THE END
The Chateau of La Ferté stands upon a low hill forty kilometres (about twenty-five miles) northeast of Briois. It is a wooded hill, because it has been a neglected one. The old trees of the ancient demesne have grown up in disorder, and have gathered to themselves a wild brood of other trees and bushes. The whole place is a wilderness, but threaded with paths of picnickers—parties du plaisir—and it is a place, too, full of game; here pasture deer, and the fox lurks in its coverts, and the grouse and the partridge, and on the shielded lake swim wild ducks. Its great towers are falling to ruin; the stone walls that bound them together are in decay, but buried in the thicketed vines that have sprung upon them in profusion like a horde of biting hounds. The strong trunks of the wistarias, like mighty thighs have crushed in their partitions, and the old courtyards are damp with rank weeds and spotted fungus-growths. The northeast tower still lifts up its gray masses of wall above the encroaching trees, but its feet are buried in the luxuriant verdure of the plants and trees. A strangely beautiful spot. Traces of the old gardens remain, and a few still decipherable paths wander up and down the northern slopes. Some of these lead to the lake, invaded on all sides by rushes and sedges, thickly wadding its sides, except at one rim where still a pebbly margin stretches its white ribbon against the vivid green of descending, creeping mosses.
A moat was once dug deeply about the fortress-villa, and the range of the portcullis can be irregularly interpreted in the crumbling walls, that faced the ditch. It is a wide domain, embracing hundreds of acres, and the tangled thickets are interrupted by open grassy plains, while towards the south an orchard partially redeemed by some neighboring farmers, mixes with the savage glories of the unmolested wilderness, the pastoral sweetness of cultivation. It is a rare bit of natural artistry, enriched by feudal history and weirdly darkened by ancient crime, and now in the country circuits ascribed a half sinister population of unfavorable natural tenants. Here the owl secretes his nest and bewitches the night with his melancholy screams, the mosaic-backed snakes glide within its shadows, or bask in its hot exposures, the claw legged bats drape its fastnesses in the daytime, and wheel in twitching gyrations about its grim sentinel towers in the moonlight. Toads and stealthy rats find in its uninvaded precincts safe hiding. Like some untamed forest land it invited the flight of the hated denizens of the countrysides, and freely offered its thickets, overgrown jungles, and sunless recesses for their concealment and protection.
But there were more terrible things said of La Ferté. The displeasure of Heaven had visited it. The blazing lightning had struck it again and again. Its ancient oaks had been blasted by the fires of the Almighty. When storms came from the north or east, their worst fury was spent on the wearied old walls of La Ferté; when the snow fell it fell deepest at La Ferté and the winds played there their most demoniacal tricks. Some wanderers who once had taken refuge in its deserted rooms, had been killed by the bolts of lightning, and others—a Gypsy band—in winter had been found huddled together dead in its woods, buried beneath enormous drifts, when the snowfall outside of the fated spot and over the general country-land had been light and even.
Ah yes, the old castle lay under a curse. In its old dungeons men and women, and children too had been done to death, and there was the well-known tale of the murdered duke and his beautiful wife and three fair children stabbed to death with the very dining forks at a banquet, when words ran high and the wine had turned the heads of the wicked guests who were the duke's own kindred; such current gossip as fascinates the contemplation of every deserted ruin.
In the spring St. Elmo fires burned on its turrets, and were one to enter its woods at night haunting lights shone from its empty windows, and, if the wind rose—it soon became a tempest at La Ferté—and on it rose a chorus of wailing, long sighing sobs, that you could hear as far as the post road. That was well known everywhere. And then a thunder bolt, a great iron rock, hurled from Heaven, had crushed in the roof of an old keep, outside of the moat, where once a pretty girl—so ran the legend—and boy who were in the way of a terrible baron, way back in the reign of Charles V, had been strangled, and their bodies sunk in a well, which sometimes filled even now with blood, and ran out, painting the ground in red streaks under the hawthorn bushes. You could see the stone now, though the way to it was through thick-set briars. No wild flowers ever grew there, though everywhere else at La Ferté they were plentiful enough, and the marguerites were famous. Hundreds came there to gather them for birthdays, at weddings, and for funerals. Yes, yes—but only in daylight was La Ferté visited. All good people gave it a wide berth at night. The post road passed near it, but those who chanced to travel on it by night hurried past the gloomy shadows of La Ferté—darkest too like ink or ebony, when the moon silvered its craggy walls.
To Gabrielle and to me, La Ferté was invested with no terrors. We loved it. From our earliest years of life we had every summer gone to it on pleasure parties, and later—so absorbing was it to my fancy—I had, when a very young man, made a complete survey of it, mapped its old walk-ways, gardens, and outbuildings, reconstructed in drawings, from ancient prints, its granaries and storerooms, the cellars, vaults, larders, arsenals, and the upper stories of its dwelling apartments. So the supernatural summons to repair to La Ferté brought with it, despite its ghostly origin, no fears. Indeed fear under the spell of this awful errand could not have been suspected. It all lay prone before the sublime magnitude of the event which we were to serve, whose heralds and appanage we were. The excitement, spiritual and mental, woven with the emancipated feelings of destiny, and also with the emotional elation over the issue of peace and restoration, lifted us completely above usual physical states, and half immersed us in that dreamless sleep which the Hindus call prajna, or something like it. Consciousness was there with us, of course, but a larger consciousness obliterated our own selves, and we had become mixed in with the currents of the intentions of the Supreme Spirit.