The Gothic Terror MEGAPACK ™: 17 Classic Tales Page 33

  The light was soft and clear in the room. There stood Gabriel Ockram by his father’s bedside, and there knelt Evelyn Warburton, her hair lying like a golden shadow down her shoulder, and her hands clasped nervously together. Opposite Gabriel, a nurse was trying to make Sir Hugh drink. But he would not, and though his lips were parted, his teeth were set. He was very, very thin and yellow now, and his eyes caught the light sideways and were as yellow coals.

  “Do not torment him,” said Nurse Macdonald to the woman who held the cup. “Let me speak to him, for his hour is come.”

  “Let her speak to him,” said Gabriel in a dull voice.

  So the ancient nurse leaned to the pillow and laid the feather-weight of her withered hand, that was like a brown moth, upon Sir Hugh’s yellow fingers, and she spoke to him earnestly, while only Gabriel and Evelyn were left in the room to hear.

  “Hugh Ockram,” she said, “this is the end of your life; and as I saw you born, and saw your father born before you, I come to see you die. Hugh Ockram, will you tell me the truth?”

  The dying man recognized the little faraway voice he had known all his life and he very slowly turned his yellow face to Nurse Macdonald; but he said nothing. Then she spoke again.

  “Hugh Ockram, you will never see the daylight again. Will you tell the truth?”

  His toad-like eyes were not yet dull. They fastened themselves on her face.

  “What do you want of me?” he asked, and each word struck hollow upon the last. “I have no secrets. I have lived a good life.”

  Nurse Macdonald laughed—a tiny, cracked laugh, that made her old head bob and tremble a little, as if her neck were on a steel spring. But Sir Hugh’s eyes grew red, and his pale lips began to twist.

  “Let me die in peace,” he said slowly.

  But Nurse Macdonald shook her head, and her brown, moth-like hand left his and fluttered to his forehead.

  “By the mother that bore you and died of grief for the sins you did, tell me the truth!”

  Sir Hugh’s lips tightened on his discoloured teeth.

  “Not on earth,” he answered slowly.

  “By the wife who bore your son and died heartbroken, tell me the truth!”

  “Neither to you in life, nor to her in eternal death.”

  His lips writhed, as if the words were coals between them, and a great drop of sweat rolled across the parchment of his forehead. Gabriel Ockram bit his hand as he watched his father die. But Nurse Macdonald spoke a third time.

  “By the woman whom you betrayed, and who waits for you this night, Hugh Ockram, tell me the truth!”

  “It is too late. Let me die in peace.”

  His writhing lips began to smile across his yellow teeth, and his toad eyes glowed like evil jewels in his head.

  “There is time,” said the ancient woman. “Tell me the name of Evelyn Warburton’s father. Then I will let you die in peace.”

  Evelyn started back, kneeling as she was, and stared at Nurse Macdonald, and then at her uncle.

  “The name of Evelyn’s father?” he repeated slowly, while the awful smile spread upon his dying face.

  The light was growing strangely dim in the great room. As Evelyn looked, Nurse Macdonald’s crooked shadow on the wall grew gigantic. Sir Hugh’s breath came thick, rattling in his throat, as death crept in like a snake and choked it back. Evelyn prayed aloud, high and clear.

  Then something rapped at the window, and she felt her hair rise upon her head in a cool breeze, as she looked around in spite of herself. And when she saw her own white face looking in at the window, her own eyes staring at her through the glass, wide and fearful, and her own hair streaming against the pane, and her own lips dashed with blood, she rose slowly from the floor and stood rigid for one moment before she screamed once and fell straight back into Gabriel’s arms. But the shriek that answered hers was the fear-shriek of a tormented corpse out of which the soul cannot pass for shame of deadly sins, though the devils fight in it with corruption, each for their due share.

  Sir Hugh Ockram sat upright in his deathbed, and saw and cried aloud:

  “Evelyn!” His harsh voice broke and rattled in his chest as he sank down. But still Nurse Macdonald tortured him, for there was a little life left in him still.

