THE PHANTOM COACH: Collected Ghost Stories (31 page)

Where now were Gustav and his troop? What had they done? What had happened since they left? How soon would they come back? I asked myself these questions incessantly.

I could think of nothing else. I looked at my watch every few minutes. As the time wore on, the hours appeared to grow longer. At two o’clock, before I had gone half my round, it seemed to me that I had been all night in the saddle. From two to three, from three to four, the hours dragged by as if every minute were weighted with lead.

‘The Graf von Lichtenstein will be coming back this way,
mein Herr
,’ said the orderly, spurring his horse up beside mine, and saluting with his hand to the side of his helmet as he spoke.

‘Which way? Over the hill, or down in the hollow?’

‘Through the hollow,
mein Herr
. That is the road by which the Herr Graf rode out; and the river is too wide for them to cross anywhere but up-stream.’

‘Then they must come this way?’

‘Yes,
mein Herr
.’

We were riding along the ridge of a long hill, one side of which sloped down towards the river, while on the other side it terminated in an abrupt precipice overhanging a narrow road or ravine, some forty feet below. The opposite bank was also steep, though less steep than that on our side; and beyond it the eye travelled over a wide expanse of dusky pine-woods, now white and heavy with snow.

I reined in my horse the better to observe the scene. Yonder flowed the Inn, dark and silent, a river of ink winding through meadow flats of dazzling silver. Far away upon the horizon rose the mystic outlines of the Franconian Alps. A single sentry, pacing to and fro some four hundred yards ahead, was distinctly visible in the moonlight; and such was the perfect stillness of the night that, although the camp lay at least two miles and a half away, I could hear the neighing of the horses and the barking of the dogs.

Again I looked at my watch, again calculated how long my friend had been absent. It was now a quarter past four A.M., and he had left the camp at mid-day.

If he had not yet returned—and of course he might have done so at any moment since I had been out on duty—he had now been gone sixteen hours and a quarter.

Sixteen hours and a quarter! Time enough to have ridden to Munich and back!

The orderly again brought his horse up abreast with mine.

‘Pardon,
mein Herr
,’ he said, pointing up the ravine with his sabre; ‘but do you see nothing yonder—beyond the turn of the road—just where there is a gap in the trees?’

I looked; but I saw nothing.

‘What do you think you see?’ I asked him.

‘I scarcely know,
mein Herr
—something moving close against the trees, beyond the hollow way.’

‘Where the road emerges upon the plain and skirts the pine-woods?’

‘Yes,
mein Herr
; several dark objects—Ah! they are horsemen!’

‘It is the Graf von Lichtenstein and his troop!’ I exclaimed.

‘Nay,
mein Herr
; see how slowly they ride, and how they keep close under the shade of the woods! The Graf von Lichtenstein would not steal back so quietly.’

I stood up in my stirrups, shaded my eyes with my hand, and stared eagerly at the approaching cavalcade.

They were perhaps half-a-mile away as the crow flies, and would not have been visible from this point but for a long gap in the trees on this side of the hill. I could see that they were soldiers. They might be French; but, somehow, I did not think they were. I fancied, I hoped, they were our own Lichtensteiners come back again.

‘They are making for the hollow way,
mein Herr,
’ said the orderly.

They were evidently making for the hollow way. I watched them past the gap till the last man had gone by, and it seemed to me they were about twenty in number.

I dismounted, flung my reins to the orderly, and went to where the edge of the precipice overhung the road below. Hence, by means of such bushes and tree-stumps as were rooted in the bank, I clambered down a few feet lower, and there lay concealed till they should pass through.

It now seemed to me that they would never come. I do not know how long I waited. It might have been ten minutes—it might have been half-an-hour; but the time that elapsed between the moment when I dismounted and the moment when the first helmet came in sight seemed interminable.

