Count Magnus

By what means the papers out of which I have made a connected story cameinto my hands is the last point which the reader will learn from thesepages.But it is necessary to prefix my extracts from them a statement of theform in which I possess them. They consist, then, partly of a series of collections for a book oftravels, 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 afair specimen of the class to which I allude. These books usually treated ofsome unfamiliar district on the Continent. They were illustrated withwoodcuts or steel plates. They gave details of hotel accommodation , and ofmeans of communication, such as we now expect to find in any well-regulatedguide-book, and they dealt largely in reported conversations withintelligent 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 asthey progressed assumed the character of a record of one single personalexperience, and this record was continued 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 dependentirely on the evidence his writings afford, and from these I deduce thathe was a man past middle age, possessed of some private means, and very muchalone in the world. He had, it seems, no settled abode in England, but was adenizen of hotels and boarding -houses. it is probable that he entertainedthe idea of settling down at some future time which never came; and I thinkit also likely that the Pantechnicon fire in the early seventies must havedestroyed a great deal that would have thrown light on his antecedents, forhe refers once or twice to property of his that was warehoused at thatestablishment. It is further apparent that Mr . Wraxall had published a book, and thatit treated of a holiday he had once taken in Brittany. more than this Icannot say about his work, because a diligent search in bibliographicalworks has convinced me that it must have appeared either anonymously orunder a pseudonym. As to his character, it is not difficult to form some superficialopinion. He must have been an intelligent and cultivated man. It seems hewas near being a Fellow of his college at Oxford - Brasenose, as I judgefrom the Calendar. His besetting fault was pretty clearly that of over-inquisitiveness, possibly a good fault in a traveller, certainly a faultfor which this traveller paid dearly enough in the end. On what proved topbe his last expedition, he was plotting another book. Scandinavia, a regionnot widely known to Englishmen forty years ago, had struck him as aninteresting field. He must have lighted on some old books of Swedishhistory, or memoirs, and the idea had struck him that there was room for abook descriptive of travel in Sweden, interspersed with episodes from thehistory of some of the great Swedish families. he procured letters ofintroduction, therefore, to some persons of quality in Sweden, and set outthither in the early summer of 1863. Of his travels in the North there is no need to speak, nor of hisresidence of some weeks in Stockholm. I need only mention that some savantresident there put him on the track of an important collection of familypapers belonging to the proprietors of an ancient manor-house inVestergothland, and obtained for him permission to examine them. The manor house, or herrgard, in question is to be calledRŒbŠck(pronounced something like Roebeck) though that is not its name. It isone of the best building s of its kind in all the country, and the pictureof it in Dahlenberg's Suecia antiqua et moderna, engraved in 1694, shows itvery much as the tourist may see it today. It was built soon after 1600, andis, roughly speaking, very much like an English house of that period inrespect of material - red-brick with stone facings - and style. The man whobuilt it was a scion of the great house of De la Gardie, and his descendantspossess it still. De la Gardie is the name by which I will designate themwhen mention of them becomes necessary. They received Mr. Wraxall with great kindness and courtesy, and pressedhim to stay in the house as long as his researches lasted.But, preferring tobe independent, and mistrusting his powers of conversing in Swedish, hesettled himself at the village inn, which turned out quite sufficientlycomfortable, at any rate during the summer months. This arrangement wouldentail a short walk daily to and from the manor-house of something under amile. The house itself stood in a park and, and was protected - we shouldsay grown up - with large old timber. Near it you found the walled garden,and then entered a close wood fringing one of the small lakes with which thewhole country is pitted. Then came the wall of the demense, and you climbeda steep knoll - a knob of rock lightly covered with soil - and on the top ofthis stood the church, fenced in with tall dark