Black Diamonds: A Novel

by Mór Jókai

The countess placed her trembling fingers in the abbé's hand, and as she felt the firm, manly clasp, an unusual sense of strength and protection possessed her; she ceased to shake and shiver, her eyes no longer saw shapes and fantasies moving before them; her heart began to beat steadily. The bare touch of this man's hand gave her new life.

"Come with me," he said, in a decided voice, while he stuck his whip under his left arm, and with the right drew the countess after him. "Where are the keys of the secret staircase, and of the room through which we must pass?"

Theudelinde felt that she could not let go his hand for one minute. She was for the moment, so to speak, mesmerized by his superior mind. She crawled after him submissively; she should follow him, were it to the very gates of hell itself. Without a word she pointed to the key cabinet, an antique piece of furniture which would have made the joy of a bric-à-brac collector, and in which there was a drawer full of keys.

Without a moment's hesitation the priest put his hand on the ones that were wanted. It was no miracle that he should do so, although to the weakened mind of his companion it appeared to be miraculous; on one of the keys there was the well-known sign of a vault key, the crucifix.

The abbé now drew aside the curtain which concealed the secret passage to the library, and here, at the first step, he was met by a certain proof, if such were wanting, to show him the credit to be given to the countess's statements that she was in the habit of descending to the vault: as he opened the door a mass of cobwebs blew into his face. The countess, however, was firm in her hallucination. It is a phase of such nervous disorders as hers to believe that what they have dreamed is actual fact; they can even supply small details.

As the countess went up the steps she whispered to her companion—

"A window is broken here, and the wind whistles through it." And as they turned the angle of the steps there was a narrow slip-window which in the daytime gave light to the staircase, the panes of which were actually broken. She had never seen this. When they came to the door of the library she confided to the abbé that she was always frightened to pass the threshold.

"It is such a ghostly place!" she said. "When the moon shines through the shutter of the upper window it throws white specks upon the mosaic pattern of the marble floor, which makes it look like some mysterious writing. In one of the corners between two presses there is a glass case with a skeleton in it; in another case the wax impression, taken after death, of Ignatius Loyola."

Everything was precisely as the countess related. The moon shone through the upper panes of glass, the skeleton stood in his glass case, the waxen head of the dead saint lay in the other, but the countess had never crossed the threshold. In her childhood her nurse had told her these tales of the Bondavara Castle, and when she had become its mistress her first care had been to lock these rooms. Ten years' dust lay on the carpets, on the chairs and tables; cobwebs hung from the ceilings, mice played games in the deep wainscots, for no one ever came here.

At the moment in which the countess and her companion entered the library a certain peace reigned in the vault below. The tumult seemed lulled; there were neither shrieks nor demoniacal songs to be heard. From the mortuary chapel, however, the notes of the organ reached the ears of the two listeners. It sounded like the prelude which is played in church before mass begins, only the chords of the prelude were all discords; it was as if the organ were played by a condemned spirit.