And death! what death of the body could touch that Doppelganger, and the strange ghastly consciousness, that, made all that came within its perception as terrible as though the body itself were there, but without any power of will to avert it or to turn the attention to any other matter. My consciousness, which hitherto I have spoken of as hovering, now became so sensibly united to the phantasm that I regarded it as being myself, and though its motion was still independent of my will I was conscious of the 19weird force which drew it, and which I can only describe as a resolution against the will, a determination to do an act from which consciousness shrank, which all the faculties knew to be evil, to do which there was no temptation or desire, even as though the resolution on which the limbs acted were formed by some exterior will, whose tendencies were all evil. Close by me (I speak now in the person of the Doppelganger) lay a mouldering coffin, once of solid oak and bound and clamped with iron; but age had rusted the iron to mere red dust and the oaken boards looked as though they might crumble at a touch. A will within me which was not mine put forth a hand to rub the angle of the lid: it crumbled, and a renewed horror took me that my dream was growing real; unless I had been here in flesh and blood could the decayed wood have crumbled to my touch? And if here now, why here for countless ages, among the rotting bodies and the evil magnetic phantasms of the long ago dead, to take my place there conscious, alive, material, yet dead and prisoned: it was an awful thought.

The coffin I had touched seemed to quiver or shake; a jagged hole where my fingers had rubbed away the rotten wood seemed to let through a bluish phosphoric light, and it seemed as though something inside were struggling to emerge; then suddenly, as a large rotten piece fell out, a leg bone protruded, green with age, and far within appeared gleaming eyes, blazing with all the concentrated malice and spite of a hundred demons in torment, and above sprang into sudden and vivid prominence the face of the picture in the hall. Then, as it were a voice, the first sensation of sound I had perceived in the awful gloom. “Run! run! or it will catch you.” An awful terror seized me that the demon of the terrible eyes would enter in and possess my phantasm which was now myself, and would drive it through torture and madness while sensation was abnormally acute and all will or power to resist was dead or paralysed. I turned and fled – the first act of will that had been possible for me since the sundering of my consciousness. Then succeeded a terrific time, ages upon ages, as it seemed to me, fleeing through endless caverns, through the sea and through the fire, away into the boundless regions of space, pursued by troops of demons eager, as I felt, to possess even that poor fleeting fragment of a body which was left to me, being themselves bodiless and unable therefore to gratify the lusts and passions which tormented them. Suddenly and with a start I felt my consciousness no longer attached to the phantasm. I was again looking on my material body, which fell with a crash at the top of the stair in the little landing. So all the long and complex series of visions I had been through must have taken place within the time of my body fainting and falling to the ground. But where was the Doppelganger? I felt, though I did not know, that it had re-united with the material body, and my conscious self was now looking down on both.

The crash of my fall brought old Peter running up. I watched him at first with a mild curiosity, bathing my forehead and dashing water on my 20face and pouring a few drops of whiskey into my mouth; then a kind of pity seemed to inspire me for that body which after all had served me well, and I first hoped and then resolved that his efforts should be successful; as I consciously tried to assist him, the blood came back to the cheeks, I could feel it surge through heart and brain, the eyes opened, and I looked up at Peter with something of a wild stare.

“Where have I been?” I said.

“Eh! laddie; that’s more than I can ken”, said Peter. “Ye just fell down in a faint, so soon as ever ye put foot into this little room; come awa wi’ ye noo. Weel I wat ye’ve been among some of them. I warned ye, ye mind, but ye would na heed me.”

“O Peter,” I said, “I’ve been where sure never man was efore, I’ve been down to the gates of death.”

I leant on the old man as we descended the stair. In the hall I paused for a moment to look at the picture; it had faded into its old dimness, but there was the remains of a wicked gleam in the eyes.

“Peter,” I said. “That man or devil is not gone, his wicked soul haunts this place.”

“Sorrow o’ me kens,” replied Peter. “Mony’s the time I’ve seen him, ill fa’ his lean wicked face; but whether he’s alive or dead I canna tell. Sair did he plague puir Mistress Dalrymple, but I think she’s went to a place noo where she has the victory over him. Whiles I’ve seen him come gliding across the hall just as he used wi’ the smile on his lips, that he aye had when he had ony special deviltry afoot, and I’ve seen my leddy stay her foot just there by the seventh step, and take that cross hilted dagger from her bonny breast, and he just cowered and fled, as the Devil always does from the sign of the cross.” Here old Peter who in his earnestness had lapsed almost into pure English in a deep and solemn tone, crossed himself devoutly, and opened the door to let me pass out.

The fresh evening air revived and restored me, and passing down Dundas Street to my lodgings, I suddenly heard myself hailed from a window by an old fellow-student. “Come awa’ in, mon!” he called. “I’ve got a book here that will just delight your soul.”

“What is it?” I answered, feeling, truth to tell, much more inclined to go home and sleep than to stay up talking books.

“The writings of Fergus Fergusson, the auld Scots Wizard,” he replied. “I dug it out of the University Library to day; they didn’t know they had it.”

