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Black Spirits and White, by Ralph Adams Cram

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Black Spirits and White, by Ralph Adams Cram
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BLACK SPIRITS AND WHITE
CARNATION SERIES
Black Spirits & White
A Book of Ghost Stories
BY RALPH ADAMS CRAM
[Device]
CHICAGO STONE & KIMBALL
MDCCCXCV
COPYRIGHT, 1895, BY STONE AND KIMBALL
Transcriber's Note:
Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note
...

"BLACK SPIRITS AND WHITE, RED SPIRITS AND GRAY, MINGLE, MINGLE, MINGLE, YE THAT
MINGLE MAY
...
252 RUE M
...
252 RUE M
...

No
...
le Prince
...
I fancy this windfall surprised him
not a little, for the relations between the aunt and nephew had never been cordial, judging from Eugene's
remarks touching the lady, who was, it seems, a more or less wicked and witch-like old person, with a
penchant for black magic, at least such was the common report
...
To be sure d'Ardeche reviled her as a bad old woman, being himself in
that state of enthusiastic exaltation which sometimes accompanies a boyish fancy for occultism; but in spite of
his distant and repellent attitude, Mlle
...
" This malevolent
old portent, whose gray and crafty face was often seen in the Rue M
...
de

Black Spirits and White, by Ralph Adams Cram

3

Tartas had, it seems, fully expected to enjoy her small wealth after her death; and when it appeared that she
had left him only the contents of the gloomy old house in the Quartier Latin, giving the house itself and all
else of which she died possessed to her nephew in America, the Sar proceeded to remove everything from the
place, and then to curse it elaborately and comprehensively, together with all those who should ever dwell
therein
...

This final episode was the last word I received from Eugene, but I knew the number of the house, 252 Rue M
...
So, after a day or two given to a first cursory survey of Paris, I started across the Seine to find
Eugene and compel him to do the honors of the city
...
le Prince, running up the hill towards the Garden
of the Luxembourg
...
252 was,
when I found it, quite as queer as any
...
The effect of this bit of seventeenth-century masonry, with its dirty old
doors, and rusty broken lantern sticking gaunt and grim out over the narrow sidewalk, was, in its frame of
fresh plaster, sinister in the extreme
...
I went into the doorway of one of the new hôtels and interviewed the concierge
...
d'Ardeche did not live there, though to be sure he owned the mansion; he himself resided in Meudon,
in the country house of the late Mlle
...
Would Monsieur like the number and the street?
Monsieur would like them extremely, so I took the card that the concierge wrote for me, and forthwith started
for the river, in order that I might take a steamboat for Meudon
...
In three minutes we were sitting in the queer little garden of the Chien Bleu,
drinking vermouth and absinthe, and talking it all over
...

"No, but if this sort of thing keeps on I shall have to
...
You must come out with me to-night and see it
...
But there is something wrong with this house opposite
...
I have had three, all within six months, but the stories have gone around and a
man would as soon think of hiring the Cour des Comptes to live in as No
...
It is notorious
...
"
I laughed and ordered more vermouth
...
It is haunted all the same, or enough to keep it empty, and the funny part is that no one
knows how it is haunted
...
As far as I can find out, people just have the
horrors there, and have them so bad they have to go to the hospital afterwards
...
So the house stands empty, and as it covers considerable ground and is taxed for a lot, I don't
know what to do about it
...
I shouldn't mind the ghosts, I am sure
...
They
promised that they would spend the night with me some time in my aunt's house,--which is called around
here, you must know, 'la Bouche d'Enfer,'--and I thought perhaps they would make it this week, if they can get
off duty
...
"
The plan suited me perfectly, so we went up to the hospital, found Fargeau, who declared that he and
Duchesne were ready for anything, the nearer the real "bouche d'enfer" the better; that the following Thursday
they would both be off duty for the night, and that on that day they would join in an attempt to outwit the
devil and clear up the mystery of No
...

"Does M
...

"Why of course," I replied, "I intend to go, and you must not refuse me, d'Ardeche; I decline to be put off
...
Show me a real live
ghost, and I will forgive Paris for having lost the Jardin Mabille
...

Later we went down to Meudon and ate dinner in the terrace room of the villa, which was all that d'Ardeche
had said, and more, so utterly was its atmosphere that of the seventeenth century
...

Mlle
...
No one ever was seen
to enter the door of No
...
Indeed, the neighbors, who for eleven years had
watched the old sorcerer sidle crab-wise up to the bell almost every day, declared vociferously that never had
he been seen to leave the house
...

This was curious, for No
...
le Prince and the Rue de l'Ecole, and the mystery
was one of the choice possessions of the Latin Quarter
...
252, many of them private, not a few with crests on the door panels,
from all of them descending veiled female figures and men with coat collars turned up
...
252 became for the
moment popular, for by placing the ear against the wall strange music could distinctly be heard, and the sound
of monotonous chanting voices now and then
...
de Tartas was ominously silent
...

"A queer thing about the whole affair is," he said, "the fact that every one in the street swears that about a

Black Spirits and White, by Ralph Adams Cram

5

month ago, while I was out in Concarneau for a visit, the music and voices were heard again, just as when my
revered aunt was in the flesh
...
"
I must acknowledge that these stories did not reassure me; in fact, as Thursday came near, I began to regret a
little my determination to spend the night in the house
...
I suppose I believed more or less in ghosts, I am sure
now that I am older I believe in them, there are in fact few things I can not believe
...

Well, to come to the memorable night of the twelfth of June, we had made our preparations, and after
depositing a big bag inside the doors of No
...

I remember I hardly felt that the conversation was in good taste
...
By this time we had drunk more or less, and
Duchesne launched into a photographic and Zolaesque account of the only time (as he said) when he was
possessed of the panic of fear; namely, one night many years ago, when he was locked by accident into the
dissecting-room of the Loucine, together with several cadavers of a rather unpleasant nature
...

It was just ten o'clock when we came into the street
...

Eugene opened the creaking door, and tried to light one of the lanterns; but the gusty wind blew out every
match, and we finally had to close the outer doors before we could get a light
...
We were in a long, vaulted passage, partly carriageway, partly
footpath, perfectly bare but for the street refuse which had drifted in with eddying winds
...
The place had evidently been once a most noble palace
...
, with a great wisteria vine covering half
...

The great bare court, littered with bits of paper blown in by the wind, fragments of packing cases, and straw,
mysterious with flashing lights and flaunting shadows, while low masses of torn vapor drifted overhead,
hiding, then revealing the stars, and all in absolute silence, not even the sounds of the streets entering this
prison-like place, was weird and uncanny in the extreme
...
Just the place for a
Snark! I have said it thrice, What I tell you three times is true,"--

Black Spirits and White, by Ralph Adams Cram

6

which kept repeating themselves over and over in my brain with feverish insistence
...

"There is one thing certain," said Fargeau, "anything might have happened here without the slightest chance of
discovery
...
"D'Ardeche, your lamented relative was certainly well
fixed; she had full scope here for her traditional experiments in demonology
...
"I
never saw this court under these conditions before, but I could believe anything now
...

"Well, I wish doors wouldn't slam in houses that have been empty eleven months
...

Remember we have to deal not only with the spectral lumber left here by your scarlet aunt, but as well with
the supererogatory curse of that hell-cat Torrevieja
...
Light your pipes, your tobacco is a sure protection
against 'your whoreson dead bodies'; light up and move on
...

"There is nothing on this floor," said Eugene, "except servants' rooms and offices, and I don't believe there is
anything wrong with them
...
Let's go up stairs
...
work
...
de Tartas
inherited it, was a good and true Royalist; he went to Spain after the Revolution, and did not come back until
the accession of Charles X
...
This explains why it
is all so new
...
de Tartas had left her personal property had done his work
thoroughly
...

"I feel better," remarked Fargeau
...
"
"Just you wait," replied Eugene
...
' Come up stairs and I will show you a better mise en scène
...
A corridor ran
behind them connecting with the wing corridor, and from this opened a door, unlike any of the other doors in
that it was covered with green baize, somewhat moth-eaten
...

"We are now," he said, "on the very threshold of hell itself; these rooms in here were my scarlet aunt's unholy
of unholies
...
I only wish Torrevieja
had kept out; as it was, he looted them, as he did the rest of the house, and nothing is left but the walls and
ceiling and floor
...