trees. It was a curiousbuilding to English eyes. The nave and aisles were low, and filled with pewsand galleries. In the western gallery stood the handsome old organ, gailypainted, and with silver pipes.The ceiling was flat, and had been adorned bya seventeenth-century artist with a strange and hideous last judgment, fullof lurid flames, falling cities, burning ships, crying souls, and brown andsmiling demons. Handsome brass coronae hung from the roof; the pulpit waslike a dolls-house covered with little painted cherubs and saints; a standwith three hour-glasses was hinged to the preachers desk. Such sights asthese may be seen in many a church in Sweden now, but what distinguishedthis one was an addition to the original building. At the eastern end of thenorth aisle the builder of the manor -house had erected a mausoleum forhimself and his family. it was a largish eight-sided building, lighted by aseries of oval windows, and it had a domed roof, topped by a kind ofpumpkin-shaped object rising into a spire, a form in which Swedisharchitects greatly delighted.The roof was of copper externally, and waspainted black, while the walls, in common with those of the church, werestaringly white. To this mausoleum there was no access from the church. Ithad a portal and steps of its own on the northern side. Past the churchyard the path to the village goes, and not more than threeor four minutes bring you to the inn door. On the first day of his stay at RŒbŠck Mr. Wraxall found the church dooropen, and made these notes of the interior which I have epitomized. Into themausoleum, however, he could not make his way. He could, by looking throughthe keyhole, just descry that there were fine marble effigies and sarcophagiof copper, and a wealth of armorial ornament, which made him very anxious tospend some time in investigation. The papers he had come to examine at the manor-house proved to be justthe kind of thing he wanted for his book.There were family correspondence,journals, and account-books of the earliest owners of the estate, verycarefully kept and clearly written, full of amusing and picturesque detail.The first De La Gardie appeared in them as a strong and capable man. Shortlyafter the building of the mansion there had been a period of distress in thedistrict, and the peasants had risen and attacked several chateaux and donesome damage. The owner of RŒbŠck took a leading part in suppressing thetrouble, and there was reference to executions of ringleaders and severepunishments inflicted with no sparing hand. The portrait of this Magnus de la Gardie was one of the best in thehouse, and Mr Wraxall studied it with no little interest after his day'swork. He gives no detailed description of it, but I gather that the faceimpressed him rather by its power than by its beauty or goodness; in fact,he writes that Count Magnus was an almost phenomenally ugly man. On this day Mr Wraxall took his supper with the family, and walked backin the late but still bright evening. "I must remember," he writes, "to ask the sexton if he can let me intothe mausoleum at the church. He evidently has access to it himself, for Isaw him tonight standing in the steps, and, as I thought, either locking orunlocking the door." I find that early on the following day Mr Wraxall had some conversationwith his landlord.His setting it down at such length as he does surprised meat first; but I soon realized that the papers I was reading here were, atleast in their beginning, the materials for the book he was meditating, andthat it was to have been one of those quasi-journalistic productions whichadmit of the introduction of an admixture of conversational matter. His object, he says, was to find out whether any traditions of CountMagnus de la Gardie lingered on in the scenes of that gentleman's activity,and whether the popular estimate of him were favourable or not. He foundthat the Count was decidedly not a favourite. If his tenants came late totheir work on the days which they owed to him as Lord of the Manor, theywere set on the wooden horse, or flogged and branded in the manor-houseyard. One or two cases there were of men who had occupied lands whichencroached on the lord's domain, and whose houses had been mysteriouslyburnt on a winter's night, with the whole family inside. But what seemeddwell on the innkeeper's mind most- for he returned to the subject more thanonce- was that the Count had been on the Black Pilgrimage, and had broughtsomething or someone back with him. You will naturally inquire, as Mr Wraxall did, what the Black Pilgrimagemay have been. But your curiosity on the point must remain unsatisfied forthe time being, just as his did. The landlord was evidently unwilling togive a full answer, or indeed