The Continental Monthly, Vol. 2, No 3, September, 1862

'Have I given you a strange and fearful picture? Be sure that I have not conveyed to you one thousandth part of the impression made upon myself, and that until the day I die that strange apparition will remain stamped upon the tablets of my mind. Diabolical beauty! infernal ugliness!—I would give half my life, be it longer or shorter, to be able to explain whence such things can come, to confound and stupefy all human calculation!'

CHAPTER II

MORE OF PARISIAN FORTUNE-TELLERS—THE VISIONS OF THE WHITE MIST—REBELLION, GRIEF, HOPE, BRAVERY AND DESPAIR

It was after a second bottle of green-seal had flashed out its sparkles into the crystal, that Ned Martin drew a long breath like that drawn by a man discharging a painful and necessary duty, and resumed his story:

'You may some time record this for the benefit of American men and women,' he went on, 'and if you are wise you will deal chiefly in the language to which they are accustomed. I speak the French, of course, nearly as well and as readily as the English; but I think in my native tongue, as most men continue to do, I believe, no matter how many dialects they acquire; and I shall not interlard this little narrative with any French words that can just as well be translated into our vernacular.

'Well, as I was saying, there stood my horribly beautiful fiend, and there I sat spell-bound before her. As for Adolph, though he had told me nothing in advance of the peculiarities of her appearance, he had been fully aware of them, of course, and I had the horrible surprise all to myself. I think the sorceress saw the mingled feeling in my face, and that a smile blended of pride and contempt contorted the proud features and made the ghastly face yet more ghastly for one moment. If so, the expression soon passed away, and she stood, as before, the incarnation of all that was terrible and mysterious. At length, still retaining her place and fixing her eyes upon Von Berg, she spoke, sharply, brusquely, and decidedly:

''You are here again! What do you want?'

''I wish to introduce my friend, the Baron Charles Denmore, of England,' answered Von Berg, 'who wishes–'

''Nothing!' said the sorceress, the word coming from her lips with an unmistakably hissing sound. He wants nothing, and he is not the Baron Charles Denmore! He comes from far away, across the sea, and he would not have come here to-night but that you insisted upon it! Take him away—go away yourself—and never let me see you again unless you have something to ask or you wish me to do you an injury!'

''But–' began Yon Berg.

''Not another word!' said the sorceress, 'I have said. Go, before you repent having come at all!'

''Madame,' I began to say, awed out of the feeling at least of equality which I should have felt to be proper under such circumstances, and only aware that Adolph, and possibly myself, had incurred the enmity of a being so near to the supernatural as to be at least dangerous—'Madame, I hope that you will not think–'

'But here she cut me short, as she had done Von Berg the instant before.

''Hope nothing, young artist!' she said, her voice perceptibly less harsh and brusque than it had been when speaking to my companion. 'Hope nothing and ask nothing until you may have occasion; then come to me.'

''And then?'

''Then I will answer every question you may think proper to put to me. Stay! you may have occasion to visit me sooner than you suppose, or I may have occasion to force knowledge upon you that you will not have the boldness to seek. If so, I shall send for you. Now go, both of you!'

'The dark curtain suddenly fell, and the singular vision faded with the reflected light which had filled the room. The moment after, I heard the shuffling feet of the slattern girl coming to show us out of the room, but, singularly enough, as you will think, not out of the house! Without a word we followed her—Adolph, who knew the customs of the place, merely slipping a five-franc piece into her hand, and in a moment more we were out in the street and walking up the Rue Saint Denis. It is not worth while to detail the conversation which followed between us as we passed up to the Rue Marie Stuart, I to my lodgings and Adolph to his own, further on, close to the Rue Vivienne, and not far from the Boulevard Montmartre. Of course I asked him fifty questions, the replies to which left me quite as much in the dark as before. He knew, he said, and hundreds of other persons in Paris knew, the singularity of the personal appearance of the sorceress, and her apparent power of divination, but neither he nor they had any knowledge of her origin. He had been introduced at her house several months before, and had asked questions affecting his family in Prussia and the chances of descent of certain property, the replies to which had astounded him. He had heard of her using marvelous and fearful incantations, but had never himself witnessed any thing of them. In two or three instances, before the present, he had taken friends to the house and introduced them under any name which he chose to apply to them for the time, and the sorceress had never before chosen to call him to account for the deception, though, according to the assurances of his friends after leaving the house, she had never failed to arrive at the truth of their nationalities and positions in life. There must have been something in myself or my circumstances, he averred, which had produced so singular an effect upon the witch, (as he evidently believed her to be,) and he had the impression that at no distant day I should again hear from her. That was all, and so we parted, I in any other condition of mind than that promising sleep, and really without closing my eyes, except for a moment or two at a time, during the night which followed. When I did attempt to force myself into slumber, a red spectre stood continually before me, an unearthly light seemed to sear my covered eyeballs, and I awoke with a start. Days passed before I sufficiently wore away the impression to be comfortable, and at least two or three weeks before my rest became again entirely unbroken.

