Count Magnus
Scary Books:
Ghost Stories Of An Antiquary
:
Montague Rhodes James
By what means the papers out of which I have made a connected story came
into my hands is the last point which the reader will learn from these
pages. But it is necessary to prefix to my extracts from them a statement
of the form in which I possess them.
They consist, then, partly of a series of collections for a book of
travels, such a volume as was a common product of the forties and
fifties. Horace Mar
yat's _Journal of a Residence in Jutland and the
Danish Isles_ is a fair specimen of the class to which I allude. These
books usually treated of some unknown district on the Continent. They
were illustrated with woodcuts or steel plates. They gave details of
hotel accommodation and of means of communication, such as we now expect
to find in any well-regulated guide-book, and they dealt largely in
reported conversations with intelligent foreigners, racy innkeepers, and
garrulous peasants. In a word, they were chatty.
Begun with the idea of furnishing material for such a book, my papers as
they progressed assumed the character of a record of one single personal
experience, and this record was continued up to the very eve, almost, of
its termination.
The writer was a Mr Wraxall. For my knowledge of him I have to depend
entirely on the evidence his writings afford, and from these I deduce
that he was a man past middle age, possessed of some private means, and
very much alone in the world. He had, it seems, no settled abode in
England, but was a denizen of hotels and boarding-houses. It is probable
that he entertained the idea of settling down at some future time which
never came; and I think it also likely that the Pantechnicon fire in the
early seventies must have destroyed a great deal that would have thrown
light on his antecedents, for he refers once or twice to property of his
that was warehoused at that establishment.
It is further apparent that Mr Wraxall had published a book, and that it
treated of a holiday he had once taken in Brittany. More than this I
cannot say about his work, because a diligent search in bibliographical
works has convinced me that it must have appeared either anonymously or
under a pseudonym.
As to his character, it is not difficult to form some superficial
opinion. He must have been an intelligent and cultivated man. It seems
that he was near being a Fellow of his college at Oxford--Brasenose, as I
judge from the Calendar. His besetting fault was pretty clearly that of
over-inquisitiveness, possibly a good fault in a traveller, certainly a
fault for which this traveller paid dearly enough in the end.
On what proved to be his last expedition, he was plotting another book.
Scandinavia, a region not widely known to Englishmen forty years ago, had
struck him as an interesting field. He must have alighted on some old
books of Swedish history or memoirs, and the idea had struck him that
there was room for a book descriptive of travel in Sweden, interspersed
with episodes from the history of some of the great Swedish families. He
procured letters of introduction, therefore, to some persons of quality
in Sweden, and set out thither in the early summer of 1863.
Of his travels in the North there is no need to speak, nor of his
residence of some weeks in Stockholm. I need only mention that some
_savant_ resident there put him on the track of an important collection
of family papers belonging to the proprietors of an ancient manor-house
in Vestergothland, and obtained for him permission to examine them.
The manor-house, or _herrgard_, in question is to be called Rabaeck
(pronounced something like Roebeck), though that is not its name. It is
one of the best buildings of its kind in all the country, and the picture
of it in Dahlenberg's _Suecia antiqua et moderna_, engraved in 1694,
shows it very much as the tourist may see it today. It was built soon
after 1600, and is, roughly speaking, very much like an English house of
that period in respect of material--red-brick with stone facings--and
style. The man who built it was a scion of the great house of De la
Gardie, and his descendants possess it still. De la Gardie is the name by
which I will designate them when mention of them becomes necessary.
They received Mr Wraxall with great kindness and courtesy, and pressed
him to stay in the house as long as his researches lasted. But,
preferring to be independent, and mistrusting his powers of conversing in
Swedish, he settled himself at the village inn, which turned out quite
sufficiently comfortable, at any rate during the summer months. This
arrangement would entail a short walk daily to and from the manor-house
of something under a mile. The house itself stood in a park, and was
protected--we should say grown up--with large old timber. Near it you
found the walled garden, and then entered a close wood fringing one of
the small lakes with which the whole country is pitted. Then came the
wall of the demesne, and you climbed a steep knoll--a knob of rock
lightly covered with soil--and on the top of this stood the church,
fenced in with tall dark trees. It was a curious building to English
eyes. The nave and aisles were low, and filled with pews and galleries.
