 section 12 of famous modern ghost stories. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Recorded by Kelly Elizabeth. Famous modern ghost stories compiled by Dorothy Scarborough. Section 12, Ligia by Edgar Allen Poe. Ligia by Edgar Allen Poe. And the will therein lyeth, which dieeth not. Who knoweth the mystery of the will with its figure? For God is but a great will, pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death entirely save only through the weakness of his feeble will. Joseph Glanville. I cannot for my soul remember how, when, or even precisely where, I first became acquainted with the Lady Ligia. Long years have since elapsed and my memory is feeble through much suffering. Or perhaps I cannot now bring these points to mind, because in truth the character of my beloved, her rare learning, her singular yet placid cast of beauty, and the thrilling and enthralling eloquence of her low musical language made their way into my heart by paces so steadily and stealthily progressive that they have been unnoticed and unknown. Yet I believe that I met her first and most frequently in some large old decaying city near the Rhine. Of her family, I have surely heard her speak. That it is a remotely ancient date cannot be doubted. Ligia, Ligia, buried in studies of a nature more than all else adapted to deaden impressions of the outward world. It is by that sweet word alone by Ligia that I bring before my eyes and fancy the image of her who is no more. And now while I write a recollection flashes upon me that I have never known, the paternal name of her who was my friend and my betrothed, and who became the partner of my studies and finally the wife of my bosom. Was it a playful charge on the part of my Ligia? Or was it a test of my strength of affection that I should institute no inquiries upon this point? Or was it rather a caprice of my own, a wildly romantic offering on the shrine of the most passionate devotion? I but indistinctly recall the fact itself. What wonder that I have utterly forgotten the circumstances which originated or attended it? And indeed, if ever that spirit which is entitled romance, if ever she, the one misty winged astathet of idolatrous Egypt, presided, as they tell over marriages ill-olmined, that most surely she presided over mine. There is one dear topic, however, on which my memory fails me not. It is the person of Ligia. In stature she was tall, somewhat slender, and in her latter days even emaciated. I would in vain attempt to portray the majesty, the quiet ease of her demeanor, or the incomprehensible lightness and elasticity of her football. She came and departed as a shadow. I was never made aware of her entrance into my closed study saved by the dear music for low sweet voice as she placed her marble hand upon my shoulder. In beauty of face no maiden ever equaled her. It was the radiance of an opium dream, an airy and spirit lifting vision more wildly divine than the fantasies which hovered about the slumbering souls of the daughters of Delos. Yet her features were not of that regular mold which we have been falsely taught to worship in the classical labors of the heathen. There is no exquisite beauty says Bacon, Lord Veralam, speaking truly of all the forms in general of beauty, without some strangeness in the proportion. Yet although I saw that the features of Ligia were not of a classic regularity, although I perceive that her loveliness was indeed exquisite, and felt that there was much of strangeness pervading it. Yet I have tried in vain to detect the irregularity and to trace home my own perception of the strange. I examine the contour of the lofty and pale forehead. It was faultless. How cold indeed that word when applied to a majesty so defined, the skin rivaling the purest ivory, the commanding extent and repose the gentle prominence of the regions above the temples, and then the raven black, the glossy, the luxuriant and naturally curling tresses setting forth the full force of the Homeric epithet highest in theme. I looked at the delicate outlines of the nose and nowhere but in the graceful medallions of the Hebrews had I beheld a similar perfection. There were the same luxurious smoothness of the surface, the same scarcely perceptible tendency to the aquiline, the same harmoniously curved nostril speaking of the free spirit. I regarded the sweet mouth. Here was indeed the triumph of all things heavenly, the magnificent turn of the short upper lip, the soft voluptuous slumber of the under, the dimples which sported and the color which spoke, the teeth glancing back with a brilliancy almost startling, every ray of the holy light which fell upon them in her serene and placid yet most exulting radiant of all smiles. I scrutinized the formation of the chin and here too I found the gentleness of breath, the softness of the majesty, the fullness and the spirituality of the Greek, the contour which the God Apollo revealed but in a dream to Cleomenes, the son of Athenian. And then I peered into the large eyes of Ligia. For eyes we have no models in the remotely antique. It might have been to that in these eyes of my beloved laid the secret to which Lord Berylum eludes. They were, I must believe, far larger than the ordinary eyes of our own race. They were even fuller than the fullest of the gazelle eyes of the tribe of the valley of Nojahad. Yet it was only at intervals and moments of intense excitement that this peculiarity became more than slightly noticeable in Ligia. And at such moments was her beauty. In my heated fancy thus it appeared perhaps, the beauty of beings either above or apart from the air. The beauty of the fabulous hurry of the Turk, the hue of the orbs was the most brilliant of black and far over them hung jetty lashes of great length. The brows slightly irregular and outline had the same tint. The strangeness, however, which I found in the eyes was of a nature distinct from the formation or the color or the brilliancy of the features and must after all be referred to the expression. A word of no meaning behind whose vast latitude of mere sound we entrench our ignorance of so much of the spiritual. The expression of the eyes of Ligia, how for long hours I have pondered upon it. How have I, through the whole of those midsummer nights, struggled to fathom it? What was it that something more profound than the well of Democritus, which lay far within the pupils of my beloved? What was it? I was possessed with a passion to discover those eyes, those large, those shining, those divine orbs. They became to me twin stars of Lita and I to them devoutest of astrologers. There is no point among the many incomprehensible anomalies of the science of mind, or thrillingly exciting than the fact. Never, I believe, noticed in the schools than in our endeavors to recall to memory something long forgotten. We often find ourselves upon the very verge of remembrance without being able in the end to remember. And thus how frequently in my intense scrutiny of Ligia's eyes have I felt approaching the full knowledge of their expression, felt it approaching, yet not quite be mine, and so at length entirely depart. And strange, oh, strangest mystery of all I found in the commonest objects of the universe, a circle of analogies to that expression. I mean to say that, subsequently to the period when Ligia's beauty passed into my spirit, their dwelling is in a shrine I derived from many existences in the material world, a sentiment such as I felt always around within me by her large and luminous orbs. Yet not the more could I define that sentiment or analyze or even steadily view it. I recognized it, let me repeat, sometimes in the survey of a rapidly growing vine, in the contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water. I have felt it in the ocean, in the falling of a meteor. I have felt it in the glances of unusually aged people. And there are one or two stars in heaven, one especially a star of the sixth magnitude, double and changeable to be found to the large star in Lyra, in the telescopic scrutiny of which I have been made aware of the feeling. I have been filled with it by certain sounds from stringed instruments, and not unfrequently by passages from books. Among innumerable other instances, I well remember something in a volume of Joseph Glanville, which, perhaps merely from its quaintness, who shall say, never failed to inspire me with the sentiment. And the will therein lieth, which dieeth not. Who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its figure? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will. Length of years and subsequent reflection have enabled me to trace, indeed, some remote connection between this passage in the English moralist and a portion of the character of Lygia. An intensity in thought, action, or speech was possibly, in her, a result, or at least an index of that gigantic volition which, during our long intercourse, failed to give other and more immediate evidence of its existence. Of all the women whom I have ever known, she, the outwardly calm, the ever-placid Lygia, was the most violently apprayed to the tumultuous vultures of stern passion, and of such passion I could form no estimate, saved by the miraculous expansion of those eyes which it once so delighted and appalled me, by the most magical melody, modulation, distinctness, and placidity of her very low voice, and by the fierce energy rendered doubly effective by contrast with her manner of utterance of the wild words which she habitually uttered. I have spoken of the learning of Lygia. It was immense, such as I have never known a woman, in the classical tongues which she deeply proficient, and as far as my own acquaintance extended in regard to the modern dialects of Europe, I have never known her at fault. Indeed, upon any theme of the most admired, because simply, the most abstruse of the boasted erudition of the academy, have I ever found Lygia at fault? How singularly, how thrillingly this one point in the nature of my wife has forced itself, at this late period, only upon my attention. I said her knowledge was such as I have never known in the woman, but where breathed the man who has traversed, and successfully, all the wide areas of moral, physical, and mathematical science. I saw not then what I now clearly perceive that the acquisitions of Lygia were gigantic, were astounding. Yet I was sufficiently aware of her infinite supremacy to resign myself, with a childlike confidence to her guidance through the chaotic world of metaphysical investigation, at which I was most busily occupied during the earlier years of our marriage. With how vast a triumph, with how vivid a delight, with how much of all that is ethereal in hope did I feel, as she bent over me in studies but little sought, but less known, that delicious vista by slow degrees expanding before me, and whose long, gorgeous, and all-entrodden path I might at length pass onward to the goal of a wisdom too divinely precious not to be forbidden. How poignant, then, must have been the grief with which, after some years, I beheld my well-grounded expectations take wing to themselves and fly away. Without Lygia, I was but as a child, groping benighted. Her presence, her readings alone rendered vividly luminous the many mysteries of the transcendentalism in which we were immersed. Wanting the radiant luster of her eyes, letters, lampent, and golden grew duller than Saturnian lead. And now those eyes shone less and less frequently upon the pages over which I poured. Lygia grew ill. The wild eyes blazed with the two, two glorious effulgence. The pale fingers became of the transparent waxing heel of the grave. And the blue veins upon the lofty forehead swelled and sank in petuously with the tides of the most gentle emotion. I saw that she must die. And I struggled desperately in spirit with the grim as real. And the struggles of the passionate wife were, to my astonishment, even more energetic than my own. There had been much in her stern nature to impress me with the belief that to her death would have come without its terrors. But not so. Words are impotent to convey any just idea of the fierceness of resistance with which she wrestled with the shadow. I groaned in anguish at the pitiable spectacle. I would have sued, I would have reasoned, but in the intensity of her wild desire for life, for life, but for life, solace and reason were alike the uttermost of folly. Yet not until the last instance amid the most convulsive writings of her fierce spirit was shaken the external placidity of her demeanor. Her voice grew more gentle, grew more low. Yet I would not wish to dwell upon the wild meaning of the quietly uttered words. My brain reeled as I harkened in trance to a melody more than mortal, to assumptions and aspirations which mortality had never before known. That she loved me I should not have doubted. And I might have been easily aware that in a bosom such as hers love would have reigned no ordinary passion. But in death only was I fully impressed with the strength of her affection. For long hours detaining my hand would she pour out before me the overflowing of a heart whose more than passionate devotion amounted to idolatry. How had I deserved to be so blessed by such confessions? How would I deserve to be so cursed with the removal of my beloved in the hour of my making them? But upon this subject I cannot bear to dilate. Let me say only that in Ligia's more than womanly abandonment to a love alas, all unmerited, all unworthily bestowed, I at length, recognize the principle of her longing was so wildly earnest to desire, the life which was now fleeing so rapidly away. It is this wild longing it is this eager vehemence of desire for life, but for life, that I have no power to portray, no utterance capable of expressing. At high noon of the night in which she departed, beckoning me preemptorily to her side, she bade me repeat certain verses composed by herself not many days before. I obeyed her, they were these. Load is a gala night within the lonesome latter years. An angel throng bewinged vedite in veils and drowned in tears. Sit in a theater to see, a play of hopes and fears, while the orchestra breathes fitfully the music of the spheres. Mimes in the form of God on high, mutter and mumble low, and hither and thither fly, mere puppets they who come and go, abiding a vast formless things that shift the scenery to and fro, flapping from out their condor wings in visible woe. That motley drama, oh be sure, it shall not be forgot, with its phantom chased forevermore by a crowd that sees it not. Through a circle that ever returned it into the self-same spot, and much of madness and more of sin and horror the soul of the plot. But see amid the mimic route a crawling shape intrude, a blood-red thing that writhes from out the scenic solitude. It writhes, it writhes, with mortal pangs the mimes become its food, and the serath sob at vermin fangs in human gore imbued. Out, out of the lights, out all, and over each quivering form, the curtain of funeral pall comes down with the rush of the storm, and the angels all pallid and wand, uprising, unveiling a firm, that the play is the tragedy man, and its hero, the conqueror worm. Oh, God, have shriek Lygia, leaping to her feet and extending her arms aloft with this fasmatic movement as I made an end of these lines. Oh, God, oh divine Father, shall these things be undeviatingly so? Shall this conqueror be not once conquered? Are we not part and parcel in thee? Who, who knoweth the mysteries of the will with its figure? Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly save only through the weakness of his feeble will. And now, as if exhausted with emotion, she suffered her white arms to fall and returned solemnly to her bed of death. And as she breathed her last sighs, there came mingled with them a low murmur from her lips. I bent to them my ear and distinguished again the concluding words of the passage in Glanville. Man doth not yield him to the angels, nor unto death utterly save only through the weakness of his feeble will. She died, and I, crushed into the very dust with sorrow, could no longer endure the lonely desolation of my dwelling in the dim and decaying city by the Rhine. I had no lack of what the world calls well. Lygia had brought me far more, very far more than ordinary falls to the lot of mortals. After a few months, therefore, of weary and aimless wandering, I purchased and put in some repair, an abbey which I shall not name, in one of the wildest and least frequented portions of Fair England. The gloomy and dreary grandeur of the building, the almost savage aspect of the domain, the many melancholy and time honored memories connected with both, had much in unison with the feelings of utter abandonment, which had driven me into that remote and unsocial region of the country. Yet, although the external abbey with its fared and decay hanging about it, suffered but little alteration, I gave way with a childlike perversity, and perchance with a faint hope of alleviating my sorrows, to a display of more than regal magnificence within. For such follies, even in childhood, I had imbibed taste. And now they came back to me as if in the dotage of grief. Alas, I feel how much even of incipient madness might have been discovered in the gorgeous and fantastic draperies, in the solemn carvings of Egypt, in the wild cornices and furniture, in the bedlam patterns of the carpets of tufted gold. I had become a bound and slave in the trammels of opium, and my labors and my orders had taken a coloring from my dreams. With these absurdities, I must not pause to detail. Let me speak only of that one chamber ever accursed, wither in a moment of mental alienation, I