I was up my friend’s stair in a twinkling, and seizing the book turned eagerly to the frontispiece. There sure enough were the lineaments so firmly imprinted on my mind as those of Signor Hernandez; the date was 1670, but a note in the preface stated that it was printed from an MS. of 1430. My acquaintance with the old world lore of Edinburgh, instantly connected the latter date with the presence of a considerable Spanish colony in Edinburgh. Of the book itself I need say nothing here. It was of much 21the same character as the writings of Cornelius Agrippa, of Michael Scot, and other old world wizards; and I am bound to say at that time looked to me, who had not the key thereto, like a farrago of nonsense, though here and there a phrase caught my eye which seemed like an exact description of my experience of that afternoon.

Utterly tired out at last, I borrowed the book from my friend, and returned to my lodgings, where I soon fell into a deep and dreamless sleep. Next morning I took the book and the scrap of paper which I had found in the little octagon room, and again called on Mr. Dalrymple, anxious to hear the completion of his story.

As soon as Mr. Dalrymple came into the room I handed him the old book I had borrowed. He opened it with great interest and looked long and attentively at the engraved portrait. “Yes!” he said at last. 1430, a curious likeness; it is strange how these family features are transmitted. Signor Hernandez must have been a direct descendant of that old wizard, if indeed he were not – but no! that would be too impossible. I think Hernandez had some of his powers too. Look here! do you see this figure of a pentacle? well that is exactly the figure I have seen Hernandez trace, and he had it engraved on a brass instrument; but what is that paper you have in your hand?” “A scrap,” I replied, “which I found in the little octagon room yesterday afternoon.” And I told him something of my experience there.

“Strange! most strange!” he said, “I thought I was abnormally sensitive. You are far more so. Never fail, my young friend, to thank God that your path has been through clean and wholesame ways, and let the experience of this old house be a warning to you, as doubtless it was intended to be, of the dangers which lie close over the threshold of our ordinary five senses. This fragment of a letter was my poor wife’s, and written as I think to Hernandez, but how or why written, and how it came to be where you found it, I can only guess. Now light a cigar and sit down, and I will finish my story as briefly as I can. After your second visit to the house you will perhaps follow it more easily.

“I will not weary you with any account of my journey to Seville, nor with any descriptions of that beautiful city, which you know as well as I, probably. Enough to say that I got there in ample time, and spent the intervening days in visiting friends and relatives, of whom I had a few living there at the time. You may guess my state of feverish excitement when the day dawned which my beloved Mercédes had appointed. I betook myself betimes to the Cathedral, but not a vestige of her could I trace, not even the faintest indication of her presence. In fact ever since I left Scotland it seemed as though the magnetic chain were broken, and Mercédes had passed out of my life for ever. I ought to mention that, before I left, my engagement to Edith Challenor had been definitely broken off. Blame me as you will for this, I was the sport of stronger influences 22than my own will could control, and could no more help myself than a straw can help being carried on the current. Had it been otherwise, had I strengthened and exercised my own will as I now, too late, know how to do, and used it to carry out the dictates of my conscience, none can say what misery might have been saved. There are few more disastrous things in life than to know the right, and from a weak fluctuating will to be unable to do it.

“The evening was drawing in fast, vespers were just beginning. I knelt in the Cathedral, praying with all my soul that whatever power had guided my steps thus far would enable me to help and rescue my darling from whatever trouble or peril she might be in. All at once a strange flutter came to my heart, a warm glow spread all over me, the well known scent of sandal wood almost overpowered the incense, and instinctively I turned to a dim chapel on the right hand side where only two candles burnt before a small altar of the Mater Dolorosa. There, in the well known amber robe and the black lace mantilla, knelt a figure. I looked intently, all my soul in my eyes, she looked up: it was Mercédes, as I had seen her at Lady Scott’s ball, only now it was a crimson covered prayer book in place of the fan. – The great dark eyes were raised one moment in piteous pleading, and seemed to say ‘come and help me!’ – there was a little rustle of a dress – she was gone – whether? I rushed from the Cathedral. All was dim without in the ill-lighted streets, I ran aimlessly up and down, peering down every alley, but in vain, and now there chanced something which I can only explain on the theory known to the Hebrews as Bath-kol, or an appropriate answer given in some apparently chance way to a query in one’s mind. As I went in great agitation past a chemist’s shop, the scent of sandal wood floated out – no uncommon thing you will say in a chemist’s shop – but it arrested my steps in a moment. A plan of Seville was in the window, and a jagged line of light, thrown from a cracked glass, lay exactly on certain streets, and pointed right out of the map, and on a piece of printed paper beyond I started to see the name Mercédes. It is as you know a common enough Spanish name. This printed paper set forth that a certain face powder was used by a popular actress of that name, but as it was folded and covered by other goods it merely displayed the words in Spanish, ‘Straight forward, Mercédes.’ It flashed to my mind in a moment, I must take the streets indicated by the line of light, and go straight on beyond the parts shewn in the map in the same direction.