any answer, on the point, and being called outfor the moment, trotted out with obvious alacrity, only putting his head inat the door to say that he was called away to Skara, and should not be backuntil evening. So Mr Wraxall had to go unsatisfied to his day's work at the manor house.The papers on which he was just then engaged soon put his thoughts intoanother channel, for he had to occupy himself with glancing over thecorrespondence between Sophia Albertina in Stockholm and her married cousinUlrica Leonora at RŒbŠck in the years 1705-10. The letter were ofexceptional interest for the light they threw upon the culture of thatperiod in Sweden, as anyone can testify who has read the full edition ofthem in the publications of the Swedish Historical Manuscripts Commission. In the afternoon he had done with these, and after returning the boxes inwhich they were kept to their places on the shelf, he proceeded,verynaturally, to take down some of the volumes nearest to them, in order todetermine which of them had best be his principal subject of investigationnext day. The shelf he had hit upon was occupied mostly by a collection ofaccount-books in the writing of the first Count Magnus. But one among themwas not an account-book, but a book of alchemical and other tracts inanother sixteenth-century hand. Not being very familiar with alchemicalliterature, Mr Wraxall spends much space which he might have spared insetting out the names and beginnings of the various treatises; The book ofthe Phoenix, book of the Thirty Words,book of the Toad, book of Miriam,Turba Philosophorum, and so forth; and then he announces with a good deal ofcircumstance his delight at finding, on a leaf originally left blank nearthe middle of the book, some writing of Count Magnus himself headed 'Libernigrae peregrinationis'. It is true that only a few lines were written, butthere was quite enough to show that the landlord had that morning beenreferring to a belief at least as old as the time of Count Magnus, andprobably shared by him. This is the English of what was written: 'If any man desires to obtain a long life, if he would obtain a faithfulmessenger and see the blood of his enemies, it is necessary that he shouldfirst go into the city of Chorazin, and there salute the prince...' Herethere was an erasure of one word, not very thoroughly done, so that MrWraxall felt pretty sure that he was right in reading it as aeris ('of theair'). But there was no more of the text copied, only a line in Latin:Quaere reliqua hujus materiei inter secretiora. (See the rest of this matteramong the more private things.). It could not be denied that this threw a rather lurid light on the tastesand beliefs of the Count; but to Mr Wraxall, separated from him by nearlythree centuries, the thought that the might have added to his generalforcefulness alchemy, and to alchemy something like magic, only made him amore picturesque figure, and when, after a rather prolonged contemplation ofhis picture in the hall, Mr Wraxall set out on his homeward way, his mindwas full of the thought of Count Magnus. He had no eyes for hissurroundings, no perceptions of the evening scents of the woods or theevening light on the lake; and when all of a sudden he pulled up short, hewas astonished to find himself already at the gate of the churchyard, andwithin a few minutes of his dinner. His eyes fell on the mausoleum. "Ah," he said, "Count Magnus, there you are. I should dearly like to seeyou". "Like many solitary men," he writes, "I have a habit of talking to myselfaloud; and, unlike some of the Greek and Latin particles, I do not expect ananswer. Certainly and perhaps fortunately in this case, there was neithervoice nor any that regarded: only the woman who, I suppose, was cleaning upthe church, dropped some metallic object on the floor, whose clang startledme. Count Magnus, I think, sleeps sound enough." That same evening the landlord of the inn, who had heard Mr Wraxall saythat he wished to see the clerk or deacon (as he would be called in Sweden)of the parish, introduced him to that official in the inn parlour.A visit tothe De la Gardie tomb-house was soon arranged for the next day, and a littlegeneral conversation ensued. Mr Wraxall, remembering that one function of Scandinavian deacons is toteach candidates for Confirmation, thought he would refresh his own memoryon a Biblical point. "Can you tell me," he said,"anything about Chorazin?" The deacon seemed startled, but readily reminded him how that village hadonce been denounced. "To be sure," said Mr Wraxall,"it is, I suppose, quite a ruin now?" "So I expect," replied the deacon."I have heard some of our old priestssay that Antichrist is to be born there; and there are tales-" "Ah!" what tales are