  “You have seen the mother as she waits for you, Hugh Ockram. Who was this girl Evelyn’s father? What was his name?”

  For the last time the dreadful smile came upon the twisted lips, very slowly, very surely now, and the toad eyes glared red, and the parchment face glowed a little in the flickering light; for the last time words came.

  “They know it in hell.”

  Then the glowing eyes went out quickly, the yellow face turned waxen pale, and a great shiver ran through the thin body as Hugh Ockram died.

  But in death he still smiled, for he knew his secret and kept it still, on the other side, and he would take it with him, to lie with him forever in the north vault of the chapel where the Ockrams lie uncoffined in their shrouds—all but one. Though he was dead, he smiled, for he had kept his treasure of evil truth to the end, and there was none left to tell the name he had spoken, but there was all the evil he had not undone left to bear fruit.

  As they watched—Nurse Macdonald and Gabriel, who held Evelyn still unconscious in his arms while he looked at the father—they felt the dead smile crawling along their own lips—the ancient crone and the youth with the angel’s face. Then they shivered a little, and both looked at Evelyn as she lay with her head on his shoulder, and, though she was very beautiful, the same sickening smile was twisting her young mouth too, and it was like the foreshadowing of a great evil that they could not understand.

  By and by they carried Evelyn out, and she opened her eyes and the smile was gone. From far away in the great house the sound of weeping and crooning came up the stairs and echoed along the dismal corridors, for the women had begun to mourn the dead master, after the Irish fashion, and the hall had echoes of its own all that night, like the far-off wail of the banshee among forest trees.

  When the time was come they took Sir Hugh in his winding-sheet on a trestle bier, and bore him to the chapel and through the iron door and down the long descent to the north vault, with tapers, to lay him by his father. And two men went in first to prepare the place, and came back staggering like drunken men, and white, leaving their lights behind them.

  But Gabriel Ockram was not afraid, for he knew. When he went in alone he saw that the body of Sir Vernon Ockram leaning upright against the stone wall, and that its head lay on the ground nearby with the face turned up, and the dried leathern lips smiled horribly at the dried-up corpse, while the iron coffin, lined with black velvet, stood open on the floor.

  Then Gabriel took the thing in his hands—for it was very light, being quite dried by the air of the vault—and those who peeped in the door saw him lay it in the coffin again. They heard it rustle a little, as it touched the sides and the bottom, like a bundle of reeds. He also placed the head upon the shoulders and shut down the lid, which fell to with the snap of its rusty spring.

  After that they laid Sir Hugh beside his father, with the trestle bier on which they had brought him, and they went back to the chapel.

  But when they saw one another’s faces, master and men, they were all smiling with the dead smile of the corpse they had left in the vault, so that they could not bear to look at one another again until it had faded away.

  Chapter III

  Gabriel Ockram became Sir Gabriel, inheriting the baronetcy with the half-ruined fortune left by his father, and still Evelyn Warburton lived at Ockram Hall, in the south room that had been hers ever since she could remember anything. She could not go away, for there were no relatives to whom she could have gone, and, besides, there seemed to be no reason why she should not stay. The world would never trouble it
self to care what the Ockrams did on their Irish estates, and it was long since the Ockrams had asked anything of the world.

  So Sir Gabriel took his father’s place at the dark old table in the dining room, and Evelyn sat opposite to him, until such time as their mourning should be over, and they might be married at last. And meanwhile their lives went on as before, since Sir Hugh had been a hopeless invalid during the last year of his life, and they had seen him but once a day for a little while, spending most of their time together in a strangely perfect companionship.

  But though the late summer saddened into autumn, and autumn darkened into winter, and storm followed storm, and rain poured on rain through the short days and the long nights, yet Ockram Hall seemed less gloomy since Sir Hugh had been laid in the north vault beside his father. And at Christmastide Evelyn decked the great hall with holly and green boughs, and huge fires blazed on every hearth. The tenants were all bidden to a New Year’s dinner, and they ate and drank well, while Sir Gabriel sat at the head of the table. Evelyn came in when the port wine was brought, and the most respected of the tenants made a speech to propose health.