'You must be partially aware with what anxiety we Americans temporarily sojourning on the other side of the Atlantic, who loved the country we had left behind on this, watched the succession of events which preceded and accompanied the Presidential election of that year. Some suppose that a man loses his love for his native land, or finds it comparatively chilled within his bosom, after long residence abroad. The very opposite is the case, I think! I never knew what the old flag was, until I saw it waving from the top of an American consulate abroad, or floating from the gaff of one of our war-vessels, when I came down the mountains to some port on the Mediterranean. It had been merely red, white and blue bunting, at home, where the symbols of our national greatness were to be seen on every hand: it was the only symbol of our national greatness when we were looking at it from beyond the sea; and the man whose eyes will not fill with tears and whose throat will not choke a little with overpowering feeling, when catching sight of the Stars and Stripes where they only can be seen to remind him of the glory of the country of which he is a part, is unworthy the name of patriot or of man!

'But to return: Where was I? Oh! I was remarking with what interest we on the other side of the water watched the course of affairs at home during that year when the rumble of distant thunder was just heralding the storm. You are well aware that without extensive and long-continued connivance on the part of sympathizers among the leading people of Europe—England and France especially—secession could never have been accomplished so far as it has been; and there never could have been any hope of its eventual success if there had been no hope of one or both these two countries bearing it up on their strong and unscrupulous arms. The leaven of foreign aid to rebellion was working even then, both in London and Paris; and perhaps we had opportunities over the water for a nearer guess at the peril of the nation, than you could have had in the midst of your party political squabbles at home.

'During the months of September and October, when your Wide-Awakes on the one hand, and your conservative Democracy on the other, were parading the streets with banners and music, as they or their predecessors had done in so many previous contests, and believing that nothing worse could be involved than a possible party defeat and some bad feelings, we, who lived where revolutions were common, thought that we discovered the smoldering spark which would be blown to revolution here. The disruption of the Charleston Convention and through it of the Democracy; the bold language and firm resistance of the Republicans; the well-understood energy of the uncompromising Abolitionists, and the less defined but rabid energy of the Southern fire-eaters: all these were known abroad and watched with gathering apprehension. American newspapers, and the extracts made from them by the leading journals of France and Europe, commanded more attention among the Americo-French and English than all other excitements of the time put together.

'Then followed what you all know—the election, with its radical result and the threats which immediately succeeded, that 'Old Abe Lincoln' should never live to be inaugurated! 'He shall not!' cried the South. 'He shall!' replied the North. To us who knew something of the Spanish knife and the Italian stiletto, the probabilities seemed to be that he would never live to reach Washington. Then the mutterings of the thunder grew deeper and deeper, and some disruption seemed inevitable, evident to us far away, while you at home, it seemed, were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, holding gala-days and enjoying yourselves generally, on the brink of an arousing volcano from which the sulphurous smoke already began to ascend to the heavens! So time passed on; autumn became winter, and December was rolling away.

'I was sitting with half-a-dozen friends in the chess-room at Very's, about eleven o'clock on the night of the twentieth of December, talking over some of the marvelous successes which had been won by Paul Morphy when in Paris, and the unenviable position in which Howard Staunton had placed himself by keeping out of the lists through evident fear of the New-Orleanian, when Adolph Von Berg came behind me and laid his hand on my shoulder.

''Come with me a moment,' he said, 'you are wanted!'

''Where?' I asked, getting up from my seat and following him to the door, before which stood a light coupé, with its red lights flashing, the horse smoking, and the driver in his seat.

''I have been to-night to the Rue la Reynie Ogniard!' he answered.

''And are you going there again?' I asked, my blood chilling a little with an indefinable sensation of terror, but a sense of satisfaction predominating at the opportunity of seeing something more of the mysterious woman.

''I am!' he answered, 'and so are you! She has sent for you! Come!'

'Without another word I stepped into the coupé, and we were rapidly whirled away. I asked Adolph how and why I had been summoned; but he knew nothing more than myself, except that he had visited the sorceress at between nine and ten that evening, that she had only spoken to him for an instant, but ordered him to go at once and find his friend, the American, whom he had falsely introduced some months before as the English baron. He had been irresistibly impressed with the necessity of obedience, though it would break in upon his own arrangements for the later evening, (which included an hour at the Chateau Rouge;) had picked up a coupé, looked in for me at two or three places where he thought me most likely to be at that hour in the evening, and had found me at Very's, as related. What the sorceress could possibly want of me, he had no idea more than myself; but he reminded me that she had hinted at the possible necessity of sending for me at no distant period, and I remembered the fact too well to need the reminder.

