The Gothic Terror MEGAPACK ™: 17 Classic Tales Page 16

  This was very poor logic, but it was very good as a ‘scene’. Lloyd put his arm around his wife’s waist and tried to kiss her, but she shook him off with magnificent scorn. Poor fellow! he had coveted a ‘devilish fine woman’, and he had got one. Her scorn was intolerable. He walked away with his ears tingling—irresolute, distracted. Before him was his secretary, and in it the sacred key which with his own hand he had turned in the triple lock. He marched up and opened it, and took the key from a secret drawer, wrapped in a little packet which he had sealed with his own honest bit of blazonry. Je garde, said the motto—‘I keep’. But he was ashamed to put it back. He flung it upon the table beside his wife.

  “Put it back!” she cried. “I want it not. I hate it!”

  “I wash my hands of it,” cried her husband. “God forgive me!”

  Mrs Lloyd gave an indignant shrug of her shoulders, and swept out of the room, while the young man retreated by another door. Ten minutes later Mrs Lloyd returned, and found the room occupied by her little step-daughter and the nursery-maid. The key was not on the table. She glanced at the child. Her little niece was perched on a chair, with the packet in her hands. She had broken the seal with her own small fingers. Mrs Lloyd hastily took possession of the key.

  At the habitual supper-hour Arthur Lloyd came back from his counting-room. It was the month of June, and supper was served by daylight. The meal was placed on the table, but Mrs Lloyd failed to make her appearance. The servant whom his master sent to call her came back with the assurance that her room was empty, and that the women informed him that she had not been seen since dinner. They had, in truth, observed her to have been in tears, and, supposing her to be shut up in her chamber, had not disturbed her. Her husband called her name in various parts of the house, but without response. At last it occurred to him that he might find her by taking the way to the attic. The thought gave him a strange feeling of discomfort, and he bade his servants remain behind, wishing no witness in his quest. He reached the foot of the staircase leading to the topmost flat, and stood with his hand on the banisters, pronouncing his wife’s name. His voice trembled. He called again louder and more firmly. The only sound which disturbed the absolute silence was a faint echo of his own tones, repeating his question under the great eaves. He nevertheless felt irresistibly moved to ascend the staircase. It opened upon a wide hall, lined with wooden closets, and terminating in a window which looked westward, and admitted the last rays of the sun. Before the window stood the great chest. Before the chest, on her knees, the young man saw with amazement and horror the figure of his wife. In an instant he crossed the interval between them, bereft of utterance. The lid of the chest stood open, exposing, amid their perfumed napkins, its treasure of stuffs and jewels. Rosalind had fallen backward from a kneeling posture, with one hand supporting her on the floor and the other pressed to her heart. On her limbs was the stiffness of death, and on her face, in the fading light of the sun, the terror of something more than death. Her lips were parted in entreaty, in dismay, in agony; and on her blanched brow and cheeks there glowed the marks of ten hideous wounds from two vengeful ghostly hands.

  JEAN-AH POQUELIN, by John Washington Cable

  In the first decade of the present century, when the newly established American Government was the most hateful thing in Louisiana—when the Creoles were still kicking at such vile innovations as the trial by jury, American dances, anti-smuggling laws, and the printing of the Governor’s proclamation in English—when the Anglo-American flood that was presently to burst in a crevasse of immigration upon the delta had thus far been felt only as slippery seepage which made the Creole tremble for his footing—there stood, a short distance above what is now Canal Street, and considerably back from the line of villas which fringed the river-bank on Tchoupitoulas Road, an old colonial plantation-house half in ruin.

  It stood aloof from civilization, the tracts that had once been its indigo fields given over to their first noxious wildness, and grown up into one of the horridest marshes within a circuit of fifty miles.