I took it all in as rapidly as possible, and started as fast as I could thread my way along the streets, over the Guadalquiver and out into the suburbs, straight on and on till I came to where the road turned at right angles right and left. I paused a second in doubt; then upon my ear came a sort of strange chant. I listened intently; where had I heard that weird music before? Then my mind recalled the uncanny witchcraft my uncle had practised with my cross-hilted dagger. It was the same chant – so far as I could hear, or as I could remember, it was the, same words. I looked straight 23ahead. Over a low wall fronting me was a graveyard – an old disused place. I had often heard that the natives would not on any account go there at night, and hardly by day. Some old stories hung about of some terrible butchery of Christians by the Moors perpetrated there – or it might have been the other way, I am not sure – anyhow infidels had been buried there, and some horrible cruelties had profaned it, and unquiet spirits wandered there, so it was said. A strange fright caught my breath for a moment, thinking of those old stories, as I saw what seemed a faint blue light, and heard that weird chant, but calling on the name of Mercédes, and nerving myself to a supreme effort, I went forward to the low wall, and saw a solitary figure waving its arms in strange gesticulations, as though mesmerizing somebody; the chant, which now came clear on my ear, was the same which I had heard my uncle singing. I put my hand on my dagger, to feel if it were still there; the touch of the metal, though it felt like a magnetic shock, gave me fresh vital force and resolve. I bounded over the wall and strode straight to the figure, and with a start I recognised Hernandez; around him, cut on the turf, was a double circle about eighteen feet in diameter; a chafing-dish with live coals was at his feet, on which he had apparently sprinkled some incense, for a fragrant smoke curled upwards; other strange shaped vessels were about, one containing what looked like blood.

“Instantly I felt the same feeling of giddiness which had overcome me in the old house in the Canongate, when I first saw Hernandez; involuntarily I felt drawn towards him and into the magic circle in which he stood, as though invisible hands pushed me, till I stood beside him. As I did so he lowered his hands and ceased the mesmeric passes for a moment; then he held his right hand steadily pointed towards the city with some bright short instrument, rather like a stiletto, in it. ‘You have come?’ he said quietly. ‘It is well; I told you we should meet in Spain. You want your sweetheart; well! she is coming; patience, she comes over fields, and ditches and hedges. I called her from the Cathedral an hour ago. I have need of you both. Be good children and all shall be right.’ He spoke placidly, slowly, almost like an automaton, without accentuation, and as though he were afraid the least effort or movement would destroy the stern concentration of will that was on every feature.

“My feelings were horrible to look back upon; for the moment I looked on Hernandez as a dog might look on his master; his strength and his will seemed the only firm things in a world of wavering shadows; the most dreadful fate seemed to be separation from him. I know not by what chance or providence it was that, as I stood beside Hernandez within the magic circle, my hand should fall instinctively on my cross-hilted dagger, and I should draw it out and gaze hard upon it. But as I did so, the thought sprang like lightning to my mind that this man, by some subtle power of evil, had drawn me and was drawing Mercédes within his toils, and as I thought of this his hand quivered – the fixity of will in his face 24was crossed by a shade of doubt, and in an instant all became plain to me, and I sprang upon him like a wolf, and wrenching the little steel wand from his hand I flung it far away. With a horrible curse he closed upon me, and for one awful minute we wrestled within the charmed circle; only once did my right hand pass beyond it, and that moment I felt an agony like tongues of flame, and became aware of thousands of presences – spirits, call them what you will, circling round like a rushing mighty wind; and over all one single huge eye. Since then I have learned something of the occult sciences, and the construction of many pentacles has been shown to me, but I have never fathomed exactly the rite which Hernandez was practising there. I may be describing it wrongly, for at that time I knew nothing about the matter, and can only tell you the circumstances as they appeared to me. By a strange intuition I knew that outside of the pentacle were a mob of howling demons, who would probably kill me if I ventured outside, and that no one but Hernandez who had summoned them could dismiss them to their own place. At last I got him in my power – my hand was on his throat. ‘Dismiss your foul crew,’ I said, ‘or by the Devil who will certainly claim your accursed soul, I will send you to him before your time’. How I obtained any power over him I know not – it seems to me now contrary to all the occult laws I know. But the thing was even as I have told you, and I know that my dagger was a powerful charm, and altogether I am convinced that the whole occurrence followed some laws which I have never fathomed. Anyhow Hernandez, almost choked by my fingers on his throat, gasped out some words in either Hebrew or Arabic, and instantly the air grew clear and fresh as on a Spring morning in Scotland, and leaning over the churchyard gate I saw my beloved Mercédes looking wild with terror, wearied to death and travel-stained, but, thank God! safe. I flew towards her, and just as she fell almost fainting in my arms, I saw Hernandez gathering up his various implements, departing with a sinister look of hatred which burnt itself into my memory for ever.

126 THE after events are very dimly outlined on my mind now. It was early dawn: many hours must have gone by while I stood with Hernandez within that pentacle, during that terrible fight, but they seemed like a few moments only. A countryman passed with cart laden with fragrant hay; on this soft couch I gently placed the fainting form of Mercédes, and a liberal gratuity induced the man to go a considerable distance out of his way, to the house of an old lady, a distant relative, to whose care I proposed to entrust Mercédes. My relation was not up when we got there, but she soon appeared, and hearing the fragmentary story, which was all I could give her then, she readily undertook the kind office.