In the western gallery stood the handsome old organ, gaily painted, and
with silver pipes. The ceiling was flat, and had been adorned by a
seventeenth-century artist with a strange and hideous 'Last Judgement',
full of lurid flames, falling cities, burning ships, crying souls, and
brown and smiling demons. Handsome brass coronae hung from the roof; the
pulpit was like a doll's-house covered with little painted wooden cherubs
and saints; a stand with three hour-glasses was hinged to the preacher's
desk. Such sights as these may be seen in many a church in Sweden now,
but what distinguished this one was an addition to the original building.
At the eastern end of the north aisle the builder of the manor-house had
erected a mausoleum for himself and his family. It was a largish
eight-sided building, lighted by a series of oval windows, and it had a
domed roof, topped by a kind of pumpkin-shaped object rising into a
spire, a form in which Swedish architects greatly delighted. The roof was
of copper externally, and was painted black, while the walls, in common
with those of the church, were staringly white. To this mausoleum there
was no access from the church. It had a portal and steps of its own on
the northern side.
Past the churchyard the path to the village goes, and not more than three
or four minutes bring you to the inn door.
On the first day of his stay at Rabaeck Mr Wraxall found the church door
open, and made these notes of the interior which I have epitomized. Into
the mausoleum, however, he could not make his way. He could by looking
through the keyhole just descry that there were fine marble effigies and
sarcophagi of copper, and a wealth of armorial ornament, which made him
very anxious to spend some time in investigation.
The papers he had come to examine at the manor-house proved to be of just
the kind he wanted for his book. There were family correspondence,
journals, and account-books of the earliest owners of the estate, very
carefully kept and clearly written, full of amusing and picturesque
detail. The first De la Gardie appeared in them as a strong and capable
man. Shortly after the building of the mansion there had been a period of
distress in the district, and the peasants had risen and attacked several
chateaux and done some damage. The owner of Rabaeck took a leading part in
supressing trouble, and there was reference to executions of ring-leaders
and severe punishments inflicted with no sparing hand.
The portrait of this Magnus de la Gardie was one of the best in the
house, and Mr Wraxall studied it with no little interest after his day's
work. He gives no detailed description of it, but I gather that the face
impressed him rather by its power than by its beauty or goodness; in
fact, he writes that Count Magnus was an almost phenomenally ugly man.
On this day Mr Wraxall took his supper with the family, and walked back
in the late but still bright evening.
'I must remember,' he writes, 'to ask the sexton if he can let me into
the mausoleum at the church. He evidently has access to it himself, for I
saw him tonight standing on the steps, and, as I thought, locking or
unlocking the door.'
I find that early on the following day Mr Wraxall had some conversation
with his landlord. His setting it down at such length as he does
surprised me at first; but I soon realized that the papers I was reading
were, at least in their beginning, the materials for the book he was
meditating, and that it was to have been one of those quasi-journalistic
productions which admit of the introduction of an admixture of
conversational matter.
His object, he says, was to find out whether any traditions of Count
Magnus de la Gardie lingered on in the scenes of that gentleman's
activity, and whether the popular estimate of him were favourable or not.
He found that the Count was decidedly not a favourite. If his tenants
came late to their work on the days which they owed to him as Lord of the
Manor, they were set on the wooden horse, or flogged and branded in the
manor-house yard. One or two cases there were of men who had occupied
lands which encroached on the lord's domain, and whose houses had been
mysteriously burnt on a winter's night, with the whole family inside. But
what seemed to dwell on the innkeeper's mind most--for he returned to the
subject more than once--was that the Count had been on the Black
Pilgrimage, and had brought something or someone back with him.
You will naturally inquire, as Mr Wraxall did, what the Black Pilgrimage
may have been. But your curiosity on the point must remain unsatisfied
for the time being, just as his did. The landlord was evidently unwilling
to give a full answer, or indeed any answer, on the point, and, being
called out for a moment, trotted out with obvious alacrity, only putting
his head in at the door a few minutes afterwards to say that he was
called away to Skara, and should not be back till evening.