  The house was of heavy cypress, lifted up on pillars, grim, solid, and spiritless, its massive build a strong reminder of days still earlier, when every man had been his own peace officer and the insurrection of the blacks a daily contingency. Its dark, weatherbeaten roof and sides were hoisted up above the jungly plain in a distracted way, like a gigantic ammunition-wagon stuck in the mud and abandoned by some retreating army. Around it was a dense growth of low water willows, with half a hundred sorts of thorny or fetid bushes, savage strangers alike to the “language of flowers” and to the botanist’s Greek. They were hung with countless strands of discolored and prickly smilax, and the impassable mud below bristled with chevaux de frise of the dwarf palmetto. Two lone forest-trees, dead cypresses, stood in the centre of the marsh, dotted with roosting vultures. The shallow strips of water were hid by myriads of aquatic plants, under whose coarse and spiritless flowers, could one have seen it, was a harbor of reptiles, great and small, to make one shudder to the end of his days.

  The house was on a slightly raised spot, the levee of a draining canal. The waters of this canal did not run; they crawled, and were full of big, ravening fish and alligators, that held it against all comers.

  Such was the home of old Jean Marie Poquelin, once an opulent indigo planter, standing high in the esteem of his small, proud circle of exclusively male acquaintances in the old city; now a hermit, alike shunned by and shunning all who had ever known him. “The last of his line,” said the gossips. His father lies under the floor of the St. Louis Cathedral, with the wife of his youth on one side, and the wife of his old age on the other. Old Jean visits the spot daily. His half-brother—alas! there was a mystery; no one knew what had become of the gentle, young half brother, more than thirty years his junior, whom once he seemed so fondly to love, but who, seven years ago, had disappeared suddenly, once for all, and left no clew of his fate.

  They had seemed to live so happily in each other’s love. No father, mother, wife to either, no kindred upon earth. The elder a bold, frank, impetuous, chivalric adventurer; the younger a gentle, studious, book-loving recluse; they lived upon the ancestral estate like mated birds, one always on the wing, the other always in the nest.

  There was no trait in Jean Marie Poquelin, said the old gossips, for which he was so well known among his few friends as his apparent fondness for his “little brother.” “Jacques said this,” and “Jacques said that;” he “would leave this or that, or any thing to Jacques,” for “Jacques was a scholar,” and “Jacques was good,” or “wise,” or “just,” or “far-sighted,” as the nature of the case required; and “he should ask Jacques as soon as he got home,” since Jacques was never elsewhere to be seen.

  It was between the roving character of the one brother, and the bookishness of the other, that the estate fell into decay. Jean Marie, generous gentleman, gambled the slaves away one by one, until none was left, man or woman, but one old African mute.

  The indigo-fields and vats of Louisiana had been generally abandoned as unremunerative. Certain enterprising men had substituted the culture of sugar; but while the recluse was too apathetic to take so active a course, the other saw larger, and, at time, equally respectable profits, first in smuggling, and later in the African slave-trade. What harm could he see in it? The whole people said it was vitally necessary, and to minister to a vital public necessity,—good enough, certainly, and so he laid up many a doubloon, that made him none the worse in the public regard.

  One day old Jean Marie was about to start upon a voyage that was to be longer, much longer, than any that he had yet made. Jacques had begged him hard for many days not to go, but he laughed him off, and finally said, kissing him:

  “Adieu, ’tit frere.”

  “No,” said Jacques, “I shall go with you.”

  They left the old hulk of a house in the sole care of the African mute, a
nd went away to the Guinea coast together.

  Two years after, old Poquelin came home without his vessel. He must have arrived at his house by night. No one saw him come. No one saw “his little brother;” rumor whispered that he, too, had returned, but he had never been seen again.

  A dark suspicion fell upon the old slave-trader. No matter that the few kept the many reminded of the tenderness that had ever marked his bearing to the missing man. The many shook their heads. “You know he has a quick and fearful temper;” and “why does he cover his loss with mystery?” “Grief would out with the truth.”

  “But,” said the charitable few, “look in his face; see that expression of true humanity.” The many did look in his face, and, as he looked in theirs, he read the silent question: “Where is thy brother Abel?” The few were silenced, his former friends died off, and the name of Jean Marie Poquelin became a symbol of witchery, devilish crime, and hideous nursery fictions.