“Mercédes, so long a vision, was now to me a living and breathing reality. But it was weeks before she was sufficiently recovered to tell me anything of her story, and even when I learnt it, it was vague and imperfect. It was however, clear that she was what is called a natural sensitive. She had, I imagine, been stolen by gipsies in early childhood, for she had been brought up by them – not, however, in the squalid way and with the vulgar associations belonging to the English or Scottish idea of gipsies. The tribe with whom she had lived, had their home away in the Basque mountains, where, though shunning houses, as is the manner of all their race, they seem to have maintained an almost regal magnificence. Like all their race, they were deeply skilled in the occult sciences, and had, as I suppose, stolen Mercédes, who I fancy from various indications, must have belonged to some noble Spanish house, for the sake of her remarkable gifts. It seems she lived happily enough with the gipsies, never dreaming she was not what she was reported to be – the daughter of the chief. But for the last year her sleep had been haunted by strange visions. A house unlike anything she had ever seen, indeed, very few houses were ever seen by this dweller in tents and in caves, an evil haunting presence, her description of which tallied curiously with my own impression of Hernandez, and someone to whom she always fled for protection, and in whom she seemed now to recognize myself. In her dream the evil figure seemed to be dominating both her own life and mine, and it was in obedience to an uncontrollable impulse that she had come a considerable distance to the Vesper Service in Seville. After kneeling at the altar she became absolutely unconscious, and only recovered to find herself wearied out, and terrified nigh to death, beside the Churchyard gate. The little I then knew of spiritualism led me to a definite conclusion, viz., that Hernandez, who, whatever other powers he might possess, was clearly a very strong mesmerist, had long known the wonderful clairvoyant faculty of Mercédes, and determined to avail himself of it; meeting me he had recognized in me a similar power, and had laid his plans with diabolical coolness and cunning to bring us both under his will, that the mediumistic force of two sensitives acting and reacting in reality on each other, might produce results beyond what could be achieved by one. So it seemed to me then – but I confess to you that spiritualism and the phenomena of mediumship never attracted me much; when not utterly trivial they seem to me fraught with risks too grave to be lightly faced, so I have never read much of the literature of the subject, and my conclusions may be widely erroneous. But it seemed to me that without, or even against his will, the power of his 127mesmeric influence had drawn the astral form of Mercédes to the old house in the Canongate, and thus a magnetic connexion was established between her and me, which his subsequent mesmeric experiments on me had deepened and intensified, till at last in bringing us together he had defeated his own ends, but what those ends were, or who or what was Hernandez, I am wholly unable to hazard even a guess.

“There is no particular interest for a stranger in this part of my story. I will therefore hurry over it as rapidly as I can. Suffice it to say that I married Mercédes, as of course you will have guessed, after some opposition, but at last with the full approval of the gipsy chief who had been as a father to her. He was utterly reticent as to her history, but in every other respect no prince of the blood could have met me with greater courtesy, and to all the details of my strange experience he listened gravely with a slow wise smile as one who knows all about it, looking from time to time at the palm of my hand, but saying no word. Never in this world I think were married lovers so happy as we during a long summer holiday in the beautiful Basque provinces which, unknown to nearly every traveller, were as familiar to my half-gipsy bride as the streets of Edinburgh are to us to-day.

“At last we bent our steps homeward, and it was with a feeling of pride that I took Mercédes to the old house. Her first exclamation was, ‘How familiar it all is’. Like a merry child she ran from room to room, exploring every hole and corner; the old house was very bright then, and as I have told you some of my happiest days belong to this period. Now and then a dark shadow would pass over in consequence of a certain delicacy of health of my beloved Mercédes, but this the doctors assured me would pass away; a tendency to hysteria they called it; but from time to time she would fall into deep trances, in which sometimes she would say strange and startling things. It had been a great grief to us that we had no children, but one day in one of these deathlike trances she suddenly looked up and said, ‘It is well we have no child. You are the last of your race, the old curse will break with me.’ At another time she said, ‘I grow stronger, he grows weaker, he will not succeed again’. These and many other sentences of the kind, whose meaning was entirely beyond my power to fathom. I had told my uncle, who, by the way, still resided with us, of my experiences in Spain and my encounter with Hernandez, of which he gave a totally different explanation from that which had commended itself to me. ‘It was not Signor Hernandez himself that you saw,’ so he said to me one evening. ‘If you go to a spiritual seance you will very likely see Shakspere, or Julius Cæsar, or some other great personage called up and materalized before your eyes, but directly they write, as they sometimes do, or rap out communications, it becomes at once evident that not the spirit of the mighty dead, but a very vulgar and illiterate spirit is manipulating the form which you see. So it was here; some low and evil spirit put on the aspect of Hernandez to deceive you; his actions prove it. Had you been more advanced in occultism you would have recognized this at once.’ Nevertheless I was not satisfied, and I seemed to have so fully recognised Hernandez, not by the outward shape, but by the personal influence which surrounded him, that I felt no manner of doubt that it was himself. My uncle, however, grew so urgent on the point that after a while I became convinced against myself, and ready to admit that what I had seen was some mere delusive shade.

