Matthew Phipps Shiel

“ At such periods the rains descended—and the floods came—even as in the first world-deluge; those rösts, or eddies, which ever encircled Rayba, spurning then the bands of lateral space, burst aloft into a whirl of water-spouts, to dance about the little land, upon which, converging, some of them discharged their waters: and the locks which flowed to the cataract thus redoubled their volume, and crashed with redoubled roar. Harfager said it was miraculous that for eighteen years no such grand event had transacted itself at Rayba. ”

“ To such an ear, I understood him to say, the luxury of torture involved in a large sound-increase around was an allurement from which no human virtue could turn: and when I said that I could not even conceive such an increase, much less the means by which it could be effected, he brought out from the archives of the mansion some annals kept by the heads of his family. From these it appeared that the tempests that ever lacerated the latitude of Rayba did not fail to give place, at intervals of some years, to one mammoth madness, one Samson among the merry men, and Sirius among the suns. ”

“ In a moment of opportunity our two forces got the shutter shut again.
“Come!”—he had obtained a fresh glimmer, and beckoned before me—“let’s go see how the dead fare in the great desolation”: and we ran, but had hardly got to the middle of the stairway, when I was thrilled by the consciousness of some great shock, the bass of a dull thud, which nothing save the thumping to the floor of the whole lump of the coffins could have caused. I looked for Harfager, and for a moment only saw his heels skedaddling, panic-hounded, his ears stopped, his mouth round! ”

“ Aith was thus a prisoner. I then entered the lady’s chamber. She lay over the bed in the alcove, and to my bent ear grossly croaked the ruckle of death. A glance at her mangled throat convincing me that her last moments were come, I settled her on the bed, curtained her within the loosened festoons of the hangings of black, and turned from the cursedness of her aspect. On an escritoire near I noticed a note, intended apparently for Harfager: “I mean to defy, and fly; not from fear, but for the delight of the defiance itself. Can you come?” ”

“ When I passionately shouted that I could gather no fragment of sound from his moving mouth, he clapped both his palms to his ears, and then anew besieged mine: but again without result: and now, with an angry throw of the hand, he caught up his taper, and walked from the apartment.
There was something strikingly unnatural in his manner— something which reminded me of the skeleton, Aith: an excess of zeal, a fever, a rage, a loudness, an eagerness of gait, a great extravagance of gesture. ”

“ When I found my way back to Harfager, very anguish was now stamping in him about the chamber; he shook his head like a tormented horse, brushing and barring from his hearing each crash of the brass shields. “Ah, when—when——” he hoarsely groaned into my ear, “will that ruckle cease in her throat? I will myself, I tell you— with my own hand—oh God. . .” Since the morning his auditory fever (as indeed my own also) appeared to have increased in steady proportion with the roaring and screeching chaos round ”

“ Descending from my ledge, I passed along it, now drenched in spray; and, as I came nearer, could see that the house, too, was to half its height more thickly bearded than an old hull with barnacles and every variety of bright seaweed; also—what was very surprising—that from many spots near the top of the brazen wall ponderous chains, dropping beards, reached out in rays: so that the fabric had the aspect of a many-anchored ark. ”

“ Down this defile, with a sinking of the heart, and a singular sickness of giddiness, I passed; and, on reaching its end, emerged upon a ledge of rock which shuddered to the immediate onsets of the sea—though all this part of the island was, besides, in the grip of an ague not due to the great guns of the sea. Hugging a crag of cliff for steadiness from the gusts, I gazed forth upon a scene not less eerily dismal than some drear district of the dreams of Dante. ”

“ So he went to Rayba, and saw there a great House stand, and when he looked on it, he said: ‘This, sooth, was y-built by my brother Harold, be he dead or be he on-live.’ And there he dwelt, and his lady, and his sons’ sons until now: for that the House is ruthless and without pity; wherefore ’tis said that upon all who dwell there falleth a wicked madness and a lecherous anguish; and that by way of the ears do they drinck the cup of the furie of the earless Harold, till the time of the House be ended. ”

“ He then explained that the rats which ran riot in the place of death would in time do their full work upon her; but would be unable to reach to the region of the throat without first gnawing their way through the three strings stretched across the holes of the bridges within the coffin, and thus, one by one, liberating the three morrisco-bells to tinklings.
The winter solstice had gone, another year began. I was sleeping a deep sleep by night when Harfager came into my chamber, and shook me. His face was ghastly in the taper’s glare. ”

“ I mentioned the case to my friend, Haco Harfager, then occupying with me an old mansion in St. Germain, shut in by a wall and jungle of shrubbery. He listened with singular interest, and during a good while sat wrapped in gloom.
Another case which I gave made a great impression upon my friend: A young man, a toy-maker of St. Antoine, suffering from consumption—but sober, industrious—returning one gloaming to his garret, happened to purchase one of those factious journals which circulate by lamplight over the Boulevards. ”

“ Swift—still swifter—in an ague of flurry it raced, every portico a sail to the gale, racking its great frame to fragments. I, running by the door of a room littered with the ruins of a wall, saw through that livid moonlight Harfager sitting on a tomb—a drum by him, upon which, with a club in his bloody fist, he feebly, but persistently, beat. The speed of the leaning house had now attained the sleeping stage, that last pitch of the spinning-top ”

“ For such this scheme of things is clearly no fit habitation, but a Machine of Death, a baleful Immense. Too cruel to some is the rushing shriek of Being—they cannot stand the world. Let each look well to his own little shred of existence, I say, and leave the monstrous Automaton alone! ”

