The Black Cat (magazine)/Volume 1/Number 1/The Secret of the White Castle

by Julia Magruder

The Secret of the White Castle.

by Julia Magruder.

WHEN I became the occupant of the Chateau Blanc, in the neighborhood of Fontainebleau, I found that my wish for a place of complete seclusion was likely to be realized to the full. I was not in a state of mind for society, and I had deliberately given myself three months in which to fight out a certain battle with myself, for which I needed solitude and reflection.

When the old woman who acted as keeper and caretaker of the place took me through it, on a tour of inspection, there were three things which, in spite of my preoccupation with my own affairs, struck me very forcibly. The first was the forlorn remnants of the body of a white swan, which must once have been a creature of splendid size and shape. My informant told me that this swan had been a great pet of the former owner of the chateau, until some accident had killed it; after which it had been stuffed and fastened in its place upon the surface of the little lake under his window. There it was still—what remained of it—a mass of weather-beaten and dirty feathers.

Another thing that compelled my strong attention was a certain picture which hung in the bedroom of the late owner, and which I was informed was his own portrait, painted by himself. This room, by the way, was sinister and mysterious in its effect beyond any I had ever entered . One reason for this was the fact that all the furniture, which was elaborately carved and which must once have been of beautiful polish and color, had been ruthlessly covered with a coat of black paint,—the bed, the table, chairs, wardrobe, chests of drawers, and even the great leather easy chair which was placed just under the picture, facing the opposite wall.

It was a wretched piece of work, that picture, representing a man dressed in some sort of court dress of the last century, and it would have seemed ineffectual and amateurish to the last degree but for the truly marvelous expression of the eyes, which were fixed on a certain spot in the wall opposite with an earnestness and intensity which made me feel that there was some hidden significance in this look. The man not only looked at the spot himself, but he compelled me to do the same, and forced me, by the insistent command of his eyes, to look again and again.

And yet there was nothing to see. The wall was perfectly bare in that place and covered with a meaningless sort of wall-paper, which gave me no encouragement whatever.

Another thing that I noticed specially, with a feeling of being imperiously directed to do so, was a large rusty key that hung on the wall directly under the picture. When I inquired of the old woman what this key belonged to she answered that she had never known, but that it had been hung there by the late proprietor and had been undisturbed since his death. That event had occurred a great many years ago, and it was owing to the provisions of the will left by him that no one had ever occupied the house in the interval. The prescribed time had only just expired, and I was the first person to rent the chateau, the revenue from which was to go to a nephew, who lived abroad.

The somberness of the black chamber suited my frame of mind, and I decided on taking it for my room. Besides this, the picture, the key, and the white swan all interested me, and, as it was the first time that an outside interest had made any headway against the melancholy of my own thoughts, these objects, far from cheerful as they were in themselves, afforded a grateful diversion.

So continually did I wonder why the picture looked always and could compel me to look at that one spot, and why.the key had been hung in that place and had kept its position so many years undisturbed, as if some ghostly guardian watched over it, and why, ever and always, the old white swan compelled me, as if by some irresistible power, to connect it with these other things, that I kept myself awake at night, weaving all sorts of stories concerning these objects, and spent half my days in looking from the picture to the wall, and back again to the key, and then out of the window at the battered effigy of a noble bird beneath it, until the confusion of mind thus produced seemed likely to drive me crazy.

I expended all the ingenuity of which I was master in questioning the old woman, who had lived here in the time of the former owner, but the satisfaction of my curiosity in that direction was rather meager.

She told me that her former master had had a wife whom he adored, fair as an angel, and gifted with a divinely beautiful voice, such as none had ever heard, before or since. This young wife had been snatched from him by a sudden and frightful death. The fever which seized her had been so contagious, the woman said, that every one had fled the premises, except one woman servant and the master himself. These, with the help of the doctor, had nursed the young wife through her brief illness until its end.

My informant had heard it said that the circumstances of her death were very peculiar,—that, in her delirium, on the very last night of her illness, those who had ventured to linger about the premises had heard her singing more gloriously than ever in her life; that it had reminded them of the great white swan, which but the night before had sung its last sweet song on the lake, in the moonlight, and had been found dead in the morning.

The woman who had remained to help the master in his last sad ministrations to his dying and dead wife had gone away the day after the funeral, and had never been heard of since.