  The man and his house were alike shunned. The snipe and duck hunters forsook the marsh, and the wood-cutters abandoned the canal. Sometimes the hardier boys who ventured out there snake-shooting heard a slow thumping of oar-locks on the canal. They would look at each other for a moment half in consternation, half in glee, then rush from their sport in wanton haste to assail with their gibes the unoffending, withered old man who, in rusty attire, sat in the stern of a skiff, rowed homeward by his white-headed African mute.

  “O Jean-ah Poquelin! O Jean-ah! Jean-ah Poquelin!”

  It was not necessary to utter more than that. No hint of wickedness, deformity, or any physical or moral demerit; merely the name and tone of mockery: “Oh, Jean-ah Poquelin!” and while they tumbled one over another in their needless haste to fly, he would rise carefully from his seat, while the aged mute, with downcast face, went on rowing, and rolling up his brown fist and extending it toward the urchins, would pour forth such an unholy broadside of French imprecation and invective as would all but craze them with delight.

  Among both blacks and whites the house was the object of a thousand superstitions. Every midnight they affirmed, the feu follet came out of the marsh and ran in and out of the rooms, flashing from window to window. The story of some lads, whose words in ordinary statements were worthless, was generally credited, that the night they camped in the woods, rather than pass the place after dark, they saw, about sunset, every window blood-red, and on each of the four chimneys an owl sitting, which turned his head three times round, and moaned and laughed with a human voice. There was a bottomless well, everybody professed to know, beneath the sill of the big front door under the rotten veranda; whoever set his foot upon that threshold disappeared forever in the depth below.

  What wonder the marsh grew as wild as Africa! Take all the Faubourg Ste. Marie, and half the ancient city, you would not find one graceless dare-devil reckless enough to pass within a hundred yards of the house after nightfall.

  * * * * *

  The alien races pouring into old New Orleans began to find the few streets named for the Bourbon princes too strait for them. The wheel of fortune, beginning to whirl, threw them off beyond the ancient corporation lines, and sowed civilization and even trade upon the lands of the Graviers and Girods. Fields became roads, roads streets. Everywhere the leveller was peering through his glass, rodsmen were whacking their way through willow-brakes and rose-hedges, and the sweating Irishmen tossed the blue clay up with their long-handled shovels.

  “Ha! that is all very well,” quoth the Jean-Baptistes, fueling the reproach of an enterprise that asked neither co-operation nor advice of them, “but wait till they come yonder to Jean Poquelin’s marsh; ha! ha! ha!” The supposed predicament so delighted them, that they put on a mock terror and whirled about in an assumed stampede, then caught their clasped hands between their knees in excess of mirth, and laughed till the tears ran; for whether the street-makers mired in the marsh, or contrived to cut through old “Jean-ah’s” property, either event would be joyful. Meantime a line of tiny rods, with bits of white paper in their split tops, gradually extended its way straight through the haunted ground, and across the canal diagonally.

  “We shall fill that ditch,” said the men in mud-boots, and brushed close along the chained and padlocked gate of the haunted mansion. Ah, Jean-ah Poquelin, those were not Creole boys, to be stampeded with a little hard swearing.

  He went to the Governor. That official scanned the odd figure with no slight interest. Jean Poquelin was of short, broad frame, with a bronzed leonine face. His brow was ample and deeply furrowed. His eye, large and black, was bold and open like that of a war-horse, and his jaws shut together with the firmness of iron. He was dressed in a suit of Attakapas cottonade, and his shirt unbuttoned and thrown back from the throat and bosom, sailor-wise, showed a herculean breast; hard and grizzled. There was no fierceness or defiance in his look, no harsh ungentleness, no symptom of his unlawful life or violent temper; but rather a peaceful and peaceable fearlessness. Across the whole face, not marked in one or another feature, but as it were laid softly upon the countenance like an almost imperceptible veil, was the imprint of some great grief. A careless eye might easily overlook it, but, once seen, there it hung—faint, but unmistakable.