So Mr Wraxall had to go unsatisfied to his day's work at the manor-house.
The papers on which he was just then engaged soon put his thoughts into
another channel, for he had to occupy himself with glancing over the
correspondence between Sophia Albertina in Stockholm and her married
cousin Ulrica Leonora at Rabaeck in the years 1705-10. The letters were of
exceptional interest from the light they threw upon the culture of that
period in Sweden, as anyone can testify who has read the full edition of
them in the publications of the Swedish Historical Manuscripts
Commission.
In the afternoon he had done with these, and after returning the boxes in
which they were kept to their places on the shelf, he proceeded, very
naturally, to take down some of the volumes nearest to them, in order to
determine which of them had best be his principal subject of
investigation next day. The shelf he had hit upon was occupied mostly by
a collection of account-books in the writing of the first Count Magnus.
But one among them was not an account-book, but a book of alchemical and
other tracts in another sixteenth-century hand. Not being very familiar
with alchemical literature, Mr Wraxall spends much space which he might
have spared in setting out the names and beginnings of the various
treatises: The book of the Phoenix, book of the Thirty Words, book of the
Toad, book of Miriam, Turba philosophorum, and so forth; and then he
announces with a good deal of circumstance his delight at finding, on a
leaf originally left blank near the middle of the book, some writing of
Count Magnus himself headed 'Liber nigrae peregrinationis'. It is true
that only a few lines were written, but there was quite enough to show
that the landlord had that morning been referring to a belief at least as
old as the time of Count Magnus, and probably shared by him. This is the
English of what was written:
'If any man desires to obtain a long life, if he would obtain a faithful
messenger and see the blood of his enemies, it is necessary that he
should first go into the city of Chorazin, and there salute the
prince....' Here there was an erasure of one word, not very thoroughly
done, so that Mr Wraxall felt pretty sure that he was right in reading it
as _aeris_ ('of the air'). But there was no more of the text copied, only
a line in Latin: _Quaere reliqua hujus materiei inter secretiora_. (See
the rest of this matter among the more private things.)
It could not be denied that this threw a rather lurid light upon the
tastes and beliefs of the Count; but to Mr Wraxall, separated from him by
nearly three centuries, the thought that he might have added to his
general forcefulness alchemy, and to alchemy something like magic, only
made him a more picturesque figure, and when, after a rather prolonged
contemplation of his picture in the hall, Mr Wraxall set out on his
homeward way, his mind was full of the thought of Count Magnus. He had no
eyes for his surroundings, no perception of the evening scents of the
woods or the evening light on the lake; and when all of a sudden he
pulled up short, he was astonished to find himself already at the gate of
the churchyard, and within a few minutes of his dinner. His eyes fell on
the mausoleum.
'Ah,' he said, 'Count Magnus, there you are. I should dearly like to see
you.'
'Like many solitary men,' he writes, 'I have a habit of talking to myself
aloud; and, unlike some of the Greek and Latin particles, I do not expect
an answer. Certainly, and perhaps fortunately in this case, there was
neither voice nor any that regarded: only the woman who, I suppose, was
cleaning up the church, dropped some metallic object on the floor, whose
clang startled me. Count Magnus, I think, sleeps sound enough.'
That same evening the landlord of the inn, who had heard Mr Wraxall say
that he wished to see the clerk or deacon (as he would be called in
Sweden) of the parish, introduced him to that official in the inn
parlour. A visit to the De la Gardie tomb-house was soon arranged for the
next day, and a little general conversation ensued.
Mr Wraxall, remembering that one function of Scandinavian deacons is to
teach candidates for Confirmation, thought he would refresh his own
memory on a Biblical point.
'Can you tell me,' he said, 'anything about Chorazin?'
The deacon seemed startled, but readily reminded him how that village had
once been denounced.
'To be sure,' said Mr Wraxall; 'it is, I suppose, quite a ruin now?'
'So I expect,' replied the deacon. 'I have heard some of our old priests
say that Antichrist is to be born there; and there are tales--'
'Ah! what tales are those?' Mr Wraxall put in.