“It was about this time that old Peter, the old servant who shewed you over the house, came back. I had not seen him before; he was originally as a boy in my father’s employment, and had been picked up by him somewhere, I believe, in the West Indies. Peter is said to be a half-caste, but what his particular breed is I can’t tell you; I suspect he has a good deal of Spanish blood in his veins and more than a dash of nigger; anyhow Peter 128has always from a boy been curiously sensitive and directly he was employed, I think as a page or boot boy or something, about the old house he seemed almost to become a part of the house; it had a strange fascination for him, and he was never happy away from it; but shortly before my return to my ancestral home Peter had been ill, and my uncle sent him away for rest and change, and so it was that until my return from Spain with Mercédes I never saw Peter. I must notice here, what you have remarked, the singular way in which most of the people intimately connected with the old house have been peculiarly sensitive. My uncle unquestionably was so in some directions, in fact, I have no doubt of his having been a spirit medium, either naturally or by cultivation; so from what I can learn was my grandfather who married a Spanish lady. She by the way played him false, and learning of her treachery at the supper table one evening, in a fit of sudden madness he flung a dagger which struck her on the chest and went straight to the heart, killing her instantly; the story was hushed up, my grandfather went abroad and died very shortly after of apoplexy. Criminal justice was as you know, very uncertain in Scotland a hundred years ago, and while poor wretches in the Cowgate were hanged for petty thefts, high-placed murderers like my grandfather escaped scot free sometimes. Then my father, who had nothing of the sensitive about him, never lived in the house at all; he married a douce pious Scotch lady, when he was pretty well on in life, but only knew of the Canongate house by tradition. I must have been born a sensitive I think, though the powers only developed when I came to the old house. My darling Mercédes was exceptionally so, old Peter also, and now you who are also sensitive, whether you know it or not, must needs go rummaging and exploring about the place, and catching all its weird influence. It seems as though the old house, like a living creature, had some almost conscious power of attracting to itself those whom its wicked influences can affect. You will remember how you, a total stranger, were impelled to go in and explore it, and unless Providence had guided you to me you would have been caught like a fly in a spider’s web, or rather what seems to me a better simile, like some poor insect attracted to a carnivorous plant which absorbs and destroys it. Soul and body, will that accursed house destroy all sensitives who come within its influence, unless they have great powers of resistance.

“Very shortly after our return, I met Hernandez in the hall. I started on seeing him; my uncle who was with me said, ‘Now, nephew! you’ve been telling me various cock and bull stories about Signor Hernandez; he has in fact never left this house since you went away. Look at him carefully now, and you will see how little like he is to the astral that you saw at Seville.’ I did so, and Hernandez gazed full into my eyes; as he did so the scene in the churchyard sprang into sudden vividness, and to my utter amazement the wizard who had been making those mesmeric passes in the magic circle was a totally different person from Hernandez who stood before me.

“I felt bound to offer him an apology, but I was not satisfied. No sooner, however, did Mercédes set eyes on him than she fell into a dead faint and was ill for a long time. Peter also conceived the most extraordinary repulsion for him. ‘Mr. Dalrymple,’ he said to me one day, ‘yon man is the deevil – or if he’s no himself, I’m thinking he’s no vera far awa' kin. And look ye, sir, if I’m no much mistaken he’s just practising his uncanny arts on the young mistress, puir thing! and it’s truth I’m telling ye, gin she should make a moonlight flitting wi’ him, she’ll no be to blame; it’ll no be her fault, puir leddy, but just against her will and through the deviltries of that black sorcerer.’ I remembered his strange influence over Mercédes, and altogether I made up my mind that Hernandez must go. I was just beginning to say to my uncle that I intended to tell him so, when Hernandez himself came up with his travelling valise in his hand. ‘I find 129I have to leave you suddenly,’ he said, ‘but we shall meet again ere long.’ I answered somewhat stiffly that I feared I should not be able to receive him as a guest for the present, owing to private arrangements. He was not in the least put out, but simply replied, ‘Oh! of course, not here. I understand, exactly, but you will be my guest soon, in the land of the olive and wine – your uncle comes with me to-night.’ Another moment and he was gone. ‘What does he mean, uncle?’ I said. “You are not going to leave us.’ ‘No! no!’ said my uncle with a nervous little laugh, quite foreign to him. ‘Signor Hernandez mistook. I don’t know what he was thinking of.’ I noticed, however, that his jolly red face was very pale.

“That night the house was full of strange noises. I have heard similar sounds in other houses sometimes and was told they were rats; it may be so. I saw nothing. Peter told me afterwards those that he calls “them as walks” were all about that night, far more manifest and more wicked than usual. About 3 o’clock in the morning, as nearly as I could time it, I heard a long, wailing cry which sounded like that of a person in utter terror, then several choking sobs mixed with a stertorous kind of snoring, and a rattling noise as of a person breathing with great difficulty through an obstruction: then a stillness as of death. I sprang out of bed and on to the stairs, and called several times. At last old Peter came; in answer to my inquiries he had heard nothing; troops of phantoms according to him had been flitting up and down the stairs, but he had not heeded them and had gone to sleep. We took candles and searched everywhere, but in vain. My uncle’s bedroom was locked as usual. We knocked, and he answered from within in his usual cheery tones; the little vaulted room was locked as it always was. At last we went to bed. Next morning we found my uncle’s room empty. The bed had not been slept in, and on breaking open the door of the little vaulted room, there lay his body stiff and cold. He must have been dead many hours. The face was swollen livid, the tongue protruded and bitten through, on either side of the throat two long black marks. ‘Apoplexy,’ the doctor said, an old family physician with a grave face and a gold-headed malacca cane. ‘Apoplexy, my dear sir. His father, your grandfather, died of the same; hereditary tendency I fear; a little blood-letting might have saved him.’ The marks on the throat he accounted for in some way which I forget, pressure of a tight collar or something; but I am as certain as that we sit here, that my uncle was strangled by some hand, physical or not, and that Hernandez had something to do with it. But what ghost or spirit or human being it was that mimicked my uncle’s voice, and replied to our knock, probably no one will ever know.”