led from the altar as my bride, as a successor of the Unforgotten Ligia, the fair haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevenian of Tremaine. There is no individual portion of the architecture and decoration of that bridal chamber which is not visibly before me. Where were the souls of the haughty family of the bride went through thirst of gold, they permitted to pass the threshold of an apartment so bedecked, a maiden and a daughter so beloved. I have said that I minutely remembered the details of this chamber, yet I am sadly forgetful on topics of deep moment. And here there was no system, no keeping, in the fantastic display to take hold upon the memory. The room lay in a high turret of the castellated Abbey was pentagonal in shape and of capacious size. Occupying the whole southern face of the pentagonal was the sole window, an immense sheet of unbroken glass from Venice, a single pane and tinted of a leaden hue so that the rays of either sun or moon passing through it fell with a ghastly luster on the objects within. Over the upper portion of this huge window extended the trellis work of an aged vine, which clambered up the massy walls of the turret. The ceiling of gloomy looking oak was excessively lofty, vaulted and elaborately fretted with the wildest and most grotesque specimens of a semi-gothic, semi-druidical device. From out the most central recess of this melancholy vaulting depended by a single chain of gold with long links, a huge sensor of the same metal, saracenic in pattern, and with many preparations so contrived that there writhed in and out of them as if endued with a serpent vitality, continual succession of party-colored fires. Some few Ottomans in Golden Kendalabra of Eastern figure were in various stations about, and there was the couch, too, the bridal couch of an Indian model and low and sculptured of solid ebony with a pall-like canopy above. In each of the angles of the chamber stood on end, a gigantic sarcophagus of black granite from the tombs of the kings over against Luxor, with their aged lids full of a memorial sculpture. But in the draping of the apartment lay alas the cheap fantasy of all. The lofty walls gigantic in height, even unproportionably so, were hung from summit to foot in vast folds with a heavy and massive looking tapestry. Tapestry of a material which was found alike as a carpet on the floor as a covering for the Ottomans and the ebony bed as a canopy for the bed and as the gorgeous values of the curtains which partially shaded the window. The material was the richest cloth of gold. It was spotted all over irregular intervals with arabesque figures about a foot in diameter and wrought upon the cloth in patterns of the most juddy black. But these figures partook of the true character of the arabesque only when regarded from a single point of view by a contrivance now common and indeed traceable to a very remote period of antiquity. They were made changeable in aspect. To one entering the room they bore the appearance of simple monstrosities. But upon a farther advance this appearance gradually departed and step by step as the visitor moved to station in the chamber he saw himself surrounded by an endless succession of the ghastly forms which belonged to the superstition of the Norman or arise in the guilty slumbers of the monk. The phantasmagoric effect was vastly heightened by the artificial introduction of a strong continual current of a wind behind the draperies giving a hideous and uneasy animation to the whole. In halls such as these and a bridal chamber such as this I passed with the lady of Tremaine the unhollowed hours of the first month of our marriage passed them with but little disquietude that my wife dreaded the fierce moodiness of my temper that she shunned me and loved me but little I could not help receiving. But it gave me rather pleasure than otherwise. I loathed her with a hatred of belonging more to demon than to man. My memory flew back oh with what intensity of regret to Ligia the beloved the August the beautiful the entombed. I reveled in recollections of the purity of her wisdom of her lofty her ethereal nature of her passionate her idolatrous love. Now then did my spirit fully and freely burn with more than all the fires of her own. In the excitement of my opium dreams for I was obitually fettered in the shackles of the drug I would call aloud upon her name during the silence of the night or among the sheltered recesses of the glens by the day as if through the wild eagerness the solemn passion the consuming ardor of my longing for the departed I could restore her to the pathways she had abandoned. Could it be forever upon the earth. About the commencement of the second month of the marriage the Lady Rowena was attacked with sudden illness from which her recovery was slow. The fever which consumed her rendered her nights uneasy and in her perturbed state of half slumber she spoke of sounds and of motions in and about the chamber of the turret which I concluded had no origin save in the distemper of her fancy or perhaps in the phantasmagoric influences of the chamber itself. She became at length convalescent finally well. Yet but a second more violent disorder again threw her upon a bed of suffering and from this attack or frame at all times feeble never altogether recovered. Her illnesses were after this epoch of alarming character and of more alarming recurrence defying alike the knowledge of and the great exertions of her physicians. With the increase of the chronic disease which had thus apparently taken to sure hold upon her constitution to be eradicated by human means I could not fail to observe a similar increase in the nervous irritation of her temperament and in her excitability by trivial causes of fear. She spoke again and now more frequently and pertinaciously of the sounds of the slight sounds and of the unusual emotions among the tapestries to which she had formally eluded. One night near the closing in of September she pressed this distressing subject with more than usual emphasis upon my attention. She had just awakened from an unquiet slumber and I had been watching with feelings half of anxiety, half of vague terror, the workings of her emaciated countenance. I sat by the side of her evening bed upon one of the Ottomans of India. She partly arose and spoke in an earnest low whisper of sounds which she then heard but which I could not hear of motions which she then saw but which I could not perceive. The wind was rushing hurriedly behind the tapestries and I wished to show her that what let me confess that I could not all believe that those almost inarticulate breathings and those very gentle variations of the figures upon the wall were but the natural effects of that customary rushing of the wind. But a deadly pallor over spreading her face had proved to me that my exertions to reassure her would be fruitless. She appeared to be fainting and no attendants were within call. I remembered there was deposited a decanter of light wine which had been ordered by her physicians and hastened across the chamber to procure it. But as I stepped beneath the light of the censor two circumstances of startling nature attracted my attention. I had felt that some palpable although invisible object would pass lightly by my person and I saw that there lay upon the golden carpet in the very middle of the rich luster thrown from the censor a shadow, a faint indefinite shadow of angelic aspect such as might be fancied for the shadow of a shade. But I was wild with the excitement of an immoderate dose of opium and heeded these things but little nor spoke of them to Rowena. Having found the wine I recrossed the chamber and poured out a goblet full which I held to the lips of the fainting lady. She had now partially recovered however and took the vessel herself while I sank upon an Ottoman near me with my eyes fastened upon her person. It was then that I became distinctly aware of a gentle footfall upon the carpet and near the couch. And in a second thereafter as Rowena was in the act of raising the wine to her lips I saw, or may have dreamed that I saw, fall within the goblet as if from some invisible spring in the atmosphere of the room three or four large drops of a brilliant and ruby colored fluid. If this I saw, not so Rowena. She swallowed the wine unhazitatingly and I forbore to speak to her of the circumstance which must. After all I considered have been but the suggestion of vivid imagination rendered morbidly active by the terror of the lady by the opium and by the hour. Yet I cannot conceal it from my own perception that immediately subsequent to the fall of the ruby drops a rapid change for the worse took place in the disorder of my wife so that on the third subsequent night the hands of her menials prepared her for the tomb and on the fourth I sat alone with her