The road, as I have already said, lay between a steep declivity on the one side and a less abrupt height, covered with pine-trees, on the other—a picturesque winding gorge or ravine, half dark as night, half bright as day; here deep in shadow, there flooded with moonlight; and carpeted a foot deep with fresh-fallen snow. After I had waited and watched till my eyes ached with staring in the gloom, I at last saw a single horseman coming round the turn of the road, about a hundred yards from the spot where I was lying. Slowly, and as it seemed to me, dejectedly, he rode in advance of his comrades. The rest followed two and two.

At the first glance, while they were yet in deep shadow, and, as I have said, a hundred yards distant, I recognised the white cloaks and plumes and the black chargers of my own corps. I knew at once that it was Lichtenstein and his troop.

Then a sudden terror fell upon me. Why were they coming back so slowly? What evil tidings did they bring? How many were returning? How many were missing? I knew well, if there had been a skirmish, who was sure to have been foremost in the fight. I knew well, if but three or four had fallen, who was sure to be one of the fallen.

These thoughts flashed upon me in the first instant when I recognised the Lichtenstein uniform. I could not have uttered a word, or have done anything to attract the men’s attention, if it had been to save my life. Dread paralysed me.

Slowly, dejectedly, noiselessly, the first
cuirassier
emerged into the moonlight, passed on again into the gloom, and vanished in the next turn of the road. It was but for a moment that the moonlight streamed full upon him; yet in that moment I saw there had been a fray, and that the man had been badly wounded.

As slowly, as dejectedly, as noiselessly, with broken plumes and battered helmets, and cloaks torn and blood-stained, the rest came after, two and two; each pair, as they passed, shining out momentarily, distinctly, like the images projected for an instant upon the disk of a magic-lantern.

I held my breath and counted them as they went by—first one alone; then two and two, till I had counted eighteen riding in pairs. Then one alone, bringing up the rear. Then——

I waited—I watched—I refused to believe that this could be all. I refused to believe that Gustav must not presently come galloping up to overtake them. At last, long after I knew it was in vain to wait and watch longer, I clambered up again—cramped, and cold, and sick at heart—and found the orderly walking the horses up and down on the brow of the hill. The man looked me in the face, as if he would fain have asked me what I had seen.

‘It was the Graf von Lichtenstein’s troop,’ I said, by an effort; ‘but—but the Graf von Lichtenstein is not with them.’

And with this I sprang into the saddle, clapped spurs to my horse, and said no more.

I had still two outposts to visit before finishing my round; but from that moment to this I have never been able to remember any one incident of my homeward ride. I visited these outposts, without doubt; but I was as unconscious of the performance of my duty as a sleeper is unconscious of the act of breathing.

Gustav was the only man missing. Gustav was dead. I repeated it to myself over and over again. I felt that it was true. I had no hope that he was taken prisoner. No—he was dead. He had fallen, fighting to the last. He had died like a hero. But—he was dead.

At a few minutes after five, I returned to the camp. The first person I met was Von Blumenthal, the Prince of Lichtenstein’s secretary. He was walking up and down outside my tent, waiting for me. He ran to me as I dismounted.

‘Thank heaven you are come!’ he said. ‘Go at once to the prince—the Graf von Lichtenstein is dying. He has fought a troop of French lancers three times as many as his own, and carried off a bundle of despatches. But he has paid for them with his life, and with the lives of all his men. He rode in, covered with wounds, a couple of hours ago, and had just breath enough left to tell the tale.’

‘His own life, and the lives of all his men!’ I repeated hoarsely.

‘Yes, he left every man on the field—himself the only survivor. He cut his way out with the captured despatches in one hand and his sword in the other—and there he lies in the prince’s tent—dying.’

He was unconscious—had been unconscious ever since he was laid upon his uncle’s bed—and he died without again opening his eyes or uttering a word. I saw him breathe his last, and that was all. Even now, old man as I am, I cannot dwell upon that scene. He was my first friend, and I may say my best friend. I have known other friendships since then; but none so intimate—none so precious.