'It was nearly midnight when we drove down the Rue St. Denis, turned into La Reynie Ogniard, and drew up at the antiquated door I had once entered nearly three months earlier. We entered as before, rang the bell as before, and were admitted into the inner room by the same slattern girl. I remember at this moment one impression which this person made upon me—that she did not wash so often as four times a year, and that the same old dirt was upon her face that had been crusted there at the time of my previous visit. There seemed no change in the room, except that two tapers, and each larger than the one I had previously seen, were burning upon the table. The curtain was down, as before, and when it suddenly rose, after a few minutes spent in waiting, and the blood-red woman stood in the vacant space, all seemed so exactly as it had done on the previous visit, that it would have been no difficult matter to believe the past three months a mere imagination, and this the same first visit renewed.

'The illusion, such as it was, did not last long, however. The sorceress fixed her eyes full upon me, with the red flame seeming to play through the eyeballs as it had before done through her cheeks, and said, in a voice lower, more sad and broken, than it had been when addressing me on the previous occasion:

''Young American, I have sent for you, and you have done well to come. Do not fear–'

''I do not fear—you, or any one!' I answered, a little piqued that she should have drawn any such impression from my appearance. I may have been uttering a fib of magnificent proportions at the moment, but one has a right to deny cowardice to the last gasp, whatever else he must admit.

''You do not? It is well, then!' she said in reply, and in the same low, sad voice. 'You will have courage, then, perhaps, to see what I will show you from the land of shadows.'

''Whom does it concern?' I asked. 'Myself, or some other?'

''Yourself, and many others—all the world!' uttered the lips of flame. 'It is of your country that I would show you.'

''My country? God of heaven! What has happened to my country?' broke from my lips almost before I knew what I was uttering. I suppose the words came almost like a groan, for I had been deeply anxious over the state of affairs known to exist at home, and perhaps I can be nearer to a weeping child when I think of any ill to my own beloved land, than I could be for any other evil threatened in the world.

''But a moment more and you shall see!' said the sorceress. Then she added: 'You have a friend here present. Shall he too look on what I have to reveal, or will you behold it alone?'

''Let him see!' I answered. 'My native land may fall into ruin, but she can never be ashamed!'

''So let it be, then!' said the sorceress, solemnly. 'Be silent, look, and learn what is at this moment transpiring in your own land!'

'Beneath that adjuration I was silent, and the same dread stillness fell upon my companion. Suddenly the sorceress, still standing in the same place, waved her right hand in the air, and a strain of low, sad music, such as the harps of angels may be continually making over the descent of lost spirits to the pit of suffering, broke upon my ears. Von Berg too heard it, I know, for I saw him look up in surprise, then apply his fingers to his ears and test whether his sense of hearing had suddenly become defective. Whence that strain of music could have sprung I did not know, nor do I know any better at this moment. I only know that, to my senses and those of my companion, it was definite as if the thunders of the sky had been ringing.

'Then came another change, quite as startling as the music and even more difficult to explain. The room began to fill with a whitish mist, transparent in its obscurity, that wrapped the form of the sybil and finally enveloped her until she appeared to be but a shade. Anon another and larger room seemed to grow in the midst, with columned galleries and a rostrum, and hundreds of forms in wild commotion, moving to and fro, though uttering no sound. At one moment it seemed that I could look through one of the windows of the phantom building, and I saw the branches of a palmetto-tree waving in the winter wind. Then amidst and apparently at the head of all, a white-haired man stood upon the rostrum, and as he turned down a long scroll from which he seemed to be reading to the assemblage, I read the words that appeared on the top of the scroll: 'An ordinance to dissolve the compact heretofore existing between the several States of the Federal Union, under the name of the United States of America.' My breath came thick, my eyes filled with tears of wonder and dismay, and I could see no more.

''Horror!' I cried. 'Roll away the vision, for it is false! It can not be that the man lives who could draw an ordinance to dissolve the Union of the United States of America!'

''It is so! That has this day been done!' spoke the voice of the sorceress from within the cloud of white mist.

''If this is indeed true,' I said, 'show me what is the result, for the heavens must bow if this work of ruin is accomplished!'

''Look again, then!' said the voice. The strain of music, which had partially ceased for a moment, grew louder and sadder again, and I saw the white mist rolling and changing as if a wind were stirring it. Gradually again it assumed shape and form; and in the moonlight, before the Capitol of the nation, its white proportions gleaming in the wintry ray, the form of Washington stood, the hands clasped, the head bare, and the eyes cast upward in the mute agony of supplication.

''All is not lost!' I shouted more than spoke, 'for the Father of his Country still watches his children, and while he lives in the heavens and prays for the erring and wandering, the nation may yet be reclaimed.'