shrouded body in that fantastic chamber which had received her as my bride. Wild visions, opium engendered, flitted shadow-like before me. I gazed with unquiet eye upon the sarcophagi in the angles of the room, upon the varying figures of the drapery, and upon the writhing of the party-colored flames in the censor overhead. My eyes then fell as I called to mind the circumstances of a former night to the spot beneath the glare of the censor where I had seen the faint traces of the shadow. It was there, however, no longer, and breathing with greater freedom I turned my glances to the pallid and rigid figure upon the bed. Then rushed upon me a thousand memories of Ligia, and then came back upon my heart with the turbulent violence of a flood, the whole of that unutterable woe with which I had regarded her thus enshrouded. The night waned and still with a bosom full of bitter thoughts of the one only and supremely beloved I remained gazing upon the body of Rowena. It might have been midnight or perhaps earlier or later for I had taken no note of time, when a sob, low, gentle, but very distinct startled me from my reverie. I felt that it came from the bed of Abany, the bed of death. I listened in agony of superstitious terror, but there was no repetition of the sound. I strained my vision to detect any motion in the corpse, but there was not the slightest perceptible. Yet I could not have been deceived. I had heard the noise, however faint, and my soul was awakened within me. I resolutely and perseveringly kept my attention riveted upon the body, many minutes elapsed before any circumstance occurred tending to throw light upon the mystery. At length it became evident that a slight, a very feeble, and barely noticeable tinge of color had fleshed up within the cheeks, and along the sunken small veins of the eyelids. Through a species of unutterable horror and awe for which the language of mortality has no sufficiently energetic expression, I felt my heart cease to beat, my limbs grow rigid where I sat. Yet a sense of duty finally operated to restore my self-possession. I could no longer doubt that we had been precipitated in our preparations, that Rowena still lived. It was necessary that some immediate exertion be made, yet the turret was altogether apart from the portion of the abbey tenanted by the servants. There were none within call. I had no means of summoning them to my aid without leaving the room for many minutes, and this I could not venture to do. I therefore struggled alone in my endeavors to call back this fear at still hovering. In a short period it was certain, however, that a relapse had taken place. The color disappeared from both eyelid and cheek, leaving a wandness even more than that of marble. The lips became doubly shriveled and pinched up in the ghastly expression of death. A repulsive clamminess and coldness overspread rapidly the surface of the body, and all the usual rigorous stiffness immediately supervene. I fell back with a shudder upon the couch from which I had been so startinglingly outroused, and again gave myself up to passionate waking visions of legia. An hour thus elapsed when, could it be possible, I was a second time aware of some vague sound issuing from the region of the bed. I listened in extremity of horror. The sound came again. It was a sigh. Rushing to the corpse I saw, distinctly saw, a tremor upon the lips. In a minute afterward they relaxed, disclosing a bright line of the pearly teeth. Amazement now struggled in my bosom with a profound awe which had hitherto reigned there alone. I felt that my vision grew dim, that my reason wandered, and it was only by a violent effort that I at length succeeded in nerving myself to the task which duty thus once more had pointed out. There was now a partial glow upon the forehead and upon the cheek and throat. A perceptible warmth pervaded the whole frame. There was even a slight pulsation at the heart. The lady lived, and with redoubled ardor I betook myself to the task of restoration. I chafed and bathed the temples in the hands and used every exertion which experienced and no little medical reading could suggest, but in vain. Suddenly the color fled, the pulsation ceased. The lips resumed the expression of the dead, and in an instant afterward the whole body took upon itself the icy chilliness, the livid hue, the intense rigidity, the sunken outline, and all the loathsome peculiarities of that which has been for many days a tenet of the tomb. And again I sunken divisions of Ligia, and again what marvel that I shudder while I write. Again there reached my ears a low sob from the region of the ebony bed. But why shall I minutely detail the unspeakable horrors of that night? Why shall I pause to relate how time after time until near the period of the Grey Dawn this hideous drama of revivification was repeated, how each terrific relapse was only into a sterner and apparently more irredeemable death, how each agony wore the aspect of a struggle with some invisible foe, and how each struggle was succeeded by I know not what of wild change and the personal appearance of the corpse. Let me hurry to a conclusion. The greater part of the fearful night had worn away, and she who had been dead once again stirred, and now more vigorously than hitherto, although arousing from a disillusion, more appalling in its utter hopelessness than any. I had long ceased to struggle or to move, and remained sitting rigidly upon the ottoman, a helpless prey to a whirl of violent emotions of which extreme awe was perhaps the least terrible, the least consuming. The corpse I repeat stirred, and now more vigorously than before. The hues of life flushed up with unwanted energy into the countenance, the limbs relaxed, and saved that the eyelids were yet pressed heavily together, and that the bandages and draperies of the grave still imparted their charnel character to the figure. I might have dreamed that Rowena had indeed shaken off utterly the fetters of death. But if this idea was not even then altogether adopted, I could at least doubt no longer when arising from the bed, tottering with feeble steps, with closed eyes, and with the manner of one bewildered and enthroned dream, the thing that was enshrouded invents boldly and palpably into the middle of the apartment. I trembled not, I stirred not, for a crowd of unutterable fancies connected with the air, the stature, the demeanor of the figure, rushing hurriedly through my brain, had paralyzed, had chilled me into stone. I stirred not, but gazed upon the apparition. There was a mad disorder in my thoughts, a tumult unappeasable. Could it indeed be the living Rowena who confronted me? Could it indeed be Rowena at all? The fair-haired, the blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanian of Tremaine. Why, why should I doubt it? The bandage lay heavily about the mouth. But then might it not be the mouth of the breathing Lady of Tremaine? And the cheeks. There were the roses as in her noon of life. Yes, these might, indeed, be the fair cheeks of the living Lady of Tremaine. And the chin, with its dimples? As in health might it not be hers? But had she then grown taller since her malady? What inexpressible madness sees me with that thought? One bound and I had reached her feet. Shrinking from my touch she let fall from her head unloosen the ghastly ceramins which had confined it, and there streamed forth into the rushing atmosphere of the chamber huge masses of long and disheveled hair. It was blacker than the raven wings of midnight, and now slowly opened the eyes of the figure which stood before me. Here then at last I shrieked aloud. Can I never, can I never be mistaken? These are the full and the black and the wild eyes of my lost love of the Lady of the Lady Lygia. End of Lygia. End of Section 12 of Famous Modern Ghost Stories, recorded by Kelly Elizabeth, Chicago, Illinois. Section 13 of Famous Modern Ghost Stories. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Famous Modern Ghost Stories. Compiled by Dorothy Scarborough. Section 13. The Haunted Orchard. By Richard Logalien. Spring was once more in the world. As she sang to herself in the faraway woodlands, her voice reached even the years of the city, weary with the long winter. Daffodils flowed at the entrances to the subway, furniture removing vans blocked the side streets, children clustered like blossoms on the doorsteps. The open cars were running, and the cry of the cash-claw, man, was once more heard in the land. Yes, it was the spring, and the city dreamed wistfully of lilacs and the dewy piping of birds in gnarled old apple trees, of dogwood lighting up with sudden silver the thickening woods, of water plants unfolding their glossy scrolls and pools of morning freshness. On Sunday mornings the outbound trains were thronged with eager pilgrims hastening out of the city, to behold once more the ancient marvel of the spring. And on Sunday evening the railway termini were a flower with banners of blossom, from rifled woodland and orchard, carried in the hands of the returning pilgrims, whose eyes still shone with the spring magic, in whose ears still sang the fairy music. And, as I beheld these signs of the vernal equinox, I knew that I, too, must follow the music. For sake of while the beautiful siren we call the city, and in the green silences meet once more my sweetheart solitude. As the train drew out of the grand central I hummed to myself, I have a neater, sweeter maiden in a greener, cleaner land. And so I said good-bye to the city, and went forth with beating heart to meet the spring. I had been told of an almost forgotten corner on the south coast of Connecticut, where the spring and I could live in inviolate loneliness, a place uninhabited saved by birds and blossoms, woods and thick grass, and an occasional silent farmer, and pervaded by the breath and shimmer of the sound. Nor had rumour lied, for when the train set me down at my destination I stepped out into the most wonderful green hush, a leafy sabbath silence through which the very train, as it went farther on its way, seemed to steal as noiselessly as possible for fear of breaking the spell. After a winter in town, to be dropped thus suddenly into the intense quiet of the countryside makes an almost ghostly impression upon one, as of an enchanted silence, a silence that listens and watches but never speaks finger on lip. There is a spectral quality about everything upon which the eye falls. The woods, like great green clouds, the wayside flowers, the still farmhouses, half lost in orchard blossom, all seem to exist in a dream. Everything is so still, everything so supernaturally green. Nothing moves or talks except the gentle sursons of the spring wind swaying the young buds high up in the quiet sky, or a bird now and again, or a little brook singing softly to itself among the crowding rushes. Though from the houses one notes here and there, there are evidently human inhabitants of this green silence, none are to be seen. I have often wondered where the country folk hide themselves, as I have walked hour after hour past farm and croft and lonely dooryards and never caught sight of human face. If you should want to ask the way, a farmer is as shy as a squirrel, and if you knock at a farmhouse door, all is as silent as a rabbit warren. As I walked along in the enchanted stillness, I came at length to a quaint old farmhouse, old colonial in its architecture, embowered in white lilacs and surrounded by an orchard of ancient apple trees, which cast a rich shade on the deep spring grass. The orchard had the impressiveness of those old religious groves, dedicated to the strange worship of Sylvan gods, gods to be found now only in Horus or Catullus, and in the hearts of young poets to whom the beautiful antique Latin is still dear. The old house seemed already the abode of solitude. As I lifted the latch of the white gate and walked across the forgotten grass, and up onto the veranda already festooned with wisteria, and looked into the window, I saw solitude sitting by an old piano, on which no composer later than Bach had ever been played. In other words, the house was empty, and going around to the back, where old barns and stables leaned together as if falling asleep, I found a broken pain, and so climbed in and walked through the echoing rooms. The house was very lonely. Evidently no one had lived in it for a long time. Yet it was already for some occupant, for whom it seemed to be waiting. Quaint old four-poster bedsteads stood in three rooms, dimity curtains and spotless linen, old oak chests and mahogany presses, and opening drawers and Chippendale sideboards, I came upon beautiful frail old silver and exquisite china that set me thinking of a beautiful grandmother of mine, made out of old lace and laughing wrinkles and mischievous blue eyes. There was one little room that particularly interested me, a tiny bedroom all white, and that the window the red roses were already in bud. But what caught my eye with peculiar sympathy was a small bookcase, in which were some twenty or thirty volumes, wearing the same forgotten expression, forgotten and yet cared for, which lay like a kind of memorial charm upon everything in the old house. Yes, everything seemed forgotten, and yet everything curiously, even religiously, remembered. I took out book after book from the shelves. Once or twice flowers fell out from the pages, and I caught sight of a delicate handwriting here and there and frail markings. It was evidently the little intimate library of a young girl. What surprised me most was to find that quite half of the books were in French, French poets and French romancers, a charming, very rare edition of Rensard, a beautiful printed edition of Alfred de Musée, and a copy of Théophile Gauthier's Mademoiselle de Maupin. How did these exotic books come to be there alone in a deserted New England farmhouse? The question was to be answered later in a strange way. Meanwhile I had fallen in love with the sad, old, silent place, and as I closed the white gate and was once more on the road, I looked about for someone who could tell me whether or not this house of ghosts might be rented with the summer by a comparatively living man. I was referred to a fine old New England farmhouse shining white through the trees a quarter of a mile away. There I met an ancient couple, a typical New England farmer and his wife, the old man, lean, chin bearded, with keen gray eyes flickering occasionally with a shrewd humor, the old lady with a kindly old face of the withered apple type and ruddy. They were evidently prosperous people, but their minds, for some reason I could not at the moment divine, seemed to be divided between their New England desire to drive a hard bargain and their disinclination to let the house at all. Over and over again they spoke of the loneliness of the place. They feared I would find it very lonely. No one had lived in it for a long time, and so on. It seemed to me that afterwards I understood their curious hesitation, but at the moment only regarded it as a part of the circuitous New England method of bargaining. At all events the rent I offered finally overcame their disinclination, whatever its cause, and so I came into possession for four months of that silent old house, with the white lilacs and the drowsy barns and the old piano and the strange orchard and, as the summer came on and the year changed its name from May to June, I used to lie under the apple trees in the afternoons, dreamily reading some old book, and through half-sleepy eyelids watching the silken shimmer of the sound. I had lived in the old house for about a month when one afternoon a strange thing happened to me. I remember the date well. It was the afternoon of Tuesday, June 13th. I was reading, or rather dipping here and there, in Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy. As I read I remember that a little unripe apple, with a petal or two of blossom, still clinging to it, fell upon the old yellow page. Then I suppose I must have fallen into a dream, though it seemed to me that both my eyes and my ears were wide open, for I suddenly became aware of a beautiful young voice singing very softly somewhere among the leaves. The singing was very frail, almost imperceptible, as though it came out of the air. It came and went fitfully, like the elusive fragrance of sweet briar, as though a girl was walking to and fro, dreamily humming to herself in the still afternoon. Yet there was no one to be seen. The orchard had never seemed more lonely. And another fact that struck me as strange was that the words that floated to me out of the aerial music were French. Half sad, half gay snatches of some long dead singer of old France. I looked for the origin of the sweet sounds, but in vain. Could it be the birds that were singing in French in this strange orchard? Presently the voice seemed to come quite close to me, so near that it might have been the voice of a dry-ed singing to me out of the tree, against which I was leaning. And this time I distinctly caught the words of the sad little song. Chante, Rossignol, chante, toi qui a le currer, tu a le currer hier, moi je l'ai ta pleure. But though the voice was at my shoulder I could see no one, and then the singing stopped, with what sounded like a sob, and a moment or two later I seemed to hear a sound of sobbing far down the orchard. Then there followed silence, and I was left to ponder on the strange occurrence. Naturally I decided that it was just a daydream between sleeping and waking over the pages of an old book. Yet when next day and the day after the invisible singer was in the orchard again I could not be satisfied with such mere matter-of-fact