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Hauntings

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HAUNTINGS

FANTASTIC STORIES

VERNON LEE

1890






To _FLORA PRIESTLEY_ and _ARTHUR LEMON_

_Are Dedicated_

DIONEA, AMOUR DURE,

_and_ THESE PAGES OF INTRODUCTION AND APOLOGY.




_Preface_

We were talking last evening--as the blue moon-mist poured in through
the old-fashioned grated window, and mingled with our yellow
lamplight at table--we were talking of a certain castle whose
heir is initiated (as folk tell) on his twenty-first birthday to the
knowledge of a secret so terrible as to overshadow his subsequent life.
It struck us, discussing idly the various mysteries and terrors that
may lie behind this fact or this fable, that no doom or horror
conceivable and to be defined in words could ever adequately solve this
riddle; that no reality of dreadfulness could seem caught but paltry,
bearable, and easy to face in comparison with this vague we know not
what.

And this leads me to say, that it seems to me that the supernatural, in
order to call forth those sensations, terrible to our ancestors and
terrible but delicious to ourselves, skeptical posterity, must
necessarily, and with but a few exceptions, remain enwrapped in
mystery. Indeed, 'tis the mystery that touches us, the vague shroud of
moonbeams that hangs about the haunting lady, the glint on the
warrior's breastplate, the click of his unseen spurs, while the figure
itself wanders forth, scarcely outlined, scarcely separated from the
surrounding trees; or walks, and sucked back, ever and anon, into the
flickering shadows.

A number of ingenious persons of our day, desirous of a
pocket-superstition, as men of yore were greedy of a pocket-saint to
carry about in gold and enamel, a number of highly reasoning men of
semi-science have returned to the notion of our fathers, that ghosts
have an existence outside our own fancy and emotion; and have culled
from the experience of some Jemima Jackson, who fifty years ago, being
nine years of age, saw her maiden aunt appear six months after decease,
abundant proof of this fact. One feels glad to think the maiden aunt
should have walked about after death, if it afforded her any
satisfaction, poor soul! but one is struck by the extreme
uninterestingness of this lady's appearance in the spirit,
corresponding perhaps to her want of charm while in the flesh.
Altogether one quite agrees, having duly perused the collection of
evidence on the subject, with the wisdom of these modern ghost-experts,
when they affirm that you can always tell a genuine ghost-story by the
circumstance of its being about a nobody, its having no point or
picturesqueness, and being, generally speaking, flat, stale, and
unprofitable.

A genuine ghost-story! But then they are not genuine ghost-stories,
those tales that tingle through our additional sense, the sense of the
supernatural, and fill places, nay whole epochs, with their strange
perfume of witchgarden flowers.

No, alas! neither the story of the murdered King of Denmark (murdered
people, I am told, usually stay quiet, as a scientific fact), nor of
that weird woman who saw King James the Poet three times with his
shroud wrapped ever higher; nor the tale of the finger of the bronze
Venus closing over the wedding-ring, whether told by Morris in verse
patterned like some tapestry, or by Mérimée in terror of cynical
reality, or droned by the original mediaeval professional story-teller,
none of these are genuine ghost-stories. They exist, these ghosts, only
in our minds, in the minds of those dead folk; they have never stumbled
and fumbled about, with Jemima Jackson's maiden aunt, among the
armchairs and rep sofas of reality.

They are things of the imagination, born there, bred there, sprung from
the strange confused heaps, half-rubbish, half-treasure, which lie in
our fancy, heaps of half-faded recollections, of fragmentary vivid
impressions, litter of multi-colored tatters, and faded herbs and
flowers, whence arises that odor (we all know it), musty and damp, but
penetratingly sweet and intoxicatingly heady, which hangs in the air
when the ghost has swept through the unopened door, and the flickering
flames of candle and fire start up once more after waning.

The genuine ghost? And is not this he, or she, this one born of
ourselves, of the weird places we have seen, the strange stories we
have heard--this one, and not the aunt of Miss Jemima Jackson? For what
use, I entreat you to tell me, is that respectable spinster's vision?
Was she worth seeing, that aunt of hers, or would she, if followed,
have led the way to any interesting brimstone or any endurable
beatitude?

The supernatural can open the caves of Jamschid and scale the ladder of
Jacob: what use has it got if it land us in Islington or Shepherd's
Bush? It is well known that Dr. Faustus, having been offered any ghost
he chose, boldly selected, for Mephistopheles to convey, no less a
person than Helena of Troy. Imagine if the familiar fiend had summoned
up some Miss Jemima Jackson's Aunt of Antiquity!

