Part 32

A few dabs of disinfectant had indeed been distributed about the moat, on much the same principle, and with the same effect, as the red pepper which is served with wild duck, just to heighten the flavour of the dish.

* * * * *

Perhaps the most lasting impression of that Lombardy sojourn was the morning discovery in a glass of drinking-water which had been placed beside the bed the previous night, of the most extraordinary creature any of us had ever seen. It was like a very large shrimp, perfectly transparent, with such gigantic antennæ and legs that they protruded over the top of the tumbler!

No one else in the castle had ever beheld anything like it either, it appeared; except one old woman, who described it vaguely as “una bestia del acqua.” But as it most certainly had not been in the tumbler when the water was put into it, its origin remains for ever a mystery.

A few nights later the little girl of the party of travellers found one of these zoological mysteries in a quite empty tumbler! We might have thought it a practical joke played on the forestieri, only that no one could have come into the room without the knowledge of its occupants.

This, and the sudden departure of the “chef” who had been responsible for the little quails in the soup, did upset the equanimity of the pretty hostess.

“To think,” she cried, “that I should invite my best friend here, to starve or poison her!... And that unknown beasts should get into her drinking-water! I—I have been here every summer for eleven years and I have never seen a beast like that!”

She thought we had dreamt the first monster. The second was carried in to her, with its horrible transparent legs bristling over the tumbler. She surveyed it hopelessly.

“Il ne manquait plus que cela!”

* * * * *

Yet one looks back on it all with a kind of tenderness. It was all so picturesque! What a dwelling might have been made of that antique castle by anyone who had the money and the art to spend it!

But, alas!... In the great stone bedchambers where we lodged there were blinds with Swiss scenes depicted in the most vivid colours: a mountain maiden and a Mont Blanc, and a torrent upon each.... Incongruity could go no farther—except perhaps in the billiard-room, which had been done up by the Principe and was always shown off with great pomp. It was a splendid vaulted apartment, dating from the Barbarossa period; there were four deep niches hewn out of the stone: well, in two of these were placed large Chinese Mandarins, with heads that nodded if anyone could reach high enough to set them going; and, in the other two were plaster statues of the worst garden description: Flora with a basket, Ceres with a lumpy sheaf!

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XXXIII

There is no ghost in the garden of the Villino. Neither the meek spirit of Susan nor Tom’s saturnine spectre haunts the peaceful glade where they lie. ‹Juvenal has planted a “Tree of Heaven” at the head of his ever-mourned darling and covered the grave with Forget-me-nots!›

* * * * *

My youth ‹these reminiscences are contributed by Loki’s grandmother› was spent in a large country place in Ireland, and to us children—we were six then—certain walks, certain dells in the woods, were assuredly haunted.

The property had long ago belonged to one Lady Tidd, who so adored it that she had herself buried on a hill overlooking it, her coffin upright in its tall square tomb. It was Lady Tidd who was popularly supposed to haunt the fair wooded lands that had come to us. This Dysart Hill, on the top of which the ruined chapel and the deserted graveyard lay, was a favourite walk of our childish days. When our short legs had mastered the difficulties of the slope—and a very stony slope it was, covered towards the summit with a fine mountain grass, than which no footing is more slippery—we never failed to wander round to that singular monument, through the massive granite door of which she who stood in the upright coffin was supposed to be gazing down upon the distant prospect of our own home. It was never without an awful sense of horror and mystery that I pictured those dead eyes, endowed with miraculous vision, piercing through wood and stone to stare out upon what she still loved. Some apprehension of the horror and tragedy of bodily death and of the dread power of the spirit seized hold of my small soul as I contemplated that grave of human folly and of poor human aspiration. There it was, perhaps, that an overpowering dislike of graveyards began in me.

* * * * *

Lady Tidd was seen by a gardener of ours, between two Yew trees, in a dark corner outside the garden wall.

“She riz up out of the ground at me,” he told my mother. And he added, as a convincing detail, that his hat stood up on his equally rising hair. “Sure, wasn’t me hat lifted an inch off me head, ma’m?”

My mother, strong-souled creature as she was, laughed with a fine scepticism. Another kind of spirit had done the mischief, she declared. But we who heard could not so easily dismiss the agonizingly fascinating tale. We knew that spot outside the garden wall, in the shadow of the black Yew trees; and the fear and the darkness that always fell upon us when we passed it.

* * * * *

Another dreaded place was a certain Primrose dell, beautifully starred with blossoms, beautifully green, beautifully shaded; the very place for happy children, it would seem, and for long hours of flower-picking gipsy teas and endless games. It was quite lost in the woods that banded the property, away from intrusions of nurse or governess—and yet, how haunted! Never shall I forget—I feel it now as I write—the profound misery that would seize upon me at the very entrance to the laughing glade.

I am not sure, however, that there was not a tangible reason for this depression, connected with the disappearance of a fondly-loved four-footed playfellow. A darling dog he was: one of the jocose, high-spirited kind; his open mouth and hanging tongue seemed to show him a partaker in human mirth, with a waggish humour all his own. ‹No pun is intended!› He had a rough tangled coat, black and white, a flag of a tail, flopping ears. He was the swiftest, gayest, most romping creature that has ever shared the play of children. We adored him. His name was Carlo. I don’t know of what breed he was, if of any.... Alas! he hunted the sheep! He disappeared! No one knew what had become of him. We children never ascertained anything, but there was a rumour—a dark, untraceable, yet most convincing rumour—that somebody had seen the small, rough corpse hanging from a tree-trunk, not far from the Primrose dell. Was it not that, perhaps, which haunted the dell for me?

We suspected the herd. A large, fat, round-faced, smiling man, this; with an unctuous, creeping voice that seemed to gurgle up like a slow oil-bubble from inner recesses of obesity. A man who at intervals would remark, seeing us grouped about our mother, “You’ve a lovely lot of ladies, ma’m, God bless them!”—as if we were little pigs or calves.

He had a sinister reputation with us already on account of his periodical dealings with sheep, which we, tender-hearted and impressionable children, scarcely as much as hinted to each other; and certainly never really associated with the roast mutton that appeared twice a week.