THE PHANTOM COACH: Collected Ghost Stories (19 page)

I passed through the solemn courtyard, with its little garden, its mounted statue, and its air of classic stillness. I passed on to the reading-rooms, and chose a remote corner by a window. There I took my place amid a busy company, and began my life of authorship in Paris.

Day after day, week after week, I occupied the same place; followed the same train of thought; and resolutely carried out my plan of work. And work rewarded me with a portion of my lost peace. Amid those venerable archives of old learnings; amid the wealth of literature amassed from antique days by Francis I, by the Medici, by the Sforzi, by the Visconti, by Petrarch—I lost for awhile the remembrance of my private sorrows.

Excluded on Sundays from the library, I generally passed those mornings in the Louvre, wandering through the galleries of antiquities; pursuing my studies of ancient history amidst the vases, mosaics, and cameos of the Musée Grec et Egyptien; and sometimes, though rarely, mingling with the throngs who on this day frequent the art galleries.

As the springtime came, I used to escape on Sunday, into the pleasant parks in the neighbourhood of Paris. There, in the sylvan glades of St Cloud, among the alleys of Vincennes, or in the forest-shades of St Germains, I used to spend long days with a book and my own thoughts. I was resigned, if not happy; and my work progressed as the weeks and months went by.

There was an attendant at the Bibliothèque Royale, in whom I took a considerable interest. He was called M. Benoit. I first remarked him for the respectability of his appearance, and for the courtliness of his address; and I was surprised one day to find that he read the Oriental languages with facility.

It happened thus: I had written the name of a rare Arabic work upon a slip of paper—as is the custom of the place—and requested him to procure it for me. He looked at it, and shook his head.

‘It is useless, monsieur,’ he said. ‘That work is not in the collection. I have been often asked for it, but in vain. If monsieur will write for this work instead, I think he will find its contents very similar.’

And he wrote the title of another book upon the back of my paper, and wrote it, moreover, in the Arabic characters.

‘You write Arabic?’ I exclaimed with amazement.

He smiled sadly. ‘I was once a rich man, monsieur,’ he said, with a sigh, ‘and my education is all that I have not lost.’

After this I had many conversations with M. Benoit, and he frequently visited me at my apartments in the Faubourg St Germain. I learned that he was the son of a wealthy builder; that he had received a learned and expensive education; that his property had been swept away in the Reign of Terror; and that during the Consulate he had obtained this subordinate situation through the interest of an early college-friend. I compared this poor old man’s condition with my own, and learned a lesson from his patient cheerfulness. I found his conversation learned—often profound; and I gradually unfolded to him the plan and purpose of my book and of my opinions.

One evening I had read a chapter aloud to him, and we were arguing upon certain inductions which I had therein made from the system of Zoroaster.

‘It is very strange,’ said M. Benoit; ‘but it strikes me that we have a manuscript in which the author has anticipated you on this subject.’

‘Indeed!’ I said, with some disappointment. ‘I had hoped that my views were original.’

‘They may be original, Monsieur Henneberg, without being new,’ replied the old gentleman; ‘and I know that they are original; for the manuscript in question has never been copied, and indeed I think has never been read, excepting by myself and the writer.’

‘Perhaps you are the writer!’ I exclaimed, hastily.

‘Indeed I am not,’ he said; ‘but I knew him well—very well. He was a professor in the Collége Royale de France, and from him I received the greater part of my education in the Oriental tongues. He was a great sufferer, and he loved me dearly. I was his favorite pupil—I attended his death-bed. Just before he died he gave the manuscript into my care, and bade me present it to the Bibliothèque Royale. I did so, and read it. It is utterly unknown—it lies amid thousands of others; and I believe no person has ever perused it before or since.’

‘I should like to see this work,’ I said.

‘
Trés bien
,’ he replied, ‘I will show it to you tomorrow.’