Tremble and enter
...
Walls, floor, and ceiling were covered
with a black lacquer, brilliantly polished, that flashed the light of our lanterns in a thousand intricate
reflections
...
From this we passed to
another room, and here we nearly dropped our lanterns
...
The most astounding, misshapen, absolutely terrifying thing, I think, I ever saw
...
The floor was of red lacquer,
and in it was inlaid a pentagram the size of the room, made of wide strips of brass
...

The effect of the room was simply crushing, with this gigantic red figure crouched over it all, the staring eyes
fixed on one, no matter what his position
...

The third room was like the first in dimensions, but instead of being black it was entirely sheathed with plates
of brass, walls, ceiling, and floor,--tarnished now, and turning green, but still brilliant under the lantern light
...

This was all
...
In Egypt,
in India, they would not be entirely out of place, but here in Paris, in a commonplace hôtel, in the Rue M
...

We retraced our steps, Eugene closed the iron door with its baize covering, and we went into one of the front
chambers and sat down, looking at each other
...
"Nice old party, with amiable tastes; I am glad we are not to spend the
night in those rooms
...
"I know more or less about black art, but that series
of rooms is too much for me
...
The round room may have been used for invocations and incantations
...
Any way it is all just about as queer and fin de siècle as I can well imagine
...
"
The four chambers on this floor of the old house were those said to be haunted, the wings being quite
innocent, and, so far as we knew, the floors below
...
There was no communication between the rooms to be
sure, but, as the doors all opened into the corridor, every sound was plainly audible
...

It seemed innocent enough, a commonplace, square, rather lofty Parisian sleeping-room, finished in wood
painted white, with a small marble mantel, a dusty floor of inlaid maple and cherry, walls hung with an
ordinary French paper, apparently quite new, and two deeply embrasured windows looking out on the court
...

The wind had gone down, and it was very still without,--still and hot
...
The great masses of rank wisteria leaves, with
here and there a second blossoming of purple flowers, hung dead over the window in the sluggish air
...
I filled my pipe again and waited
...
I soon gave up my attempts at conversation, and devoted myself to the task of keeping
awake
...
It was making
me irresistibly sleepy, and wakefulness was absolutely necessary
...
But
almost never, it seemed, had sleep looked so desirable
...
Nor did the exertion of relighting it pull me
together
...
It was most vexing
...
It was most annoying
...
I could hardly stand
...
There was no longer any sound from the other
rooms, nor from without
...
How dark it was growing! I turned up the lantern
...
The lantern, too, was that
going out? I lifted my hand to turn it up again
...

Then I awoke,--absolutely
...
" This was the Horror
...
My body was like lead, my tongue was paralyzed
...
And
the light was going out
...
Darker and darker yet; little by little the pattern of
the paper was swallowed up in the advancing night
...
A thin, keen
humming began in my head, like the cicadas on a hillside in September
...

Yes, this was it
...
Physically I was already
dead
...

It had come at last
...
They were fixed in that last look on
the place where the door had been, now only a deepening of the dark
...
I sat and waited; my mind was still keen, but how long
would it last? There was a limit even to the endurance of the utter panic of fear
...
In the velvet blackness came two white eyes, milky, opalescent, small, far away,--awful
eyes, like a dead dream
...
I
could not have moved my eyes had I possessed the power: they devoured the fearful, beautiful things that
grew slowly, slowly larger, fixed on me, advancing, growing more beautiful, the white flakes of light
sweeping more swiftly into the blazing vortices, the awful fascination deepening in its insane intensity as the
white, vibrating eyes grew nearer, larger
...

With ordinary fear goes always a physical terror, but with me in the presence of this unspeakable Thing was
only the utter and awful terror of the mind, the mad fear of a prolonged and ghostly nightmare
...
I could only feel myself go mad
with the terror of hideous death
...

Suddenly a wet, icy mouth, like that of a dead cuttle-fish, shapeless, jelly-like, fell over mine
...

What was it that I was fighting? My arms sunk through the unresisting mass that was turning me to ice
...
I fought to
wrest my mouth from this awful Thing that sealed it, but, if ever I succeeded and caught a single breath, the
wet, sucking mass closed over my face again before I could cry out
...

*****
Then I heard a voice say, "If he is dead, I can never forgive myself; I was to blame
...
Drive like
hell, cocher! twenty francs for you, if you get there in three minutes
...
I lay in a hospital
ward, very white and sunny, some yellow fleurs-de-lis stood beside the head of the pallet, and a tall sister of
mercy sat by my side
...
I asked for Fargeau or Duchesne, and by and by the latter came, and sitting beside the bed told
me all that I did not know
...
Soon after two o'clock Fargeau, who was in the next room, called to me to ask if I was awake
...
The door was
locked on the inside! He instantly called d'Ardeche and Duchesne, and together they hurled themselves
against the door
...
Within they could hear irregular footsteps dashing here and there, with heavy
breathing
...
As the door crashed in, they were
suddenly hurled back against the walls of the corridor, as though by an explosion, the lanterns were
extinguished, and they found themselves in utter silence and darkness
...
They lighted one of the lanterns, and saw the strangest sight that can be imagined
...
As for me, I was drenched with the same cursed liquid
...
They dragged me away, stripped off my clothing, wrapped me in their coats, and hurried to the
hospital, thinking me perhaps dead
...
They were too late
...
A neighbor rushed up to d'Ardeche: "O Monsieur! what misfortune, yet what fortune! It is true la
Bouche d'Enfer--I beg pardon, the residence of the lamented Mlle
...
The wings were saved, and for that great credit is due the brave firemen
...
"
It was quite true
...
A last engine
was pumping slowly as d'Ardeche came up; half a dozen limp, and one distended, hose stretched through the
porte cochère, and within only the façade of Francis I
...
Beyond lay a great vacancy, where thin smoke was rising slowly
...
Blaye de Tartas were only a memory
...

IN KROPFSBERG KEEP
...

To the traveller from Innsbrück to Munich, up the lovely valley of the silver Inn, many castles appear, one
after another, each on its beetling cliff or gentle hill,--appear and disappear, melting into the dark fir trees that
grow so thickly on every side,--Laneck, Lichtwer, Ratholtz, Tratzberg, Matzen, Kropfsberg, gathering close
around the entrance to the dark and wonderful Zillerthal
...

We were visiting the von C----s at Matzen, and gaining our first wondering knowledge of the courtly, cordial
castle life in the Tyrol,--of the gentle and delicate hospitality of noble Austrians
...
The
days moved on in a golden round of riding and driving and shooting: down to Landl and Thiersee for
chamois, across the river to the magic Achensee, up the Zillerthal, across the Schmerner Joch, even to the
railway station at Steinach
...
Stories, and legends, and fairy tales, while the stiff old

Black Spirits and White, by Ralph Adams Cram

11

portraits changed countenance constantly under the flickering firelight, and the sound of the drifting Inn came
softly across the meadows far below
...
All the windows were open to catch the faint wind, and we had sat for a long time
watching the Otzethaler Alps turn rose-color over distant Innsbrück, then deepen to violet as the sun went
down and the white mists rose slowly until Lichtwer and Laneck and Kropfsberg rose like craggy islands in a
silver sea
...

*****
A great many years ago, soon after my grandfather died, and Matzen came to us, when I was a little girl, and
so young that I remember nothing of the affair except as something dreadful that frightened me very much,
two young men who had studied painting with my grandfather came down to Brixleg from Munich, partly to
paint, and partly to amuse themselves,--"ghost-hunting" as they said, for they were very sensible young men
and prided themselves on it, laughing at all kinds of "superstition," and particularly at that form which
believed in ghosts and feared them
...
Well, they knew that we had lots of beautiful castles here in the "lower valley," and they assumed,
and rightly, that every castle has at least one ghost story connected with it, so they chose this as their hunting
ground, only the game they sought was ghosts, not chamois
...