'Tales, I was going to say, which I have forgotten,' said the deacon; and
soon after that he said good night.
The landlord was now alone, and at Mr Wraxall's mercy; and that inquirer
was not inclined to spare him.
'Herr Nielsen,' he said, 'I have found out something about the Black
Pilgrimage. You may as well tell me what you know. What did the Count
bring back with him?'
Swedes are habitually slow, perhaps, in answering, or perhaps the
landlord was an exception. I am not sure; but Mr Wraxall notes that the
landlord spent at least one minute in looking at him before he said
anything at all. Then he came close up to his guest, and with a good deal
of effort he spoke:
'Mr Wraxall, I can tell you this one little tale, and no more--not any
more. You must not ask anything when I have done. In my grandfather's
time--that is, ninety-two years ago--there were two men who said: "The
Count is dead; we do not care for him. We will go tonight and have a free
hunt in his wood"--the long wood on the hill that you have seen behind
Rabaeck. Well, those that heard them say this, they said: "No, do not go;
we are sure you will meet with persons walking who should not be walking.
They should be resting, not walking." These men laughed. There were no
forestmen to keep the wood, because no one wished to live there. The
family were not here at the house. These men could do what they wished.
'Very well, they go to the wood that night. My grandfather was sitting
here in this room. It was the summer, and a light night. With the window
open, he could see out to the wood, and hear.
'So he sat there, and two or three men with him, and they listened. At
first they hear nothing at all; then they hear someone--you know how far
away it is--they hear someone scream, just as if the most inside part of
his soul was twisted out of him. All of them in the room caught hold of
each other, and they sat so for three-quarters of an hour. Then they hear
someone else, only about three hundred ells off. They hear him laugh out
loud: it was not one of those two men that laughed, and, indeed, they
have all of them said that it was not any man at all. After that they
hear a great door shut.
'Then, when it was just light with the sun, they all went to the priest.
They said to him:
'"Father, put on your gown and your ruff, and come to bury these men,
Anders Bjornsen and Hans Thorbjorn."
'You understand that they were sure these men were dead. So they went to
the wood--my grandfather never forgot this. He said they were all like so
many dead men themselves. The priest, too, he was in a white fear. He
said when they came to him:
'"I heard one cry in the night, and I heard one laugh afterwards. If I
cannot forget that, I shall not be able to sleep again."
'So they went to the wood, and they found these men on the edge of the
wood. Hans Thorbjorn was standing with his back against a tree, and all
the time he was pushing with his hands--pushing something away from him
which was not there. So he was not dead. And they led him away, and took
him to the house at Nykjoping, and he died before the winter; but he went
on pushing with his hands. Also Anders Bjornsen was there; but he was
dead. And I tell you this about Anders Bjornsen, that he was once a
beautiful man, but now his face was not there, because the flesh of it
was sucked away off the bones. You understand that? My grandfather did
not forget that. And they laid him on the bier which they brought, and
they put a cloth over his head, and the priest walked before; and they
began to sing the psalm for the dead as well as they could. So, as they
were singing the end of the first verse, one fell down, who was carrying
the head of the bier, and the others looked back, and they saw that the
cloth had fallen off, and the eyes of Anders Bjornsen were looking up,
because there was nothing to close over them. And this they could not
bear. Therefore the priest laid the cloth upon him, and sent for a spade,
and they buried him in that place.'
