THE PLAGUE IN MY CHAMBER.—THE MIDNIGHT SCENE ON THE ALTENBERG.
The Count of Nideck was in a dying condition. All that art might accomplish I had tried without avail, and at that moment, when life and death were struggling for the mastery, I was compelled to stand idly by and watch the sands of Time's hour-glass run out. Towards midnight, the Count seemed almost gone; his pulse beat feebly, and at times seemed to stop. Sometimes I thought the end was but the question of a few moments. At length, worn out with exhaustion and anxiety, I bid the weeping Sperver remain with his master while I repaired to the Tower to snatch a few moments' sleep.
A bright fire was burning in my chamber. I threw myself on the bed without removing my clothes, and soon fell into a heavy, troubled slumber. I slept thus, with my face turned towards the fire, whose rays danced upon the polished flagstones. After an hour, the fire suddenly started up, and as it often happens, the flame, rising and falling momentarily, beat upon the walls its great red wings and tired my eyelids. Lost in a vague slumber, I half opened my eyes to see whence came these alternate lights and shadows, when I was brought wide awake by an appalling sight.
"I RAISED MYSELF ON MY ELBOW AND STARED FEARFULLY IN THE DIRECTION."
At the further end of the hearth, hardly revealed by the light of a few glowing embers, a dark profile was dimly visible,—the profile of the Black Plague. At first, I thought it an hallucination, the natural offspring of my feverish thoughts. I raised myself on my elbow, and stared fearfully in the direction, real or fancied, of the image. It was she indeed! Calm and motionless she sat, her hands clasped about her knees, just as I had seen her in the snow, with her long, thin neck, sharp, hooked nose, and thin lips tightly closed,—and she was warming herself before the fire.
I was horrified. How could the creature have got into my room? How could she have climbed the Tower, beneath which precipices yawned on every side? Everything that Sperver had told me concerning her mysterious power seemed no whit exaggerated. The vision of Lieverlé growling against the wall passed before me like a flash. I huddled close in the alcove, hardly daring to breathe, and watching this immovable silhouette as a mouse watches a cat from the bottom of its hole. The old woman stirred no more than the chimney-breast cut in the solid rock, and her lips moved as she mumbled inarticulate words.
My heart beat painfully fast, and my fear increased from moment to moment, as I gazed on the motionless figure amid the perfect silence. This lasted perhaps a quarter of an hour, when the fire catching a pine splinter, the flame leaped up and a few rays penetrated to the end of the room. This flash sufficed to show me the aged woman dressed in an old gown of purple brocade that shimmered violet and red in different lights, with a heavy bracelet on her left wrist and a gold arrow stuck through her thick, gray hair, which was coiled up on the back of her head. It was like an apparition of past ages.
Still, the Plague could have no hostile designs upon me, or she would have profited by my slumber to execute them. This thought was beginning to reassure me, when she suddenly got up and moved slowly towards my bed, holding in her hand a torch which she had just lighted at the fire. I now observed that her eyes were fixed and haggard. I made an effort to rise and cry out, but not a muscle of my body would obey my will, not a sound passed my lips, and the old witch, bending over me between the parted curtains, fixed her eyes on me with a strange smile. I tried to spring upon her and cry for help, but her glance paralyzed me as the snake's look charms the tiny bird. During this dumb contemplation, each second seemed to me an eternity. What was she about to do? I was prepared for anything. Suddenly she turned her head, listened, and then crossing the room with a rapid step, she opened the door. At last I had recovered a little courage; an effort of the will brought me to my feet, as if acted upon by an invisible spring, and I followed on the heels of the old woman, who with one hand was holding her torch above her head, and with the other kept the hall-door wide open.
I was about to seize her by the hair when, at the end of the long gallery, beneath the oval archway that opened upon the ramparts, I saw—the Count of Nideck! The Count of Nideck, whom I thought dying, clad in a huge wolf-skin, with its upper jaw projecting like a visor over his eyebrows, the claws resting on his shoulders, and the tail dragging behind him over the flagstones. He wore heavy boots, a silver clasp fastened the wolf-skin at his throat, and his expression, except for the dull, icy look in his eyes, bespoke the strong man born to command,—the master.
In the presence of such a personage my ideas became vague and confused. Flight was impossible. I had presence of mind enough left, however, to throw myself into an embrasure of the window.
The Count entered the chamber and fixed upon the old woman a rigid stare. They held a whispered conversation, of which I was able to hear nothing, but their gestures were full of meaning. The old hag pointed to the bed. They moved to the fireplace on tiptoe, and there in the shadow of the triforium the Black Plague unrolled a large bundle, grinning hideously meanwhile. Hardly had the Count caught sight of the sack, before he sprang to the bedside and disappeared between the curtains, which stirred in a strange fashion. I could only see one leg still resting on the floor, and the wolf's tail moving back and forth. They seemed to be enacting a mock murder scene.
