THE PHANTOM COACH: Collected Ghost Stories (43 page)

Then, seeing me look puzzled, he laughed, and added:

‘’Tis a great English poet says that, Gretchen, in one of his plays.’

Here a shrill trumpet-call in the courtyard, followed by the prolonged roll of many drums, warned me that evening parade was called, and that as soon as it was over my father would be home and looking for me. So I started up, and put out my hand to say goodbye.

Monsieur Maurice took it between both his own.

‘I don’t like parting from you so soon, little
Mädchen
,’ he said. ‘Will you come again tomorrow?’

‘Every day, if you like!’ I replied eagerly.

‘Then every day it shall be; and—let me see—you shall improve my bad German, and I will teach you French.’

I could have clapped my hands for joy. I was longing to learn French, and I knew how much it would also please my father; so I thanked Monsieur Maurice again and again, and ran home with a light heart to tell of all the wonders I had seen.

Chapter IV

Reminiscences

From this time forth, I saw him always once, and sometimes twice a day—in the afternoons, when he regularly gave me the promised French lesson; and occasionally in the mornings, provided the weather was neither too cold nor too damp for him to join me in the grounds. For Monsieur Maurice was not strong. He could not with impunity face snow, and rain, and our keen Rhenish north-east winds; and it was only when the wintry sun shone out at noon and the air came tempered from the south, that he dared venture from his own fireside. When, however, there shone a sunny day, with what delight I used to summon him for a walk, take him to my favourite points of view, and show him the woodland nooks that had been my chosen haunts in summer! Then, too, the unwonted colour would come back to his pale cheek, and the smile to his lips, and while the ramble and the sunshine lasted he would be all jest and gaiety, pelting me with dead leaves, chasing me in and out of the plantations, and telling me strange stories, half pathetic, half grotesque, of Dryads, and Fauns, and Satyrs—of Bacchus, and Pan, and Polyphemus—of nymphs who became trees, and shepherds who were transformed to fountains, and all kinds of beautiful wild myths of antique Greece—far more beautiful and far more wild than all the tales of gnomes and witches in my book of Hartz legends.

At other times, when the weather was cold or rainy, he would take down his
Musee Napoléon
, a noble work, in eight or ten volumes, and show me engravings after pictures by great masters in the Louvre, explaining them to me as we went along, painting in words the glow and glory of the absent colour, and steeping my childish imagination in golden dreams of Raphael and Titian, and Paulo Veronese.

And sometimes, too, as the dusk came on and the firelight brightened in the gathering gloom, he would take up his guitar, and to the accompaniment of a few slight chords sing me a quaint old French
chanson
of the feudal times; or an Arab chant picked up in the tent or the Nile boat; or a Spanish ballad, half love-song, half litany, learned from the lips of a muleteer on the Pyrenean border.

For Monsieur Maurice, whatever his present adversities, had travelled far and wide at some foregone period of his life—in Syria, and Persia; in northernmost Tartary and the Siberian steppes; in Egypt and the Nubian desert, and among the perilous wilds of central Arabia. He spoke and wrote with facility some ten or twelve languages. He drew admirably, and had a profound knowledge of the Italian schools of art; and his memory was a rich storehouse of adventure and anecdote, legend and song.

I am an old woman now, and Monsieur Maurice must have passed away many a year ago upon his last long journey; but even at this distance of time, my eyes are dimmed with tears when I remember how he used to unlock that storehouse for my pleasure, and ransack his memory for stories either of his own personal perils by flood and field, or of the hairbreadth ’scapes of earlier travellers. For it was his amusement to amuse me; his happiness to make me happy. And I in return loved him with all my childish heart. Nay, with something deeper and more romantic than a childish love—say rather with that kind of passionate hero-worship which is an attribute more of youth than of childhood, and, like the quality of mercy, blesseth him that gives even more than him that takes.

‘What dreadful places you have travelled in, Monsieur Maurice!’ I exclaimed on day. ‘What dangers you have seen!’

He had been showing me a little sketchbook full of Eastern jottings, and had just explained how a certain boat therein depicted had upset with him on a part of the Upper Nile so swarming with alligators that he had to swim for his life, and even so, barely scrambled up the slimy bank in time.

‘He who travels far courts many kinds of death,’ replied Monsieur Maurice; ‘but he escapes that which is worst—death from ennui.’

‘Suppose they had dragged you back, when you were half-way up the bank!’ said I, shuddering.

And as I spoke, I felt myself turn pale; for I could see the brown monsters crowding to shore, and the red glitter of their cruel eyes, and the hot breath steaming from their open jaws.

‘Then they would have eaten me up as easily as you might swallow an oyster,’ laughed Monsieur Maurice. ‘Nay, my child, why that serious face? I should have escaped a world of trouble, and been missed by no one—except poor Ali.’

‘Who was Ali?’ I asked quickly.

‘Ali was my Nubian servant—my only friend then; as you, little Gretchen, are my only friend now,’ replied Monsieur Maurice, sadly. ‘Aye, my only little friend in the wide world—and I think a true one.’

I did not know what to say; but I nestled closer to his side; and pressed my cheek fondly against his shoulder.

‘Tell me more about him, Monsieur Maurice,’ I whispered. ‘I am so glad he loved you dearly.’

‘He loved me very dearly,’ said Monsieur Maurice, ‘so dearly that he gave his life for me.’

‘But is Ali dead?’