There was a little inn down in the village then, kept by an old man named Peter Rosskopf, and the two young
men made this their headquarters
...
Of course the old man believed every word he said, and you can imagine his horror and
amazement when, after telling his guests the particularly blood-curdling story of Kropfsberg and its haunted
keep, the elder of the two boys, whose surname I have forgotten, but whose Christian name was Rupert,
calmly said, "Your story is most satisfactory: we will sleep in Kropfsberg Keep to-morrow night, and you
must provide us with all that we may need to make ourselves comfortable
...
"What for a blockhead are you?" he cried, with big eyes
...
"
"But there was a man stayed there once, and in the morning he was dead
...
"
"But it's a ghost, I tell you," almost screamed the innkeeper; "are ghosts afraid of firearms?"
"Whether they are or not, we are not afraid of them
...
I remember the name, for I had a music

Black Spirits and White, by Ralph Adams Cram

12

teacher once by that name
...

In a word, they finally bullied the old fellow into submission, and when the morning came he set about
preparing for the suicide, as he considered it, with sighs and mutterings and ominous shakings of the head
...

Well, at the time I tell you of, the keep was still partially preserved
...
But when the ghost hunters
came, though the two lower floors had fallen into the crypt, the third floor remained
...

No one dared touch him, and so he hung there for twelve years, and all the time venturesome boys and daring
men used to creep up the turret steps and stare awfully through the chinks in the door at that ghostly mass of
steel that held within itself the body of a murderer and suicide, slowly returning to the dust from which it was
made
...

So, when the two men climbed the stairway to the haunted room, they found a very different state of things
from what exists now
...

No one had dared to cross the threshold, and I suppose that for forty years no living thing had entered that
dreadful room
...
All the clothing of the bed was in perfect order, and on it lay a book, open, and face
downward
...
The tapestry on the walls was green with mould, but hardly torn or otherwise defaced, for although the
heavy dust of forty years lay on everything the room had been preserved from further harm
...

The men looked at the room curiously, and, I am sure, not without some feelings of awe and unacknowledged
fear; but, whatever they may have felt of instinctive shrinking, they said nothing, and quickly set to work to
make the room passably inhabitable
...
In the great
fireplace they piled a lot of wood on the caked ashes of a fire dead for forty years, turned the old chest into a
table, and laid out on it all their arrangements for the evening's amusement: food, two or three bottles of wine,
pipes and tobacco, and the chess-board that was their inseparable travelling companion
...
He would not aid and abet them
...


Black Spirits and White, by Ralph Adams Cram

13

At length everything was in readiness, and after a final visit to the inn for dinner Rupert and Otto started at
sunset for the Keep
...
But none went farther
than the outer doorway of the stairs, for it was already growing twilight
...
When a
moment later a light showed itself in the high windows above, they sighed resignedly and went their ways, to
wait stolidly until morning should come and prove the truth of their fears and warnings
...
Rupert afterwards told my uncle that they really felt no fear whatever, only a contemptuous
curiosity, and they ate their supper with good appetite and an unusual relish
...
They
played many games of chess, waiting for midnight
...
Ten, eleven, came and went,--it was almost midnight
...
The clocks in the village struck twelve;
the sound coming muffled through the high, deep-embrasured windows
...

Finally they decided that there was no use in sitting up and boring themselves any longer, they had much
better rest; so Otto threw himself down on the mattress, falling almost immediately asleep
...
The iron hook in the oak beam, that crossed the ceiling midway, fascinated him, not with fear, but
morbidly
...
What a strange and
fiendish idea it was, the young, handsome noble who had ruined himself and his family in the society of the
splendid debauchees, gathering them all together, men and women who had known only love and pleasure, for
a glorious and awful riot of luxury, and then, when they were all dancing in the great ballroom, locking the
doors and burning the whole castle about them, the while he sat in the great keep listening to their screams of
agonized fear, watching the fire sweep from wing to wing until the whole mighty mass was one enormous and
awful pyre, and then, clothing himself in his great-great-grandfather's armor, hanging himself in the midst of
the ruins of what had been a proud and noble castle
...

But that was forty years ago
...
Why did that great iron hook stand out so plainly? why did that dark shadow
dance and quiver so mockingly behind it?--why-- But he ceased to wonder at anything
...

It seemed to him that he woke almost immediately; the fire still burned, though low and fitfully on the hearth
...
In the utter silence he
heard the clock in the village strike two
...

Yes, It was there
...
It seemed quite natural, he would have been disappointed had he
seen nothing; but now he knew that the story was true, knew that he was wrong, and that the dead do

Black Spirits and White, by Ralph Adams Cram

14

sometimes return to earth, for there, in the fast-deepening shadow, hung the black mass of wrought steel,
turning a little now and then, with the light flickering on the tarnished and rusty metal
...
He sat and watched the thing disappear in the gathering dark, his hand on
his pistol as it lay by him on the great chest
...

It had grown absolutely dark; a bat fluttered against the broken glass of the window
...

Like a flash of lightning came a jagged line of fire down the blank wall opposite him, a line that remained,
that grew wider, that let a pale cold light into the room, showing him now all its details,--the empty fireplace,
where a thin smoke rose in a spiral from a bit of charred wood, the mass of the great bed, and, in the very
middle, black against the curious brightness, the armored man, or ghost, or devil, standing, not suspended,
beneath the rusty hook
...

Count Albert raised his mailed hand and beckoned to him; then turned, and stood in the riven wall
...
Count Albert passed through the mighty
wall and disappeared in the unearthly light
...
He felt the crushing of the mortar
beneath his feet, the roughness of the jagged wall where he rested his hand to steady himself
...
Before him moved the figure of Count Albert,--a black silhouette in the ever-increasing light
...

In a final blaze of vivid, intolerable light, in a burst of hellish music that might have come from Bedlam,
Rupert stepped from the corridor into a vast and curious room where at first he saw nothing, distinguished
nothing but a mad, seething whirl of sweeping figures, white, in a white room, under white light, Count Albert
standing before him, the only dark object to be seen
...

Around the long, narrow hall, under the fearful light that came from nowhere, but was omnipresent, swept a
rushing stream of unspeakable horrors, dancing insanely, laughing, gibbering hideously; the dead of forty
years
...
These were the dead of many years
ago
...
Then green and gray horrors, bloated and
shapeless, stained with earth or dripping with spattering water; and here and there white, beautiful things, like
chiselled ivory, the dead of yesterday, locked it may be, in the mummy arms of rattling skeletons
...

And in the very midst of this ring of death, a sight not for words nor for thought, a sight to blast forever the

Black Spirits and White, by Ralph Adams Cram

15

mind of the man who looked upon it: a leaping, writhing dance of Count Albert's victims, the score of
beautiful women and reckless men who danced to their awful death while the castle burned around them,
charred and shapeless now, a living charnel-house of nameless horror
...

"We are ready for you now; dance!"
A prancing horror, dead some dozen years, perhaps, flaunted from the rushing river of the dead, and leered at
Rupert with eyeless skull
...

"Dance!"
His hard lips moved
...
"
Count Albert swept his vast two-handed sword into the f[oe]tid air while the tide of corruption paused in its
swirling, and swept down on Rupert with gibbering grins
...

*****
Perfect silence, perfect darkness; not a breath, not a sound: the dead stillness of a long-sealed tomb
...

Where was he? Dead? In hell? He reached his hand out cautiously; it fell on dusty boards
...
Had he dreamed? Of course; but how ghastly a dream! With chattering teeth he called
softly,-"Otto!"
There was no reply, and none when he called again and again
...
A panic of abject terror came on him; the matches were gone! He turned towards the
fireplace: a single coal glowed in the white ashes
...
Then he
piled the old books on the blaze, and looked fearfully around
...

But why did Otto sleep so soundly; why did he not awake?
He stepped unsteadily across the room in the flaring light of the burning books, and knelt by the mattress
...

THE WHITE VILLA
...

When we left Naples on the 8
...
46
...
11, which would land us in Naples too late for the dinner at the Turners and the San Carlo afterwards
...

However, we had promised, so that was an end of it
...