V. – The end of Mr. Dalrymple’s Story.

While Mr. Dalrymple was talking he had been carelessly turning over the leaves of the old book containing the writings of Fergus Fergusson. After telling the tragic story of his uncle's death his eye fell on a passage which attracted him, and he read eagerly and in silence for some time. “This is very remarkable,” he said at last. “Listen! here is a short account, about two pages long, of the old wizard – this is the end of it: ‘He (the wizard) was a man of notoriously profligate character, his last exploit being to elope with a noble lady of Spanish birth, the wife of a good gentleman of fortune in Edinburgh, whose name was Dalrymple; the populace were so enraged at this, that he was seized and with brief shrift condemned to be burnt alive. He was drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution, but on being bound to the stake, and the faggots lighted, it was found that he had vanished; but whether preserved by his curious arts, or whether as some assert, the Devil, who was his master, at that moment claimed his wicked soul as the prize of his misdeeds the chronicler knoweth not. Yet are there not wanting, even now, some who assert that Fergus 130Fergusson was seen alive and well in the streets of Edinburgh long after this occurrence; yet he could not be apprehended of any man.’ “The old curse”, continued Mr. Dalrymple, “goes deeper and further back than I knew; three hundred years ago, you see, here were the same fatal elements of tragedy present in my own family, and in the same old house, and still that same infernal face appearing as the evil genius of the family. I must hurry on with my story – but one circumstance after my uncle’s death was so curious in the light what followed, that I must tell it you here. Mercédes, despite the doctor’s assurances, grew weaker, and her trances more frequent and lasting longer, and sometimes when wearied out and ill at ease, she has stopped in front of that picture in the hall and sighed deeply. “I wish he would come back,’ she sometimes said, ‘it was so pleasant when he was here.’ I would have done anything in the world to pleasure my darling, even to the inviting of Signor Hernandez, much as I detested him, to my house; but always in the morning when I mentioned the subject to her, she would entreat me with a shudder never to let him come near to her. I concluded that her desire to see Hernandez was merely a fantasy bred of a weak and overwrought brain, which cool reflection and waking strength turned into the natural loathing her pure soul felt for a bad man.

“Several times about this period old Peter startled me by saying he had seen ‘yon auld deevil’, as he always called Hernandez, about the house. At such times every corner was searched, but without result; only now and then an echo, that sounded like the sneering laugh characteristic of him, seemed to sound through the hollows down below the foundations. ‘He’s after the mistress, puir leddy,’ said Peter to me once, ‘an ye’ll no catch him, the foul devil-dealing brute – gin ye could catch him, and wring the ill-fared neck o’ him ye wad do the world a guid turn; but I reckon he can go invisible and pass through closed doors as easy as open anes by some of them wicked cantrips o’ his.’

“One night I was just thinking of going to rest, when Peter suddenly beckoned to me, and led me to a window, you probably remember it, which commanded a partial view of the Canongate. ‘Whisht!’ he said, ‘yon black deevil has bewitched the puir mistress – see ye there.’ Sure enough down the Canongate was walking my beautiful Mercédes. You will remember the Canongate was a very different place fifty years ago from what it is now. A fashionable street it had been in old times, and there were still some families of distinction living there. She had simply the tartan plaid drawn over her head after that graceful fashion which our rulers once thought fit to forbid by sumptuary laws, and in wearing which she adopted our old Scottish fashion and added to it all the grace and beauty of her native land. By her side was a figure I knew only too well – it was Hernandez. Immediately under my hand lay a sword-cane which I had found useful in some of my travels. I caught it up and followed the pair. Down the Canongate they went and past the old front of Holyrood, I after them; and as I passed, crowds of ghosts of the old historic personages seemed to be thronging the windows of Holyrood. On they went past Muchat’s cairns, past the ruins of St. Anthony’s Chapel, I panting after them. Just as they paused for a moment beside the end of Hunter’s Bog I grasped my cross-hilted dagger. One mad moment I poised it, meaning to fling – the next the story of my grandfather flashed through my mind. I should miss Hernandez, I should kill my darling wife; the haunting sense of the old tragedy was upon me. Over and over again must the scene be re-enacted, so some inner voice seemed to be saying – over and over again till – then it became silent; but the brooding curse settled down on my spirit, and the consciousness that I myself had been through this very scene before forced itself very strongly upon me.

