The House of the White Shadows. Farjeon Benjamin Leopold

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      "And cannot afford to pay for independent legal aid."

      "It is fortunate. He will meet with his deserts more surely and swiftly."

      "You can doubtless call to mind instances of innocent persons being accused of crimes they did not commit, and being made to suffer."

      "There is no fear in the case of Gautran."

      "Let us hope not," said the Advocate, whose voice during the conversation had been perfectly passionless, "and in the meantime, do not lose sight of this principle. Were Gautran the meanest creature that breathes, were he the most repulsive being on earth, he is an innocent man until he is declared guilty by the law. Equally so were he a man gifted with exceeding beauty of person, and bearing an honoured name. And of those two extremes, supposing both were found guilty of equal crimes, it is worthy of consideration, whether he who walks the gutters be not better entitled to a merciful sentence than he who lives on the heights."

      At this moment a clerk brought some papers into the room. Jacob Hartrich looked over them, and handed them, with a roll of notes, to the Advocate, who rose and prepared to go.

      "Have you a permanent address?" asked the banker. "We take up our quarters at once," replied the Advocate, "at the House of White Shadows."

      Jacob Hartrich gazed at him in consternation. "Christian Almer's villa! He made no mention of it to me."

      "It was an arrangement entered into some time since. I have a letter from Master Pierre Lamont informing me that the villa is ready for us."

      "It has been uninhabited for years, except by servants who have been kept there to preserve it from falling into decay. There are strange stories connected with that house."

      "I have heard as much, but have not inquired into them. The probability is that they arise from credulity or ignorance, the foundation of all superstition."

      With that remark the Advocate took his leave.

      CHAPTER V

      FRITZ THE FOOL

      As the little wooden clock in the parlour of the inn of The Seven Liars struck the hour of five, Fritz the Fool ran through the open door, from which an array of bottles and glasses could be seen, and cried:

      "They are coming-they are coming-the great Advocate and his lady-and will arrive before the cook can toss me up an omelette!"

      And having thus delivered himself, Fritz ran out of the inn to the House of White Shadows, and swinging open the gates, cried still more loudly:

      "Mother Denise! Dionetta, my pearl of pearls! Haste-haste! They are on the road, and will be here a lifetime before old Martin can straighten his crooked back!"

      Within five minutes of this summons, there stood at the door of the inn of The Seven Liars, the customers who had been tippling therein, the host and hostess and their three children; and ten yards off, at the gates of the villa. Mother Denise, her pretty granddaughter, Dionetta, and old Martin, whose breathing came short and quick at the haste he had made to be in time to welcome the Advocate and his lady. The refrain of the breaking-up song sung in the little village school was dying away, and the children trooped out, and waited to witness the arrival. The schoolmaster was also there, with a look of relief on his face, and stood with his hand on the head of his favourite pupil. The news had spread quickly, and when the carriage made its appearance at the end of the lane, which shelved downward to the House of White Shadows, a number of villagers had assembled, curious to see the great lord and lady who intended to reside in the haunted house.

      As the carriage drove up at the gates, the courier jumped down from his seat next to the driver, and opened the carriage door. The villagers pressed forward, and gazed in admiration at the beautiful lady, and in awe at the stern-faced gentleman who had selected the House of White Shadows for a holiday residence. There were those among them who, poor as they were, would not have undertaken to sleep in any one of the rooms in the villa for the value of all the watches in Geneva. There were, however, three persons in the small concourse of people who had no fears of the house. These were Mother Denise, the old housekeeper, her husband Martin, and Fritz the Fool.

      Mother Denise, the oldest servant of the house, had been born there, and was ghost and shadow proof; so was her husband, now in his eighty-fifth year, whose body was like a bent bow stretched for the flight of the arrow, his soul. Not for a single night in sixty-eight years had Mother Denise slept outside the walls of the House of White Shadows; nothing did she know of the great world beyond, and nothing did she care; a staunch, faithful servant of the Almer family, conversant with its secret history, her duty was sufficient for her, and she had no desire to travel beyond the space which encompassed it. For forty-three years her husband had kept her company, and to neither, as they had frequently declared, had a supernatural visitant ever appeared. They had no belief whatever in the ghostly gossip.

      Fool Fritz, on the contrary, averred that there was no mistake about the spiritual visitants; they appeared to him frequently, but he had no fear of them; indeed, he appeared to rather enjoy them. "They may come, and welcome," he said. "They don't strike, they don't bite, they don't burn. They reveal secrets which you would like nobody to find out. If it had not been for them, how should I have known about Karl and Mina kissing and courting at the back of the schoolhouse when everybody was asleep, or about Dame Walther and her sly bottle, or about Wolf Constans coming home at three in the morning with a dead lamb on his back-ah, and about many things you try and keep to yourselves? I don't mind the shadows, not I." There was little in the village that Fritz did not know; all the scandal, all the love-making, all the family quarrels, all the secret doings-it was hard to keep anything from him; and the mystery was how he came to the knowledge of these matters. "He is in affinity with the spirits," said the village schoolmaster; "he is himself a ghost, with a fleshly embodiment. That is why the fool is not afraid." Truly Fritz the Fool was ghostlike in appearance, for his skin was singularly white, and his head was covered with shaggy white hair which hung low down upon his shoulders. From a distance he looked like an old man, but he had not reached his thirtieth year, and so clear were his eyes and complexion that, on a closer observance, he might have passed for a lad of half the years he bore. A shrewd knave, despite his title of fool.

      Pretty Dionetta did not share his defiance of ghostly visitors. The House of White Shadows was her home, and many a night had she awoke in terror and listened with a beating heart to soft footsteps in the passage outside her room, and buried her head in the sheets to shut out the light of the moon which shone in at her window. Fritz alone sympathised with her. "Two hours before midnight," he would say to her; "then it was you heard them creeping past your door. You were afraid, of course-when one is all alone; I can prescribe a remedy for that-not yet, Dionetta, by-and-by. Till then, keep all men at a distance; avoid them; there is danger in them. If they look at you, frown, and lower your eyes. And to-night, when you go to bed, lock your door tight, and listen. If the spirits come again, I will charm them away; shortly after you hear their footsteps, I will sing a stave outside to trick them from your door. Then sleep in peace, and rely on Fritz the Fool."

      Very timid and fearful of the supernatural was this country beauty, whom all the louts in the neighbourhood wanted to marry, and she alone, of those who lived in the House of White Shadows, welcomed the Advocate and his wife with genuine delight. Fool Fritz thought of secretly-enjoyed pleasures which might now be disturbed, Martin was too old not to dislike change, and Mother Denise was by no means prepared to rejoice at the arrival of strangers; she would have been better pleased had they never shown their faces at the gates.

      The Advocate and his wife stood looking around them, he with observant eyes and in silence, she with undisguised pleasure and admiration. She began to speak the moment she alighted.

      "Charming! СКАЧАТЬ