explanation. Acclaire-Fontaine went the voice to and fro through the thick orchard-bows. Men à l'en promener, j'ai trouvé l'eau si belle, que je m'y suis bagnée. Lui il y a longtemps que je t'aime, jamais je n'ai oublié. It was certainly uncanny to hear that voice going to and fro the orchard, there somewhere amid the bright sun-dazzled boughs, yet not a human creature to be seen, not another house even within half a mile. The most materialistic mind could hardly but conclude that here was something not dreamed of in our philosophy. It seemed to me that the only reasonable explanation was the entirely irrational one, that my orchard was haunted, haunted by some beautiful young spirit with some sorrow of lost joy that would not let her sleep quietly in her grave. And next day I had a curious confirmation of my theory. Once more I was lying under my favourite apple-tree, half reading and half watching the sound, lulled into a dream by the whore of insects and the spices called up from the earth by the hot sun. As I bent over the page I suddenly had the startling impression that someone was leaning over my shoulder and reading with me, and that a girl's long hair was following over me down onto the page. The book was the rancor I had found in the little bedroom. I turned, but again there was nothing there. Yet this time I knew that I had not been dreaming and I cried out, Poor child, tell me of your grief that I may help your sorrowing heart to rest. But of course there was no answer, yet that night I dreamed a strange dream. I thought I was in the orchard again in the afternoon and once again heard the strange singing. But this time as I looked up the singer was no longer invisible. Coming toward me was a young girl with wonderful blue eyes filled with tears and gold hair that fell to her waist. She wore a straight white robe that might have been a shroud or a bridal dress. She appeared not to see me, though she came directly to the tree where I was sitting. And there she knelt and buried her face in the grass and sobbed as if her heart would break. Her long hair fell over her like a mantle and in my dream I stroked it pityingly and murmured words of comfort for a sorrow I did not understand. Then I woke suddenly as one does from dreams. The moon was shining brightly into the room. Rising from my bed I looked out into the orchard. It was almost as bright as day. I could plainly see the tree of which I had been dreaming and then a fantastic notion possessed me. Slipping on my clothes I went out into one of the old barns and found a spade. Then I went to the tree where I had seen the girl weeping in my dream and dug down at its foot. I had dug little more than a foot when my spade struck upon some hard substance and in a few more moments I had uncovered and exhumed a small box, which on examination proved to be one of those pretty old-fashioned Chippendale workboxes used by our grandmothers to keep their thimbles and needles in, their reels of cotton and skeins of silk. After smoothing down the little grave in which I had found it, I carried the box into the house and under the lamplight examined its contents. Then at once I understood why that sad young spirit went to and fro the orchard singing those little French songs. For the treasure trove I had found under the apple tree, the buried treasure of an unquiet suffering soul, proved to be a number of love-letters written mostly in French in a very picturesque hand, letters too written but some five or six years before. Perhaps I should not have read them, yet I read them with such reverence for the beautiful, impassioned love that animated them, and literally made them smell sweet and blossom in the dust, that I felt I had the sanction of the dead to make myself the confidant of their story. Among the letters were little songs, two of which I had heard the strange young voice singing in the orchard, and of course there were many withered flowers and such like remembrances of bygone rapture. Not that night could I make out all the story, though it was not difficult to define its essential tragedy, and later on a gossip in the neighborhood and a headstone in the churchyard told me the rest. The unquiet young soul that had sung so wistfully to and fro the orchard was my landlord's daughter. She was the only child of her parents, a beautiful, willful girl, exotically unlike those from whom she was sprung, and among whom she lived with a disdainful air of exile. She was, as a child, a little creature of fairy fancies, and as she grew up it was plain to her father and mother that she had come from another world than theirs. To them she seemed like a child in an old fairy tale, strangely found on his hearth by some shepherd as he returns from the fields at evening. A little fairy girl swaddled in fine linen and dowered with a mysterious bag of gold. Soon she developed delicate spiritual needs to which her simple parents were strangers. From long truancies in the woods she would come home laden with mysterious flowers, and soon she came to ask for books and pictures and music, of which the poor souls that had given her birth had never heard. Finally she had her way and went to study at a certain fashionable college, and there the brief romance of her life began. There she met a romantic young Frenchman who had read Ronsard to her and had written her those picturesque letters I had found in the old mahogany work-box. And after a while the young Frenchman had gone back to France and the letters had ceased. Month by month went by, and at length one day as she sat wistful at the window, looking out at the foolish sunlit road a message came. He was dead. That headstone in the village churchyard tells the rest. She was very young to die, scarcely nineteen years, and the dead who have died young with all their hopes and dreams still like unfolded buds within their hearts, do not rest so quietly in the grave as those who have gone through the long day from morning until evening and are only too glad to sleep. Next day I took the little box to a quiet corner of the orchard and made a little pyre of fragrant boughs. For so I interpreted the wish of that young, unquiet spirit, and the beautiful words are now safe, taken up again into the aerial spaces from which they came. But since then the birds sing no more little French songs in my old orchard—end of the haunted orchard—end of section thirteen of famous modern ghost stories. Section fourteen of famous modern ghost stories. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Famous modern ghost stories. Compiled by Dorothy Scarborough. The Bowman. By Arthur Machen. It was during the retreat of the eighty thousand, and the authority of the censorship is sufficient excuse for not being more explicit. But it was on the most awful day of that awful time, on the day when ruin and disaster came so near that their shadow fell over London far away, and without any certain news the hearts of men failed within them and grew faint, as if the agony of the army in the battlefield had entered into their souls. On this dreadful day then, when three hundred thousand men, in arms, with all their artillery, swelled like a flood against the little English company, there was one point above all other points in our battle-line that was, for a time, in awful danger—not merely of defeat, but of utter annihilation. With the permission of the censorship and of the military expert, this corner may perhaps be described as assailant, and if this angle were crushed and broken, then the English force as a whole would be shattered, the Allied left would be turned, and sedan would inevitably follow. All the morning the German guns had thundered and shrieked against this corner, and against the thousand or so of men who held it. The men joked at the shells and found funny names for them, and had bets about them, and greeted them with scraps of music-call songs. But the shells came on and burst, and tore good Englishmen limb from limb, and tore brother from brother, and, as the heat of day increased, so did the fury of that terrific cannonade. There was no help, it seemed. The English artillery was good, but there was not nearly enough of it. It was being steadily battered into scrap iron. There comes a moment in a storm at sea when people say to one another, It is at its worst, it can blow no harder, and then there is a blast ten times more fierce than any before it. So it was in these British trenches. There were no stouter hearts in the whole world than the hearts of these men, but even they were appalled as this seven times heated hell of German cannonade fell upon them and overwhelmed them and destroyed them. And at this very moment they saw from their trenches that a tremendous host was moving against their lines. Five hundred of the thousand remained, and as far as they could see the German infantry was pressing on