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
Marryat'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
unfamiliar 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
guidebook, 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 lighted 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 herrgård, in question is to be called Råbäck (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 Råbäck Mr Wraxall found the church door
open, and made those 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 ear]iest 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 Råbäck took a leading part in suppressing the trouble,
and there was reference to executions of ringleaders 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 hirn 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 off with obvious alacrity, only putting his head in at the
door a few minutes after wards 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 Råbäck 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 aëris ('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 Råbäck. 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 forest-men to keep
the wood, because no one wished to hunt 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 sometime.'
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 Count's 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
Råbäck. 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 Råbäck. 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 several small
notebooks 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 Trollhättan. 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 the other 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 remembered 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.
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