Complete Works of Bram Stoker (449 page)

‘Halt!’

The soldiers were ordered to spread around and watch, and then we commenced to examine the ruins. The commissary himself began to lift away the charred boards and rubbish. These the soldiers took and piled together. Presently he started back, then bent down and rising beckoned me.

‘See!’ he said.

It was a gruesome sight. There lay a skeleton face downwards, a woman by the lines  —  an old woman by the coarse fibre of the bone. Between the ribs rose a long spike-like dagger made from a butcher’s sharpening knife, its keen point buried in the spine.

‘You will observe,’ said the commissary to the officer and to me as he took out his note book, ‘that the woman must have fallen on her dagger. The rats are many here  —  see their eyes glistening among that heap of bones  —  and you will also notice’  —  I shuddered as he placed his hand on the skeleton  —  ’that but little time was lost by them, for the bones are scarcely cold!’

There was no other sign of any one near, living or dead; and so deploying again into line the soldiers passed on. Presently we came to the hut made of the old wardrobe. We approached. In five of the six compartments was an old man sleeping  —  sleeping so soundly that even the glare of the lanterns did not wake them. Old and grim and grizzled they looked, with their gaunt, wrinkled, bronzed faces and their white moustaches.

The officer called out harshly and loudly a word of command, and in an instant each one of them was on his feet before us and standing at ‘attention!’

‘What do you here?’

‘We sleep,’ was the answer.

‘Where are the other chiffoniers?’ asked the commissary.

‘Gone to work.’

‘And you?’

‘We are on guard!’

‘Peste!’ laughed the officer grimly, as he looked at the old men one after the other in the face and added with cool deliberate cruelty: ‘Asleep on duty! Is this the manner of the Old Guard? No wonder, then, a Waterloo!’

By the gleam of the lantern I saw the grim old faces grow deadly pale, and almost shuddered at the look in the eyes of the old men as the laugh of the soldiers echoed the grim pleasantry of the officer.

I felt in that moment that I was in some measure avenged.

For a moment they looked as if they would throw themselves on the taunter, but years of their life had schooled them and they remained still.

‘You are but five,’ said the commissary; ‘where is the sixth?’ The answer came with a grim chuckle.

‘He is there!’ and the speaker pointed to the bottom of the wardrobe. ‘He died last night. You won’t find much of him. The burial of the rats is quick!’

The commissary stooped and looked in. Then he turned to the officer and said calmly:

‘We may as well go back. No trace here now; nothing to prove that man was the one wounded by your soldiers’ bullets! Probably they murdered him to cover up the trace. See!’ again he stooped and placed his hands on the skeleton. ‘The rats work quickly and they are many. These bones are warm!’

I shuddered, and so did many more of those around me.

‘Form!’ said the officer, and so in marching order, with the lanterns swinging in front and the manacled veterans in the midst, with steady tramp we took ourselves out of the dustheaps and turned backward to the fortress of Bicêtre.

My year of probation has long since ended, and Alice is my wife. But when I look back upon that trying twelvemonth one of the most vivid incidents that memory recalls is that associated with my visit to the City of Dust.

A DREAM OF RED HANDS

The first opinion given to me regarding Jacob Settle was a simple descriptive statement, ‘He’s a down-in-the-mouth chap’: but I found that it embodied the thoughts and ideas of all his fellow-workmen. There was in the phrase a certain easy tolerance, an absence of positive feeling of any kind, rather than any complete opinion, which marked pretty accurately the man’s place in public esteem. Still, there was some dissimilarity between this and his appearance which unconsciously set me thinking, and by degrees, as I saw more of the place and the workmen, I came to have a special interest in him. He was, I found, for ever doing kindnesses, not involving money expenses beyond his humble means, but in the manifold ways of forethought and forbearance and self-repression which are of the truer charities of life. Women and children trusted him implicitly, though, strangely enough, he rather shunned them, except when anyone was sick, and then he made his appearance to help if he could, timidly and awkwardly. He led a very solitary life, keeping house by himself in a tiny cottage, or rather hut, of one room, far on the edge of the moorland. His existence seemed so sad and solitary that I wished to cheer it up, and for the purpose took the occasion when we had both been sitting up with a child, injured by me through accident, to offer to lend him books. He gladly accepted, and as we parted in the grey of the dawn I felt that something of mutual confidence had been established between us.