  It was long, he said, since there had been a Lady Ockram. Sir Gabriel shaded his eyes with his hand and looked down at the table, but a faint color came into Evelyn’s transparent cheeks. But, said the gray-haired farmer, it was longer still since there had been a Lady Ockram so fair as the next was to be, and he gave the health of Evelyn Warburton.

  Then the tenants all stood up and shouted for her, and Sir Gabriel stood up likewise, beside Evelyn. And when the men gave the last and loudest cheer of all, there was a voice not theirs, above them all, higher, fiercer, louder—a scream not earthly, shrieking for the bride of Ockram Hall. And the holly and the green boughs over the great chimney-piece shook and slowly waved as if a breeze were blowing over them. But the men turned very pale, and many of them set down their glasses, but others let them fall upon the floor for fear. And looking into one another’s faces, they saw that they were all smiling strangely, a dead smile, like dead Sir Hugh’s. One cried out words in Irish, and the fear of death was suddenly upon them all, so that they fled in panic, falling over one another like wild beasts in the burning forest, when the thick smoke runs along before the flame; and the tables were overturned, and drinking glasses and bottles were broken in heaps, and dark red wine crawled like blood upon the polished floor.

  Sir Gabriel and Evelyn were left standing alone at the head of the table before the wreck of their feast, not daring to turn to look at one another, for each knew that the other smiled. But Gabriel’s right arm held her and his left hand clasped her tight as they stared before them; and but for the shadows of her hair, one might not have told their two faces apart. They listened long, but the cry came not again, and the dead smile faded from their lips, while each remembered that Sir Hugh Ockram lay in the north vault, smiling in his winding sheet, in the dark, because he had died with his secret.

  So ended the tenants’ New Year’s dinner. But from that time on, Sir Gabriel grew more and more silent, and his face grew even paler and thinner than before. Often, without warning and without words, he would rise from his seat as if something moved him against his will. He would go out into the rain or the sunshine to the north side of the chapel, and sit on the stone bench, staring at the ground as if he could see through it, and through the vault below, and through the white winding-sheet in the dark, to the dead smile that would not die.

  Always when he went out in that way Evelyn came out presently and sat beside him. Once, too, as in summer, their beautiful faces came suddenly near, and their lids drooped, and their red lips were almost joined together. But as their eyes met, they grew wide and wild, so that the white showed in a ring all round the deep violet, and their teeth chattered, and their hands were like the hands of corpses, each in the other’s, for the terror of what was under their feet, and of what they knew but could not see.

  Once, also, Evelyn found Sir Gabriel in the chapel alone, standing before the iron door that led down to the place of death, and in his hand there was the key to the lock; but he had not put it into the lock. Evelyn drew him away, shivering, for she had also been driven in waking dreams to see that terrible thing again, and to find out whether it had changed since it had been lain there.

  “I’m going mad,” said Sir Gabriel, covering his eyes with his hand as he went with her. “I see it in my sleep, I see it when I am awake—it draws me to it, day and night—and unless I see it I shall die!”

  “I know,” answered Evelyn, “I know. It is as if threads were spun from it like a spider’s, drawing us down to it.” She was silent for a moment, and then she started violently and grasped his arm with a man’s strength, and almost screamed the words she spoke. “But we must not go there!” she cried. “We must not go!”

  Sir Gabriel’s eyes were half shut, and he was not moved by the agony of her face.

  “I shall die, unless I see it again,” he said, in a quiet voice not like his own. And all that day and that evening he scarcely spoke, thinking of it, always thinking, while Evelyn Warburton quivered from head to foot with a terror she had never known.

  She went alone, on a grey winter morning, to Nurse Macdonald’s room in the tower, and sat down beside the great leathern easy-chair, laying her thin white hand upon the withered fingers.