“I drew the blade from the sword cane and rushed madly at the pair; I could almost hear their low whispers. I made a wild lunge at Hernandez; 131my foot slipt as I did so and the blade passed clean through him – aye! but with no resistance even as though it passed through a cloud – and that moment like a cloud the unclean form dispersed. A wraith of pale blue vapor floated up the side of Arthur’s Seat, but Mercédes lay at my feet as one dead. I had the fullest confidence in the absolute purity of my wife and I gently raised her in my arms and carried her home, where for weeks she lay unconscious. When at last she came to herself she remembered no word of the nocturnal adventure – only that her sleep had been troubled by hateful and impure visions which she seemed unable to drive away or flee from. I thought of the obscene forms conjured up by my uncle in the little vaulted room, and shuddered at the idea of such foul shapes invading the pure sleep of my darling; but at last she recovered and seemed her old girlish self once more, delighting to throw herself down into a lounge in our room in front of the old mirror in amber, satin, and black lace, with the dear old sandal wood perfume about her, and enact the part of my dream love of olden days. Happy days were these, and old Peter used to say ‘them as walks’ had never been so peaceful as then, though he met wraiths on the stairs and hovering round, yet all ever benignant and well disposed towards us, and of Hernandez nothing whatever was seen or heard by anyone. Happy days but all too few, and the calm was ominous. Very soon alarming symptoms began to show themselves in my darling Mercédes; not only now was it physical weakness and the persistent recurrence of the long death-like trances, but mental aberration; often she did not recognize me, and would fall into fits of uncontrolled and violent passion, as unlike herself as could well be imagined.

One night as I sat watching by her bedside a strange drowsiness crept over me, very much like that which had affected me when first I wooed her as the lady of the mirror. I could see the room and all its surroundings, but of sitting there myself I was utterly unconscious; I seemed to be everywhere and as it were part of everything, and in this state I saw plainly what I took to be the spirit form of Mercédes, herself, yet glorified and purified and transfigured, and her message to me, though I must needs translate it into words, yet came not in that form, but as it were flashed from soul to soul in an instant. ‘Mourn not for me,’ she seemed to say, ‘I am here no longer but happy and at rest at last. The poor body you look upon contains my spirit no longer. I died weeks ago according to the time of earth. It is an evil spirit, or creation of him who persecuted me, that now animates that frame of flesh and blood.’ At this mention of Hernandez I felt an irresistible wave of wrath rise in my soul; but the gentle message came again: ‘Nay, be not wrath, we are not angry with the medicines that bring us health, nor with the exercises that bring strength to our bodies. I was weak and sickly; it was my trial and my task to meet and overcome him. I failed, and over and over again in infinite kindness was the same task set me, and over and over again I failed, but with each failure I gathered new strength. So long as I failed his will could chain me to this old house; but now I am free, and in winning my freedom, I have won release for you too, my beloved; in a few days you will leave this house, accursed as it is for all your race, and you will enter it nevermore. He whom you know as Hernandez was once in earth-life the ancestor of your family. He now embodies all that is evil in the inherited tendencies of that family. He and you and I have enacted the same scenes together but with a different result many times – but now you, O my beloved, have crushed out your inherited tendencies, have fought successfully against the characteristics you derive from your family, and your strength has been strength in me, and by repeated opposition we have conquered Hernandez; and we can now recognize that it is he who supplying a force to oppose our own has developed our strength and to whom we must be grateful. The ancient curse is broken.’ So saying the lovely vision faded away and the feverish form of Mercédes was left tossing rest132lessly on the bed. In the morning I did not remember the vision, nor did it come back to me for long afterwards. I knew, however, when it did come back, when and where I had seen it.

“The doctor who came daily told me that Mercédes was developing a tendency to suicidal mania, and cautioned me to keep everything of a dangerous nature out her reach, and to watch her carefully. This I did: but one night I presume I must have slept at my post, for I suddenly became wide awake, and the great funeral bed was empty. Mercédes was nowhere to be seen. I called, but no answer. In an agony of mind I rushed to the little landing. There at the head of the stairs lay my darling – her night dress stained and dabbled with blood, my cross-hilted dagger in her breast – dead and cold. The blank terrible despair of that moment was almost more than flesh and blood can bear. I cried an exceeding bitter cry and fell in a dead faint beside the corpse.

“How long I was unconscious I cannot tell, days, weeks, months, I know not. I heard afterwards that there had been some enquiry, that I had been found in a swoon beside the body of my darling, and that the Crown with its usual intelligence had come to the conclusion that I might have killed her – I who would have given every breath in my body to shield her from the slightest pain. Of all this, however, I was mercifully unconscious, and Peter took me abroad, when I first recovered myself, and then I remembered the visit, and I knew, though of course your scientific men would jeer at such an idea, that my pure and holy Mercédes had never been guilty of the sin of suicide; long before, she had left the poor frail body she used to inhabit, and it was but the foul elemental conjured up by Hernandez to take possession of it which had grown wrath with its material dwelling-place, and plunged the dagger into that sweet breast from which the angel spirit had long flown; but how the dagger came there I never knew. I have never parted from it since.

“Leave me now, my young friend, my story is done. I have never before told it to mortal man, and would not have told it to you had you not come within the spell of the old house. It is but the evil magnetism which lingers there now: the spirit of Mercédes has met and conquered the spirit of evil, and very soon no stone shall be left on another to mark where stood a place accursed of God and man.”

