“I wish you would explain it to me,” replied Cristiano; “for I have been trying in vain to recall where I could have seen him; if we ever did meet, the circumstances must have been very insignificant, since my memory of them is so confused. Let me see, has he been travelling in France or Italy since—”
“Oh, it is a long, long time since he left the north!”
“I am mistaken, then; I have never seen the baron before to-day. And yet one would have said that he recognized me. May he not have been delirious when he cried: ‘There it is! there it is!’”
“Oh, that is a sure thing,” said the major. “I have a gardener in my bostoelle,[4] who was at one time one of his servants, and who has told me a good many curious things about him. The baron is subject to violent attacks, which his physician calls nervous attacks, and which come from a chronic liver complaint. While these spells last, he sometimes shows signs of the strangest fear. He, the sceptic, the jeering infidel, is as cowardly as a child. He sees ghosts, especially that of a woman, and it is at such moments that he cries: ‘There it is! there it is!’ meaning, I suppose, ‘There, my fit is seizing me!’ or, perhaps, ‘There is the ghost that haunts me!’”
“He seems to be tormented by remorse.”
“Some say it is the recollection of his sister-in-law.”
“Whom he assassinated?”
“They don’t say that he killed her, but merely that he caused her to disappear.”
“Yes, that is a more elegant expression.”
“It is quite possible that there is no foundation for either story,” resumed the major. “The fact is that we don’t know anything at all about it, and that the baron is perhaps perfectly innocent of a great many crimes of which he is accused. You know that we are living here on the classical soil of the marvellous. The Dalecarlians have the greatest horror of anything practical, and of natural explanations. You cannot strike against a stone in this country, without supposing that a goblin pushed it against you on purpose; if your nose itches, you must run to a sibyl to be cured of a dwarf’s poisonous bite; nor is there a driver who will mend the broken trace of a carriage or sleigh without saying, ‘Come, come, little goblin, leave us alone; we are not doing you any harm.’”