“ Aith, he told me, had been admitted into the palace during the period of his own absence in youth, and he knew little of him beyond the fact that he was extraordinarily strong. Whence he had come, or how, no person except the lady Swertha was aware: and she, it seems, feared, or at least persistently flinched from admitting him into the mystery. He added that, as a matter of fact, the lady, from the day of his coming back to Rayba, had with some object imposed upon herself a dumbness on all subjects, which he had never once known her to break through, except by an occasional note. ”

“ I seemed to stand in the centre of some yelling planet, the row resembling the resounding of many thousands of cannon, punctuated by strange crashing and breaking uproars. And a sadness descended on me; I was near to tears. “Here,” I said, “is the place of weeping; not elsewhere is the vale of sighing.” ”

“ I saw, too, three upright rods secured to a side of the coffin, each rod fitted at its top with a little silver bell of the sort called morrice, pendent from a flexible spring. And at the head of the bed, Aith, with an air of irascibility, was stamping to and fro within a narrow area.
Harfager deposited the taper upon a stone table, and stood poring with a crazy intentness over the body. I, too, stood and looked at death so grim and rigorous as I think I never saw. The coffin looked angrily full of tangled grey locks, the lady being of great age, bony and hook-nosed ”

“ When I asked what limit he, then, set to the persistence of “life” in the “dead,” he answered that when decay had so far advanced that the nerves could no longer be called nerves, or when the brain had been disconnected at the neck from the body, as by rats gnawing, then the king of terrors was king verily. With an indiscretion strange to me before my residence at Rayba, I now blurted out the question whether in all this he could be referring to his mother? ”

“ Really, one does not know whether to chuckle or to weep over such a business. Observe, for one thing, how diversely men are made! There are minds precisely so sensitive as a thread of melted lead: every breath will fret and trouble them: and how about the hurricane? ”

“ After I had read the narrative half-aloud, I smiled, saying: “This, Harfager, is very tolerable romance on the part of the good Gascoigne, but has the look of indifferent history.”
“It is, nevertheless, history,” he replied.
“You believe that?”
“The house stands solidly on Rayba.”
“But you believe that mediaeval ghosts superintended the building of their family mansions?”
“Gascoigne nowhere says that,” he answered: “for to be ‘stricken with a darte,’ is not necessarily to die ”

“ Now, it befell that Sweyn was minded by a dream to have built a great mansion in Hjaltland for the home-coming of the lady Thronda; wherefore he called to him a cunning Master-workman, and sent him to England to gather men for the building of this lusty House, while he himself remained with his lady at Rome. ”

“ Under each floor it spreads out, helping to support the floor. What is the precise quality of the impression which I have made upon your mind by this description?”
“I do not know,” I answered, turning from him: “ask me none of your enigmas, Harfager: I feel a giddiness...”
“But answer me,” he said: “consider the strangeness of that brazen lowest floor, which I have discovered to be some six feet thick, and whose under-surface, I have reason to think, is somewhat above the bedrock; remember that the fabric is at no point fastened to the column ”

“ When the sun next pried above the horizon, we had closely approached the coast; and it was then that for the first time the impression of some spinning motion of the island (due probably to the swirling movements of the water) was produced upon me. We affected a landing at a voe, or sea-arm, on the west coast—the east, though the point of my aim, was out of the question on account of the swell. ”

“ Now, the diameter of that globe in the dome I know to be four and a half feet; and the diameter of the leaden balls about the third of an inch. Supposing, then, that 1389 was the year in which the globe was full of balls, you may readily calculate that not many fellows of the four million and odd which have since dropped at the rate of one an hour are now left within. The fall of the balls cannot persist another year. The figure 9 is therefore forced upon us.”
“But you assume, Harfager!” ”

“ He therefore did not see (though he may have understood by hearing) the thing which, with cowering awe, I now saw: for a ball slipped from the horologe with a hiss and mist of smoke into the pool; and while the clock once ticked another: and while the clock yet ticked, another! and the smoke of the first had not perfectly thinned, when the smoke of the third, mixing with it, floated toward the dome. Understanding that the sands of the mansion were run, I, too, throwing up my arm, rushed from the spot ”

“ The idea of Bacon and Paracelsus that the principle of life resides in a spirit or fluid was proof to him that such fluid could not, from its very nature, undergo any sudden annihilation, while the organs which it pervades remain. ”

“ Now of these two brothers the older, Harold, being of seemly personage and prowess, did go a pilgrimage into Danemark, wherefrom he repaired again home to Hjaltland (Zetland) , and with him fetched the amiable Thronda for his wife, who was a daughter of the sank (blood) royal of Danemark. And his younger brother, Sweyn, that was sad and debonair, but far surpassed the other in cunning, received him with all good cheer.
“But eftsoons (soon after) fell Sweyn sick for all his love that he had of Thronda, his brother’s wife. ”

“ For, as we were once passing by an iron door on the lower floor, he stopped, and for some minutes stood listening with a leer most keen and cunning. Presently the cry “Hark!” escaped him; and he then turned to me and wrote on the tablet: “Did you not hear?” ”

“ For answer he led me to a circular hall which, he said, he had ascertained to be the centre of the circular mansion. It was a very large hall—so large as I think I never saw—so large that the amount of wall lighted at one time by the candle seemed nearly flat: and nearly the whole of its area, from floor to roof, was occupied by a column of brass, the space between the wall and column being only such as to admit of a stretched-out arm.
“This column,” Harfager wrote, “goes up to the dome and passes beyond it; it goes down to the lower floor, and passes through that ”