Books: Jezebel

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Schwartz returned to Jack--still watching patiently by the side of the
couch. "Was she a relation of yours?" he asked.

"All the relations in the world to me!" Jack burst out passionately.
"Father and mother--and brother and sister and wife."

"Aye, aye? Five relations in one is what I call an economical family,"
said Schwartz. "Come out here, to the table. You stood treat last
time--my turn now. I've got the wine handy. Yes, yes--she was a fine
woman in her time, I dare say. Why haven't you put her into a coffin like
other people?"

"Why?" Jack repeated indignantly. "I couldn't prevent them from bringing
her here; but I could have burnt the house down over their heads, if they
had dared to put her into a coffin! Are you stupid enough to suppose that
Mistress is dead? Don't you know that I'm watching and waiting here till
she wakes? Ah! I beg your pardon--you don't know. The rest of them would
have let her die. I saved her life. Come here, and I'll tell you how."

He dragged Schwartz into the cell. As the watchman disappeared from view,
the wild white face of Madame Fontaine appeared between the curtains of
her hiding-place, listening to Jack's narrative of the opening of the
cupboard, and the discovery that had followed.

Schwartz humored his little friend (evidently, as he now concluded, his
crazy little friend), by listening in respectful silence. Instead of
making any remark at the end, he mentioned once more that the wine was
handy. "Come!" he reiterated; "come to the table!"

Madame Fontaine drew back again behind the curtains. Jack remained
obstinately in the cell. "I mean to see it," he said, "the moment she
moves."

"Do you think your eyes will tell you?" Schwartz remonstrated. "You look
dead-beat already; your eyes will get tired. Trust the bell here, over
the door. Brass and steel don't get tired; brass and steel don't fall
asleep; brass and steel will ring, and call you to her. Take a rest and a
drink."

These words reminded Jack of the doctor's experiment with the alarm-bell.
He could not disguise from himself the stealthily-growing sense of
fatigue in his head and his limbs. "I'm afraid you're right," he said
sadly. "I wish I was a stronger man." He joined Schwartz at the table,
and dropped wearily into the watchman's chair.

His head sank on his breast, his eyes closed. He started up again. "She
may want help when she wakes!" he cried, with a look of terror. "What
must we do? Can we carry her home between us? Oh! Schwartz, I was so
confident in myself a little while since--and it seems all to have left
me now!"

"Don't worry that weary little head of yours about nothing," Schwartz
answered, with rough good-nature. "Come along with me, and I'll show you
where help's to be got when help's wanted. No! no! you won't be out of
hearing of the bell--if it rings. We'll leave the door open. It's only on
the other side of the passage here."

He lighted a lantern, and led Jack out.

Leaving the courtyard and the waiting-room on their left hand, he
advanced along the right-hand side of the passage, and opened the door of
a bed-chamber, always kept ready for use. A second door in the
bed-chamber led to a bath-room. Here, opposite the bath, stood the
cabinet in which the restorative applications were kept, under the care
of the overseer.

When the two men had gone out, Madame Fontaine ventured into the
Watchman's Chamber. Her eyes turned towards the one terrible cell, at the
farther end of the row of black curtains. She advanced towards it; and
stopped, lifting her hands to her head in the desperate effort to compose
herself.

The terror of impending discovery had never left her, since Jack had
owned the use to which he had put the contents of the blue-glass bottle.

Animated by that all-mastering dread, she had thrown away every poison in
the medicine-chest--had broken the bottles into fragments--and had taken
those fragments out with her, when she left the house to follow Doctor
Dormann. On the way to the cemetery, she had scattered the morsels of
broken glass and torn paper on the dark road outside the city gate.
Nothing now remained but the empty medicine-chest, and the writing in
cipher, once rolled round the poison called the "Looking-Glass Drops."

Under these altered circumstances, she had risked asking Doctor Dormann
to interpret the mysterious characters, on the bare chance of their
containing some warning by which she might profit, in her present
ignorance of the results which Jack's ignorant interference might
produce.

Acting under the same vague terror of that possible revival, to which
Jack looked forward with such certain hope, she had followed him to the
Deadhouse, and had waited, hidden in the cells, to hear what dangerous
confidences he might repose in the doctor or in Mr. Keller, and to combat
on the spot the suspicion which he might ignorantly rouse in their minds.
Still in the same agony of doubt, she now stood, with her eyes on the
cell, trying to summon the resolution to judge for herself. One look at
the dead woman, while the solitude in the room gave her the chance--one
look might assure her of the livid pallor of death, or warn her of the
terrible possibilities of awakening life. She hurried headlong over the
intervening space, and looked in.

There, grand and still, lay her murderous work! There, ghostly white on
the ground of the black robe, were the rigid hands, topped by the hideous
machinery which was to betray them, if they trembled under the mysterious
return of life!

In the instant when she saw it, the sight overwhelmed her with horror.
She turned distractedly, and fled through the open door. She crossed the
courtyard, like a deeper shadow creeping swiftly through the darkness of
the winter night. On the threshold of the solitary waiting-room,
exhausted nature claimed its rest. She wavered--groped with her hands at
the empty air--and sank insensible on the floor.

In the meantime, Schwartz revealed the purpose of his visit to the
bath-room.