  “Nurse,” she said, “what was it that Uncle Hugh should have told you, that night before he died? It must have been an awful secret—and yet, though you asked him, I feel somehow that you know it, and that you know why he used to smile so dreadfully.”

  The old woman’s head moved slowly from side to side.

  “I only guess—I shall never know,” she answered slowly in her cracked little voice.

  “But what do you guess? Who am I? Why did you ask who my father was? You know I am Colonel Warburton’s daughter, and my mother was Lady Ockram’s sister, so that Gabriel and I are cousins. My father was killed in Afghanistan. What secret can there be?”

  “I do not know. I can only guess.”

  “Guess what?” asked Evelyn imploringly, and pressing the soft withered hands, as she leaned forward. But Nurse Macdonald’s wrinkled lids dropped suddenly over her strange blue eyes, and her lips shook a little with her breath, as if she were asleep.

  Evelyn waited. By the fire the Irish maid was knitting fast, and the needles clicked like three or four clocks ticking against each other. And the real clock on the wall solemnly ticked alone, checking off the seconds of the woman who was a hundred years old, and had not many days left. Outside the ivy branch beat the window in the wintry blast, as it had beaten against the glass a hundred years ago.

  Then as Evelyn sat there she felt again the waking of a horrible desire—the sickening wish to go down, down to the thing in the north vault, and to open the winding-sheet, and see whether it had changed; and she held Nurse Macdonald’s hands as if to keep herself in her place and fight against the appalling attraction of the evil dead.

  But the old cat that kept Nurse Macdonald’s feet warm, lying always on the bag footstool, got up and stretched itself, and looked up into Evelyn’s eyes, while its back arched, and its tail thickened and bristled, and its ugly pink lips drew back in a devilish grin, showing its sharp teeth. Evelyn stared at it, half fascinated by its ugliness. Then the creature suddenly put out one paw with all its claws spread, and spat at the girl, and all at once the grinning cat was like the smiling corpse far down below, so that Evelyn shivered down to her small feet, and covered her face with her free hand, lest Nurse Macdonald should wake and see the dead smile there, for she could feel it.

  The old woman had already opened her eyes again, and she touched her cat with the end of her crutch-stick, whereupon its back went down and its tail shrunk, and it sidled back to its place on the bag footstool. But its yellow eyes looked up sideways at Evelyn, between the slits of its lids.
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br />   “What is it that you guess, nurse?” asked the young girl again.

  “A bad thing, a wicked thing. But I dare not tell you, lest it might not be true, and the very thought should blast your life. For if I guess right, he meant that you should not know, and that you two should marry, and pay for his old sin with your souls.”

  “He used to tell us that we ought not to marry—”

  “Yes—he told you that, perhaps—but it was as if a man put poisoned meat before a starving beast, and said ‘do not eat,’ but never raised his hand to take the meat away. And if he told you that you should not marry, it was because he hoped you would; for of all men living or dead, Hugh Ockram was the falsest man that ever told a cowardly lie, and the cruelest that ever hurt a weak woman, and the worst that ever loved a sin.”

  “But Gabriel and I love each other,” said Evelyn very sadly.

  Nurse Macdonald’s old eyes looked far away, at sights seen long ago, and that rose in the grey winter air amid the mists of an ancient youth.

  “If you love, you can die together,” she said, very slowly. “Why should you live, if it is true? I am a hundred years old. What has life given me? The beginning is fire; the end is a heap of ashes; and between the end and the beginning lies all the pain of the world. Let me sleep, since I cannot die.”

  Then the old woman’s eyes closed again, and her head sank a little lower upon her breast.

  So Evelyn went away and left her asleep, with the cat asleep on the bag footstool; and the young girl tried to forget Nurse Macdonald’s words, but she could not, for she heard them over and over again in the wind, and behind her on the stairs. And as she grew sick with fear of the frightful unknown evil to which her soul was bound, she felt a bodily something pressing her, and pushing her, and forcing her on, and from the other side she felt threads that drew her mysteriously: and when she shut her eyes, she saw in the chapel behind the altar, the low iron door through which she must pass to go to the thing.