The next day Mr Wraxall records that the deacon called for him soon after
his breakfast, and took him to the church and mausoleum. He noticed that
the key of the latter was hung on a nail just by the pulpit, and it
occurred to him that, as the church door seemed to be left unlocked as a
rule, it would not be difficult for him to pay a second and more private
visit to the monuments if there proved to be more of interest among them
than could be digested at first. The building, when he entered it, he
found not unimposing. The monuments, mostly large erections of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were dignified if luxuriant, and
the epitaphs and heraldry were copious. The central space of the domed
room was occupied by three copper sarcophagi, covered with
finely-engraved ornament. Two of them had, as is commonly the case in
Denmark and Sweden, a large metal crucifix on the lid. The third, that of
Count Magnus, as it appeared, had, instead of that, a full-length effigy
engraved upon it, and round the edge were several bands of similar
ornament representing various scenes. One was a battle, with cannon
belching out smoke, and walled towns, and troops of pikemen. Another
showed an execution. In a third, among trees, was a man running at full
speed, with flying hair and outstretched hands. After him followed a
strange form; it would be hard to say whether the artist had intended it
for a man, and was unable to give the requisite similitude, or whether it
was intentionally made as monstrous as it looked. In view of the skill
with which the rest of the drawing was done, Mr Wraxall felt inclined to
adopt the latter idea. The figure was unduly short, and was for the most
part muffled in a hooded garment which swept the ground. The only part of
the form which projected from that shelter was not shaped like any hand
or arm. Mr Wraxall compares it to the tentacle of a devil-fish, and
continues: 'On seeing this, I said to myself, "This, then, which is
evidently an allegorical representation of some kind--a fiend pursuing a
hunted soul--may be the origin of the story of Count Magnus and his
mysterious companion. Let us see how the huntsman is pictured: doubtless
it will be a demon blowing his horn.'" But, as it turned out, there was
no such sensational figure, only the semblance of a cloaked man on a
hillock, who stood leaning on a stick, and watching the hunt with an
interest which the engraver had tried to express in his attitude.
Mr Wraxall noted the finely-worked and massive steel padlocks--three in
number--which secured the sarcophagus. One of them, he saw, was detached,
and lay on the pavement. And then, unwilling to delay the deacon longer
or to waste his own working-time, he made his way onward to the
manor-house.
'It is curious,' he notes, 'how, on retracing a familiar path, one's
thoughts engross one to the absolute exclusion of surrounding objects.
Tonight, for the second time, I had entirely failed to notice where I was
going (I had planned a private visit to the tomb-house to copy the
epitaphs), when I suddenly, as it were, awoke to consciousness, and found
myself (as before) turning in at the churchyard gate, and, I believe,
singing or chanting some such words as, "Are you awake, Count Magnus? Are
you asleep, Count Magnus?" and then something more which I have failed to
recollect. It seemed to me that I must have been behaving in this
nonsensical way for some time.'
He found the key of the mausoleum where he had expected to find it, and
copied the greater part of what he wanted; in fact, he stayed until the
light began to fail him.
'I must have been wrong,' he writes, 'in saying that one of the padlocks
of my Counts sarcophagus was unfastened; I see tonight that two are
loose. I picked both up, and laid them carefully on the window-ledge,
after trying unsuccessfully to close them. The remaining one is still
firm, and, though I take it to be a spring lock, I cannot guess how it is
opened. Had I succeeded in undoing it, I am almost afraid I should have
taken the liberty of opening the sarcophagus. It is strange, the interest
I feel in the personality of this, I fear, somewhat ferocious and grim
old noble.'
The day following was, as it turned out, the last of Mr Wraxall's stay at
Rabaeck. He received letters connected with certain investments which made
it desirable that he should return to England; his work among the papers
was practically done, and travelling was slow. He decided, therefore, to
make his farewells, put some finishing touches to his notes, and be off.
These finishing touches and farewells, as it turned out, took more time
than he had expected. The hospitable family insisted on his staying to
dine with them--they dined at three--and it was verging on half past six
before he was outside the iron gates of Rabaeck. He dwelt on every step of
his walk by the lake, determined to saturate himself, now that he trod it
for the last time, in the sentiment of the place and hour. And when he
reached the summit of the churchyard knoll, he lingered for many minutes,
gazing at the limitless prospect of woods near and distant, all dark
beneath a sky of liquid green. When at last he turned to go, the thought
struck him that surely he must bid farewell to Count Magnus as well as
the rest of the De la Gardies. The church was but twenty yards away, and
he knew where the key of the mausoleum hung. It was not long before he
was standing over the great copper coffin, and, as usual, talking to
himself aloud: 'You may have been a bit of a rascal in your time,
Magnus,' he was saying, 'but for all that I should like to see you, or,
rather--'
'Just at that instant,' he says, 'I felt a blow on my foot. Hastily
enough I drew it back, and something fell on the pavement with a clash.
It was the third, the last of the three padlocks which had fastened the
sarcophagus. I stooped to pick it up, and--Heaven is my witness that I am
writing only the bare truth--before I had raised myself there was a sound
of metal hinges creaking, and I distinctly saw the lid shifting upwards.
I may have behaved like a coward, but I could not for my life stay for
one moment. I was outside that dreadful building in less time than I can
write--almost as quickly as I could have said--the words; and what
frightens me yet more, I could not turn the key in the lock. As I sit
here in my room noting these facts, I ask myself (it was not twenty
minutes ago) whether that noise of creaking metal continued, and I cannot
tell whether it did or not. I only know that there was something more
than I have written that alarmed me, but whether it was sound or sight I
am not able to remember. What is this that I have done?'
Poor Mr Wraxall! He set out on his journey to England on the next day, as
he had planned, and he reached England in safety; and yet, as I gather
from his changed hand and inconsequent jottings, a broken man. One of the
several small note-books that have come to me with his papers gives, not
a key to, but a kind of inkling of, his experiences. Much of his journey
was made by canal-boat, and I find not less than six painful attempts to
enumerate and describe his fellow-passengers. The entries are of this
kind:
24. Pastor of village in Skane. Usual black coat and soft black hat.
25. Commercial traveller from Stockholm going to Trollhaettan. Black
cloak, brown hat.
26. Man in long black cloak, broad-leafed hat, very old-fashioned.
This entry is lined out, and a note added: 'Perhaps identical with No.
13. Have not yet seen his face.' On referring to No. 13, I find that he
is a Roman priest in a cassock.
The net result of the reckoning is always the same. Twenty-eight people
appear in the enumeration, one being always a man in a long black cloak
and broad hat, and another a 'short figure in dark cloak and hood'. On
the other hand, it is always noted that only twenty-six passengers appear
at meals, and that the man in the cloak is perhaps absent, and the short
figure is certainly absent.
On reaching England, it appears that Mr Wraxall landed at Harwich, and
that he resolved at once to put himself out of the reach of some person
or persons whom he never specifies, but whom he had evidently come to
regard as his pursuers. Accordingly he took a vehicle--it was a closed
fly--not trusting the railway and drove across country to the village of
Belchamp St Paul. It was about nine o'clock on a moonlight August night
when he neared the place. He was sitting forward, and looking out of the
window at the fields and thickets--there was little else to be
seen--racing past him. Suddenly he came to a cross-road. At the corner
two figures were standing motionless; both were in dark cloaks; the
taller one wore a hat, the shorter a hood. He had no time to see their
faces, nor did they make any motion that he could discern. Yet the horse
shied violently and broke into a gallop, and Mr Wraxall sank back into
his seat in something like desperation. He had seen them before.
Arrived at Belchamp St Paul, he was fortunate enough to find a decent
furnished lodging, and for the next twenty-four hours he lived,
comparatively speaking, in peace. His last notes were written on this
day. They are too disjointed and ejaculatory to be given here in full,
but the substance of them is clear enough. He is expecting a visit from
his pursuers--how or when he knows not--and his constant cry is 'What has
he done?' and 'Is there no hope?' Doctors, he knows, would call him mad,
policemen would laugh at him. The parson is away. What can he do but lock
his door and cry to God?
People still remember last year at Belchamp St Paul how a strange
gentleman came one evening in August years back; and how the next morning
but one he was found dead, and there was an inquest; and the jury that
viewed the body fainted, seven of 'em did, and none of 'em wouldn't speak
to what they see, and the verdict was visitation of God; and how the
people as kep' the 'ouse moved out that same week, and went away from
that part. But they do not, I think, know that any glimmer of light has
ever been thrown, or could be thrown, on the mystery. It so happened that
last year the little house came into my hands as part of a legacy. It had
stood empty since 1863, and there seemed no prospect of letting it; so I
had it pulled down, and the papers of which I have given you an abstract
were found in a forgotten cupboard under the window in the best bedroom.