those?" Mr Wraxall put in. "Tales, I was going to say, which I have forgotten," said the deacon; andsoon after that he said good night. The landlord was now alone, and at Mr Wraxall's mercy; and that inquirerwas not inclined to spare him. "Herr Nielsen," he said, "I have found out something about the BlackPilgrimage. You may as well tell me what you know. What did the Count bringback with him?" Swedes are habitually slow, perhaps, in answering,or perhaps the landlordwas an exception. I am not sure; but Mr Wraxall notes that the landlordspent at least one minute in looking at him before he said anything at all.Then he came close up to his guest, and with a good deal of effort he spoke: "Mr Wraxall, I can tell you this one little tale, and no more - not anymore. You must not ask anything when I have done. In my grandfather's time -that is, ninety-two years ago - there were two men who said:'The Count isdead; we do not care for him. We will go tonight and have a free hunt in hiswood' - the long wood on the hill that you have seen behind RŒbŠck.Well,those that heard them say this, they said:'No, do not go; we are sure youwill meet with persons walking who should not be walking.They should beresting, not walking.' These men laughed. There were no forest-men to keepthe wood, because no one wished to live there. The family were not here atthe house. These men could do what they wished, "Very well, they go to the wood that night. My grandfather was sittinghere in this room. It was the summer, and a light night. With the windowopen, he could see out to the wood, and hear. "So he sat there, and two or three men with him, and they listened. Atfirst they hear nothing at all; then they hear someone- you know how faraway it is- they hear someone scream, just as if the most inside part of hissoul was twisted out of him. All of them in the room caught hold of eachother, and they sat so for three quarters of an hour. Then they hear someoneelse, only about three hundred ells off. They hear him laugh out loud: itwas not one of those two men who laughed, and indeed, they have all of themsaid that it was not any man at all. After that they hear a great door shut. "Then, when it was just light with the sun, they all went to the priest.They said to him: 'Father, put on your gown and your ruff, and come to bury these men,Anders Bjornsen and Hans Thorbjorn.' "You understand that they were sure these men were dead. So they went tothe wood- my grandfather never forgot this. He said they were all like somany dead men themselves. The priest, too, he was in a white fear. He saidwhen they came to him: 'I heard one cry in the night, and I heard one laugh afterwards. If Icannot forget that, I shall not be able to sleep again.' "So they went to the wood, and they found these men on the edge of thewood. Hans Thorbjorn was standing with his back against a tree, and all thetime he was pushing with his hands- pushing something away from him whichwas not there. So he was not dead. And they led him away, and took him tothe house at Nykjoping and he died before the winter; but he went on pushingwith his hands. Also Anders Bjornsen was there; but he was dead. And I tellyou this about Anders Bjornsen, that he was once a beautiful man, but nowhis face was not there, because the flesh of it was sucked away off thebones. You understand that? My grandfather did not forget that. And theylaid him on the bier which they had brought, and and they put a cloth overhis head, and the priest walked before; and they begin to sing the psalm forthe dead as well as they could. So, as they were singing the end of thefirst verse, one fell down, who was carrying the head of the bier, and theothers looked back, and they saw that the cloth had fallen off, and the eyesof Anders Bjornsen were looking up, because there was nothing to close overthem.And this they could not bear. Therefore the priest laid the cloth uponhim, and sent for a spade, and they buried him in that place." The next day Mr Wraxall records that the deacon called for him soon afterhis breakfast, and took him to the church and mausoleum. He noticed that thekey of the latter was hung on a nail just by the pulpit, and it occurred tohim that, as the church door seemed to be left unlocked as a rule, it wouldnot be difficult for him to pay a second and more private visit to themonuments if there proved to be more of interest among them than could bedigested at first. The building, when he entered it, he found notunimposing. The monuments, mostly large erections of the seventeenth andeighteenth centuries, were dignified if luxuriant,and the epitaphs andheraldry were copious. The central space of the domed room was occupied bythree copper sarcophagi, covered with finely engraved