That is the thing--the Past, the more or less remote Past, of which the
prose is clean obliterated by distance--that is the place to get our
ghosts from. Indeed we live ourselves, we educated folk of modern
times, on the borderland of the Past, in houses looking down on its
troubadours' orchards and Greek folks' pillared courtyards; and a
legion of ghosts, very vague and changeful, are perpetually to and fro,
fetching and carrying for us between it and the Present.

Hence, my four little tales are of no genuine ghosts in the scientific
sense; they tell of no hauntings such as could be contributed by the
Society for Psychical Research, of no specters that can be caught in
definite places and made to dictate judicial evidence. My ghosts are
what you call spurious ghosts (according to me the only genuine ones),
of whom I can affirm only one thing, that they haunted certain brains,
and have haunted, among others, my own and my friends'--yours, dear
Arthur Lemon, along the dim twilit tracks, among the high growing
bracken and the spectral pines, of the south country; and yours, amidst
the mist of moonbeams and olive-branches, dear Flora Priestley, while
the moonlit sea moaned and rattled against the moldering walls of the
house whence Shelley set sail for eternity.

VERNON LEE

_MAIANO, near FLORENCE, June 1889._





_Amour Dure:_

PASSAGES FROM THE DIARY OF SPIRIDION TREPKA.



_Part I_

_Urbania, August 20th, 1885.--_

I had longed, these years and years, to be in Italy, to come face to
face with the Past; and was this Italy, was this the Past? I could have
cried, yes cried, for disappointment when I first wandered about Rome,
with an invitation to dine at the German Embassy in my pocket, and
three or four Berlin and Munich Vandals at my heels, telling me where
the best beer and sauerkraut could be had, and what the last article by
Grimm or Mommsen was about.

Is this folly? Is it falsehood? Am I not myself a product of modern,
northern civilization; is not my coming to Italy due to this very
modern scientific vandalism, which has given me a traveling scholarship
because I have written a book like all those other atrocious books of
erudition and art-criticism? Nay, am I not here at Urbania on the
express understanding that, in a certain number of months, I shall
produce just another such book? Dost thou imagine, thou miserable
Spiridion, thou Pole grown into the semblance of a German pedant,
doctor of philosophy, professor even, author of a prize essay on the
despots of the fifteenth century, dost thou imagine that thou, with thy
ministerial letters and proof-sheets in thy black professorial
coat-pocket, canst ever come in spirit into the presence of the Past?

Too true, alas! But let me forget it, at least, every now and then; as
I forgot it this afternoon, while the white bullocks dragged my gig
slowly winding along interminable valleys, crawling along interminable
hill-sides, with the invisible droning torrent far below, and only the
bare grey and reddish peaks all around, up to this town of Urbania,
forgotten of mankind, towered and battlemented on the high Apennine
ridge. Sigillo, Penna, Fossombrone, Mercatello, Montemurlo--each single
village name, as the driver pointed it out, brought to my mind the
recollection of some battle or some great act of treachery of former
days. And as the huge mountains shut out the setting sun, and the
valleys filled with bluish shadow and mist, only a band of threatening
smoke-red remaining behind the towers and cupolas of the city on its
mountain-top, and the sound of church bells floated across the
precipice from Urbania, I almost expected, at every turning of the
road, that a troop of horsemen, with beaked helmets and clawed shoes,
would emerge, with armor glittering and pennons waving in the sunset.
And then, not two hours ago, entering the town at dusk, passing along
the deserted streets, with only a smoky light here and there under a
shrine or in front of a fruit-stall, or a fire reddening the blackness
of a smithy; passing beneath the battlements and turrets of the
palace.... Ah, that was Italy, it was the Past!

_August 21st.--_

And this is the Present! Four letters of introduction to deliver, and
an hour's polite conversation to endure with the Vice-Prefect, the
Syndic, the Director of the Archives, and the good man to whom my
friend Max had sent me for lodgings....