  The Governor bowed.

  “Parlez-vous francais?” asked the figure.

  “I would rather talk English, if you can do so,” said the Governor.

  “My name, Jean Poquelin.”

  “How can I serve you, Mr. Poquelin?”

  “My ’ouse is yond’; dans le marais la-bas.”

  The Governor bowed.

  “Dat marais billong to me.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “To me; Jean Poquelin; I hown ’im meself.”

  “Well, sir?”

  “He don’t billong to you; I get him from me father.”

  “That is perfectly true, Mr. Poquelin, as far as I am aware.”

  “You want to make strit pass yond’?”

  “I do not know, sir; it is quite probable; but the city will indemnify you for any loss you may suffer—you will get paid, you understand.”

  “Strit can’t pass dare.”

  “You will have to see the municipal authorities about that, Mr. Poquelin.”

  A bitter smile came upon the old man’s face:

  “Pardon, Monsieur, you is not le Gouverneur?”

  “Yes.”

  “Mais, yes. You har le Gouverneur—yes. Veh-well. I come to you. I tell you, strit can’t pass at me ’ouse.”

  “But you will have to see—”

  “I come to you. You is le Gouverneur. I know not the new laws. I ham a Fr-r-rench-a-man! Fr-rench-a-man have something aller au contraire—he come at his Gouverneur. I come at you. If me not had been bought from me king like bossals in the hold time, ze king gof—France would-a-show Monsieur le Gouverneur to take care his men to make strit in right places. Mais, I know; we billong to Monsieur le President. I want you do somesin for me, eh?”

  “What is it?” asked the patient Governor.

  “I want you tell Monsieur le President, strit—can’t—pass—at—me—’ouse.”

  “Have a chair, Mr. Poquelin;” but the old man did not stir. The Governor took a quill and wrote a line to a city official, introducing Mr. Poquelin, and asking for him every possible courtesy. He handed it to him, instructing him where to present it.

  “Mr. Poquelin,” he said with a conciliatory smile, “tell me, is it your house that our Creole citizens tell such odd stories about?”

  The old man glared sternly upon the speaker, and with immovable features said:

  “You don’t see me trade some Guinea nigga’?”

  “Oh, no.”

  “You don’t see me make some smuggling”

  “No, sir; not at all.”

  “But, I am Jean Marie Poq
uelin. I mine me hown bizniss. Dat all right? Adieu.”

  He put his hat on and withdrew. By and by he stood, letter in hand, before the person to whom it was addressed. This person employed an interpreter.

  “He says,” said the interpreter to the officer, “he come to make you the fair warning how you muz not make the street pas’ at his ’ouse.”

  The officer remarked that “such impudence was refreshing;” but the experienced interpreter translated freely.

  “He says: ‘Why you don’t want?’” said the interpreter.

  The old slave-trader answered at some length.

  “He says,” said the interpreter, again turning to the officer, “the marass is a too unhealth’ for peopl’ to live.”

  “But we expect to drain his old marsh; it’s not going to be a marsh.”

  “Il dit—” The interpreter explained in French.

  The old man answered tersely.

  “He says the canal is a private,” said the interpreter.

  “Oh! that old ditch; that’s to be filled up. Tell the old man we’re going to fix him up nicely.”

  Translation being duly made, the man in power was amused to see a thunder-cloud gathering on the old man’s face.

  “Tell him,” he added, “by the time we finish, there’ll not be a ghost left in his shanty.”

  The interpreter began to translate, but—

  “J’ comprends, J’ comprends,” said the old man, with an impatient gesture, and burst forth, pouring curses upon the United States, the President, the Territory of Orleans, Congress, the Governor and all his subordinates, striding out of the apartment as he cursed, while the object of his maledictions roared with merriment and rammed the floor with his foot.