''It may be so,' said the voice through the mist, 'for look!'

'Again the strain of music sounded, but now louder and clearer and without the tone of hopeless sadness. Again the white mists rolled by in changing forms, and when once more they assumed shape and consistency I saw great masses of men, apparently in the streets of a large city, throwing out the old flag from roof and steeple, lifting it to heaven in attitudes of devotion, and pressing it to their lips with those wild kisses which a mother gives to her darling child when it has been just rescued from a deadly peril.

''The nation lives!' I shouted. 'The old flag is not deserted and the patriotic heart yet beats in American bosoms! Show me yet more, for the next must be triumph!'

''Triumph indeed!' said the voice. 'Behold it and rejoice at it while there is time!' I shuddered at the closing words, but another change in the strain of music roused me. It was not sadness now, nor yet the rising voice of hope, for martial music rung loudly and clearly, and through it I heard the roar of cannon and the cries of combatants in battle. As the vision cleared, I saw the armies of the Union in tight with a host almost as numerous as themselves, but savage, ragged, and tumultuous, and bearing a mongrel flag that I had never seen before—one that seemed robbed from the banner of the nation's glory. For a moment the battle wavered and the forces of the Union seemed driven backward; then they rallied with a shout, and the flag of stars and stripes was rebaptized in glory. They pressed the traitors backward at every turn—they trod rebellion under their heels—they were every where, and every where triumphant.

''Three cheers for the Star-Spangled Banner!' I cried, forgetting place and time in the excitement of the scene. 'Let the world look on and wonder and admire! I knew the land that the Fathers founded and Washington guarded could not die! Three cheers—yes, nine—for the Star-Spangled Banner and the brave old land over which it floats!'

''Pause!' said the voice, coming out once more from the cloud of white mist, and chilling my very marrow with the sad solemnity of its tone. 'Look once again!' I looked, and the mists went rolling by as before, while the music changed to wild discord; and when the sight became clear again I saw the men of the nation struggling over bags of gold and quarreling for a black shadow that flitted about in their midst, while cries of want and wails of despair went up and sickened the heavens! I closed my eyes and tried to close my ears, but I could not shut out the voice of the sorceress, saying once more from her shroud of white mist:

''Look yet again, and for the last time! Behold the worm that gnaws away the bravery of a nation and makes it a prey for the spoiler!' Heart-brokenly sad was the music now, as the vision changed once more, and I saw a great crowd of men, each in the uniform of an officer of the United States army, clustered around one who seemed to be their chief. But while I looked I saw one by one totter and fall, and directly I perceived that the epaulette or shoulder-strap on the shoulder of each was a great hideous yellow worm, that gnawed away the shoulder and palsied the arm and ate into the vitals. Every second, one fell and died, making frantic efforts to tear away the reptile from its grasp, but in vain. Then the white mists rolled away, and I saw the strange woman standing where she had been when the first vision began. She was silent, the music was hushed, Adolph Von Berg had fallen hack asleep in his chair, and drawing out my watch, I discovered that only ten minutes had elapsed since the sorceress spoke her first word.

''You have seen all—go!' was her first and last interruption to the silence. The instant after, the curtain fell. I kicked Von Berg to awake him, and we left the house. The coupé was waiting in the street and set me down at my lodgings, after which it conveyed my companion to his. Adolph did not seem to have a very clear idea of what had occurred, and my impression is, that he went to sleep the moment the first strain of music commenced.

'As for myself, I am not much clearer than Adolph as to how and why I saw and heard what I know that I did see and hear. I can only say that on that night of the twentieth December, 1860, the same on which, as it afterward appeared, the ordinance of secession was adopted at Charleston, I, in the little old two-story house in the Rue la Reynie Ogniard, witnessed what I have related. What may be the omens, you may judge as well as myself. How much of the sybil's prophecy is already history, you know already. That SHOULDER-STRAPS, which I take to be the desire of military show without courage or patriotism, are destroying the armies of the republic, I am afraid there is no question. Perhaps you can imagine why at the moment of hearing that there was a worm on my shoulder for a shoulder-strap, I for the instant believed that it was one of the hideous yellow monsters that I saw devouring the best officers of the nation, and shrunk and shrieked like a whipped child. Is not that a long story?' Martin concluded, lighting a fresh cigar and throwing himself back from the table.

'Very long, and a little mad; but to me absorbingly interesting,' was my reply, 'And in the hope that it may prove so to others, I shall use it as a strange, rambling introduction to a recital of romantic events which have occurred in and about the great city since the breaking out of the rebellion, having to do with patriotism and cowardice, love, mischief, and secession, and bearing the title thus suggested.'

A part of which stipulation is hereby kept, with the promise of the writer that the remainder shall be faithfully fulfilled in forthcoming numbers.