Love Eternal

by H. Rider Haggard

On Thursday he was quite happy. On Friday he began to suffer from uneasiness, which on Saturday became very pronounced. It seemed to him that already waves of influence were creeping towards him like the fringes of some miasmic mist. Doubtless it was imagination, but he could feel their first frail tentacles wrapping themselves around his will, and drawing him towards Lucerne. As the day went on the tentacles grew stronger, till by evening there might have been a very octopus behind them. If this were so that night, he wondered what would happen on the following day, when the octopus began to pull. On one point he was determined. He would not go; never would he allow Madame Riennes to put him to sleep again, and what was much worse to make him kiss her. At any rate that spirit, Eleanor, was beautiful and attractive—but Madame Riennes! Rather than forgather with her again in this affectionate manner, much as he dreaded it—or her—he would have compounded with the ghost called Eleanor.

Now, although like most young people, Godfrey was indolent and evasive of difficulties, fearful of facing troubles also, he had a bedrock of character. There were points beyond which he would not go, even for the sake of peace. But here a trouble came in; he was well aware that although he would not go—to Madame Riennes to wit—there was something stronger than himself which would make him go. It was the old story over again set out by St. Paul once and for ever, that of the two laws which make a shuttlecock of man so that he must do what he wills not. Having once given way to Madame Riennes, who was to him a kind of sin incarnate, he had become her servant, and if she wished to put him to sleep, or to do anything else with him, well, however much he hated it, he must obey.

The thought terrified him. What could he do? He had tried prayers, never before had he prayed so hard in all his life; but they did not seem to be of the slightest use. No guardian angel, not even Eleanor, appeared to protect him from Madame Riennes, and meanwhile, the fog was creeping on, and the octopus tentacles were gripping tighter. In his emergency there rose the countenance of Miss Ogilvy’s dying counsel, welcome and unexpected as light of the moon to a lost traveller on a cloud-clothed night. What had she told him to do? To resist Madame Riennes. He had tried that with lamentable results. To invoke the help of religion. He had tried that with strictly negative results; the Powers above did not seem inclined to intervene in this private affair. To appeal to the Pasteur. That he had not tried but, unpromising as the venture seemed to be, by Jove! he would. In his imminent peril there was nothing to which he would have appealed, even Mumbo-Jumbo itself if it gave him the slightest hope of protection from Madame Riennes.

Accordingly, when they went to the observatory that night, instead of applying his eye to the telescope in the accustomed fashion, Godfrey rushed at the business like a bull at a gate. At first the Pasteur was entirely confused, especially as Godfrey spoke in English, which the preceptor must translate into French in his own mind. By degrees, however, he became extraordinarily interested, so much so that he let the new pipe go out, and what was very rare with him, except in the most moving passages of his own sermons, pushed the blue spectacles from his high nose upwards, till they caught upon the patch of grizzled hair which remained upon his bald head.

“Ah!” he said, answering in French, which by now Godfrey understood fairly well, “this is truly exciting; at last I come in touch with the thing. Know, Godfrey, that you furnish me with a great occasion. Long have I studied this, what you call it—demonology. Of it I know much, though not from actual touch therewith.”

Then he began to talk of gnosticism, and witchcraft, and Incubi, and Succubi, and the developments of modern spiritualism, till Godfrey was quite bewildered. At length he paused, relit the new pipe, and said:

“These matters we will study afterwards; they are, I assure you, most entertaining. Meanwhile, we have to deal with your Madame Riennes. All right, oh! quite all right. I will be her match. She will not make me kiss her, no, not at all, not at all! Be tranquil, young friend, if to-morrow you feel the impulse to go, go you shall, but I will go with you. Then we will see. Now to bed and sleep well. For me, I must study; I have many books on this subject, and there are points whereon I would refresh myself. Be not afraid. I know much of Madame Riennes and I will leave her flat as that,” and with surprising alacrity he jumped on a large black beetle which, unhappily for itself, just then ran across the observatory floor to enjoy the warmth of the stove. “Wait,” he added, as Godfrey was leaving. “First kneel down, I have memory of the ancient prayer, or if I forget bits, I can fill in the holes.”

Godfrey obeyed in a rather abject fashion, whereon the old Pasteur, waving the pipe above his head, from which emerged lines of blue smoke such as might have been accessory to an incantation, repeated over him something in Latin, that, owing to the foreign accent, he could not in the least understand. It ended, however, with the sign of the cross made with the bowl of the pipe, which the Pasteur forgot still remained in his hand.

Fortified by the accession of this new ally, Godfrey slept fairly well, till within a little while of dawn, when he was awakened by a sound of rapping. At first he thought that these raps, which seemed very loud and distinct, were made by someone knocking on the door, perhaps to tell him there was a fire, and faintly murmured “Entrez.” Then to his horror he became aware that they proceeded, not from the door, but from the back of his wooden bedstead, immediately above him, and at the same time recollected that he had heard similar noises while sitting at the little table in the Villa Ogilvy, which the mystics gathered there declared were produced by spirits.

His hair rose upon his head, a cold perspiration trickled down him; he shook in every limb. He thought of lighting a candle, but reflected that it was on the chest of drawers at the other side of the room, also that he did not know where he had put the matches. He thought of flying to the Pasteur, but remembered that to do so, first he must get out of bed, and perhaps expose his bare legs to the assault of ghostly hands, and next that, to reach the chamber of Monsieur and Madame Boiset, he must pass through the sanctuary of the room occupied by Juliette. So he compromised by retiring under the clothes, much as a tortoise draws its head into its shell.