against them, column upon column, a gray world of men, ten thousand of them, as it appeared afterwards. There was no hope at all. They shook hands, some of them. One man improvised a new version of the battle song, Goodbye, Goodbye to Tipperary, ending with, and we shan't get there. And they all went on firing steadily. The officer pointed out that such an opportunity for high-class fancy shooting might never occur again. The Tipperary humorists asked, What price, Sydney Street? And the few machine guns did their best. But everybody knew it was of no use. The dead gray bodies lay in companies and battalions, as others came on and on and on, and they swarmed and stirred and advanced from beyond and beyond. World without end, amen, said one of the British soldiers with some irrelevance as he took aim and fired. And then he remembered, he says he cannot think why or wherefore a queer vegetarian restaurant in London, where he had once or twice eaten eccentric dishes of cutlets made of lentils and nuts that pretended to be steak. On all the plates in this restaurant there was printed a figure of St. George in blue, with the model Odesit Anglis Sanctus Georgius. May St. George be a present help to the English. This soldier happened to know Latin and other useless things, and now, as he fired at his man in the gray advancing mass, three hundred yards away, he uttered the pious vegetarian motto. He went on firing to the end, and at last Bill, on his right hand, had to clout him cheerfully over the head to make him stop, pointing out, as he did so, that the king's ammunition cost money and was not likely to be wasted in drilling funny patterns into dead Germans. For as the Latin scholar uttered his invocation, he felt something between a shutter and an electric shock pass through his body. The roar of the battle died down in his ears to a gentle murmur. Instead of it, he says, he heard a great voice and a shout louder than a thunder-peel, crying, Aray, Aray, Aray! His heart grew hot as a burning coal. It grew cold as ice within him, as it seemed to him that a tumult of voices answered to his summons. He heard, or seemed to hear, a thousand shouting, St. George, St. George! Ha! Messiah, ha! Sweet St., grant us good deliverance! St. George, for Mary England! Harrow, harrow! Monsignor St. George, succour us! Ha! St. George! Ha! St. George! A long bow and a strong bow! Heaven's night, aid us! And as the soldier heard these voices he saw before him, beyond the trench, a long line of shapes, with a shining about them. They were like men who drew the bow, and with another shout, their cloud of arrows flew singing and tingling through the air towards the German hosts. The other men in the trench were firing all the while. They had no hope, but they aimed just as if they had been shooting at Bisley. Suddenly one of them lifted up his voice in the plainest English. God help us! he bellowed to the man next to him, but we're blooming marbles. Look at those gray gentlemen. Look at them. Do you see them? They're not going down in dozens, nor in hundreds. It's thousands it is. Look, look. There's a regiment gone while I'm talking to you. Shut it! the other soldier bellowed, taking aim. What are you gassing about? But he gulped with astonishment, even as he spoke, for indeed the gray men were falling by the thousands. The English could hear the guttural scream of the German officers, the crackle of their revolvers as they shot the reluctant, and still, line after line, crashed to the earth. All the while the Latin-bred soldier heard the cry. Harrow, harrow, monsignor, dear saint, quit to our aid. But George, help us. High Chevalier, defend us. The singing arrows fled so swift and thick that they darkened the air the heathen horde melted from before them. More machine guns, Bill yelled to Tom. Don't hear them, Tom yelled back. But thank God anyway they've got it in the neck. In fact there were ten thousand dead German soldiers left before the salient of the English army, and consequently there was no sedan. In Germany, a country ruled by scientific principles, the great general staff decided that the contemptible English must have employed shells containing an unknown gas of a poisonous nature, as no wounds were discernible on the bodies of the dead German soldiers. But the man who knew what nuts tasted like when they called themselves steak knew also that St. George had brought his Agingcourt bowman to healthy English. End of the Bowman. End of Section 14 of Famous Modern Ghost Stories. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Famous Modern Ghost Stories. Compiled by Dorothy Scarborough. A Ghost by Guy de Maupassant. We were speaking of sequestration, alluding to a recent lawsuit. It was at the close of a friendly evening in a very old mansion in the Rue de Grinnell, and each of the guests had a story to tell, which he assured us was true. Then the old Marquis de la Tour Samuel, eighty-two years of age, rose and came forward to lean on the mantelpiece. He told the following story in his slightly quavering voice. I also have witnessed a strange thing. So strange that it has been the nightmare of my life. It happened fifty-six years ago, and yet there is not a month when I do not see it again in my dreams. From that day I have borne a mark, a stamp of fear. Do you understand? Yes, for ten minutes I was prey to terror in such a way that ever since a constant dread has remained in my soul. Good sounds chill me to the heart. Objects which I can ill-distinguish in the evening shadows make me long to flee. I am afraid at night. No, I would not have owned such a thing before reaching my present age. But now I may tell everything. One may fear imaginary dangers at eighty-two years old. But before actual danger I have never turned back, madame. That affair so upset my mind filled me with such a deep, mysterious unrest that I never could tell it. I kept it in that inmost part, that corner where we conceal our sad, our shameful secrets, all the weaknesses of our life which cannot be confessed. I will tell you that strange happening just as it took place, with no attempt to explain it. Unless I went mad for one short hour it must be explainable, though. Yet I was not mad, and I will prove it to you. Imagine what you will. Here are the simple facts. It was in eighteen twenty-seven in July. I was quartered with my regiment in ruin. One day, as I was strolling on the quay, I came across a man I believed I recognized, though I could not place him with certainty. I instinctively went more slowly, ready to pause. The stranger saw my impulse, looked at me, and fell into my arms. It was a friend of my younger days, of whom I had been very fond. He seemed to have become half a century older in the five years since I had seen him. His hair was white, and he stooped in his walk as if he were exhausted. He understood my amazement and told me the story of his life. A terrible event had broken him down. He had fallen madly in love with a young girl and married her in a kind of dreamlike ecstasy. After a year of unalloyed bliss and inexhausted passion, she had died suddenly of heart disease, no doubt killed by love itself. He had left the country on the very day of her funeral, and had come to live in his hotel at ruin. He remained there, solitary and desperate, grief slowly mining him, so wretched that he constantly thought of suicide. As I thus came across you again, he said, I shall ask a great favor of you. I want you to go to my chateau and get some papers I urgently need. They are in the writing desk of my room, of our room. I cannot send a servant or a lawyer, as the errand must be kept private. I want absolute silence. I shall give you the key of the room, which I locked carefully myself before leaving, and the key to the writing desk. I shall also give you a note for the gardener who will let you in. Come to breakfast with me to-morrow, and we'll talk the matter over. I promised to render him that slight service. It would mean but a pleasant excursion for me, his home not being more than twenty-five miles from ruin. I could go there in an hour on horseback. At ten o'clock the next day I was with him. We breakfasted alone together, yet he did not utter more than twenty words. He asked me to excuse him. The thought that I was going to visit the room where his happiness lay shattered upset him, he said. Indeed, he seemed perturbed, worried, as if some mysterious struggle were taking place in his soul. At last he explained exactly what I was to do. It was very simple. I was to take two packages of letters and some papers locked in the first drawer at the right of the desk of which I had the key. He added, I need not ask you not to glance at them. I was almost hurt by his words, and told him so rather sharply. He stammered, forgive me, I suffer so much. And tears came to his eyes. I left about one o'clock