_August 22nd-27th.--_

Spent the greater part of the day in the Archives, and the greater part
of my time there in being bored to extinction by the Director thereof,
who today spouted Aeneas Sylvius' Commentaries for three-quarters of an
hour without taking breath. From this sort of martyrdom (what are the
sensations of a former racehorse being driven in a cab? If you can
conceive them, they are those of a Pole turned Prussian professor) I
take refuge in long rambles through the town. This town is a handful of
tall black houses huddled on to the top of an Alp, long narrow lanes
trickling down its sides, like the slides we made on hillocks in our
boyhood, and in the middle the superb red brick structure, turreted and
battlemented, of Duke Ottobuono's palace, from whose windows you look
down upon a sea, a kind of whirlpool, of melancholy grey mountains.
Then there are the people, dark, bushy-bearded men, riding about like
brigands, wrapped in green-lined cloaks upon their shaggy pack-mules;
or loitering about, great, brawny, low-headed youngsters, like the
parti-colored bravos in Signorelli's frescoes; the beautiful boys, like
so many young Raphaels, with eyes like the eyes of bullocks, and the
huge women, Madonnas or St. Elizabeths, as the case may be, with their
clogs firmly poised on their toes and their brass pitchers on their
heads, as they go up and down the steep black alleys. I do not talk
much to these people; I fear my illusions being dispelled. At the
corner of a street, opposite Francesco di Giorgio's beautiful little
portico, is a great blue and red advertisement, representing an angel
descending to crown Elias Howe, on account of his sewing-machines; and
the clerks of the Vice-Prefecture, who dine at the place where I get my
dinner, yell politics, Minghetti, Cairoli, Tunis, ironclads, &c., at
each other, and sing snatches of _La Fille de Mme. Angot,_ which I
imagine they have been performing here recently.

No; talking to the natives is evidently a dangerous experiment. Except
indeed, perhaps, to my good landlord, Signor Notaro Porri, who is just
as learned, and takes considerably less snuff (or rather brushes it off
his coat more often) than the Director of the Archives. I forgot to jot
down (and I feel I must jot down, in the vain belief that some day
these scraps will help, like a withered twig of olive or a three-wicked
Tuscan lamp on my table, to bring to my mind, in that hateful Babylon
of Berlin, these happy Italian days)--I forgot to record that I am
lodging in the house of a dealer in antiquities. My window looks up the
principal street to where the little column with Mercury on the top
rises in the midst of the awnings and porticoes of the market-place.
Bending over the chipped ewers and tubs full of sweet basil, clove
pinks, and marigolds, I can just see a corner of the palace turret, and
the vague ultramarine of the hills beyond. The house, whose back goes
sharp down into the ravine, is a queer up-and-down black place,
whitewashed rooms, hung with the Raphaels and Francias and Peruginos,
whom mine host regularly carries to the chief inn whenever a stranger
is expected; and surrounded by old carved chairs, sofas of the Empire,
embossed and gilded wedding-chests, and the cupboards which contain
bits of old damask and embroidered altar-cloths scenting the place with
the smell of old incense and mustiness; all of which are presided over
by Signor Porri's three maiden sisters--Sora Serafina, Sora Lodovica,
and Sora Adalgisa--the three Fates in person, even to the distaffs and
their black cats.

Sor Asdrubale, as they call my landlord, is also a notary. He regrets
the Pontifical Government, having had a cousin who was a Cardinal's
train-bearer, and believes that if only you lay a table for two, light
four candles made of dead men's fat, and perform certain rites about
which he is not very precise, you can, on Christmas Eve and similar
nights, summon up San Pasquale Baylon, who will write you the winning
numbers of the lottery upon the smoked back of a plate, if you have
previously slapped him on both cheeks and repeated three Ave Marias.
The difficulty consists in obtaining the dead men's fat for the
candles, and also in slapping the saint before he have time to vanish.

"If it were not for that," says Sor Asdrubale, "the Government would
have had to suppress the lottery ages ago--eh!"

_Sept. 9th._--This history of Urbania is not without its romance,
although that romance (as usual) has been overlooked by our Dryasdusts.
Even before coming here I felt attracted by the strange figure of a
woman, which appeared from out of the dry pages of Gualterio's and
Padre de Sanctis' histories of this place. This woman is Medea,
daughter of Galeazzo IV. Malatesta, Lord of Carpi, wife first of
Pierluigi Orsini, Duke of Stimigliano, and subsequently of Guidalfonso
II., Duke of Urbania, predecessor of the great Duke Robert II.

This woman's history and character remind one of that of Bianca
Cappello, and at the same time of Lucrezia Borgia. Born in 1556, she
was affianced at the age of twelve to a cousin, a Malatesta of the
Rimini family. This family having greatly gone down in the world, her
engagement was broken, and she was betrothed a year later to a member
of the Pico family, and married to him by proxy at the age of fourteen.
But this match not satisfying her own or her father's ambition, the
marriage by proxy was, upon some pretext, declared null, and the suit
encouraged of the Duke of Stimigliano, a great Umbrian feudatory of the
Orsini family. But the bridegroom, Giovanfrancesco Pico, refused to
submit, pleaded his case before the Pope, and tried to carry off by
force his bride, with whom he was madly in love, as the lady was most
lovely and of most cheerful and amiable manner, says an old anonymous
chronicle. Pico waylaid her litter as she was going to a villa of her
father's, and carried her to his castle near Mirandola, where he
respectfully pressed his suit; insisting that he had a right to
consider her as his wife. But the lady escaped by letting herself into
the moat by a rope of sheets, and Giovanfrancesco Pico was discovered
stabbed in the chest, by the hand of Madonna Medea da Carpi. He was a
handsome youth only eighteen years old.