But now comes a question which I yet ask myself ‘many a time and oft’, and which, throughout all the years that have gone by since that night, I have never yet been able to answer. Gustav von Lichtenstein met and fought a troop of French Lancers; saw his own twenty
cuirassiers
cut to pieces before his eyes; left them all for dead upon a certain hill-side on the opposite bank of the Inn; and rode back into camp, covered with wounds—the only survivor!

What, then, was that silent cavalcade that I saw riding through the hollow way—twenty men without their leader? Were those the dead whom I met, and was it the one living man who was absent?

The New Pass

THE CIRCUMSTANCES I AM about to relate happened just four autumns ago, when I was travelling in Switzerland with my old school and college friend, Egerton Wolfe.

Before going further, however, I wish to observe that this is no dressed-up narrative. I am a plain, prosaic man, by name Francis Legrice; by profession a barrister; and I think it would be difficult to find many persons less given to look upon life from a romantic or imaginative point of view. By my enemies, and sometimes, perhaps, by my friends, I am supposed to push my habit of incredulity to the verge of universal scepticism; and indeed I admit that I believe in very little that I do not hear and see for myself. But for these things that I am going to relate, I can vouch; and in so far as mine is a personal narrative, I am responsible for its truth. What I saw, I saw with my own eyes in the broad daylight. I offer nothing, therefore, in the shape of a story; but simply a plain statement of facts, as they happened to myself.

I was travelling, then, in Switzerland with Egerton Wolfe. It was not our first joint long-vacation tour by a good many, but it promised to be our last; for Wolfe was engaged to be married the following spring to a very beautiful and charming girl, the daughter of a north-country baronet.

He was a handsome fellow, tall, graceful, dark-haired, dark-eyed; a poet, a dreamer, an artist—as thoroughly unlike myself, in short, as one man having arms, legs, and a head, can be unlike another. And yet we suited each other capitally, and were the fastest friends and best travelling companions in the world.

We had begun our holiday on this occasion with a week’s idleness at a place which I will call Oberbrunn—a delightful place, wholly Swiss, consisting of one huge wooden building, half water-cure establishment, half hotel; two smaller buildings called
Dépendances
; a tiny church with a bulbous steeple painted green; and a handful of village—all perched together on a breezy mountain-plateau some three thousand feet above the lake and valley. Here, far from the haunts of the British tourist and the Alpine Club-man, we read, smoked, climbed, rose with the dawn, rubbed up our rusty German, and got ourselves into training for the knapsack work to follow.

At length, our week being up, we started—rather later on the whole than was prudent, for we had a thirty miles’ walk before us, and the sun was already high.

It was a glorious morning, however; the sky flooded with light, and a cool breeze blowing. I see the bright scene now, just as it lay before us when we came down the hotel steps and found our guide waiting for us outside. There were the water-drinkers gathered round the fountain on the lawn; the usual crowd of itinerant vendors of stag-horn ornaments and carved toys in wood and ivory squatted in a semi-circle about the door; some half-dozen barefooted little mountain children running to and fro with wild raspberries for sale; the valley so far below, dotted with hamlets and traversed by a winding stream, like a thread of flashing silver; the black pine-wood half-way down the slope; the frosted peaks glittering on the horizon.

‘
Bon voyage!
’ said our good host, Dr Steigl, with a last hearty shake of the hand.

‘
Bon voyage!
’ echoed the waiters and miscellaneous hangers-on.

Some three or four of the water-drinkers at the fountain raised their hats—the ragged children pursued us with their wild fruits as far as the gate—and so we departed.

For some distance our path lay along the mountain side, through pine-woods and by cultivated slopes where the Indian corn was ripening to gold, and the late hay-harvest was waiting for the mower. Then the path wound gradually downwards—for the valley lay between us and the pass we had laid out for our day’s work—and then, through a succession of soft green slopes and ruddy apple orchards, we came to a blue lake fringed with rushes, where we hired a boat with a striped awning, like the boats on Lake Maggiore, and were rowed across by a boatman who rested on his oars and sang a
jodel
-song when we where half-way across.