Nothing could have been more horrible than this mute representation of such an act. The old creature approached the bed in turn, and spread out her sack on the floor beside it. The curtains still moved, and their shadows danced upon the walls. Then a great movement succeeded. The old creature and the Count together crowded the bed clothes into the sack, stamping them down with the haste of a dog scratching a hole in the earth, and the Lord of Nideck, throwing the shapeless bundle over his shoulder, started for the door. A sheet dragged behind him, and the old woman followed him with her torch. They crossed the court.
My knees trembled and almost refused to support my weight; a prayer rose involuntarily to my lips. Two minutes had not passed before I was on their footsteps, dragged along by a subtle, irresistible curiosity. I crossed the court at a run, and was about to enter the Gothic Tower, when I perceived a deep, narrow pit at my feet, and into its depths wound a staircase, down which I saw the hag's torch turning, turning about the stone baluster like a firefly, until it became lost in the distance.
I descended in turn the first steps of the staircase, guiding my course by the distant glimmer, when it suddenly disappeared. The old woman and the Count had reached the bottom of the precipice. Soon the steps ceased. I looked around me and discovered on my left hand a ray of moonlight that found its way into the pit through a low door, across the nettles and brambles laden with hoar-frost. I put aside these bushes, clearing away the snow with my feet, and found myself at the foot of Hugh's donjon-tower. Who would have supposed that such a hole led up to the Castle? Who had shown it to the old woman? I did not stop to answer these questions. The vast plain lay before me, flooded with a light almost equal to that of day. To the right stretched the dark extent of the Black Forest, with its perpendicular rocks, its gorges and ravines. The night air was still and bitter cold; I felt exalted by the keen atmosphere. My first glance was to discover the direction which the old woman and the Count had taken. Their tall, dark forms were moving slowly up the mountain side some two hundred paces in advance of me, and stood out against the background of the heavens studded with innumerable stars. I came close up to them at the bottom of the next ravine. The Count moved slowly on, the winding-sheet still dragging behind him. His attitude and movements, like those of his companion, were automatic in their precision.
On they went, some twenty paces before me, following the hollow road to the Altenberg, now in the shadow, now in the full light, for the moon was shining with surprising brilliancy. A few clouds followed her, and seemed as if stretching out their great arms to seize her; but she evaded them, and her rays, cold as a blade of steel, cut me to the heart.
I would gladly have turned back, but an invisible power impelled me to follow this funeral procession. Even to this hour, I still see in fancy the path that winds beneath the colonnades of the Black Forest. I hear the snow crunching beneath my step, and the fallen leaves rustling in the gently stirring north wind. I still see myself following those two silent figures, and I try in vain to explain to myself the mysterious impulse which caused me to dog their footsteps.
At last we reached the forest and proceeded amongst the naked beeches, the dark shadows of whose higher boughs intersected the lower branches and traced their outlines on the snow-covered path. Sometimes I fancied I heard some one behind me; I would turn quickly around, but could see nothing.
We gained at length the line of crags on the summit of the Altenberg, behind which the torrent of the Schneeberg rushes earlier in the year, but now there was only a mere thread of water slowly trickling beneath its thick covering of ice. The vast solitude no longer had its murmurs, its warblings, and its thunder; its oppressive stillness inspired fear. The Count and the old woman found a gap in the rocks, up which they mounted quickly and apparently without effort, while I was obliged to scramble up, clinging to the bushes in order to follow them.
Scarcely had I reached the top of the rock which forms a corner of the precipice, when I found myself within three yards of them, and before me I saw a bottomless abyss. On the left hung the falls of the Schneeberg in sheets of ice. This resemblance to a wave leaping into the precipice, and bearing with it the neighboring trees, sucking up the underbrush and cleaving the ivys that follow on its crest without becoming uprooted; this appearance of mighty movement in the immovableness of death, and those two silent forms proceeding with their sinister work, all inspired me with indescribable terror. Nature herself seemed to share in my feelings.
The Count had laid down his burden; the old woman and he swung it for a moment above the precipice, then the long shroud floated over the edge, and the actors in this awful drama bent over to watch it as it fell. The long, white sheet, swelling upwards as it met the rising breath of the chasm, and then falling slowly and disappearing from sight, still floats before my eyes. I see it sinking like the swan shot far up in the sky, her wings spread out and head thrown back, falling to earth in the agony of death.
At this moment a cloud which had long been approaching the moon slowly veiled her in its bluish folds; complete darkness succeeded. After a little the moon appeared again through a rift in the clouds, and I saw the old woman seize the Count's hand and drag him along with dangerous speed down the mountain side. Then it became dark again, and I dared not risk a step lest I should fall headlong into an abyss. Once more the clouds parted. I looked about me and found myself alone on the high rock, knee-deep in snow. Seized with horror, I made my way cautiously down the steep declivity, and once on the plain I started to run towards the Castle, as much stunned as if I had shared in some dark crime.
As for the Lord of Nideck and the old woman, I had lost sight of them.