Ghost Stories of an Antiquary
you, gentlemen. I pray I may never hear such a noise again.”
“So do I,” said Herr Jensen, and he added something under his breath.
Anderson thought it sounded like the last words of the Psalter, “_omnis
spiritus laudet Dominum_,” but he could not be sure.
“But we must do something,” said Anderson—“the three of us. Shall we go
and investigate in the next room?”
“But that is Herr Jensen’s room,” wailed the landlord. “It is no use;
he has come from there himself.”
“I am not so sure,” said Jensen. “I think this gentleman is right: we
must go and see.”
The only weapons of defence that could be mustered on the spot were a
stick and umbrella. The expedition went out into the passage, not
without quakings. There was a deadly quiet outside, but a light shone
from under the next door. Anderson and Jensen approached it. The latter
turned the handle, and gave a sudden vigorous push. No use. The door
stood fast.
“Herr Kristensen,” said Jensen, “will you go and fetch the strongest
servant you have in the place? We must see this through.”
The landlord nodded, and hurried off, glad to be away from the scene of
action. Jensen and Anderson remained outside looking at the door.
“It _is_ Number 13, you see,” said the latter.
“Yes; there is your door, and there is mine,” said Jensen.
“My room has three windows in the daytime,” said Anderson, with
difficulty suppressing a nervous laugh.
“By George, so has mine!” said the lawyer, turning and looking at
Anderson. His back was now to the door. In that moment the door opened,
and an arm came out and clawed at his shoulder. It was clad in ragged,
yellowish linen, and the bare skin, where it could be seen, had long
grey hair upon it.
Anderson was just in time to pull Jensen out of its reach with a cry of
disgust and fright, when the door shut again, and a low laugh was
heard.
Jensen had seen nothing, but when Anderson hurriedly told him what a
risk he had run, he fell into a great state of agitation, and suggested
that they should retire from the enterprise and lock themselves up in
one or other of their rooms.
However, while he was developing this plan, the landlord and two
able-bodied men arrived on the scene, all looking rather serious and
alarmed. Jensen met them with a torrent of description and explanation,
which did not at all tend to encourage them for the fray.
The men dropped the crowbars they had brought, and said flatly that
they were not going to risk their throats in that devil’s den. The
landlord was miserably nervous and undecided, conscious that if the
danger were not faced his hotel was ruined, and very loth to face it
himself. Luckily Anderson hit upon a way of rallying the demoralized
force.
“Is this,” he said, “the Danish courage I have heard so much of? It
isn’t a German in there, and if it was, we are five to one.”
The two servants and Jensen were stung into action by this, and made a
dash at the door.
“Stop!” said Anderson. “Don’t lose your heads. You stay out here with
the light, landlord, and one of you two men break in the door, and
don’t go in when it gives way.”
The men nodded, and the younger stepped forward, raised his crowbar,
and dealt a tremendous blow on the upper panel. The result was not in
the least what any of them anticipated. There was no cracking or
rending of wood—only a dull sound, as if the solid wall had been
struck. The man dropped his tool with a shout, and began rubbing his
elbow. His cry drew their eyes upon him for a moment; then Anderson
looked at the door again. It was gone; the plaster wall of the passage
stared him in the face, with a considerable gash in it where the
crowbar had struck it. Number 13 had passed out of existence.
For a brief space they stood perfectly still, gazing at the blank wall.
An early cock in the yard beneath was heard to crow; and as Anderson
glanced in the direction of the sound, he saw through the window at the
end of the long passage that the eastern sky was paling to the dawn.
“Perhaps,” said the landlord, with hesitation, “you gentlemen would
like another room for tonight—a double-bedded one?”
Neither Jensen nor Anderson was averse to the suggestion. They felt
inclined to hunt in couples after their late experience. It was found
convenient, when each of them went to his room to collect the articles
he wanted for the night, that the other should go with him and hold the
candle. They noticed that both Number 12 and Number 14 had _three_
windows.
Next morning the same party reassembled in Number 12. The landlord was
naturally anxious to avoid engaging outside help, and yet it was
imperative that the mystery attaching to that part of the house should
be cleared up. Accordingly the two servants had been induced to take
upon them the function of carpenters. The furniture was cleared away,
and, at the cost of a good many irretrievably damaged planks, that
portion of the floor was taken up which lay nearest to Number 14.