ornament. Two of themhad, as is commonly the case in Denmark and Sweden, a large metal crucifixon the lid. The third,that of Count Magnus, as it appeared, had, instead ofthat, a full-length effigy engraved upon it, and round the edge were severalbands of similar ornament representing various scenes. one was a battle,with cannon belching out smoke, and walled towns, and troops of pikemen.Another showed an execution. In a third, among trees, was a man running atfull speed, with flying hair and outstretched hands. After him followed astrange form; it would be hard to say whether the artist had intended it fora man, and was unable to give it the requisite similitude, or whether it wasintentionally made as monstrous as it looked. In view of the skill withwhich the rest of the drawing was done, Mr Wraxall felt inclined to adoptthe latter idea. the figure was unduly short, and was for the most partmuffled in a hooded garment which swept the ground. The only part of theform which projected from that shelter was not shaped like any hand or arm.Mr Wraxall compares it to the tentacle of a devil-fish, and continues:"Onseeing this, I said to myself,"This, then which is evidently an allegoricalrepresentation of some kind- a fiend pursuing a hunted soul - may be theorigin of the story of Count Magnus and his mysterious companion. Let us seehow the huntsman is pictured: doubtless it will be a demon blowing hishorn." But, as it turned out, there was no such sensational figure, only thesemblance of a cloaked man on a hillock, who stood leaning on a stick, andwatching the hunt with an interest which the engraver had tried to expressin his attitude. Mr Wraxall noted the finely-worked and massive steel padlocks - three innumber - which secured the sarcophagus. One of them, he saw, was detached,and lay upon the pavement. And then, unwilling to delay the deacon longer orwaste his own working time, he made his onward to the manor-house, "It is curious, " he notes, "how, on retracing a familiar path, oneÍsthoughts engross one to the absolute exclusion of surrounding objects.Tonight, for the second time, I had entirely failed to notice where I wasgoing (I had planned a private visit to the tomb-house to copy theepitaphs), when I suddenly, as it were, awoke to consciousness, and foundmyself (as before) turning in at the churchyard gate, and, as I believe,singing or chanting some some such words as, "Are you awake, CountMagnus?Are you asleep, Count Magnus?" and then something more which I havefailed to recollect. It seemed to me that I must have been behaving in thisnonsensical way for some time." He found the key of the mausoleum where he had expected to find it, andcopied the greater part of what he wanted; in fact, he stayed until thelight began to fail him. "I must have been wrong," he writes, "in saying that one of the locks ofthe Count's sarcophagus was unfastened; I see tonight that two are loose. Ipicked both up, and laid them carefully on the window-ledge, after tryingunsuccessfully to close them. The remaining one is still firm, and, though Itake it to be a spring lock, I cannot guess how it is opened. Had Isucceeded in undoing it, I am almost afraid I should have taken the libertyof opening the sarcophagus. It is strange, the interest I feel in thepersonality of this, I fear, somewhat ferocious and grim old noble." The day following was, as it turned out, the last of Mr Wraxall's stay atRŒbŠck. He received letters connected with certain investments which made itdesirable that he should return to England; his work among the papers waspractically done, and travelling was slow. He decided, therefore, to makehis farewells, put some finishing touches to his notes, and be off. These finishing touches and farewells, as it turned out,took more timethan he had expected. The hospitable family insisted on his staying to dinewith them - they dined at three - and it was verging on half past six beforehe was outside the iron gates of RŒbŠck. He dwelt on every step of his walkby the lake, determined to saturate himself, now that he trod it for thelast time, in the sentiment of the place and hour. And when he reached thesummit of the church yard knoll, he lingered for many minutes, gazing at thelimitless prospect of woods near and distant, all dark beneath a sky ofliquid green. When at last he turned to go, the thought struck him thatsurely he must bid farewell to Count Magnus as well as the rest of the De laGardies. The church was but twenty yards away, and he knew where the key ofthe mausoleum hung. It was not long before he was standing over the greatcopper coffin, and as usual, talking to himself aloud:"You may have been abit of a rascal in your time, Magnus, " he was saying,"but for all that Ishould