That funeral, in the quaint old church but a few paces from the house, had been, from the woman's account, a melancholy affair enough. Scarcely any one dared to come to it, so malignant had been this fever, and it was feared that the few men who were willing to act as pall-bearers would not be equal to the task; but the poor lady had always been slight and fairy-like in figure, and so wasted was she from this consuming fever that the bearers declared that her weight was scarcely more than that of an empty coffin. The woman further said that, as the small funeral cortege was leaving the church, it had surprised every one to see the husband, who was directly behind the coffin, pause abruptly under a statue of the Virgin, and single out. from the great bunch of white ribbons which hung there, the long strip which his young wife had placed there on the day of her marriage to him, less than a year before. It was an old custom connected with this church. Every girl ever married there had conformed to it, and some of the ribbons were yellow with time and almost dropping to pieces. The longest and freshest bit of all had been put there by the beautiful and beloved young creature now lying dead in the flower of her youth and loveliness.

No one ever knew, the woman went on to say, how the master spent his days after the funeral was over. He had forbidden every servant to return, and turned a deaf ear to the rings and knocks of visitors. Months had passed, and no one held speech with him. They knew he was alive, because people who had looked through the palings had seen him walking in the garden, and one person reported having seen him carry from the house the stuffed body of the great swan and fasten it in its place on the lake, where it could be plainly seen from his window. He must have embalmed or stuffed it himself, the old woman said, for he was known to have remarkable knowledge and skill in such strange arts, and had once had a great room filled with birds and beasts, which he had preserved by methods studied in foreign lands.

As was inevitable, after hearing all this, my interest in the picture, and swan, and the key deepened sensibly. There was certainly a spell of the supernatural about these things for me. I had only to stand near the spot on which the eyes of the picture were fastened to experience the strangest, the most overwhelmingly significant sensations I had ever known. The spot was haunted by a presence for me, and as often as I stood there I would feel my heart throb and cease throbbing, my breath pant and cease panting, my very flesh turn cold and moist with consciousness and apprehension. I tried to account for all this on natural grounds, but I found it was quite impossible to do so.

One day—it was the 19th of August—a hot, sultry, close, indescribably gloomy day, when the heavy clouds that lowered seemed only to darken the whole earth without giving forth one drop of moisture.—the old woman came to my room and chanced to mention that it was the time of the death of the young mistress of the Chateau Blanc. She had died, it appeared, just at midnight between the 19th and 20th of August. After giving me this information, she said good-evening and left me to the reflections which it aroused.

I can scarcely call them reflections. They took the form, rather, of a sort of compulsion that was laid upon me to obey a certain force by which I felt myself suddenly dominated.

It was the picture that did it; this was certain, for, as often as I faltered, one look into that insistent, commanding, coercing face compelled me to go on. In obedience to its bidding, I did as follows:—

I went to an old desk in the room, and took from it some simple carpenters' tools, with which I deliberately cut through, first, the wall-papering, and then a thin boarding, which covered all the space between a door and window opposite the picture. When this was done I saw—I cannot say whether most to my satisfaction or my horror, that I stood opposite a door,—a regular, ordinary door, with panels, hinges, and, more than all , a keyhole. I glanced at the picture. It seemed to me that the canvas positively lived with expression.

The eyes commanded me to get the rusty key. I got it, fitted it in the lock, in which it turned with difficulty, and then, with my heart almost choking me with its throbs, my knees shaking under me, my body covered with a cold sweat, and my tongue dry in my mouth, I opened the door.

As it creaked on its rusty hinges, I saw, by the light of the candle which I held in my hand, a mass of cobwebs, heavily weighted with the dust of years, and, through these, a woman's figure.

It was clad—for I obeyed the eyes, which commanded me to examine it, though my heart was cold with terror—in what I made out to be a white silk gown, above which was the face, withered and awfully livid, as I had heard the faces of embalmed corpses appear years after death. Still, it was recognizable as a real human face, and was surrounded by masses of yellow hair, which, even through the dust and cobwebs, gleamed with the brightness of gold. The hands held something in their shrunken fingers,—a white ribbon, with the date of her marriage and death upon it, her husband's name and her own , and these words, which, under the compelling eyes of the picture, I laboriously studied out:—

"I have been able to keep you near me, even in death. I have never been separated from you, or from what was you to me once. But when death shall come to me you will have no power over my body, and they will take me from you. That I am unable to help. I think only of this: you cannot suffer for it, since you have have so long ceased to be, and by that time my suffering also will be over. I shall put my spirit into the eyes of my picture, which will watch over you still."

I looked from the paper to the picture. It seemed dull and inexpressive,—mere canvas and paint. The power of the eyes was gone. Their spell over me was broken.

Suddenly I felt within me a long-absent yearning for human companionship,—for life and love. I had come to this place impelled by a morbid and unhealthy desire for solitude, and my experiences here had made me more morbid and unhealthy still. They had culminated now in this awful revelation of disappointment and death, which threw into brilliant contrast the bright possibilities which still remained to me, and I resolved to go back into the world and do my best to deserve and win these.