You will naturally suppose that a skeleton—say that of Mag Nicolas
Francken—was discovered. That was not so. What they did find lying
between the beams which supported the flooring was a small copper box.
In it was a neatly-folded vellum document, with about twenty lines of
writing. Both Anderson and Jensen (who proved to be something of a
palæographer) were much excited by this discovery, which promised to
afford the key to these extraordinary phenomena.
I possess a copy of an astrological work which I have never read. It
has, by way of frontispiece, a woodcut by Hans Sebald Beham,
representing a number of sages seated round a table. This detail may
enable connoisseurs to identify the book. I cannot myself recollect its
title, and it is not at this moment within reach; but the fly-leaves of
it are covered with writing, and, during the ten years in which I have
owned the volume, I have not been able to determine which way up this
writing ought to be read, much less in what language it is. Not
dissimilar was the position of Anderson and Jensen after the protracted
examination to which they submitted the document in the copper box.
After two days’ contemplation of it, Jensen, who was the bolder spirit
of the two, hazarded the conjecture that the language was either Latin
or Old Danish.
Anderson ventured upon no surmises, and was very willing to surrender
the box and the parchment to the Historical Society of Viborg to be
placed in their museum.
I had the whole story from him a few months later, as we sat in a wood
near Upsala, after a visit to the library there, where we—or, rather,
I—had laughed over the contract by which Daniel Salthenius (in later
life Professor of Hebrew at Königsberg) sold himself to Satan. Anderson
was not really amused.
“Young idiot!” he said, meaning Salthenius, who was only an
undergraduate when he committed that indiscretion, “how did he know
what company he was courting?”
And when I suggested the usual considerations he only grunted. That
same afternoon he told me what you have read; but he refused to draw
any inferences from it, and to assent to any that I drew for him.
COUNT MAGNUS
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 unknown district on the Continent. They
were illustrated with woodcuts or steel plates. They gave details of
hotel accommodation, and of means of communication, such as we now
expect to find in any well-regulated guide-book, and they dealt largely
in reported conversations with intelligent foreigners, racy innkeepers,
and garrulous peasants. In a word, they were chatty.
Begun with the idea of furnishing material for such a book, my papers
as they progressed assumed the character of a record of one single
personal experience, and this record was continued up to the very eve,
almost, of its termination.
The writer was a Mr Wraxall. For my knowledge of him I have to depend
entirely on the evidence his writings afford, and from these I deduce
that he was a man past middle age, possessed of some private means, and
very much alone in the world. He had, it seems, no settled abode in
England, but was a denizen of hotels and boarding-houses. It is
probable that he entertained the idea of settling down at some future
time which never came; and I think it also likely that the Pantechnicon
fire in the early seventies must have destroyed a great deal that would
have thrown light on his antecedents, for he refers once or twice to
property of his that was warehoused at that establishment.
It is further apparent that Mr Wraxall had published a book, and that
it treated of a holiday he had once taken in Brittany. More than this I
cannot say about his work, because a diligent search in bibliographical
works has convinced me that it must have appeared either anonymously or
under a pseudonym.
As to his character, it is not difficult to form some superficial
opinion. He must have been an intelligent and cultivated man. It seems
that he was near being a Fellow of his college at Oxford—Brasenose, as
I judge from the Calendar. His besetting fault was pretty clearly that
of over-inquisitiveness, possibly a good fault in a traveller,
certainly a fault for which this traveller paid dearly enough in the
end.
On what proved to be his last expedition, he was plotting another book.
Scandinavia, a region not widely known to Englishmen forty years ago,
had struck him as an interesting field. He must have alighted on some
old books of Swedish history or memoirs, and the idea had struck him
that there was room for a book descriptive of travel in Sweden,
interspersed with episodes from the history of some of the great
Swedish families. He procured letters of introduction, therefore, to
some persons of quality in Sweden, and set out thither in the early
summer of 1863.
Of his travels in the North there is no need to speak, nor of his
residence of some weeks in Stockholm. I need only mention that some
_savant_ resident there put him on the track of an important collection
of family papers belonging to the proprietors of an ancient manor-house
in Vestergothland, and obtained for him permission to examine them.
The manor-house, or _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