like to see you, or rather-" "Just at that instant," he says, "I felt a blow on my foot.Hastily enoughI drew it back, and something fell on the pavement with a clash. It was thethird, the last of the three padlocks which had fastened the sarcophagus. Istooped to pick it up, and - Heaven is my witness that I am writing only thebare truth - before I had raised myself there was a sound of metal hingescreaking, and I distinctly saw the lid shifting upwards. I may have behavedlike a coward, but I could not for my life stay for one moment. I wasoutside that dreadful building in less time than I can write - almost asquickly as I could have said - the words; and what frightens me yet more, Icould not turn the key in the lock. As I sit here in my room noting thesefacts, I ask myself (it was not twenty minutes ago) whether that noise ofcreaking metal continued, and I cannot tell whether it did or not. I onlyknow that there was something more than I have written that alarmed me, butwhether it was sound or sight I am not able to remember. What is this that Ihave done?" Poor Mr Wraxall! he set out on his journey to England on the next day, ashe had planned, and he reached England in safety; and yet, as I judge fromhis changed hand and inconsequent jottings, a broken man.One of the severalsmall note-books that have come to me with his papers gives, not a key to,but a kind of inkling of, his experiences. Much of his journey was bycanal-boat, and I find not less than six painful attempts to enumerate anddescribe his fellow-passengers. The entries are of this kind:24. Pastor of village in SkŒne. Usual black coat and soft black hat.25. Commercial Traveller from Stockholm going to TrollhŠttan. Black cloak,brown hat.26.Man in long black cloak, broad-leafed hat, very old-fashioned.This entry is lined out, and a note added:"Perhaps identical with No.13.Have not yet seen his face." On referring to No. 13, I find that he is aRoman priest in a cassock. The net result of the reckoning is always the same. Twenty-eight peopleappear in the enumeration, one being always a man in a long black cloak andbroad hat, and the other a 'short figure in dark cloak and hood'. On theother hand, it is always noted that only twenty-six passengers appear atmeals, and that the man in the cloak is perhaps absent, and the short figureis certainly absent. On reaching England, it appears that Mr Wraxall landed at Harwich, andthat he resolved at once to put himself out of the reach of some person orpersons whom he never specifies, but whom he had evidently come to regard ashis pursuers. Accordingly he took a vehicle - it was a closed fly - nottrusting the railway, and drove across country to the village of Belchamp StPaul. It was about nine o'clock on a moonlight August night when he nearedthe place. He was sitting forward, and looking out of the window at thefields and thickets - there was little else to be seen - racing past him.Suddenly he came to a cross-road. At the corner two figures were standingmotionless; both were in dark cloaks; the taller one wore a hat, the shortera hood. He had no time to see their faces, nor did they make any motion thathe could discern. Yet the horse shied violently and broke into a gallop, andMr Wraxall sank back into his seat in something like desperation.he had seenthem before. Arrived at Belchamp St.Paul, he was fortunate enough to find a decentfurnished lodging, and for the next twenty-four hours he lived,comparatively speaking, in peace. His last notes were written on thisday.They are too disjointed and ejaculatory to be given here in full, butthe substance of them is clear enough.He is expecting a visit from hispursuers - how or when he knows not - and his constant cry is "What has hedone?" and "Is there no hope?" Doctors, he knows, would call him mad,policemen would laugh at him.The parson is away. What can he do but lock hisdoor and cry to God? People still remember last year at Belchamp St Paul how a strangegentleman came one evening in August years back; and how the next morningbut one he was found dead, and there was an inquest; and the jury thatviewed the body fainted, seven of 'em did, and none of 'em wouldn't speak towhat they see, and the verdict was was visitation of God; and how the peopleas kep' the 'ouse moved out that same week, and went away from that part.But they do not, I think, know that any glimmer of light has been thrown, orcould be thrown, on the mystery. It so happened that last year the littlehouse came into my hands as part of a legacy. It had stood empty since 1863,and there seemed no prospect of letting it; so I had it pulled down, and thepapers of which I have given you an abstract were found in a forgottencupboard under the window in the best bedroom.