The books were always most carefully and punctually returned, and in time Jacob Settle and I became quite friends. Once or twice as I crossed the moorland on Sundays I looked in on him; but on such occasions he was shy and ill at ease so that I felt diffident about calling to see him. He would never under any circumstances come into my own lodgings.

One Sunday afternoon, I was coming back from a long walk beyond the moor, and as I passed Settle’s cottage stopped at the door to say ‘How do you do?’ to him. As the door was shut, I thought that he was out, and merely knocked for form’s sake, or through habit, not expecting to get any answer. To my surprise, I heard a feeble voice from within, though what was said I could not hear. I entered at once, and found Jacob lying half-dressed upon his bed. He was as pale as death, and the sweat was simply rolling off his face. His hands were unconsciously gripping the bedclothes as a drowning man holds on to whatever he may grasp. As I came in he half arose, with a wild, hunted look in his eyes, which were wide open and staring, as though something of horror had come before him; but when he recognised me he sank back on the couch with a smothered sob of relief and closed his eyes. I stood by him for a while, quite a minute or two, while he gasped. Then he opened his eyes and looked at me, but with such a despairing, woeful expression that, as I am a living man, I would have rather seen that frozen look of horror. I sat down beside him and asked after his health. For a while he would not answer me except to say that he was not ill; but then, after scrutinising me closely, he half arose on his elbow and said:

‘I thank you kindly, sir, but I’m simply telling you the truth. I am not ill, as men call it, though God knows whether there be not worse sicknesses than doctors know of. I’ll tell you, as you are so kind, but I trust that you won’t even mention such a thing to a living soul, for it might work me more and greater woe. I am suffering from a bad dream.’

‘A bad dream!’ I said, hoping to cheer him; ‘but dreams pass away with the light  —  even with waking.’ There I stopped, for before he spoke I saw the answer in his desolate look round the little place.

‘No! no! that’s all well for people that live in comfort and with those they love around them. It is a thousand times worse for those who live alone and have to do so. What cheer is there for me, waking here in the silence of the night, with the wide moor around me full of voices and full of faces that make my waking a worse dream than my sleep? Ah, young sir, you have no past that can send its legions to people the darkness and the empty space, and I pray the good God that you may never have!’ As he spoke, there was such an almost irresistible gravity of conviction in his manner that I abandoned my remonstrance about his solitary life. I felt that I was in the presence of some secret influence which I could not fathom. To my relief, for I knew not what to say, he went on:

‘Two nights past have I dreamed it. It was hard enough the first night, but I came through it. Last night the expectation was in itself almost worse than the dream  —  until the dream came, and then it swept away every remembrance of lesser pain. I stayed awake till just before the dawn, and then it came again, and ever since I have been in such an agony as I am sure the dying feel, and with it all the dread of tonight.’ Before he had got to the end of the sentence my mind was made up, and I felt that I could speak to him more cheerfully.

‘Try and get to sleep early tonight  —  in fact, before the evening has passed away. The sleep will refresh you, and I promise you there will not be any bad dreams after tonight.’ He shook his head hopelessly, so I sat a little longer and then left him.

When I got home I made my arrangements for the night, for I had made up my mind to share Jacob Settle’s lonely vigil in his cottage on the moor. I judged that if he got to sleep before sunset he would wake well before midnight, and so, just as the bells of the city were striking eleven, I stood opposite his door armed with a bag, in which were my supper, an extra large flask, a couple of candles, and a book. The moonlight was bright, and flooded the whole moor, till it was almost as light as day; but ever and anon black clouds drove across the sky, and made a darkness which by comparison seemed almost tangible. I opened the door softly, and entered without waking Jacob, who lay asleep with his white face upward. He was still, and again bathed in sweat. I tried to imagine what visions were passing before those closed eyes which could bring with them the misery and woe which were stamped on the face, but fancy failed me, and I waited for the awakening. It came suddenly, and in a fashion which touched me to the quick, for the hollow groan that broke from the man’s white lips as he half arose and sank back was manifestly the realisation or completion of some train of thought which had gone before.