The Pico having been settled, and the marriage with him declared null
by the Pope, Medea da Carpi was solemnly married to the Duke of
Stimigliano, and went to live upon his domains near Rome.

Two years later, Pierluigi Orsini was stabbed by one of his grooms at
his castle of Stimigliano, near Orvieto; and suspicion fell upon his
widow, more especially as, immediately after the event, she caused the
murderer to be cut down by two servants in her own chamber; but not
before he had declared that she had induced him to assassinate his
master by a promise of her love. Things became so hot for Medea da
Carpi that she fled to Urbania and threw herself at the feet of Duke
Guidalfonso II., declaring that she had caused the groom to be killed
merely to avenge her good fame, which he had slandered, and that she
was absolutely guiltless of the death of her husband. The marvelous
beauty of the widowed Duchess of Stimigliano, who was only nineteen,
entirely turned the head of the Duke of Urbania. He affected implicit
belief in her innocence, refused to give her up to the Orsinis, kinsmen
of her late husband, and assigned to her magnificent apartments in the
left wing of the palace, among which the room containing the famous
fireplace ornamented with marble Cupids on a blue ground. Guidalfonso
fell madly in love with his beautiful guest. Hitherto timid and
domestic in character, he began publicly to neglect his wife, Maddalena
Varano of Camerino, with whom, although childless, he had hitherto
lived on excellent terms; he not only treated with contempt the
admonitions of his advisers and of his suzerain the Pope, but went so
far as to take measures to repudiate his wife, on the score of quite
imaginary ill-conduct. The Duchess Maddalena, unable to bear this
treatment, fled to the convent of the barefooted sisters at Pesaro,
where she pined away, while Medea da Carpi reigned in her place at
Urbania, embroiling Duke Guidalfonso in quarrels both with the powerful
Orsinis, who continued to accuse her of Stimigliano's murder, and with
the Varanos, kinsmen of the injured Duchess Maddalena; until at length,
in the year 1576, the Duke of Urbania, having become suddenly, and not
without suspicious circumstances, a widower, publicly married Medea da
Carpi two days after the decease of his unhappy wife. No child was born
of this marriage; but such was the infatuation of Duke Guidalfonso,
that the new Duchess induced him to settle the inheritance of the Duchy
(having, with great difficulty, obtained the consent of the Pope) on
the boy Bartolommeo, her son by Stimigliano, but whom the Orsinis
refused to acknowledge as such, declaring him to be the child of that
Giovanfrancesco Pico to whom Medea had been married by proxy, and whom,
in defense, as she had said, of her honor, she had assassinated; and
this investiture of the Duchy of Urbania on to a stranger and a bastard
was at the expense of the obvious rights of the Cardinal Robert,
Guidalfonso's younger brother.

In May 1579 Duke Guidalfonso died suddenly and mysteriously, Medea
having forbidden all access to his chamber, lest, on his deathbed, he
might repent and reinstate his brother in his rights. The Duchess
immediately caused her son, Bartolommeo Orsini, to be proclaimed Duke
of Urbania, and herself regent; and, with the help of two or three
unscrupulous young men, particularly a certain Captain Oliverotto da
Narni, who was rumored to be her lover, seized the reins of government
with extraordinary and terrible vigor, marching an army against the
Varanos and Orsinis, who were defeated at Sigillo, and ruthlessly
exterminating every person who dared question the lawfulness of the
succession; while, all the time, Cardinal Robert, who had flung aside
his priest's garb and vows, went about in Rome, Tuscany, Venice--nay,
even to the Emperor and the King of Spain, imploring help against the
usurper. In a few months he had turned the tide of sympathy against the
Duchess-Regent; the Pope solemnly declared the investiture of
Bartolommeo Orsini worthless, and published the accession of Robert
II., Duke of Urbania and Count of Montemurlo; the Grand Duke of Tuscany
and the Venetians secretly promised assistance, but only if Robert were
able to assert his rights by main force. Little by little, one town
after the other of the Duchy went over to Robert, and Medea da Carpi
found herself surrounded in the mountain citadel of Urbania like a
scorpion surrounded by flames. (This simile is not mine, but belongs to
Raffaello Gualterio, historiographer to Robert II.) But, unlike the
scorpion, Medea refused to commit suicide. It is perfectly marvelous
how, without money or allies, she could so long keep her enemies at
bay; and Gualterio attributes this to those fatal fascinations which
had brought Pico and Stimigliano to their deaths, which had turned the
once honest Guidalfonso into a villain, and which were such that, of
all her lovers, not one but preferred dying for her, even after he had
been treated with ingratitude and ousted by a rival; a faculty which
Messer Raffaello Gualterio clearly attributed to hellish connivance.