to accomplish my errand. The day was radiant, and I rushed through the meadows, listening to the song of the larks and the rhythmical beat of my sword on my riding-boots. Then I entered the forest, and I set my horse to walking. Branches of the trees softly caressed my face, and now and then I would catch a leaf between my teeth and bite it with avidity, full of the joy of life, as such fills you without reason, with a tumultuous happiness almost indefinable, a kind of magical strength. As I neared the house I took out the letter for the gardener, and noted with surprise that it was sealed. I was so amazed and so annoyed that I almost turned back without fulfilling my mission. Then I thought that I should thus display over-sensitiveness and bad taste. My friend might have sealed it unconsciously, worried as he was. The manor looked as though it had been deserted the last twenty years. The gate, wide open and rotten, held one wondered how. Grass filled the paths, you could not tell the flower beds from the lawn. At the noise I made, kicking a shutter, an old man came out from a side door and was apparently amazed to see me. I dismounted from my horse and gave him the letter. He read it once or twice, turned it over, looked at me with suspicion, and asked, Well, what do you want? I answered sharply. You must know it as you have read your master's orders. I want to get in the house. He appeared overwhelmed. He said, So you are going in, in his room? I was getting impatient. Par bleu! Do you intend to question me by chance? He stammered. No, monsieur, only it has not been open since the death. If you will wait five minutes, I will go in to see whether I interrupted angrily. See here, are you joking? You can't go in that room as I have the key. He no longer knew what to say. Then, monsieur, I will show you the way. Show me the stairs and leave me alone. I can find it without your help. But still, monsieur, then I lost my temper. Now be quiet, else you'll be sorry. I roughly pushed him aside and went into the house. I first went through the kitchen, then crossed two small rooms occupied by the man and his wife. From there I stepped into a large hall. I went up the stairs and I recognized the door my friend had described to me. I opened it with ease and went in. The room was so dark that at first I could not distinguish anything. I paused, arrested by that moldy and stale odor peculiar to deserted and condemned rooms, of dead rooms. Then gradually my eyes grew accustom to the gloom, and I saw rather clearly a great room and disorder, a bed without sheets having still its mattresses and pillows, one of which bore the deep imprint of an elbow or a head as if someone had just been resting on it. The chairs seemed all in confusion. I noticed a door probably that of a closet had remained ajar. I first went to the window and opened it to get some light, but the hinges of the outside shutters were so rusted that I could not loosen them. I even tried to break them with my sword but did not succeed. As those fruitless attempts irritated me, and as my eyes were by now adjusted to the dim light, I gave up hope of getting more light and went toward the writing desk. I sat down in an arm chair, folded back the top, and opened the drawer. It was full to the edge. I needed but three packages which I knew how to distinguish and I started looking for them. I was straining my eyes to decipher the inscriptions when I thought I heard or rather felt a rustle behind me. I took no notice, thinking a draft had lifted some curtain. But a minute later another movement, almost indistinct, sent a disagreeable little shiver over my skin. It was so ridiculous to be moved thus, even so slightly, that I would not turn around being ashamed. I had just discovered the second package I needed and was on the point of reaching for the third when a great and sorrowful sigh close to my shoulder made me give a mad leap two yards away. In my spring I had turned around, my hand on the hilt of my sword, and surely had I not felt that I should have fled like a coward. A tall woman, dressed in white, was facing me, standing behind the chair in which I had sat a second before. Such a shudder ran through me that I almost fell back. Oh, no one who has not felt them can understand those gruesome and ridiculous terrors. The soul melts. Your heart seems to stop. Your whole body becomes limp as a sponge, and your innermost parts seem collapsing. I do not believe in ghost, and yet I broke down before the hideous fear of the dead, and I suffered. Oh, I suffered more in a few minutes in the irresistible anguish of supernatural dread that I have suffered in all the rest of my life. If she had not spoken I might have died. But she did speak. She spoke in a soft and plaintive voice which set my nerves vibrating. I could not say that I regained my self-control. No, I was past knowing what I did, but the kind of pride I have in me, as well as a military pride, helped me to maintain, almost in spite of myself, an honorable countenance. I was making a pose, a pose for myself and for her, for her whatever she was, woman or phantom. I realized this later for at the time of the apparition I could think of nothing. I was afraid. She said, Oh, you can be of great help to me, monsieur. I tried to answer, but I was unable to utter one word. A vague sound came from my throat. She continued, Will you, you can save me, cure me. I suffer terribly. I always suffer. I suffer. Oh, I suffer. And she sat down gently in my chair. She looked at me. Will you? I nodded my head, being still paralyzed. Then she handed me a woman's comb of tortoise shell and murmured, Comb my hair. Oh, comb my hair, that will cure me. Look at my head, how I suffer. And my hair, how it hurts. Her loose hair, very long, very black it seemed to me, hung over the back of the chair, touching the floor. Why did I do it? Why did I, shivering, accept that comb? And why did I take between my hands her long hair, which left on my skin a ghastly impression of cold as if I had handled serpents? I do not know. That feeling still clings about my fingers, and I shiver when I recall it. I combed her, I handled I know not how that hair of ice. I bound and unbounded it, I plated it as one plates a horse's mane. She sighed, bent her head, seemed happy. Suddenly she said, Thank you, tore the comb from my hands and flowed through the door which I had noticed was half open. Left alone I had for a few seconds the hazy feeling one feels in waking up from a nightmare. Then I recovered myself. I ran to the window and broke the shutters by my furious assault. A stream of light poured in. I rushed to the door through which that being had gone. I found it locked and immovable. Then a fever of light seized on me, a panic, the true panic of battle. I quickly grasped the three packages of letters from the open desk. I crossed the room running. I took the steps of the stairway forward a time. I found myself outside, I don't know how, and seeing my horse close by I mounted in one leap and left at a full gallop. I didn't stop till I reached ruin and drew up in front of my house. Having thrown the reins to my orderly I flew to my room and locked myself in to think. Then for an hour I asked myself whether I had not been the victim of an elucination. Certainly I must have had one of those nervous shops, one of those brain disorders such as Give Rise to Miracles to which the supernatural owes its strength. And I had almost concluded that it was a vision, an illusion of my senses when I came near to the window. My eyes by chance looked down. My tunic was covered with hairs, some woman's hairs which had entangled themselves around the buttons. I took them off one by one and threw them out of the window with trembling fingers. I then called my orderly. I felt too perturbed to move to go and see my friend on that day. Besides I needed to think over what I should tell him. I had his letters delivered to him. He gave a receipt to the soldier. He inquired after me and was told that I was not well. I had had a sunstroke or something. He seemed distressed. I went to see him the next day, early in the morning, bent on telling him the truth. He had gone out the evening before and had not come back. I returned the same day but he had not been seen. I waited a week. He did not come back. I notified the police. They searched for him everywhere but no one could find any trace of his passing or of his retreat. A careful search was made in the deserted manner. No suspicious clue was discovered. There was no sign that a woman had been concealed there. The inquest gave no result, and so the search went no further. And in fifty-six years I have learned nothing more. I never found out the truth. End of A Ghost End of Section 15 of famous modern ghost stories. End of famous modern ghost stories. Compiled by Dorothy Scarborough.