‘If this be dreaming,’ said I to myself, ‘then it must be based on some very terrible reality. What can have been that unhappy fact that he spoke of?’

While I thus spoke, he realised that I was with him. It struck me as strange that he had no period of that doubt as to whether dream or reality surrounded him which commonly marks an expected environment of waking men. With a positive cry of joy, he seized my hand and held it in his two wet, trembling hands, as a frightened child clings on to someone whom it loves. I tried to soothe him:

‘There, there! it is all right. I have come to stay with you tonight, and together we will try to fight this evil dream.’ He let go my hand suddenly, and sank back on his bed and covered his eyes with his hands.

‘Fight it?  —  the evil dream! Ah! no, sir, no! No mortal power can fight that dream, for it comes from God  —  and is burned in here;’ and he beat upon his forehead. Then he went on:

‘It is the same dream, ever the same, and yet it grows in its power to torture me every time it comes.’

‘What is the dream?’ I asked, thinking that the speaking of it might give him some relief, but he shrank away from me, and after a long pause said:

‘No, I had better not tell it. It may not come again.’

There was manifestly something to conceal from me  —  something that lay behind the dream, so I answered:

‘All right. I hope you have seen the last of it. But if it should come again, you will tell me, will you not? I ask, not out of curiosity, but because I think it may relieve you to speak.’ He answered with what I thought was almost an undue amount of solemnity:

‘If it comes again, I shall tell you all.’

Then I tried to get his mind away from the subject to more mundane things, so I produced supper, and made him share it with me, including the contents of the flask. After a little he braced up, and when I lit my cigar, having given him another, we smoked a full hour, and talked of many things. Little by little the comfort of his body stole over his mind, and I could see sleep laying her gentle hands on his eyelids. He felt it, too, and told me that now he felt all right, and I might safely leave him; but I told him that, right or wrong, I was going to see in the daylight. So I lit my other candle, and began to read as he fell asleep.

By degrees I got interested in my book, so interested that presently I was startled by its dropping out of my hands. I looked and saw that Jacob was still asleep, and I was rejoiced to see that there was on his face a look of unwonted happiness, while his lips seemed to move with unspoken words. Then I turned to my work again, and again woke, but this time to feel chilled to my very marrow by hearing the voice from the bed beside me:

‘Not with those red hands! Never! never!’ On looking at him, I found that he was still asleep. He woke, however, in an instant, and did not seem surprised to see me; there was again that strange apathy as to his surroundings. Then I said:

‘Settle, tell me your dream. You may speak freely, for I shall hold your confidence sacred. While we both live I shall never mention what you may choose to tell me.’

He replied:

‘I said I would; but I had better tell you first what goes before the dream, that you may understand. I was a schoolmaster when I was a very young man; it was only a parish school in a little village in the West Country. No need to mention any names. Better not. I was engaged to be married to a young girl whom I loved and almost reverenced. It was the old story. While we were waiting for the time when we could afford to set up house together, another man came along. He was nearly as young as I was, and handsome, and a gentleman, with all a gentleman’s attractive ways for a woman of our class. He would go fishing, and she would meet him while I was at my work in school. I reasoned with her and implored her to give him up. I offered to get married at once and go away and begin the world in a strange country; but she would not listen to anything I could say, and I could see that she was infatuated with him. Then I took it on myself to meet the man and ask him to deal well with the girl, for I thought he might mean honestly by her, so that there might be no talk or chance of talk on the part of others. I went where I should meet him with none by, and we met!’ Here Jacob Settle had to pause, for something seemed to rise in his throat, and he almost gasped for breath. Then he went on: