THE TERRACES OF NIGHT Read online

  Before the prone body of the girl he stood, a fierce figure in rough workman’s dress, his grizzled hair wild—yet unaccountably, as I stared, somehow it was not Menken that I saw standing there, defying Fate in the chequered light and shadow! I saw a knight, strong and splendid in gleaming mail, steel-helmed and sword in hand, defending his lady. . . . And surely it was never Menken’s quavering old voice that, ringing, magnificent, shouted defiance to the Shade that faced him?

  ‘The fault was mine—mine be the punishment. Take me—I am ready!’

  Fraser always swears that at this point there was a lightning-flash—it had been stormy all day—but I am not sure! All I know is that I saw the black figure that stood there quiver like a flame in a wind—draw back, and then, it seemed—strike! Suddenly, as a snake strikes. . . . That she raised one lean hand above her head, and that with the gesture, from those hooded eyes there blazed suddenly a blinding and terrible light. Like a lightning-flash it flamed, tearing through the room, dazzling us all for a second—and when we recovered our sight and our senses once more, the room was empty, the Abbess had vanished, and only a tranquil patch of moonlight lay where she had been. But prone upon his back. His arms flung wide, lay Menken—stone-dead, with his hawklike features fixed in a stern smile of triumph!

  * * * * *

  Fraser and I had carried the body of the old man out of sight on to the veranda before Lina came round, and George, with some confused maunderings about sleep-walking, that she was, happily, too dazed to question, hustled her safely back to bed before she had time to realise the remarkable garb she was wearing . . . which was, in truth, a sheet and a linen towel pinned and twisted into a clumsy imitation of a nun’s dress. Why? Instinct, I suppose, a sort of ‘throw-back’ to the past . . . like her recollection of the house as ‘grey’, and dislike of a man in her room . . . and oh, heaps of other things.

  Which brings me to my ‘explanation’—there is to me only one really satisfactory one, though that, of course, George flatly refused to accept. In which, from his point of view, he is probably right, since to accept my solution means perforce to accept a good many things rather disquieting to a man whose preferences are strongly for the normal and everyday! I, personally, believe that in that amazing scene in the moonlit refectory of the old convent, we three men were privileged to see the final working out of an ancient play, played by the three original protagonists. With this sole difference, that the two culprits were clothed in flesh and blood, though of a different race and time, and the third was no longer of earth?.

  Lina with her strange knowledge of Nannory House, her mingled love and dread of it—was she not once Alicia Maltravers, the nun whose sin brought ruin and disgrace upon her sisterhood? And as for Menken, who gave his life to pay her debt—was he not, long ago, Roger d’Enquen, a certain Norman lord? At any rate, they tell me that George and Lina have lived happily at Nannory House these six years past, that the curse is lifted, and the grim dark ghost of the vengeful Abbess walks no longer!

  June

  The Civil Servant’s Tale

  The Room At The Rosenhaus

  Tom MacIntosh, Civil Servant, aged thirty-eight and on leave for the first time in five years, leant over the rail of the tiny green and white steamer chugging slowly up the blue length of Achensee—that marvellous lake lost among the mountains that is one of the Austrian Tyrol’s loveliest and most closely guarded secrets—and snuffing the warm, pine-scented air with luxurious satisfaction, revelled in the knowledge of three week’s idleness to come.

  It still seemed a dream that he should be here at all, complete with rucksack, stout shoes and alpenstock, to renew acquaintance with the mountains he had always adored, and—since the death of their parents threw the entire support of a delicate younger sister upon his shoulders—never thought to see again. But an unexpected legacy, and Leila’s still more unexpected marriage to the young doctor who had been attending her, had signed, for Tom MacIntosh, the order of release from the double bondage of duty and poverty, and it was with a light heart that he watched once more unfolding before him the gorgeous wooded heights, deep ravines filled with green dusk and the sound of falling waters, and little hill-perched hamlets of much-loved memory. . . .

  It was on the advice of a mountain-climbing friend that he had headed, the moment his sister’s wedding-festivities were over, for Achensee, a part of the Tyrol with which he was not acquainted, and the journey had been long and wearisome—from London to Innsbruck, thence to tiny Jenbach, then by funicular up the mountain side, and finally by steamer down the lake, which lies in a deep valley between two giant mountain-walls, is a trip long-drawn-out and tiring to a degree. It was, therefore, with considerable relief that the weary Londoner saw at last the mountains retreat, as it were, on one side of the lake, leaving a wide green plain of meadowland and at the edge of the plain, with one foot in the water and one on land, Pertisau, the tiny lake-side village that was his final destination.

  Pertisau straggles along the water’s edge for a mile or more, a scattered string of picturesque steeple-roofed little dwellings, with an occasional square white-washed pension or hotel, looking like a cardboard hat-box standing in the middle of a group of dolls’ houses. All built of wood for the most part, or of ‘lebst’, that curious compost of wayside stones mixed with mud and cement that is still much in use in parts of Austria; some washed pink or lemon or white, others green with climbing things, but all alike with the high-peaked roofs and elaborate carved wooden super-structure common to all tyrolean houses. A wide expanse of green meadows, orchards, and carefully cultivated fields stretched away behind the village, a long white quay like a pointing finger ran out before it into the blue waters of the lake . . . with an almighty churning and snorting, the little steamer drew up beside the quay, the passengers filed ashore, and MacIntosh, beaming at the beauty about him like a man enchanted, handed over his modest baggage to the care of a perspiring young porter in a dusty linen suit and round red cap, and followed him down the quay, across the dusty square and into the cool portals of the ‘Fürstenhaus’ with the most pleasurable feelings of anticipation.

  The ‘Fürstenhaus’ was the largest of the square white buildings before alluded to, and boasted a wide brick-paved veranda roofed with vines; a cool inner Esszimmer, lined with tables already spread for dinner, and, to judge from the appetizing odour ascending from the kitchen, a more than excellent cuisine. Thankfully dropping his rucksack upon a chair, MacIntosh sank into a chair and lighted a cigarette as he waited for the advent of the proprietor, feeling well content with life. But his content was of short duration. When Herr Sichel appeared, a pink and perspiring individual closely resembling, with his shining shaven head and protuberant paunch, a prize pig suddenly adorned with tight blue alpaca trousers and an American sailors’ hat, his brow was furrowed with distress as he broke out into instant incoherent speech, half-German and half-English.

  The Herr’s room—ach, was für eine Katastrophe! But yes, of course, the Herr’s room had been booked this three weeks past, but alas, who could tell what might happen? The lady—an Engländerin of the most noble, the most genteel, who had been occupying it, and who had made arrangements to go the day before, was now ill and unable to move, with a doctor in attendance. . . . MacIntosh frowned, helpless and annoyed.

  ‘Well,’ he said dryly—thankful that his German, albeit rusty, was at least better than mine host’s English, which was barely comprehensible. ‘I’m too tired to solve the problem! You booked a room for me, and it’s not my fault that the lady’s ill—I suggest you find me another room, here or somewhere else. I don’t care where I sleep—but I’ve got to sleep somewhere! Anyway, now let me have a glass of beer, and something to eat. I’m starving.’

  An obsequious waiter dashed forward to take his order, and too tired to worry further for the moment, he drank beer and ate savoury Wienerschnitzel, red cabbage salad, and sticky almond küchen, showered with caraway seeds, with great content, while the propri
etor, his brow furrowed with distress, disappeared into the house. He was just consuming the last crumbs of küchen with great relish, when the plump gentleman appeared again, his face creased into a curious expression between doubt and relief. He had found a room—a little way up the road—in the house of a gnädige Frau, who was so gracious as to have a room to let. Frau Hellner, of the ‘Rosenhaus’. . . . If the Herr did not object to sleeping there, he could come and take his principal meals at the ‘Fürstenhaus’, until his own room was vacant. Hans, the porter would take his luggage up for him—the Herr would not mind?

  The worthy Herr Sichel made the suggestion with an air of diffidence that faintly puzzled MacIntosh, who accepted the compromise with a sigh of relief. And when, indeed, after following the useful Hans a few yards up a narrow road, white with dust and fragrant with the scent of sunburnt grass and flowers, he stopped at the gate of a small whitewashed house, balconied all round with carved wood, and possessed of an incredibly steep tiled roof crowned with a rampant lion as a weather cock, he swiftly decided that to sleep here, a little way out of the village, among the scented fields, was infinitely preferable to sleeping at the ‘Fürstenhaus’, with the dust and clamour of the tiny square about its doors, and took possession of his new quarters with great content.

  Frau Hellner was scarcely as gracious as her description—a dusty, scared-looking little woman in black, silent as a shadow. But the room was all that could be desired—large, deliciously clean, furnished sparsely but adequately with that shiny yellow pinewood furniture smelling of resin and camphor-polish so common in Austria; walls covered with a white paper sprigged with pink and green daisies, spotless bed linen, and a tiled floor scrubbed till it shone red as the cheeks of Friedl, the bawny yellow-haired mädchen who assisted Hans to drag the visitor’s luggage upstairs. There was, moreover, an outside balcony built of wood that was almost as large as another room, with a green wicker table and lounge-chair already upon it—beyond it, a group of tall linden-trees nodded beside a hedge that divided the garden from a field of corn, a feathery sea of gold just beginning to turn to silver, for the evening was drawing in, and a few faint stars already pricked the dusky violet of the sky behind the dark line of the hills.

  Yes, decided MacIntosh contentedly, as he dismissed the woman and locked his door—to room at the ‘Rosenhaus’ was a good move—definitely good. Luxuriously he undressed, tossing the contents of his rucksack and valise all abroad as he searched for pyjamas, toothbrush, a book to read in case he could not sleep—but of course, he would sleep. He was dog-tired. Yet oddly enough, he did not, after all, find sleep come quite as easily as he had imagined. The bed was comfortable, the air cool, yet not too cool; yet he remained curiously restless. At last, after half an hour’s desultory reading, he decided to smoke a cigarette upon the balcony, and dragging a pillow and coverlet with him, arranged himself upon the chaise-longue—but not even his favourite Craven ‘A’ had their usual soothing effect upon him tonight.

  The faint muffled sounds of night rose up to him from all sides, the far tinkle of a cowbell came at intervals from the hills beyond, the cheep and flutter of sleepy birds, the distant murmur of some tiny stream, the whisper of the night-breeze through the leaves of the group of lindens . . . now and then he caught the faint murmur of talk from the kitchen, which was just round the angle of the house, but except for that he might have been utterly alone upon a mountain top, only that faint recurrent tinkle serving to remind him of human contacts, since it was a human hand that had tied that warning bell about the wandering creature’s neck. Curious, how conscious he became of that tiny distant sound. . . . He found himself listening for it, idly, interestedly; wondering about it, weaving pictures—turning to listen more intently, he caught sight of a paper tucked down between the slats of the wooden side of the balcony, and pulled it out.

  It was a folded magazine of some sort, and he opened it, moved by a faint curiosity. His book bored him, and this might perhaps, be a stray copy of Simpliccimus or some such rag, left there by the last occupant of the room—he laughed, surprised and disappointed, as he saw what it was. A six-month old copy of Weldon’s Journal, open and pressed back at a page of dress designs. Yet, having nothing better to do, he studied the designs idly, and noted that one was marked with pencil; a girlish little frock in flowered cotton or cretonne, short-sleeved and much flounced. . . . Yawning, he laid the paper down upon the table, and deciding that at last he really felt sleepy, arose and strolled to the balcony rail to fling away his last cigarette stub, mindful of the ‘house of wood’ in which he was sleeping!

  The little garden below was dark, but the tufts of marigold flowers, kuckucksblume, and huge white daisies shone out dimly against the dusk of the hedges behind them, like little moons. . . . The field beyond now shone all silver in the moonlight, rippling and curling as the breeze brushed the fluid waves of the corn, like some fairy ocean. There seemed to be a figure standing in the shadow of the hedge beside the group of lindens, just where there was a gap into the field. The plump serving maid, Friedl, in all probability, waiting for young Hans, the lint-haired porter from the ‘Fürstenhaus’, decided MacIntosh, indulgently, who had not failed to note the obvious intimacy between the two.

  ‘Friedl!’ he called, meaning to tease the girl, but there was no response.

  It might, of course, be Frau Hellner, but he rather thought it must be Friedl, since she had sported a light-coloured print dress, and the effect of this figure was light, mere shadow among shadows as it was. . . . But he was sleepy at last, thank goodness, and crawling thankfully between the sheets, he slept the clock round until the sun was high in the heavens, and his breakfast-coffee cold beside his bed. Yet it struck him, as he rang for a fresh supply, that he had dreamt a good deal. Dreams in which, oddly enough, the dress he had seen in Weldon’s Journal seemed to have figured—but the substance of the dream had fled. He was only vaguely conscious that in his dream a woman wearing that flowered cotton dress had somehow played a part. . . .

  But he had definitely fallen in love with the ‘Rosenhaus’—which was well, since the Engländerin at the ‘Fürstenhaus’ showed, as the days went on, no signs of recovering her health. Although at first his English liking for a hard mattress and light coverings rebelled at sleeping between the two giant feather pillows, he rapidly grew used to them, and what with living in the sun, bathing, fishing, tramping, and eating huge meals—for the type of food that is over-rich and greasy in Germany is translated into a perfect and delicious cuisine in Austria—the Tom MacIntosh who had left London a pale-faced City clerk, soon strode about the lanes and fields, bareheaded, sunburnt and gloriously happy.

  His rusty German was rapidly becoming fluent again, his untrained feet growing hard and muscular and his shoulders accepted the strain of a laden rucksack without aching. It was inconvenient on a long tramp to go back to the village for a midday meal, so each morning he packed, besides camera, book, and sketching materials, enough food into his rucksack to last until evening and the long and satisfying supper at the ‘Fürstenhaus’, and set off to lake or mountains, rarely returning to the ‘Rosenhaus’ and his bed until the stars were peering down over the ridge of mountains that ringed the flowery stretch of fields and meadow-land that cradled Pertisau.

  It was, therefore, some time before he quite realised that he was growing increasingly reluctant to go back to his sleeping quarters—and when he did discover it, though faintly puzzled, he was ready with half a dozen good reasons why he did not on the whole like the ‘Rosenhaus’ quite as much as he had thought, Certainly he was not sleeping as well as he had done at first. He slept, that is, but restlessly and dreamily, though the dreams were difficult to remember in detail; yet persistently the woman in the flowered dress seemed to figure in them . . . also Friedl’s habit of wandering about the garden below his balcony began to get a little on his nerves.

  She was a restless individual, apparently, and did not go to bed, as did most of the villagers, at the re
spectable hour of ten—often he would wake with a jerk and hear her faint rustling step in the garden below, and once or twice he had risen, irritably, and gone on to the balcony to see what on earth the girl was up to, only to glimpse her pale figure fluttering quickly into the shadow of the linden trees. Rather annoyed at the perpetual disturbances—faint as they were, they spoiled his night’s rest, and sleeping was an important of his holiday—he tackled her point-blank upon the subject one morning when she appeared with his breakfast of coffee, rolls and fragrant sundark honey.

  ‘Have a pleasant time last night, Friedl?’ he queried in his stumbling German—the girl frowned and looked at him blankly, so he tried again. ‘Who were you flirting with down in the garden last night, eh? I heard you, you bad girl!’

  It was a laboured attempt at reproof and pleasantry combined, but he was somewhat disconcerted at its effect. Friedl neither tossed her head nor looked abashed, but turned a quite alarming pallor under her healthy pink skin, and stared at him.

  ‘The Herr has heard?’ she faltered.

  A little annoyed, Tom snapped her up.

  ‘Of course I heard—you were just under my window! I don’t mind your meeting your young man in the least, my girl, but I do wish you would not whisper and shuffle about in the garden just underneath my balcony—it wakes me up!’

  To his amazement, she caught him up, eagerly, alarmedly.

  ‘Nein, nein, mein Herr! It is not me—I meet my Hans nowhere near this house! Never would I stay near this house after sundown . . . lieber Gott, nein!’