So we set off contentedly, that white May morning, determined to make the best of our few hours, little
thinking that before we saw Naples again we were to witness things that perhaps no American had ever seen
before
...
We had thought, in our innocence, that we
should be alone, that no one else would think of enduring the long four hours' ride from Naples just to spend
two hours in the ruins of these temples; but the event proved our unwisdom
...
It was a
compact little party of conventional sight-seers that accompanied us
...
Fortunately for us, this terrible old man had fastened himself upon a party of
American school-teachers travelling en Cook, and for the time we were safe; but our vision of two hours of
dreamy solitude faded lamentably away
...
And all around nothing but velvet meadows
stretching from the dim mountains behind, away to the sea, that showed only as a thin line of silver just over
the edge of the still grass
...
We gave but little space to examining the temples the tourists had left, but in a few
moments found ourselves lying in the grass to the east of Poseidon, looking dimly out towards the sea, heard
now, but not seen,--a vague and pulsating murmur that blended with the humming of bees all about us
...
The murmur of the tourist crowd had merged itself in the moan of the sea, and it was very still; suddenly
I heard the words I had been waiting for,--the suggestion I had refrained from making myself, for I knew
Thomas
...
46 go to thunder?"
I chuckled to myself
...
"
"That is just exactly what we shall do," I said, pulling out my watch, "unless we start for the station right
now
...

As the sun dropped lower towards the sea, changing its silver line to gold, we pulled ourselves together, and
for an hour or more sketched vigorously; but the mood was not on us
...
It was not a pretty village,--if you can call a rut-riven lane and a dozen
houses a village,--nor were the inhabitants thereof reassuring in appearance
...

"We might stay here all night," said Tom, grinning askance at this choice company; but his suggestion was not
received with enthusiasm
...
There were no windows in its first story, so far as we could see, and it had evidently been at one time the
fortified villa of some Campanian noble
...
It was a strange place, weird and mysterious, and we looked at it curiously
...

It was growing late: the sun was near the edge of the sea as we walked down the ivy-grown walls of the
vanished city for the last time, and as we turned back, a red flush poured from the west, and painted the Doric
temples in pallid rose against the evanescent purple of the Apennines
...

It was a sorrow to leave the beautiful things, but we could run no risk of missing this last train, so we walked
slowly back towards the temples
...

"How should I know? We are not on his land, and the walls don't matter
...


Black Spirits and White, by Ralph Adams Cram

18

"What time are you?" I said
...
"
"And I am seven minutes
...
"
"Are you sure the train goes at 6
...

By this time a woman and two children were shrieking at us hysterically; but what they said I had no idea,
their Italian being of a strange and awful nature
...
"
"Or--perhaps the time-table is changed
...

He came, and we indulged in crimination and recrimination
...
11 now leaving at 5
...
A facchino came in, and we four sat down and regarded the situation
judicially
...
"
"Could we stay at the Albergo del Sole?"
A forefinger drawn across the throat by the Capo Stazione with a significant "cluck" closed that question
...
"
"But, Signori, I am not married
...
I have only one room to sleep in
...
What can we do?" and we shifted the responsibility deftly on the
shoulders of the poor old man, who was growing excited again
...
"Giuseppe, go up to
the villa and ask if two forestieri who have missed the last train can stay there all night!"
Protests were useless
...
It seemed as though he
would never come
...
At last he appeared
...
The results were
admirable, for in a little time the table in the waiting-room had been transformed into a dining-table, and Tom
and I were ravenously devouring a big omelette, and bread and cheese, and drinking a most shocking sour
wine as though it were Château Yquem
...

It was with crowding apprehensions which we strove in vain to joke away that we set out at last to retrace our
steps to the mysterious villa, the facchino Giuseppe leading the way
...
How still it was! Not a breath of air, not a sound of life; only the awful silence that
had lain almost unbroken for two thousand years over this vast graveyard of a dead world
...
From the villa
came neither light nor sound
...
He knocked again and again, and at length we heard the rasping jar of
sliding bolts, and the door opened a little, showing an old, old man, bent with age and gaunt with malaria
...
He made no reply to our timid salutations, but motioned
tremblingly to us to enter; and with a last "good-night" to Giuseppe we obeyed, and stood half-way up the
stone stairs that led directly from the door, while the old man tediously shot every bolt and adjusted the heavy
bar
...
A fire
was burning in a great fireplace so beautiful in design that Tom and I looked at each other with interest
...
The frescoes on the
dome were stained and mildewed, and here and there the plaster was gone altogether; the carved doorways
that led out on all sides had lost half the gold with which they had once been covered, and the floor was of
brick, sunken into treacherous valleys
...
And on this
inexpressible confusion of lumber the pale shapes of the seventeenth-century nymphs, startling in their
weather-stained nudity, looked down with vacant smiles
...

Once in our room alone, Tom and I looked at each other with faces that expressed the most complex
emotions
...
Help me shut this door, and then we will
reconnoitre, take account of stock, and size up our chances
...

"Better now, much better now," said Tom; "now let us see where we are
...

A big fire had just been lighted in the fireplace, the shutters were closed, and although the only furniture
consisted of two massive bedsteads, and a chair with one leg shorter than the others, the room seemed almost
comfortable
...
"Tom, come here, quick," I cried; and for a
few minutes neither of us thought about our dubious surroundings, for we were looking at Pæstum by
moonlight
...

Perfect silence,--the silence of implacable death
...
There was but one door in the room, and that was securely locked; the great windows were
twenty feet from the ground, so we felt reasonably safe from all possible attack
...
Finally, I fell
asleep,--for how long I do not know: but I woke with the feeling that some one had tried the handle of the
door
...
I sat up, nervous from my sudden awakening under these strange
circumstances, and stared at the door
...
I began to shiver
coldly
...
But we did lock it;
and now it was opening silently
...

Then I heard a footstep,--I swear I heard a footstep in the room, and with it the frou-frou of trailing skirts; my
breath stopped and my teeth grated against each other as I heard the soft footfalls and the feminine rustle pass
along the room towards the fireplace
...
The steps stopped by the fire, and I saw the
broken-legged chair lean to the left, with a little jar as its short leg touched the floor
...

And then the footsteps came down the room lightly, towards the window; there was a pause, and then the
great shutters swung back, and the white moonlight poured in
...

I tried to cry out, to make some sound, to awaken Tom; this sense of utter loneliness in the presence of the
Inexplicable was maddening
...

The shutters closed as silently as they had opened; the moonlight was gone, the firelight also, and in utter
darkness I waited
...
I
think in my abject terror I prayed that I might see, only see; but the darkness was unbroken
...

Rigors shot over me, and my whole body shivered with collapse as I sank back on the pillow, waiting with
every nerve tense, listening with all my life
...

I called to my aid every atom of remaining strength, and, with a cry that shivered between my clattering teeth,
I hurled myself headlong from the bed on to the floor
...

It all flashed over me like the haunting of a heavy dream
...

I paused and listened
...
I
would have died now before getting into that bed again; but there was terror equally without; so I stood
trembling and listened,--listened to heavy, stealthy steps creeping along on the other side of the bed
...

There was a rush in the air by my face, the sound of a blow, and simultaneously a shriek, so awful, so
despairing, so blood-curdling that I felt my senses leaving me again as I sank crouching on the floor by the
bed
...
Round and round the room,
footsteps chasing footsteps in the ghastly night, now away by Tom's bed, now rushing swiftly down the great
room until I felt the flash of swirling drapery on my hard lips
...

They were coming nearer
...
Came one long, gurgling moan
close over my head, and then, crushing down upon me, the weight of a collapsing body; there was long hair
over my face, and in my staring eyes; and as awful silence succeeded the less awful tumult, life went out, and
I fell unfathomable miles into nothingness
...
I lay stunned and
faint, staring up at the mouldy frescoes on the ceiling, struggling to gather together my wandering senses and
knit them into something like consciousness
...
One after another the awful incidents of that unspeakable night came back, and I
lay incapable of movement, of action, trying to piece together the whirling fragments of memory that circled
dizzily around me
...
I could see the pallid lines struggling through the shutters behind
me, grow stronger along the broken and dusty floor
...

Years seemed to have passed since I first came into this terrible room
...
How soundly he slept! Ordinarily, rousing him was no easy task, and now he
revolted steadily against being awakened at this untimely hour
...

"Tom," I cried weakly, "Tom, come and help me!"
"What do you want? what is the matter with you?"
"Don't ask, come and help me!"
"Fallen out of bed I guess;" and he laughed drowsily
...
Was it the actual physical paralysis
born of killing fear that held me down? I could not have raised my head from the floor on my life; I could
only cry out in deadly fear for Tom to come and help me
...
"You have got a
bad nightmare; wake up!"
But something in my voice roused him at last, and he came chuckling across the room, stopping to throw open
two of the great shutters and let a burst of white light into the room
...
With the first glance the laugh died, and he leaped the bed and bent over me
...
"
"But, old chap, you must be hurt awfully; the floor is covered with blood!"
He lifted my head and held me in his powerful arms
...

But, apart from the black bruise on my head, there was no sign of a wound on my body, nor stain of blood on
my lips
...

"Let's get out of this," he said when I had finished; "this is no place for us
...
The room was empty, for it must have
been very early, although a fire already blazed in the fireplace
...

Presently slow footsteps sounded in the stairway, and the old man entered, silent as the night before, nodding
to us civilly, but showing by no sign any surprise which he may have felt at our early rising
...

Any attempt at drawing from him some facts as to the history of the villa was received with a grave and frigid
repellence that baffled us; and we were forced to say addio with our hunger for some explanation of the
events of the night still unsatisfied
...
It was so beautiful that the memory of my ghastly night paled and faded, and it was Tom who
assailed the station-master with questions while we waited for the train from Agropoli
...

"Is there a story of La Villa Bianca?"
"Ah, Signori, certainly; and a story very strange and very terrible
...
Well, the Duca di San Damiano married a lady so fair, so most beautiful that
she was called La Luna di Pesto; but she was of the people,--more, she was of the banditti: her father was of
Calabria, and a terror of the Campagna
...

Well, it was less than a year after they came to the villa before the Duke grew jealous,--jealous of the new
captain of the banditti who took the place of the father of La Luna, himself killed in a great battle up there in
the mountains
...
Then the Duke would go for many
days to Napoli, coming home only now and then to the villa that was become a fortress, so many men guarded
its never-opening gates
...
He looked at him, lying there
under the torchlight, and in his hand saw his own sword
...

"This is all the story of the White Villa, except that the Duke came never again to Pesto
...

"And La Luna? Some say she comes back to the villa, once a year, when the moon is full, in the month when
she was slain; for the Duke buried her, they say, with his own hands, in the garden that was once under the
window of her chamber; and as she died unshriven, so was she buried without the pale of the Church
...
Ah, grazie! Signori, grazie tanto! A rivederci! Signori, a rivederci!"
SISTER MADDELENA
...


Black Spirits and White, by Ralph Adams Cram

24

Across the valley of the Oreto from Monreale, on the slopes of the mountains just above the little village of
Parco, lies the old convent of Sta
...
From the cloister terrace at Monreale you can see its pale walls
and the slim campanile of its chapel rising from the crowded citron and mulberry orchards that flourish, rank
and wild, no longer cared for by pious and loving hands
...

Partly because of this seclusion, partly by reason of its extreme beauty, partly, it may be, because the present
owners are more than charming and gracious in their pressing hospitality, Sta
...

The Cavaliere had introduced himself to us,--Tom Rendel and me,--one morning soon after we reached
Palermo, when, in the first bewilderment of architects in this paradise of art and color, we were working nobly
at our sketches in that dream of delight, the Capella Palatina
...
In a little time we were fully acquainted,
and talking like the oldest friends
...
S
...
"Quinebaug," that, during the summer of 1888, was trying to
uphold the maritime honor of the United States in European waters
...
It was in this way that, with the luck that attends Rendel wherever he goes,
we came to see something of domestic life in Italy, and that I found myself involved in another of those
adventures for which I naturally sought so little
...
Catarina? Taormina is a paradise, an epitome
of all that is beautiful in Italy,--Venice excepted
...
Cefalù is wild and strange, and Monreale a vision out of a fairy tale; but Sta
...
Below stretches the Eden valley, the Concha d'Oro, gold-green fig orchards
alternating with smoke-blue olives, the mountains rising on either hand and sinking undulously away towards
the bay where, like a magic city of ivory and nacre, Palermo lies guarded by the twin mountains, Monte
Pellegrino and Capo Zafferano, arid rocks like dull amethysts, rose in sunlight, violet in shadow: lions
couchant, guarding the sleeping town
...
Catarina, Monreale,--all
were but parts of a dreamy vision, like the heavenly city of Sir Percivale, to attain which he passed across the
golden bridge that burned after him as he vanished in the intolerable light of the Beatific Vision
...
"
"You are going to say that the place is haunted," said Rendel, feeling vaguely on the floor beside him for his
glass of Amaro: "thank you; it is all it needs
...
Sta
...
I do not presume to offer any explanations, I only state the fact; and the fact is that
to-night one or other of you will, in all human--or unhuman--probability, receive a visit from Sister
Maddelena
...
No one sees the ghost, or whatever it is, but once, and that
usually the first night he spends in the house
...
"
"Then tell us what to expect," I said; "what kind of a ghost is this nocturnal visitor?"
"It is simple enough
...
That is all, it is hardly
worth speaking of, only some people are terribly frightened if they are visited unwarned by strange
apparitions; so I tell you this that you may be prepared
...

"Yes; it was suppressed after the unification of Italy, and given to the House of Muxaro; but the family died
out, and I bought it
...
"
"I beg that you will tell it us," cried Rendel
...
"See, the lightning is flashing already up among the mountains at the head
of the valley; if the story is tragic, as it must be, now is just the time for it
...

"As you say, there is a shower coming, and as we have fierce tempests here, we might not sleep; so perhaps
we may as well sit up a little longer, and I will tell you the story
...
The sky, thick with stars, seemed mirrored in the rich foliage below,
so numerous were the glow-worms under the still trees, and the fireflies that gleamed in the hot air
...

The Cavaliere lighted another cigar, and pulled a cushion under his head so that he could look down to the
distant lights of the city
...

"Once upon a time, late in the last century, the Duca di Castiglione was attached to the court of Charles III
...
They tell me he was very ambitious, and, not content with
marrying his son to one of the ladies of the House of Tuscany, had betrothed his only daughter, Rosalia, to

Black Spirits and White, by Ralph Adams Cram

26

Prince Antonio, a cousin of the king
...
His son was a worthy scion, cold and proud;
but Rosalia was, according to legend, utterly the reverse,--a passionate, beautiful girl, wilful and headstrong,
and careless of her family and the world
...

The fury and dismay of the old autocrat passed belief; he saw in a flash the downfall of all his hopes of family
aggrandizement through union with the royal house, and, knowing well the spirit of his daughter, despaired of
ever bringing her to subjection
...

Through his power at court he had the lover sent away to the mainland, and for more than a year he held his
daughter closely imprisoned in his palace on the Toledo,--that one, you may remember, on the right, just
beyond the Via del Collegio dei Gesuiti, with the beautiful iron-work grilles at all the windows, and the
painted frieze
...
He stipulated that she should take the name of Maddelena, that he should never hear of her again, and
that she should be held an absolute prisoner in this conventual castle
...

"She lived here for four or five years; her name was forgotten at court and in her father's palace
...

"In 1798 Ferdinand IV
...
With him came the lover of the dead Rosalia, now high in military honor
...
Then began the second act of the romance that until then had been only sadly commonplace, but now
became dark and tragic
...
By and by he found a day when she was alone, and tossed a ring to her as
she stood in the midst of the cloister
...

"With the utmost craft they arranged their plans together
...
They could make signs only when Sister Maddelena was alone
...
Finally he succeeded in casting into the cloister a coil of light rope
...
For nearly a month these nocturnal visits were undiscovered, and Michele had
almost completed his arrangements for carrying the girl from Sta
...
She instantly told the Mother Superior; and together they watched from a window in the crypt
of the chapel,--the only place, as you will see to-morrow, from which one could see the window of Sister

Black Spirits and White, by Ralph Adams Cram

27

Maddelena's cell
...

"The next day, by the order of the Mother Superior, Sister Maddelena was imprisoned in one of the cells
under the chapel, charged with her guilt, and commanded to make full and complete confession
...
At last the
Superior told her that after this fashion would they act the coming night: she herself would be placed in the
crypt, tied in front of the window, her mouth gagged; that the rope would be lowered, and the lover allowed to
approach even to the sill of her window, and at that moment the rope would be cut, and before her eyes her
lover would be dashed to death on the ragged cliffs
...
Her stubborn spirit was broken, and in the only way
possible; she begged for mercy, for the sparing of her lover
...
I will spare him on condition that you sacrifice your own life
...

"Then she silently prepared for death; and at midnight, while her lover was wandering, mad with the horror of
impotent fear, around the white walls of the convent, Sister Maddelena, for love of Michele, gave up her life
...
That she was indeed dead was only a suspicion, for when Biscari finally compelled
the civil authorities to enter the convent, claiming that murder had been done there, they found no sign
...
The old Duke of Castiglione refused to stir hand or foot in the
matter, and Michele, after fruitless attempts to prove that the Superior of Sta
...
He sought in Spain for very long; but no sign of the girl was to be found, and at
last he died, exhausted with suffering and sorrow
...
It was then that the ghost
began to appear; and, an explanation being necessary, the story, or legend, was obtained from one of the nuns
who still lived after the suppression
...
One or the other of you will probably see her to-night
...
Well, that is all the story of Sister Maddelena, known in the world as Rosalia di Castiglione
...
"But I fancy I should rather look on it simply as a story, and
not as a warning of what is going to happen
...
"
"But the poor Sister is quite harmless;" and Valguanera rose, stretching himself
...
"
"My dear Cavaliere, I beg you not to apologize
...
"
"I have an excuse,--perhaps you will say only an explanation; but I live where I see all the absurdities and
corruptions of the Church
...
Shall we go in?"
The stars were blotted out through nearly all the sky; low, thunderous clouds, massed at the head of the valley,
were sweeping over so close that they seemed to brush the black pines on the mountain above us
...

The rosy lightning flashed almost incessantly, and through the fitful darkness came the sound of bells across
the valley, the rushing torrent below, and the dull roar of the approaching rain, with a deep organ point of
solemn thunder through it all
...

My own was in the southern part of the old convent, giving on the terrace we had just quitted, and about over
the main doorway
...
Gradually the violence of the shower seemed to decrease, and I threw myself down on my
bed in the hot air, wondering if I really was to experience the ghostly visit the Cavaliere so confidently
predicted
...
The story touched me: the thought of the poor faithful girl who
sacrificed herself for her lover,--himself, very likely, quite unworthy,--and who now could never sleep for
reason of her unquiet soul, sent out into the storm of eternity without spiritual aid or counsel
...
No suspicion of sleepiness had visited me, when,
perhaps an hour after midnight, came a sudden vivid flash of lightning, and, as my dazzled eyes began to
regain the power of sight, I saw her as plainly as in life,--a tall figure, shrouded in the white habit of the
Carmelites, her head bent, her hands clasped before her
...
She was very beautiful, like the Virgin of Beltraffio in the National
Gallery,--more beautiful than I had supposed possible, her deep, passionate eyes very tender and pitiful in
their pleading, beseeching glance
...

Then she breathed, rather than articulated, with a voice that almost brought tears, so infinitely sad and
sorrowful was it, "I cannot sleep!" and the liquid eyes grew more pitiful and questioning as bright tears fell
from them down the pale dark face
...
I leaped from the bed and stood waiting
...

Out into the shadow of the corridor it moved, like a drift of pallid storm-cloud, and I followed, all natural and
instinctive fear or nervousness quite blotted out by the part I felt I was to play in giving rest to a tortured soul
...

Down the stairway into the lower hall, across the refectory, where the great frescoed Crucifixion flared into
sudden clearness under the fitful lightning, out into the silent cloister
...
I stumbled along the heaving bricks, now guiding myself by a hand on the whitewashed

Black Spirits and White, by Ralph Adams Cram

29

wall, now by a touch on a column wet with the storm
...
Still the white thing drifted before me to the farther side of the court, then along the cloister at
right angles, and paused before one of the many doorways that led to the cells
...
In the brief interval that
ensued after the flash, and before the roaring thunder burst like the crash of battle over the trembling convent,
I heard again the sorrowful words, "I cannot sleep," come from the impenetrable darkness
...

I wandered around the courtyard, searching in vain for Sister Maddelena, even until the moonlight broke
through the torn and sweeping fringes of the storm
...

In the morning the Cavaliere asked Rendel and me which of us had seen the ghost, and I told him my story;
then I asked him to grant me permission to sift the thing to the bottom; and he courteously gave the whole
matter into my charge, promising that he would consent to anything
...

"I am sure there is nothing in that cell," said Valguanera, when we came in front of the door I had marked
...
In
fact, I had the floor taken up once, soon after I came here, knowing the room was that of the mysterious Sister,
and thinking that there, if anywhere, the monastic crime would have taken place; still, we will go in, if you
like
...
The cell was very small,
hardly eight feet square
...

For the innocence of the floor the Cavaliere answered
...
But where? There seemed no answer; and I was compelled to give up the search for the
moment, somewhat to the amusement of Valguanera, who had watched curiously to see if I could solve the
mystery
...
I procured the
keys from the Cavaliere, and examined the cells adjoining; they were apparently the same, each with its
window opposite the door, and nothing-- Stay, were they the same? I hastened into the suspected cell; it was
as I thought: this cell, being on the corner, could have had two windows, yet only one was visible, and that to
the left, at right angles with the doorway
...
I was becoming excited
...

It was found at last! In the smooth surface of the yellow wall was a rough space, following approximately the
shape of the other cell windows, not plastered like the rest of the wall, but showing the shapes of bricks
through its thick coatings of whitewash
...
I felt absolutely certain that the
secret was solved, and called the Cavaliere and Rendel, too excited to give them an explanation of my
theories
...

Rendel seized a pick, and was about to assail the rude wall, when I stopped him
...

How hard the mortar had become! But a brick yielded at last, and with trembling fingers I detached it
...
Still the hole was too small to admit enough light from the dimly illuminated cell
...
It moved, and we
softly slid it from its bed
...
Yet there was cause
...

We stood there breathless, staring at the pitiful sight, fascinated, bewitched
...
With
fiendish ingenuity, the rigid ecclesiastics had blocked up the window, then forced the beautiful creature to
stand in the alcove, while with remorseless hands and iron hearts they had shut her into a living tomb
...

The room was sacred; that awful sight was not for curious eyes
...
The Cavaliere cut him short
...
" (I thanked him with a glance
...

Valguanera thought a moment, then he said, "Bring two horses; the Signor Americano will go with you,--do
you understand?" Then, turning to me, "You will go, will you not? I think you can explain matters to Padre
Stefano better than I
...
" So it happened that after a hasty luncheon I wound down the
mountain to Parco, found Padre Stefano, explained my errand to him, found him intensely eager and
sympathetic, and by five o'clock had him back at the convent with all that was necessary for the resting of the
soul of the dead girl
...
Nothing was omitted; all the needful offices of the Church were
said by Padre Stefano, while the light in the window died away, and the flickering flames of the candles
carried by two of the acolytes from San Francesco threw fitful flashes of pallid light into the dark recess
where the white face had prayed to Heaven for a hundred years
...
Instantly the
whole vision crumbled to dust, the face was gone, and where once the candlelight had flickered on the perfect
semblance of the girl dead so very long, it now fell only on the rough bricks which closed the window, bricks
laid with frozen hearts by pitiless hands
...
It had been arranged that Padre Stefano should remain at the convent all night,
and that as soon as midnight made it possible he should say the first mass for the repose of the girl's soul
...
It is true that the
Padre was with us nearly all the time; but not only was Valguanera courteous, he was almost sympathetic; and
I wondered if it might not prove that more than one soul benefited by the untoward events of the day
...
It was a curiously solemn service, in the first hour of the new day, in the midst of blazing
candles and the thick incense, the odor of the opening orange-blooms drifting up in the fresh morning air, and
mingling with the incense smoke and the perfume of flowers within
...
I smiled with quiet satisfaction and gratitude, and went
away softly, content with the chain of events that now seemed finished
...

By and by, when Rendel and I went away, with great regret, Valguanera came down to Palermo with us; and
the last act that we performed in Sicily was assisting him to order a tablet of marble, whereon was carved this
simple inscription:-HERE LIES THE BODY OF ROSALIA DI CASTIGLIONI, CALLED SISTER MADDELENA
...

To this I added in thought:-"Let him that is without sin among you cast the first stone
...

Notre Dame des Eaux
...
Pol de Leon, on the sea-cliffs of Finisterre, stands the ancient church of Notre Dame des Eaux
...
The teeth of the winds of the sea have devoured, bit by bit, the fine sculpture of the
doorway and the thin cusps of the window tracery; gray moss creeps caressingly over the worn walls in
ineffectual protection; gentle vines, turned crabbed by the harsh beating of the fierce winds, clutch the
crumbling buttresses, climb up over the sinking roof, reach in even at the louvres of the belfry, holding the
little sanctuary safe in desperate arms against the savage warfare of the sea and sky
...
Pol even around the last land of France, and so to
Brest, yet never see sign of Notre Dame des Eaux; for it clings to a cliff somewhat lower than the road, and
between grows a stunted thicket of harsh and ragged trees, their skeleton white branches, tortured and
contorted, thrusting sorrowfully out of the hard, dark foliage that still grows below, where the rise of land
below the highway gives some protection
...
Pol, and go down to the right, around the old stone quarry; then, bearing to the
left by the little cliff path, you will, in a moment, see the pointed roof of the tower of Notre Dame, and, later,
come down to the side porch among the crosses of the arid little graveyard
...
A Norman nave of round, red stone piers and arches, a delicate choir of the
richest flamboyant, a High Altar of the time of Francis I
...

So has the little church lain unnoticed for many centuries; for the horrors and follies of the Revolution have
never come near, and the hardy and faithful people of Finisterre have feared God and loved Our Lady too well
to harm her church
...
And
now the heir of Poullaouen lies in a carven tomb, forgetful of the world where he fought so nobly: the dynasty
he fought to establish, only a memory; the family he made glorious, a name; the Château Poullaouen a single
crag of riven masonry in the fields of M
...

It was Julien, Comte de Bergerac, who rediscovered Notre Dame des Eaux, and by his picture of its dreamy
interior in the Salon of '86 brought once more into notice this forgotten corner of the world
...
de
Bergerac and her daughter Héloïse came with Julien, and, buying the old farm of Pontivy, on the highway
over Notre Dame, turned it into a summer house that almost made amends for their lost château on the
Dordogne, stolen from them as virulent Royalists by the triumphant Republic in 1794
...
It was a sorrowful tragedy
...
At first this was attributed to his undisguised
admiration for Mlle
...
de Bergerac, he suddenly seized the bridle of Julien's horse, wrenched it from his hand, and,
turning his own horse's head towards the cliffs, lashed the terrified animals into a gallop straight towards the
brink
...
When this happened, and no word of
explanation was granted, only a sullen silence that lasted for days, it became clear that poor Jean's brain was
wrong in some way
...
But at night some strange
mania took possession of him
...

At last his growing insanity reached its climax; and one day in Notre Dame, when he had painted better than
usual, he suddenly stopped, seized a palette knife, and slashed the great canvas in strips
...
The thin
steel snapped, and the white throat showed only a scarlet scratch
...
He shut himself in his room at Pontivy,
refusing to see any one, walking for hours up and down, fighting against growing madness
...

Charpentier came from Paris, summoned by Mme
...
d'Yriex with him
...
de Bergerac, in which Dr
...

During the summer, word came occasionally that no trace had been found of the unhappy man, and at last the
Pontivy colony realized that the merry boy was dead
...
de Bergerac and Jean's family,--sorrowing for the death of their first-born,
away in the warm hills of Lozère,--but by Dr
...

So the summer passed, and the autumn came, and at last the cold rains of November--the skirmish line of the
advancing army of winter--drove the colony back to Paris
...
Héloïse had come down to Notre Dame for a last look at the beautiful
shrine, a last prayer for the repose of the tortured soul of poor Jean d'Yriex
...

Héloïse knelt very long before the Altar of Our Lady of the Waters; and when she finally rose, could not bring
herself to leave as yet that place of sorrowful beauty, all warm and golden with the last light of the declining
sun
...

So she sat in the corner of the aisle by the Altar of Our Lady of the Waters, watching the checkered light fade
in the advancing shadows, dreaming sad day-dreams of the dead summer, until the day-dreams merged in
night-dreams, and she fell asleep
...

With the setting of the sun great clouds rose swiftly from the sea; the wind freshened, and the gaunt branches
of the weather-worn trees in the churchyard lashed themselves beseechingly before the coming storm
...
Whirls of dead leaves rose in the
churchyard, and threw themselves against the blank windows
...

Héloïse awoke, bewildered and wondering; in a moment she realized the situation, and without fear or
uneasiness
...
It was foolish of her to fall asleep, and her mother would be
most uneasy at Pontivy if she realized before dawn that Héloïse had not returned
...

It was really very beautiful in Notre Dame by night; she had never suspected how strange and solemn the little
church could be when the moon shone fitfully through the south windows, now bright and clear, now blotted
out by sweeping clouds
...
How still it was! Only a soft low murmur without of
the restless limbs of the trees, and of the creeping sea
...

She was drifting off into the last delicious moment of vanishing consciousness, when she suddenly came fully
awake, with a shock that made every nerve tingle
...
And again! A footstep dragging and
uncertain, stealthy and cautious, but an unmistakable step, away in the blackest shadow at the end of the
church
...

Again the footstep, and again,--slow, measured, one after another at intervals of perhaps half a minute,
growing a little louder each time, a little nearer
...

Unconsciously she moved, as under a magician's spell, down to the choir-rail, straining her eyes to pierce the
thick night
...
Then a second bar, then a third, and a fourth, and
for a moment Héloïse could have cried out with relief, for nothing broke the lines of light,--no figure, no
shadow
...
The girl stared breathless, the moonlight falling on her as she stood rigid
against the low parapet
...
From the dead face stared mad eyes that gleamed like the eyes of a cat, fixed
on hers with insane persistence, holding her, fascinating her as a cat fascinates a bird
...
And the moon was going out; the shadows swept one by one over the windows; she stared at the
moonlit face for a last fascinated glance--Mother of God! it was---- The shadow swept over them, and now
only remained the blazing eyes and the dim outline of a form that crouched waveringly before her as a cat
crouches, drawing its vibrating body together for the spring that blots out the life of the victim
...

"Jean, stop!"
The thing crouched before her paused, chattering softly to itself; then it articulated dryly, and with all the

Black Spirits and White, by Ralph Adams Cram

35

trouble of a learning child, the one word, "Chantez!"
Without a thought, Héloïse sang; it was the first thing that she remembered, an old Provençal song that
d'Yriex had always loved
...
As the song died away,
came again that awful tremor, indicative of the coming death-spring, and again she sang,--this time the old
Pange lingua, its sonorous Latin sounding in the deserted church like the voice of dead centuries
...
It mattered little what she
sang
...
She could
hear no sound of her song; her body was numb, her mouth parched, her lips cracked and bleeding; she felt the
drops of blood fall from her chin
...

If only she could continue until dawn! It must be dawn so soon! The windows were growing gray, the rain
lashed outside, she could distinguish the features of the horror before her; but the night of death was growing
with the coming day, blackness swept down upon her; she could sing no more, her tortured lips made one last
effort to form the words, "Mother of God, save me!" and night and death came down like a crushing wave
...
The maniac turned in the very act of leaping on his victim, and sprang for
the two men, who stopped in dumb amazement
...
It would have
gone ill even with him,--for no one can stand against the bestial fury of a man in whom reason is dead,--had
not some sudden impulse seized the maniac, who pitched the priest aside with a single movement, and,
leaping through the door, vanished forever
...

The colony at Pontivy was blotted out by the dreary tragedy, and Notre Dame des Eaux sank once more into
silence and solitude
...

THE DEAD VALLEY
...

I have a friend, Olof Ehrensvärd, a Swede by birth, who yet, by reason of a strange and melancholy mischance
of his early boyhood, has thrown his lot with that of the New World
...
In the winter evenings we play chess together, he
and I, and after some close, fierce battle has been fought to a finish--usually with my own defeat--we fill our
pipes again, and Ehrensvärd tells me stories of the far, half-remembered days in the fatherland, before he went
to sea: stories that grow very strange and incredible as the night deepens and the fire falls together, but stories
that, nevertheless, I fully believe
...
Yet, as best

Black Spirits and White, by Ralph Adams Cram

36

I can remember it, here it is
...
I must have been about twelve years old, and Nils Sjöberg, whose father's
estate joined ours, was a few months younger
...

