The Best Horrors by F. Marion Crawford. Francis Marion Crawford

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СКАЧАТЬ sockets as though still faintly striving, striving to the very last, to understand those things which it was not given him to understand. Feebly his two hands clasped his crooked staff, road-worn and splintered by the flints; upon one foot still clung the fragments of a shoe, the other had no shoe at all, and as he stood he lifted the foot that was bare and tried to rest it upon the scanty bit of dusty leather which only half covered the other, as though to ease it from the cruel road, while he steadied himself feebly with his stick. Had there been the least fragment of a wall near him, a bit of fence, even a tree, he would have tried to lean upon it; but there was nothing — nothing but the broad flinty road, with the ditch dug deep upon each side, nothing but the cold grey sky, the black north wind that began to whirl up the dust, scattering here and there big flakes of wet snow, and, far away behind, the barking of the dogs that had driven him from the gate while the churls who lingered there after their day's work laughed and made rough jokes upon him. A little boy, the son of one of those fellows, had taken a stone and had thrown it after the old man — the missile had struck him in the back and he had bowed himself lower and limped away; he was used to it — people often threw stones at him, and sometimes they hit him. What was one blow more to him, one wound more ? The end could not be far.

      "So he rested his naked foot upon the other, now that he was out of reach of harm. He could hear the dogs barking still, but dogs never chased him long; they would not come after him now. The boy could not throw stones to such a distance either, and would not take the trouble to pursue him, though one of the men had laughed when the old man was hit, and another had said it was a good shot. He might rest for a while, if it were rest to lean upon his staff and feel the bitter wind driving the snowflakes through the rents in his clothing, and whirling up the half frozen flint dust to his sore and weary eyes. The night was coming on. He would have to sleep in the ditch. It would not be the first time — if only he could get a mile or two farther he might find some bit of arched bridge across the ditch which would shelter him, or a stone wall; or even perhaps, a farmhouse where he should not be stoned from the door and might be suffered to sleep upon the straw in an outhouse. Such luck as that was rare indeed, and the mere thought of the straw, the pitiful dream that if he could struggle a little farther he might get shelter from the wind and snow, was enough to bring something like a shadowy look of hope into his wretched face. With a great effort he began to walk again, bending low to face the blast, starving, lame, and aching in every bone, but struggling still and peering through the gathering gloom in the vain hope of finding a night's resting-place."

      "I would have killed the boy who threw the stone, if I had been you!" exclaimed Lady Brenda in ready sympathy.

      "Alas, dear madam, I was dead myself," said Heine. "It was only the other day. Well, as I said, he struggled on; but the end was at hand. The road grew worse, for it had been mended and the small broken stones lay thick together, rough and bristling. He could hardly drag his steps over them. In the darkness he struck his naked foot against one sharp flint that was larger than the rest; he stumbled and with a low cry fell headlong upon the jagged surface. His hands were wounded and the blood trickled from them in the dark, wetting the stones more quickly than did the falling snow; his face, too, had been cut. For some moments he struggled to rise, but he was too weak, too utterly spent; then he rolled upon one side and rested his bruised face upon his torn hands and lay quite still, while the wind howled louder and the snow-flakes fell more thickly upon his rags and his wounds, upon the sorrows of his soul and the pains of his body. One long breath he drew — it was more than an hour since he had fallen.

      "God be merciful to me! ' he murmured, and again, ' God be merciful to me, for I think it is the end. And the Angel of the Lord came in the storm and the darkness and touched his forehead; and it was the end. The snow buried him that night and the north wind sang his funeral dirge."

      "How terribly sad!" exclaimed Diana in deep sympathy.

      "To think that such things happen! " said Lady Brenda and Gwendoline in one breath.

      " Do you think it is the fact, or the way the fact is told, which brings the tears to your eyes ? " asked the poet. "If I had stated the fact thus: an old beggar died in a snow-storm; shortly before he died a little boy hit him with a stone — I say, if I put the thing in its simplest expression, would you feel as deep a sympathy ? I believe not. I told you a long story — a true one, if you please — to show you that your sympathy could be commanded, could be excited, by my words. You asked me of a thing concerning myself — I was not willing to state it as a fact, I was obliged to state it with such accessories as should make you feel uncomfortable in my favour, so to say. All of which proves that man, living or dead, is a detestably selfish creature, and not very strong at that. When he has command of his audience he uses it unmercifully to rouse sympathy in others. When his audience has command of him, he generally makes a fool of himself. I once visited Goethe. In half an hour I could find nothing better to say to him than that there were good plums on the road from Jena to Weimar and that I was writing a Faust. I got no applause for my plums and no sympathy for my Faust; I never wrote the Faust, but I never ate plums from that day. So much for knowing how to manage one's hearers."

      "I wish you would not talk in that light way, after what you have been telling us so earnestly," said Gwendoline.

      "I cannot help it, dear madam," answered Heine.

      "I have a particular talent for being easily moved; and when I am moved I shed tears, and when I shed tears it seems very foolish and I at once try to laugh at myself — or at the first convenient object which falls in my way. For tears hurt — bitterly sometimes, and it is best to get rid of them in any way one can, provided that one does not put them beyond one's reach altogether."

      "People talk a great deal of sweet pain," remarked Augustus. " I do not understand how anything which hurts can be sweet at the same time."

      "Can you understand how a thing sweet at the time may hurt afterwards ? "

      "Perfectly," answered Chard.

      "Then can you not understand how when the thing hurts it is pleasant to remember that it was once sweet? It is very simple. By no means all pains are sweet, but on the whole there are enough of the sort to supply poets for many years to come. There are men among us here, whose sufferings are bitter still — very bitter."

      "Shall we ever know any of your companions ? " asked Lady Brenda.

      "They would be delighted, I am sure. We rarely have an opportunity of exchanging words with living people — it has never happened to me before. Mr. Chard has discovered a rather dangerous way of making it possible, and I am delighted to see that you are not in the least nervous. That shows how greatly ideas have changed in thirty years. When I was alive there was something that made one's flesh creep in the idea of talking with a dead man. You have overcome all that. If Mr. Chard will only continue his experiments there is no reason why we dead men should not play a real part in society."

      "I see no objection whatever," said Lady Brenda. "I am sure, if they are all like you, it would be most charming. But, after all, you may only be some one who knows all about Heine and talks delightfully about him."

      "Will you let me look at your hand?" asked the poet, bending forward and taking Lady Brenda's fingers in his. "What a beautiful ring, I always loved sapphires — "

      But Lady Brenda turned pale, and after a moment's struggle with her. convictions she nervously snatched her hand away.

      "Oh you are — you are really dead — I can feel it in your fingers," she cried. After that, Lady Brenda ceased to be sceptical.

      "There is only one point upon which I must warn you in regard to my friends," resumed Heine, smiling at Lady Brenda's discomfiture. " They wear the dress of their age — as I do. You must trust to them to avoid your servants, who might be surprised — or else you must warn your servants СКАЧАТЬ