‘Ay—Ali is dead. Nay, his story is brief enough,
petite
. I bought him in the slave market at Cairo—a poor, sickly, soulless lad, half stupid from ill-treatment. I gave him good food, good clothes, and liberty. I taught him to read. I made him my own servant; and his soul and his strength came back to him as if by a miracle. He became stalwart and intelligent, and so faithful that he was ten times more my slave than if I had held him to his bondage. I took him with me through all my Eastern pilgrimage. He was my bodyguard; my cook; my dragoman; everything. He slept on a mat at the foot of my bed every night, like a dog. So he lived with me for nearly four years—till I lost him.’

He paused.

I did not dare to ask, ‘what more?’ but waited breathlessly.

‘The rest is soon told,’ he said presently; but in an altered voice. ‘It happened in Ceylon. Our way lay along a bridle-path overhanging a steep gorge on the one hand and skirting the jungle on the other. Do you know what the jungle is, little Gretchen? Fancy an untrodden wilderness where huge trees, matted together by trailing creepers of gigantic size, shut out the sun and make a green roof of inextricable shade—where the very grass grows taller than the tallest man—where apes chatter, and parrots scream, and deadly reptiles swarm; and where nature has run wild since ever the world began. Well, so we went—I on my horse; Ali at my bridle; two porters following with food and baggage; the precipice below; the forest above; the morning sun just risen over all. On a sudden, Ali held his breath and listened. His practised ear had caught a sound that mine could not detect. He seized my rein—forced my horse back upon his haunches—drew his hunting knife, and ran forward to reconnoitre. The turn of the road hid him for a moment from my sight. The next instant, I had sprung from the saddle, pistol in hand, and run after him to share the sport or the danger. My little Gretchen—he was gone.’

‘Gone!’ I echoed.

Monsieur Maurice shook his head, and turned his face away.

‘I heard a crashing and crackling of the underwood,’ he said; ‘a faint moan dying on the sultry air. I saw a space of dusty road trampled over with prints of an enormous paw—a tiny trail of blood—a shred of silken fringe—and nothing more. He was gone.’

‘What was it?’ I asked presently, in an awe-struck whisper.

Monsieur Maurice, instead of answering my question, opened the sketch-book at a page full of little outlines of animals and birds, and laid his finger silently on the figure of a sleeping tiger.

I shuddered.

‘
Pauvre petite!
’ he said, shutting up the book, ‘it is too terrible a story. I ought not to have told it to you. Try to forget it.’

‘Ah, no!’ I said. ‘I shall never forget it, Monsieur Maurice. Poor Ali! Have you still the piece of fringe you found lying in the road?’

He unlocked his desk and touched a secret spring; whereupon a small drawer flew out from a recess just under the lock.

‘Here it is,’ he said, taking out a piece of folded paper.

It contained the thing he had described—a scrap of fringe composed of crimson and yellow twist, about two inches in length.

‘And those other things?’ I said, peering into the secret drawer with a child’s inquisitiveness. ‘Have they a history, too?’

Monsieur Maurice hesitated—took them out—sighed—and said, somewhat reluctantly:

‘You may see them, little Gretchen, if you will. Yes; they, too have their history—but let it be. We have had enough sad stories for today.’

Those other things, as I had called them, were a withered rose in a little cardboard box, and a miniature of a lady in a purple morocco case.

Chapter V

‘I Don’t Understand It’

It so happened that the winter this year was unusually severe, not only at Brühl and the parts about Cologne, but throughout all the Rhine country. Heavy snows fell at Christmas and lay unmelted for weeks upon the ground. Long forgotten sleighs were dragged out from their hiding-places and put upon the road, not only for the transport of goods, but for the conveyance of passengers. The ponds in every direction and all the smaller streams were fast frozen. Great masses of dirty ice, too, came floating down the Rhine, and there were rumours of the great river being quite frozen somewhere up in Switzerland, many hundred miles nearer its source.

For myself, I enjoyed it all—the bitter cold, the short days, the rapid exercise, the blazing fires within, and the glittering snow without. I made snow-men and snow-castles to my heart’s content. I learned to skate with my father on the frozen ponds. I was never weary of admiring the wintry landscape—the wide plains sheeted with silver; the purple mountains peeping through brown vistas of bare forest; the nearer trees standing out in feather-like tracery against the blue-green sky. To me it was all beautiful; even more beautiful than in the radiant summer-time.

Not so, however, was it with Monsieur Maurice. Racked by a severe cough and unable to leave the house for weeks together, he suffered intensely all the winter through. He suffered in body, and he suffered also in mind. I could see that he was very sad, and that there were times when the burden of life was almost more then he knew how to bear. He had brought with him, as I have shown, certain things wherewith to alleviate the weariness of captivity—books, music, drawing materials, and the like; but I soon discovered that the books were his only solace, and that he never took up pencil or guitar, unless for my amusement.

He wrote a great deal, however, and so consumed many a weary hour of the twenty-four. He used a thick yellowish paper cut quite square, and wrote a very small, neat, upright hand, as clear and legible as print. Every time I found him at his desk and saw those closely covered pages multiplying under his hand, I used to wonder what he could have to write about, and for whose eyes that elaborate manuscript was intended.

‘How cold you are, Monsieur Maurice!’ I used to say. ‘You are as cold as my snow-man in the courtyard! Won’t you come out today for half-an-hour?’