"Once a week it was market day in Engelholm, and Nils and I went always there to see the strange sights that
the market gathered from all the surrounding country
...
He
was a round, woolly puppy, so funny that Nils and I sat down on the ground and laughed at him, until he came
and played with us in so jolly a way that we felt that there was only one really desirable thing in life, and that
was the little dog of the old man from across the hills
...
He gave us his word, and we ran home very fast and implored our
mothers to give us money for the little dog
...
Suppose the puppy should be sold! The
thought frightened us so that we begged and implored that we might be allowed to go over the hills to
Hallsberg where the old man lived, and get the little dog ourselves, and at last they told us we might go
...

"Soon after sunrise we were on our way, after having received minute instructions as to just what we should
do in all possible and impossible circumstances, and finally a repeated injunction that we should start for
home at the same hour the next day, so that we might get safely back before nightfall
...
Back of Engelholm lay
a long valley, from which rose the low mountains, and we had to cross this, and then follow the road along the
side of the hills for three or four miles, before a narrow path branched off to the left, leading up through the
pass
...

"Why we did not leave early on the following day, I can't quite remember; at all events, I know we stopped at
a shooting range just outside of the town, where most attractive pasteboard pigs were sliding slowly through
painted foliage, serving so as beautiful marks
...

"Therefore we hurried as fast as possible up the mountain side, while the blue dusk closed in about us, and the
light died in the purple sky
...
Latterly, however, a curious oppression came on us; we did not speak or even whistle, while
the dog fell behind, following us with hesitation in every muscle
...
Instinctively we halted to listen
...
I
could hear the blood beat through my veins; and the crushing of the grass under our feet as we advanced with
hesitating steps sounded like the falling of trees
...
The atmosphere seemed to lie upon the body like the weight of sea on a
diver who has ventured too far into its awful depths
...
This was silence in the absolute, and it crushed the mind while it intensified
the senses, bringing down the awful weight of inextinguishable fear
...
And the poor little dog we were leading justified our
terror
...
He lay close on the ground, moaning
feebly, and dragging himself painfully and slowly closer to Nils's feet
...

"In the depth of the silence came a cry, beginning as a low, sorrowful moan, rising to a tremulous shriek,
culminating in a yell that seemed to tear the night in sunder and rend the world as by a cataclysm
...

"A glance at Nils dispelled this thought in a flash
...
Without a word we fled, the panic of fear giving us strength, and together, the little dog caught
close in Nils's arms, we sped down the side of the cursed mountains,--anywhere, goal was of no account: we
had but one impulse--to get away from that place
...

"How long we ran thus, I have no idea, but by and by the forest fell behind, and we found ourselves among
the foothills, and fell exhausted on the dry short grass, panting like tired dogs
...
We looked in vain for a familiar sign
...

"As I remember, we did not speak to each other once: the terror was too heavy on us for that, but by and by
we rose simultaneously and started out across the hills
...
Still carrying the helpless dog,
Nils pressed on through the hills, and I followed close behind
...
We climbed it wearily, reached the top, and found ourselves gazing down into a
great, smooth valley, filled half way to the brim with--what?
"As far as the eye could see stretched a level plain of ashy white, faintly phosphorescent, a sea of velvet fog
that lay like motionless water, or rather like a floor of alabaster, so dense did it appear, so seemingly capable
of sustaining weight
...
Yet through that mist we must go! there
seemed no other way home, and, shattered with abject fear, mad with the one desire to get back, we started
down the slope to where the sea of milky mist ceased, sharp and distinct around the stems of the rough grass
...
A chill as of death struck through me, stopping my heart, and I threw
myself backward on the slope
...
The stars began to grow dim as thick vapor swept across them, and in
the growing dark I saw a great, watery moon lift itself slowly above the palpitating sea, vast and vague in the
gathering mist
...

"It was a race for life; that we knew
...
The last thing I remember was hearing a strange voice, that of Nils, but
horribly changed, stammer brokenly, 'The dog is dead!' and then the whole world turned around twice, slowly
and resistlessly, and consciousness went out with a crash
...
I could not think very well at first, but as I slowly grew strong again, vague flashes of
recollection began to come to me, and little by little the whole sequence of events of that awful night in the
Dead Valley came back
...
I tried to speak of the dread
things that had happened to me, but I saw at once that no one looked on them save as the hauntings of a dying
frenzy, and so I closed my mouth and kept my own counsel
...
My mother told me that he also had been ill with a strange
fever, but that he was now quite well again
...
I shall never forget the shock that struck me down on my pillow
when the boy denied everything: denied having gone with me, ever having heard the cry, having seen the
valley, or feeling the deadly chill of the ghostly fog
...

"My weakened brain was in a turmoil
...

"It was some weeks before I was really well enough to go, but finally, late in September, I chose a bright,
warm, still day, the last smile of the dying summer, and started early in the morning along the path that led to
Hallsberg
...
Presently I saw it to the right, a little distance ahead
...
Nevertheless, I turned sharply to the right, at the base of the tree, into a
narrow path that led through a dense thicket
...
A swarm of flies sung into
the air around me, and looking down I saw the matted fleece, with the poor little bones thrusting through, of
the dog we had bought in Hallsberg
...
Pride
and the desire for adventure urged me on, however, and I pressed into the close thicket that barred my way
...
The land rose slowly, and rising grew clearer, until
at last I came out on a great slope of hill, unbroken by trees or shrubs, very like my memory of that rise of
land we had topped in order that we might find the dead valley and the icy fog
...

Surely there was no danger, not until nightfall at least; so I began to whistle, and with a rush mounted the last
crest of brown hill
...
On all
sides the grass crept over the brink of the encircling hills, dusty green on the crests, then fading into ashy
brown, and so to a deadly white, this last color forming a thin ring, running in a long line around the slope
...
Bare, brown, hard earth, glittering with grains of alkali, but otherwise dead and barren
...

"In the midst of the basin, perhaps a mile and a half away, the level expanse was broken by a great dead tree,
rising leafless and gaunt into the air
...
Every particle of fear seemed to have left me, and even the valley itself did not look so very
terrifying
...
No bee or butterfly hovered through the air, no insects leaped or
crept over the dull earth
...

"As I drew near the skeleton tree, I noticed the glint of sunlight on a kind of white mound around its roots, and
I wondered curiously
...

"All around the roots and barkless trunk was heaped a wilderness of little bones
...
Here and there a larger bone appeared,--the
thigh of a sheep, the hoofs of a horse, and to one side, grinning slowly, a human skull
...
I looked up and saw a great falcon turning and sailing downward just over the tree
...

"Horror struck me, and I rushed for home, my brain whirling, a strange numbness growing in me
...
At last I glanced up
...
Close before me
was the dead tree with its pile of bones
...

"I stood dazed and frozen
...
In the east the dark was

Black Spirits and White, by Ralph Adams Cram

40

growing fast
...
I could hardly drag them over the barren earth
...

I looked down
...
The western hills halved the copper
sun
...
I knew that, and with every
remaining atom of will I staggered towards the red west through the writhing mist that crept clammily around
my ankles, retarding my steps
...
The
silence pursued me like dumb ghosts, the still air held my breath, the hellish fog caught at my feet like cold
hands
...
As I crawled on my hands and knees up the brown slope, I heard,
far away and high in the air, the cry that already had almost bereft me of reason
...
I glanced behind
...
The sky was gold under the setting sun, but below was the ashy gray of death
...
The sunset opened before me, the
night closed behind, and as I crawled home weak and tired, darkness shut down on the Dead Valley
...

There seem to be certain well-defined roots existing in all countries, from which spring the current legends of
the supernatural; and therefore for the germs of the stories in this book the Author claims no originality
...
If the Author has succeeded
in clothing one or two of these norms in some slightly new vesture, he is more than content
...

THE END
...

Concerning the Books of Stone & Kimball
1895-1896
[Illustration]
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Black Spirits and White, by Ralph Adams Cram

41

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Black Spirits and White, by Ralph Adams Cram

42

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Black Spirits and White, by Ralph Adams Cram

43

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