I could not rest that night for thinking of what the old librarian had told me. I felt disquieted that another should have been before me in this path, which I had hitherto believed a virgin solitude. My self-love was wounded; and I rose in the morning feverish and unrefreshed.

Precisely as the hour of admittance arrived, I entered the reading-rooms of the library. I looked around in every direction; but M. Benoit was nowhere to be seen. I tried to read—to work; but in vain. I could not keep my attention fixed for five minutes together, and I turned my head every instant towards the door.

More than an hour elapsed before he came; but at last he entered the room and advanced to the corner where I was sitting.

‘Where is the manuscript, M. Benoit?’ I said, eagerly—‘the manuscript on Oriental literature which you named to me last evening?’

‘It is here, M. Henneberg,’ he replied, pointing to a packet beneath his arm. ‘I had some difficulty in finding it, for it has lain there untouched these twenty years, or more!’

Slowly, with the tremulous fingers of age, he untied the papers in which it was wrapped, and placed the manuscript before me.

I opened the leaves at random; I started back; I rubbed my eyes to make sure I was not dreaming.

The handwriting upon those pages was my own!

I think I have already said that mine was a very peculiar hand. There was no mistaking it; and here it was reproduced before my eyes, in a manuscript written, probably, years before I was born!

By a powerful effort, I mastered my emotion, and said hoarsely:

‘So it was a countryman of yours who wrote this, M. Benoit?’

‘A kind friend and master of mine, M. Henneberg,’ replied the librarian. ‘Not a countryman.’

‘Indeed!’ I said. ‘Was he not French?’

‘
Ah, mon Dieu!
no; he was a German.’

Again I started. I turned to the beginning of the manuscript; my eyes fell upon the first few sentences. . . . I had half expected it. Their import, though not their phraseology, corresponded precisely with the first lines of my own work!

‘And pray from what part of Germany did your friend come, M. Benoit?’ I asked, with forced composure.

‘From the confines of Bohemia.’

‘And his name?’

‘Karl Schmidt.’

‘May I ask the date of his decease?’

The old gentleman removed his glasses, and brushed a tear from his eyes.

‘
Hélas, mon pauvre ami!
He died on the evening of the 4
th
 of May, 1790.’

The very date and moment of my birth.

I rose suddenly. I gasped for breath. I felt as if the ground were sinking from beneath my feet. . . .

‘Help, my friend!’ I gasped—‘help! I—I am dying!’

In another moment I had fainted. I was very ill for some days after this; but as soon as I had sufficiently recovered to bear the fatigue of so long a journey, I left Paris for Leipzig. I have never since passed the boundaries of the city walls. Here, in the apartments which I occupied as a youth, I live an aged and an austere man. Here I shall soon end my ‘strange eventful history’.

Such is the story of my life—a life cursed and withered by glimpses of a past, which is known only to God. I have remembered scenes and people; I have beheld palpable evidences and traces of myself in former stages of my being. Whereunto do these things tend? Will death bring me to a full knowledge of these mysteries? or is this spiritual particle, which men call the soul, destined to migrate eternally from shape to shape, never rising to a higher and diviner immortality? Alas! I know not; neither, friend, canst thou reply to me. Life is a problem; Death, perchance, a word! Will no hand lift the curtain of eternity?

It was nearly dusk by the time I had arrived at the end of the Professor’s MS, and the castle and church-spires of Gotha were already in sight. Presently the diligence stopped at an inn in the town; a party of young men surrounded the novel-reading student, and bore him off with tumultuous congratulations. The priest alighted, and wished me a civil good evening; and I went to the nearest inn and dined execrably. When I returned to the vehicle to resume my night journey, I found the three vacant places already occupied by three new passengers, and so went on towards Frankfurt. About a fortnight after, I went to Baden-Baden, and liked the place so well that I stayed there for some weeks. One day, sitting idly in the
salle à manger
of the Hotel Suisse, I happened to take up a copy of
Galignani’s Messenger
. One of the first things that caught my eye was the following announcement:

MAY, 1854.

Died suddenly, on the evening of the 4
th
 inst., in his chambers, at the College of ——, in Leipzig, Heinrich Henneberg, Professor of Oriental Literature, on his 64
th
 birthday; greatly beloved and regretted.

And so this was the end. Dead! and on the anniversary of his birth! Some people to whom I have read the foregoing memoir, say that these things are coincidences, and that too much learning touched my poor friend’s brain. It may be so; but there was a strange method in his madness after all; and who can tell what revelations in psychology may yet be in store for future generations?

An Engineer’s Story

HIS NAME WAS Matthew Price; mine is Benjamin Hardy. We were born within a few days of each other; bred up in the same village; taught at the same school. I cannot remember the time when we were not close friends. Even as boys, we never knew what it was to quarrel. We had not a thought, we had not a possession, that was not in common. We would have stood by each other fearlessly, to the death. It was such a friendship as one reads about sometimes in books—fast and firm as the great Tors upon our native moorlands, true as the sun in the heavens.

The name of our village was Chadleigh. Lifted high above the pasture-flats which stretched away at our feet like a measureless green lake and melted into mist on the farthest horizon, it nestled, a tiny stone-built hamlet, in a sheltered hollow about midway between the plain and the plateau.

Above us, rising ridge beyond ridge, slope beyond slope, spread the mountainous moor-country, bare and bleak for the most part, with here and there a patch of cultivated field or hardy plantation, and crowned highest of all with masses of huge grey crag, abrupt, isolated, hoary, and older than the deluge. These were the Tors—Druids’ Tor, King’s Tor, Castle Tor, and the like; sacred places, as I have heard, in the ancient time, where crownings, burnings, human sacrifices, and all kinds of bloody heathen rites were performed.

Bones, too, had been found there, and arrowheads, and ornaments of gold and glass. I had a vague awe of the Tors in those boyish days, and would not have gone near them after dark for the heaviest bribe.

I have said that we were born in the same village. He was the son of a small farmer, named William Price, and the eldest of a family of seven; I was the only child of Ephraim Hardy, the Chadleigh blacksmith—a well-known man in those parts, whose memory is not forgotten to this day.

Just so far as a farmer is supposed to be a bigger man than a blacksmith, Mat’s father might be said to have a better standing than mine; but William Price, with his small holding and his seven boys was, in fact, as poor as many a day-labourer; whilst the blacksmith, well-to-do, bustling, popular, and open-handed, was a person of some importance in the place.

All this, however, had nothing to do with Mat and myself. It never occurred to either of us that his jacket was out at elbows, or that our mutual funds came altogether from my pocket. It was enough for us that we sat on the same school-bench, conned our tasks from the same primer, fought each other’s battles, screened each other’s faults, fished, nutted, played truant, robbed orchards and birds’ nests together, and spent every half hour, authorised or stolen, in each other’s society.

It was a happy time; but it could not go on forever. My father, being prosperous, resolved to put me forward in the world. I must know more and do better than himself. The forge was not good enough, the little world of Chadleigh not wide enough, for me. Thus it happened that I was still swinging the satchel when Mat was whistling at the plough, and that at last, when my future course was shaped out, we were separated, as it then seemed to us, for life.

For, blacksmith’s son as I was, furnace and forge, in some form or other, pleased me best. I chose to be a working engineer. So my father by-and-by apprenticed me to a Birmingham iron-master; and, having bidden farewell to Mat, and Chadleigh, and the grey old Tors in the shadow of which I had spent all the days of my life, I turned my face northward, and went over into ‘the Black Country’.

I am not going to dwell on this part of my story. How I worked out the term of my apprenticeship; how, when I had served my full time and become a skilled workman, I took Mat from the plough and brought him over to the Black Country, sharing with him lodgings, wages, experience—all, in short, that I had to give; how he, naturally quick to learn and brimful of quiet energy, worked his way up a step at a time, and came by-and-by to be a ‘first hand’ in his own department; how, during all these years of change, and trial, and effort, the old boyish affection never wavered or weakened, but went on growing with our growth and strengthening with our strength—are facts which I need do no more than outline in this place.

About this time—it will be remembered that I speak of the days when Mat and I were on the bright side of thirty—it happened that our firm contracted to supply six first-class locomotives to run on the new line, then in progress of construction, between Turin and Genoa. It was the first Italian order we had taken.

We had had dealings with France, Holland, Belgium, Germany; but never with Italy. The connection, therefore, was new and valuable—all the more valuable because our Transalpine neighbours had but lately begun to lay down the iron roads, and would be safe to need more of our good English work as they went on. So the Birmingham firm set themselves to the contract with a will, lengthened our working hours, increased our wages, took on fresh hands, and determined, if energy and promptitude could do it, to place themselves at the head of the Italian labour-market, and stay there. They deserved and achieved success.

The six locomotives were not only turned out to time, but were shipped, despatched, and delivered with a promptitude that fairly amazed our Piedmontese consignee. I was not a little proud, you may be sure, when I found myself appointed to superintend the transport of the engines. Being allowed a couple of assistants, I contrived that Mat should be one of them; and thus we enjoyed together the first great holiday of our lives.

It was a wonderful change for two Birmingham operatives fresh from the Black Country. Genoa, that fairy city, with its crescent background of Alps; the port crowded with strange shipping; the marvellous blue sky and bluer sea; the painted houses on the quays; the quaint cathedral faced with black and white marble; the street of jewellers, like an Arabian Nights’ bazaar; the street of palaces with its Moorish courtyards, its fountains and orange-trees; the women veiled like brides; the galley-slaves chained two and two, the processions of priests and friars; the everlasting clangour of bells; the babble of a strange tongue; the singular lightness and brightness of the climate—made, altogether, such a combination of wonders that we wandered about the first day in a kind of bewildered dream, like children at a fair. Before that week was ended, being tempted by the beauty of the place and the liberality of the pay, we had agreed to take service with the Turin and Genoa Railway Company, and to turn our backs upon Birmingham forever.

Then began a new life—a life so active and healthy, so steeped in fresh air and sunshine, that we sometimes marvelled how we could have endured the gloom of the Black Country. We were constantly up and down the line—now at Genoa, now at Turin, taking trial trips with the locomotives, and placing our old experience at the service of our new employers.

In the meanwhile we made Genoa our headquarters, and hired a couple of rooms over a small shop in a by-street sloping down to the quays. Such a busy little street—so steep and winding that no vehicles could pass through it, and so narrow that the sky looked like a mere strip of deep blue ribbon overhead! Every house in it, however, was a shop where the goods encroached on the footway, or were piled about the door, or hung like tapestry from the balconies; and all day long, from dawn till dusk, an incessant stream of passers-by poured up and down between the port and the upper quarter of the city.

Our landlady was the widow of a silver-worker, and lived by the sale of filigree ornaments, cheap jewellery, combs, fans, and toys in ivory and jet. She had an only daughter, named Gianetta, who served in the shop and was simply the most beautiful woman I ever beheld. Looking back across this weary chasm of years, and bringing her image before me (as I can and do) with all the vividness of life, I am unable, even now, to detect a flaw in her beauty. I do not attempt to describe her. I do not believe there is a poet living who could find the words to do it; but I once saw a picture that was somewhat like her (not half so lovely, but still like her), and for aught I know, that picture is still hanging where I last looked at it—upon the walls of the Louvre.

It represented a woman with brown eyes and golden hair, looking over her shoulder into a circular mirror held by a bearded man in the background. In this man, as I then understood, the artist had painted his own portrait; in her, the portrait of the woman he loved. No picture that I ever saw was half so beautiful, and yet it was not worthy to be named in the same breath with Gianetta Coneglia.

You may be certain the widow’s shop did not want for customers. All Genoa knew how fair a face was to be seen behind that dingy little counter; and Gianetta, flirt as she was, had more lovers than she cared to remember, even by name. Gentle and simple, rich and poor, from the red-capped sailor buying his earrings or his amulet, to the nobleman carelessly purchasing half the filigrees in the window, she treated them all alike—encouraged them, laughed at them, led them on and turned them off at her pleasure. She had no more heart than a marble statue; as Mat and I discovered by-and-by, to our bitter cost.

I cannot tell to this day how it came about, or what first led me to suspect how things were going with us both; but long before the waning of that autumn a coldness had sprung up between my friend and myself. It was nothing that could have been put into words. It was nothing that either of us could have explained or justified, to save his life. We lodged together, ate together, worked together, exactly as before; we even took our long evening’s walk together, when the day’s labour was ended; and except, perhaps, that we were more silent than of old, no mere looker-on could have detected a shadow of change. Yet there it was, silent and subtle, widening the gulf between us every day.

It was not his fault. He was too true and gentle-hearted to have willingly brought about such a state of things between us. Neither do I believe—fiery as my nature is—that it was mine. It was all hers—hers from first to last—the sin, and the shame, and the sorrow.

If she had shown a fair and open preference for either of us, no real harm could have come of it. I would have put any constraint upon myself, and heaven knows! have borne any suffering, to see Mat really happy. I know that he would have done the same, and more if he could, for me. But Gianetta cared not one
bajocco
for either. She never meant to choose between us.

It gratified her vanity to divide us; it amused her to play with us. It would pass my power to tell how, by a thousand imperceptible shades of coquetry—by the lingering of a glance, the substitution of a word, the flitting of a smile—she contrived to turn our heads, and torture our hearts, and lead us on to love her. She deceived us both. She buoyed us both up with hope; she maddened us with jealousy; she crushed us with despair. For my part, when I seemed now and then to wake to a sudden sense of the ruin that was about our path, and saw how the truest friendship that ever bound two lives together was drifting on to wreck and ruin, I asked myself whether any woman in the world was worth what Mat had been to me and I to him. But this was not often. I was readier to shut my eyes upon the truth than to face it; and so lived on, wilfully, in a dream.

Thus the autumn passed away, and winter came—the strange, treacherous Genoese winter, green with olive and ilex, brilliant with sunshine, and bitter with storm. Still, rivals at heart and friends on the surface, Mat and I lingered on in our lodging in the Vicolo Balba. Still, Gianetta held us with her fatal wiles and her still more fatal beauty. At length there came a day when I felt I could bear the horrible misery and suspense of it no longer. The sun, I vowed, should not go down before I knew my sentence. She must choose between us. She must either take me or let me go. I was reckless. I was desperate. I was determined to know the worst or the best. If the worst, I would at once turn my back upon Genoa, upon her, upon all the pursuits and purposes of my past life, and begin the world anew. This I told her, passionately and sternly, standing before her in the little parlour at the back of the shop, one bleak December morning.

‘If it’s Mat whom you care for most,’ I said, ‘tell me so in one word, and I will never trouble you again. He is better worth your love. I am jealous and exacting; he is as trusting and unselfish as a woman. Speak, Gianetta; am I to bid you goodbye for ever and ever, or am I to write home to my mother in England, bidding her pray to God to bless the woman who has promised to be my wife?’

‘You plead your friend’s cause well,’ she replied haughtily. ‘Matteo ought to be grateful. This is more than he ever did for you.’

‘Give me an answer, for pity’s sake,’ I exclaimed, ‘and let me go!’

‘You are free to go or stay, Signor Inglese,’ she replied, ‘I am not your gaoler.’

‘Do you bid me leave you?’