VI. – The Writer’s Last Words.

But little now of my story remains to tell. Business took me out of Edinburgh almost immediately after my last interview with Mr. Dalrymple, and it was some weeks before I saw the old house again; when I did the workmen had been some time in possession and but little of the old fabric remained, all the walls were laid bare, the floors and timber were gone: only the ground floor in fact remained, and that was open to the sky, and excavations were going on below. No secret passages or unknown rooms had been discovered, it had been simply a solidly built old-fashioned mansion, some of its lower parts, from their strength and solidity, apparently belonging to a fortified place of old time. I closely questioned the workmen and learnt that at the seventh stair, the place where, according to Peter, the ghost of the lady with the dagger in her breast had always disappeared, there was an evident trace under the plaster of an old door, but the aperture had been bricked up solid some time very long ago and no man could say what had been its original purpose, for if opened it would have led out on an outside wall with a drop of some twenty feet to the ground. This I suppose must ever remain an unknown mystery.

On two points only did any interest attach to the excavations; below the old stair leading from the Laird’s room to the kitchens they had pierced down to the solid rock, and had found there a curious cleft or 133hollow leading apparently to the bowels of the earth, up which had floated a vapor of so deadly and noxious a character that two of the men had fainted and been carried off in a perilous state to the infirmary; and below the little vaulted room was some curious arched masonry; something like a very primitive crypt, on the floor of which they had found a stone which now lay loose, though when discovered it was firmly bedded in the masonry, carved with a rude serpent and some other emblems; on the wall, under one of the vaultings, was cut with a chisel, a pentagram, but roughly done as though by an amateur. I was looking curiously at this, when I became conscious that someone was watching me; I looked up, and standing just above me was a slim handsome man of about forty, very dark, and dressed in some foreign fashion. I looked curiously at him. Where had I seen that face before? Then in a moment it flashed across me, “Signor Hernandez”. I said. “You have mistaken me,” he answered tendering his card. “Count Bernstein.” I heard the voice of old Peter close behind. “God save us a’, yon’s that auld Deevil.”

“You seem to have mistaken me for a friend,” he said, with slightly melancholy accent; “permit me to give you a hand out of that pit. I think I can show you who I am.” I extended my right hand mechanically; my left was resting on the wall against the pentagram, and I stood on the carved stone. As his hand touched mine a vision flashed across my mind. I saw Hernandez in habit like some ancient Druid offering a human sacrifice, and the victim was a gipsy girl, who, as some inner sense seemed to tell me, had been unfaithful to his savage semi-animal passion; and onwards over and over again I saw the same scene repeated, and I heard his deep enunciation of undying hate and pronouncement of a curse so terrible that my blood congealed and the roots of my hair stirred. Not as a succession of pictures did these varied scenes appear, not even as a number of pictures seen all at once, but with a consciousness that each one was the same, all apprehended as one, all seen and understood in a flash, quicker far than thought, and borne in upon my mind, as I knew, by the fact of my completing some mysterious magnetic circles by standing on that stone, with one hand on the pentagram, the other in that of Hernandez.

Yet it was only during the interval between my placing my foot on a fragment of broken wall and stepping off the carved stone. All the events of many centuries seemed flashed into my mind in that instant; the next I saw him again clearly. “Mysterious being,” I said, “are you man or devil?” “I am to you,” he replied, “as you shall take me. Adam and Eve yielded to the tempting of Satan, and for them and their offspring to the last generation Satan is an ever-brooding curse. Job resisted the power of Satan, and for Job Satan appeared as one among the Sons of God. Which is the true aspect, think you? Through the attachments of family, through specious calls of duty, through wealth and through misery, Job fought with Satan and overcame. He saw Satan clearly; your friend Mr. Dalrymple sees me clearly now. Call me Satan if you will. You and all of earth have to meet with those like me, and sometimes we appear as angels of light: when there is a clear duty, we shall show you that your circumstances are exceptional; the stronger you are, the wilier must the trial be; but learn once to go fearlessly along the path, though all pleasure and vanities have to be thrown overboard; straight on though father and mother, wife and children, seem to block the way; straight on though obedience to the command seems to imply a moral guilt; straight on though it seems to be the destruction even of your very higher self; and you shall know us for what we are, angels of light,” his voice grew deep, and his figure seemed transfigured as he spoke: “But fail in any of the tests, and you shall also know us; or what we are to you, eternal and undying curses, lamentation, and woe.” The last words were hissed like the tone of a serpent in my ear, and he was gone.

134 “Who was that?” I asked a workman next me.

“No man here but ourselves,” was his answer, “what are ye thinking of master?”

“Whisht!” said old Peter, “They can’t see, but he was here for all that – his last visit I’m thinking.”

J. W. Brodie Innes, F.T.S.

The End.

Footnotes

↑ Editor’s note: An unexplained vertical stroke follows the exclamation mark in the available scan; it is retained pending comparison with another copy.

[LUC-ERR-05-652-1] Editor’s note: An unexplained vertical stroke follows the exclamation mark in the available scan; it is retained pending comparison with another copy.

[1]