Being landed on the opposite bank, we found our road at once begin to trend upwards; and here, as the guide informed us, the ascent of the Höhenhorn might be said to begin.

‘This, however,
meine Herren
,’ said he, ‘is only part of the old pass. It is ill-kept; for none but country folks and travellers from Oberbrunn come this way now. But we shall strike the New Pass higher up. A grand road,
meine Herren—
as fine a road as the Simplon, and good for carriages all the way. It has only been open since the spring.’

‘The old pass is good enough for me, anyhow!’ said Egerton, crowding a handful of wild forget-me-nots under the ribbon of his hat. ‘It’s like a stray fragment of Arcadia.’

And in truth it was wonderfully lovely and secluded—a mere rugged path winding steeply upwards in a soft green shade, among large forest trees and moss-grown rocks covered with patches of velvety lichen. A little streamlet rang singing beside it all the way—now gurgling deep in ferns and grasses; now feeding a rude trough made of a hollow trunk; now crossing our road like a broken flash of sunlight; now breaking away in a tiny fall and foaming out of sight, only to reappear a few steps further on.

Then overhead, through the close roof of leaves, we saw patches of blue sky and golden shafts of sunshine, and small brown squirrels leaping from bough to bough; and in the deep rich grass on either hand, thick ferns, and red and golden mosses, and blue campanulas, and now and then a little wild strawberry, ruby red. By-and-by, when we had been following this path for nearly an hour, we came upon a patch of clearing, in the midst of which stood a rough upright monolith, antique, weather-stained, covered with rude carvings like a Runic monument—the primitive boundary-stone between the Cantons of Uri and Unterwalden.

‘Let us rest here!’ cries Egerton, flinging himself at full length on the grass. ‘
Eheu, fugaces!
—and the hours are shorter than the years. Why not enjoy them?’

But the guide, whose name is Peter Kauffmann, interposes after the manner of guides in general, and will by no means let us have our own way. There is a mountain inn, he urges, now only five minutes distant—‘an excellent little inn, where they sell good red wine.’ So we yield to fate and Peter Kauffmann and pursue our upward way, coming presently, as he promised and predicted, upon a bright open space and a brown châlet on a shelf of plateau overhanging a giddy precipice. Here, sitting under a vine-covered trellis built out on the very brink of the cliff, we find three mountaineers discussing a flask of the good red wine aforesaid.

In this picturesque eyrie we made our mid-day halt. A smiling
Mädchen
brought us coffee, brown bread, and goats’-milk cheese; while our guide, pulling out a huge lump of the dry black bread from his wallet, fraternised with the mountaineers over a half-flask of his favourite vintage.

The men chatted merrily in their half-intelligible patois. We sat silent, looking down into the deep misty valley and across to the great amethyst mountains, streaked here and there with faint blue threads of slender waterfalls.

‘There must surely be moments,’ said Egerton Wolfe after awhile, ‘when even such men as you, Frank—men of the world, and lovers of it—feel within them some stirrings of the primitive Adam; some vague longing for that idyllic life of the woods and fields that we dreamers are still, in our inmost souls, insane enough to sigh after as the highest good.’

‘You mean, don’t I sometimes wish to be a Swiss peasant-farmer, with
sabots
; a goître; a wife without form as regards her person, and void as regards her head; and a cretin grandfather a hundred and three years old? Why, no. I prefer myself as I am.’

My friend smiled, and shook his head.

‘Why take it for granted,’ said he, ‘that no man can cultivate his brains and his paternal acres at the same time? Horace, with none of the adjuncts you name, loved a country life and turned it to immortal poetry.’

‘The world has gone round once or twice since then, my dear fellow,’ I replied, philosophically. ‘The best poetry comes out of cities now-a-days.’

