Ghost Stories and Mysteries. Ernest Favenc
reason I leave here, the reason that I now make this public, is that the other day I met the man whom we buried, the man called, I believe, George Seamore, face to face in the street, and he turned and followed me.
THE LADY ERMETTA; or, The Sleeping Secret:
A SENSATIONAL NOVELETTE IN THREE PARTS, WITH AN ORTHODOX CHRISTMAS INTRODUCTION (1875)
INTRODUCTION
It was Christmas Day, and I, the wearied super of a cattle station far out in the back country, was swinging idly in a hammock, in an iron-roofed verandah, where the thermometer stood at a hundred and ten; and imagining that I was keeping a merry Christmas. Not a sound, save the indistinct hum of insect life, was to be heard; all hands on the station, having succumbed to the influence of colonial rum and pudding, were asleep; and I lay and perspired, and smoked, and thought—of what? That is a question that will be answered directly. With my hands clasped under the back of my head, one foot projecting over the side of the hammock, and occasionally touching the verandah post in order to keep myself swinging, I began gradually to lose full consciousness of surrounding objects. I knew that it seemed to be getting hotter and hotter, that the iron roof overhead appeared to be assuming a molten appearance; that I was getting too lazy to keep myself rocking, that my eyelids were growing heavy, and that I should soon give it up and fall asleep, when I heard a deep, deep sigh close to me. I turned—
Saw throned on a flowery rise,
One sitting on a crimson scarf unrolled.
Well, not exactly.
This was a man, and he was sitting in one of the squatter chairs leaning against the slabs, and a curious looking figure he was to see in such a situation. I knew him at once; he was the Genius of Christmas. There he was, holly wreath, white beard, laughing countenance, and all the attributes complete.
I said, “Good day, old man —how are you?” for I felt astonishingly bold somehow. He was reading in a large book, the print of which seemed possessed with life, and to be constantly moving and changing; but when I made this remark he raised his head, and gazed at me with “a countenance more in sorrow than in anger,” but did not speak.
“I know who you are,” I went on; “you’re the Genius of Christmas.”
“I am,” he said.
“And you’re going to show me all manner of pictures and scenes of human life, and I shall awake by-and-by and find that it has all been a dream; and I shall be very good and charitable all the rest of my life.”
“Not you,” said the Spirit; “you couldn’t be charitable if you tried.”
“Spirit,” I said, “that’s very hard, why could I not be charitable if I tried?”
“When you couldn’t show mercy to a poor old ghost who’s been harped upon, and written about, and carolled over,—there, I’ll say no more; but man’s inhumanity to me makes a Christmas Spirit mourn.”
“Spirit,” I said, “you mistake, surely, I who esteem and venerate the Christmas season.”
“You do, do you? Now, answer me truly, were you not trying to compose a Christmas tale as you lay in that hammock?”
“I confess it, I was.”
“And you say you venerate me; pretty veneration I call that, but I’ll be revenged. I’ll stand it no longer. I’ll read Christmas poetry to you for the next three hundred and sixty-five days.”
“Spirit, do not judge me unheard; be calm.”
“Be calm! Who could be calm under such provocation? Listen! We are seven,—that’s Wordsworth isn’t it,—never mind, as I said before, we are seven; seven spirits, one for each day in the week. I’m Saturday. When Christmas Day falls on a Saturday, as it does this year, I have to attend to it. Now every leap year one of us has to do double duty, and as next year is a leap year I am told off for the extra day’s work; but there is a chance for any of us to get out of this extra work, thus,” —he went on as though quoting from some rule or regulation, —“If a Spirit when in the execution of its duty, can find a place upon earth inhabited by Christian, or supposedly Christian people, where no Christmas Literature is to be found upon Christmas Day, he shall be able to claim exemption from extra duty on leap-year, and the Spirit following him shall do his work.”
“Spend your Christmas here,” I cried, starting from the hammock. “Search the house from garret to basement (it was only a two-roomed hut), and see if you can find a Christmas magazine or paper.”
“That Christmas story,” the Spirit sternly replied, “That Christmas story, which shall never see the light, by its mere presence in your idiotic skull has spoilt my chance of a holiday, and I wanted to put Sunday into it”—the long faced sanctimonious hypocrite. “But I will be revenged, revenged!”
“Spirit,” I cried, casting myself at its feet and clutching its robe, “have mercy; I am not strong-nerved. I could not bear to be transported to regions of ice and snow, and see poor people kind and generous to one another, and pretty girls playing at blindman’s-buff, and all the many signs you would show me—have mercy!”
“Can you ask it knowing that during the whole of the past year I have wandered to and fro seeking for a place wherein to rest on this twenty fifth day of December? I marked this spot, noted the dense stolidity, not to say stupidity, visible in your face, and I said here is a place where I shall be safe; nicely situated in a warm comfortable climate, mails always a month late; here I am secure for my holiday. This morning I took a turn through Europe, Asia, Africa, and America, just to see that everything was going on all right, come here to finish my day quietly and peace fully, in the virtuous frame of mind that a Spirit feels in who has done his duty, and I find, what! That you—a being than whom a generation of apes could not produce a greater fool—have dared to compose a Christmas Story; that you have committed two pages of it to paper, and it is even now lying there in your bedroom. Can you deny it?”
I could only bow my head in guilty assent.
“But vengeance can still be mine—yes, Vengeance! Vengeance!! Vengeance!!!” Here his voice rose to such a shriek that I expected to see the stockman and cook come rushing in to see what was up; but no help came to me, and he raged on.
“I will read to you, commencing with your own wretched two pages, all the Christmas literature that has been published in the world this season!” Uttering this awful sentence he leaned back in the chair, and glared furiously at me.”
“Mercy, mercy,” I said faintly.
“No mercy, I know it not; I reckon it will just comfortably occupy us until the end of next year to get through it all.”
“Spirit!” I cried, “I have sinned, but I repent; I will be a new man, Christmas shall be to me a season of mourning and desolation; spare me.”
Its only answer was to open its book and commence reading.
As though its first word was a blow, I fell back spell-bound and motionless, and there I lay whilst the Genius began to read my now detested production of two pages. First he read it in an ordinary colloquial tone, then he gabbled it over, next he sung it, then he tried to chant it. Then he read it in a facetious manner, stopping to laugh every now and then; then he read it in a dismal manner, pretending to cry; then he tried to make blank verse of it, and I tried to stop my ears, but all in vain; over and over again he read the horrid sentences I knew so well, until at last he seemed out of breath, and stopped.
“How do you like it,” he said, “will you ever do it again?”
“Never, never,” I groaned. He chuckled, and turning again to his book, the pages of which produced anything he liked without his having to turn over the leaves, he inflicted the following story upon me:—
THE LADY ERMETTA; OR, THE SLEEPING SECRET— PROLOGUE
Calm in the serene solemnity of their solitude; grand in the outstretched vastness of their extent, and golden