At last the ex-Cardinal Robert succeeded, and triumphantly entered
Urbania in November 1579. His accession was marked by moderation and
clemency. Not a man was put to death, save Oliverotto da Narni, who
threw himself on the new Duke, tried to stab him as he alighted at the
palace, and who was cut down by the Duke's men, crying, "Orsini,
Orsini! Medea, Medea! Long live Duke Bartolommeo!" with his dying
breath, although it is said that the Duchess had treated him with
ignominy. The little Bartolommeo was sent to Rome to the Orsinis; the
Duchess, respectfully confined in the left wing of the palace.

It is said that she haughtily requested to see the new Duke, but that
he shook his head, and, in his priest's fashion, quoted a verse about
Ulysses and the Sirens; and it is remarkable that he persistently
refused to see her, abruptly leaving his chamber one day that she had
entered it by stealth. After a few months a conspiracy was discovered
to murder Duke Robert, which had obviously been set on foot by Medea.
But the young man, one Marcantonio Frangipani of Rome, denied, even
under the severest torture, any complicity of hers; so that Duke
Robert, who wished to do nothing violent, merely transferred the
Duchess from his villa at Sant' Elmo to the convent of the Clarisse in
town, where she was guarded and watched in the closest manner. It
seemed impossible that Medea should intrigue any further, for she
certainly saw and could be seen by no one. Yet she contrived to send a
letter and her portrait to one Prinzivalle degli Ordelaffi, a youth,
only nineteen years old, of noble Romagnole family, and who was
betrothed to one of the most beautiful girls of Urbania. He immediately
broke off his engagement, and, shortly afterwards, attempted to shoot
Duke Robert with a holster-pistol as he knelt at mass on the festival
of Easter Day. This time Duke Robert was determined to obtain proofs
against Medea. Prinzivalle degli Ordelaffi was kept some days without
food, then submitted to the most violent tortures, and finally
condemned. When he was going to be flayed with red-hot pincers and
quartered by horses, he was told that he might obtain the grace of
immediate death by confessing the complicity of the Duchess; and the
confessor and nuns of the convent, which stood in the place of
execution outside Porta San Romano, pressed Medea to save the wretch,
whose screams reached her, by confessing her own guilt. Medea asked
permission to go to a balcony, where she could see Prinzivalle and be
seen by him. She looked on coldly, then threw down her embroidered
kerchief to the poor mangled creature. He asked the executioner to wipe
his mouth with it, kissed it, and cried out that Medea was innocent.
Then, after several hours of torments, he died. This was too much for
the patience even of Duke Robert. Seeing that as long as Medea lived
his life would be in perpetual danger, but unwilling to cause a scandal
(somewhat of the priest-nature remaining), he had Medea strangled in
the convent, and, what is remarkable, insisted that only women--two
infanticides to whom he remitted their sentence--should be employed for
the deed.

"This clement prince," writes Don Arcangelo Zappi in his life of him,
published in 1725, "can be blamed only for one act of cruelty, the more
odious as he had himself, until released from his vows by the Pope,
been in holy orders. It is said that when he caused the death of the
infamous Medea da Carpi, his fear lest her extraordinary charms should
seduce any man was such, that he not only employed women as
executioners, but refused to permit her a priest or monk, thus forcing
her to die unshriven, and refusing her the benefit of any penitence
that may have lurked in her adamantine heart."

Such is the story of Medea da Carpi, Duchess of Stimigliano Orsini, and
then wife of Duke Guidalfonso II. of Urbania. She was put to death just
two hundred and ninety-seven years ago, December 1582, at the age of
barely seven-and twenty, and having, in the course of her short life,
brought to a violent end five of her lovers, from Giovanfrancesco Pico
to Prinzivalle degli Ordelaffi.

_Sept. 20th._--

A grand illumination of the town in honor of the taking of Rome fifteen
years ago. Except Sor Asdrubale, my landlord, who shakes his head at
the Piedmontese, as he calls them, the people here are all
Italianissimi. The Popes kept them very much down since Urbania lapsed
to the Holy See in 1645.

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