‘And the worst. Do you see those avalanches over yonder?’

Following the direction of his eyes, I saw something like a tiny puff of white smoke gliding over the shoulder of a huge mountain on the opposite side of the valley. It was followed by another and another. We could see neither whence they came nor whither they went. We were too far away to hear the sullen thunder of their fall. Silently they flashed into sight, and as silently they vanished.

Wolfe sighed heavily.

‘Poor Lawrence!’ said he. ‘Switzerland was his dream. He longed for the Alps as ardently as other men long for money or power.’

Lawrence was a younger brother of his whom I had never seen—a lad of great promise, whose health had broken down at Addiscombe some ten or twelve years before, and who had soon after died of rapid consumption at Torquay.

‘And he never had that longing gratified?’

‘Ah, no—he was never out of England. They prescribe bracing climates now, I am told, for lung disease; but not so then. Poor dear fellow! I sometimes fancy he might have lived, if only he had had his heart’s desire.’

‘I would not let such a painful thought enter my head, if I were you,’ said I, hastily.

‘But I can’t help it! My mind has been running on poor Lawrence all the morning; and, somehow, the grander the scenery gets, the more I keep thinking how he would have exulted in it. Do you remember those lines by Coleridge, written in the Valley of Chamouni? He knew them by heart. ’Twas the sight of yonder avalanches that reminded me—— Well! I will try not to think of these things. Let us change the subject.’

Just at this moment, the landlord of the châlet came out—a bright-eyed, voluble young mountaineer about five- or six-and-twenty, with a sprig of Edelweiss in his hat.

‘Good-day,
meine herren
,’ he said, including all alike in his salute, but addressing himself especially to Wolfe and myself. ‘Fine weather for travelling—fine weather for the grapes. These
Herren
are going on by the New Pass?
Ach, Herr Gott!
a grand work! a wonderful work!—and all begun and completed in less than three years. These
Herren
see it today for the first time? Good. They have probably been over the Tête Noire? No! Over the Splügen? Good—good. If these
Herren
have been over the Splügen, they can form an idea of the New Pass. The New Pass is very like the Splügen. It has a gallery tunnelled in the solid rock, just like the gallery on the Via Mala, with this difference that the gallery in the New Pass is much longer, and lighted by loop-holes at regular intervals. These
Herren
will please to observe the view looking both up and down the pass, before entering the mouth of the tunnel—there is not a finer view in all Switzerland.’

‘It must be a great advantage to the people hereabouts, having so good a road carried from valley to valley,’ said I, smiling at his enthusiasm.

‘Oh, it is a fine thing for us,
mein Herr!
’ he replied. ‘And a fine thing for all this part of the Canton. It will bring visitors—floods of visitors! By-the-way, these
Herren
must not omit to look out for the waterfall above the gallery. Holy St Nicholas! the way in which that waterfall has been arranged!’

‘Arranged!’ echoed Wolfe, who was as much amused as myself. ‘
Diavolo!
Do you arrange the waterfalls in your country?’

‘It was the Herr Becker,’ said the landlord, unconscious of banter; ‘the eminent engineer, who planned the New Pass. The waterfall, you see,
meine Herren
, could not be suffered to follow its old course down the face of the rock through which the gallery is tunneled, or it would have flowed in at the loopholes and flooded the road. What, therefore, did the Herr Becker do?’

‘Turned the course of the fall, and brought it down a hundred yards further on,’ said I somewhat impatiently.

‘No so,
mein Herr—
not so! The Herr Becker attempts nothing so expensive. He permits the fall to keep its old couloir and come down its old way—but instead of letting it wash the outside of the gallery, he pierces the rock in another direction—vertically—behind the tunnel; constructs an artificial shoot, or conduit in the heart of the rock; and brings the fall out
below
the gallery, just where the cliff overhangs the valley. Now what do the English
Herren
say to that?’