The glass doors which protected the upper division of the cabinet were
locked; the key being in the possession of the overseer. The cupboard in
the lower division, containing towels and flannel wrappers, was left
unsecured. Opening the door, the watchman drew out a bottle and an old
traveling flask, concealed behind the bath-linen. "I call this my
cellar," he explained. "Cheer up, Jacky; we'll have a jolly night of it
yet."

"I don't want to see your cellar!" said Jack impatiently. "I want to be
of use to Mistress--show me the place where we call for help."

"Call?" repeated Schwartz, with a roar of laughter. "Do you think they
can hear us at the overseer's, through a courtyard, and a waiting-room,
and a grand hall, and another courtyard, and another waiting-room beyond?
Not if we were twenty men all bawling together till we were hoarse! I'll
show you how we can make the master hear us--if that miraculous revival
of yours happens," he added facetiously in a whisper to himself.

He led the way back into the passage, and held up his lantern so as to
show the cornice. A row of fire-buckets was suspended there by books.
Midway between them, a stout rope hung through a metal-lined hole in the
roof.

"Do you see that?" said Schwartz. "You have only to pull, and there's an
iron tongue in the belfry above that will speak loud enough to be heard
at the city gate. The overseer will come tumbling in, with his bunch of
keys, as if the devil was at his heels, and the two women-servants after
him--old and ugly, Jack!--they attend to the bath, you know, when a woman
wants it. Wait a bit! Take the light into the bedroom, and get a chair
for yourself--we haven't much accommodation for evening visitors. Got it?
that's right. Would you like to see where the mad watchman hung himself?
On the last hook at the end of the row there. We've got a song he made
about the Deadhouse. I think it's in the drawer of the table. A gentleman
had it printed and sold, for the benefit of the widow and children. Wait
till we are well warmed with our liquor, and I'll tell you what I'll
do--I'll sing you the mad watchman's song; and Jacky, my man, you shall
sing the chorus! Tow-row-rub-a-dub-boom--that's the tune. Pretty, isn't
it? Come along back to our snuggery." He led the way to the Watchman's
Chamber.

CHAPTER XIX

Jack looked eagerly into the cell again. There was no change--not a sign
of that happy waking in which he so firmly believed.

Schwartz opened the drawer of the table. Tobacco and pipes; two or three
small drinking-glasses; a dirty pack of playing-cards; the mad watchman's
song, with a woodcut illustration of the suicide--all lay huddled
together. He took from the drawer the song, and two of the
drinking-glasses, and called to his little guest to come out of the cell.

"There;" he said, filling the glasses, "you never tasted such wine as
that in all your life. Off with it!"

Jack turned away with a look of disgust. "What did you say of wine, when
I drank with you the other night?" he asked reproachfully. "You said it
would warm my heart, and make a man of me. And what did it do? I couldn't
stand on my legs. I couldn't hold up my head--I was so sleepy and stupid
that Joseph had to take me upstairs to bed. I hate your wine! Your wine's
a liar, who promises and doesn't perform! I'm weary enough, and wretched
enough in my mind, as it is. No more wine for me!"

"Wrong!" remarked Schwartz, emptying his glass, and smacking his lips
after it.

"You made a serious mistake the other night--you didn't drink half
enough. Give the good liquor a fair chance, my son. No, you won't? Must I
try a little gentle persuasion before you will come back to your chair?"
Suiting the action to the word, he put his arm round Jack. "What's this I
feel under my hand?" he asked. "A bottle?" He took it out of Jack's
breast-pocket. "Lord help us!" he exclaimed; "it looks like physic!"

Jack snatched it away from him, with a cry of delight. "The very thing
for me--and I never thought of it!"

It was the phial which Madame Fontaine had repentantly kept to herself,
after having expressly filled it for him with the fatal dose of
"Alexander's Wine"--the phial which he had found, when he first opened
the "Pink-Room Cupboard." In the astonishment and delight of finding the
blue-glass bottle immediately afterwards, he had entirely forgotten it.
Nothing had since happened to remind him that it was in his pocket, until
Schwartz had stumbled on the discovery.

"It cures you when you are tired or troubled in your mind," Jack
announced in his grandest manner, repeating Madame Fontaine's own words.
"Is there any water here?"

"Not a drop, thank Heaven!" said Schwartz, devoutly.

"Give me my glass, then. I once tried the remedy by itself, and it stung
me as it went down. The wine won't hurt me, with this splendid stuff in
it. I'll take it in the wine."

"Who told you to take it?" Schwartz asked, holding back the glass.

"Mrs. Housekeeper told me."

"A woman!" growled Schwartz, in a tone of sovereign contempt. "How dare
you let a woman physic you, when you've got me for a doctor? Jack! I'm
ashamed of you."

Jack defended his manhood. "Oh, I don't care what she says! I despise
her--she's mad. You don't suppose she made this? I wouldn't touch it, if
she had. No, no; her husband made it--a wonderful man! the greatest man
in Germany!"

He reached across the table and secured his glass of wine. Before it was
possible to interfere, he had emptied the contents of the phial into it,
and had raised it to his lips. At that moment, Schwartz's restraining
hand found its way to his wrist. The deputy watchman had far too sincere
a regard for good wine to permit it to be drunk, in combination with
physic, at his own table.

"Put it down!" he said gruffly. "You're my visitor, ain't you? Do you
think I'm going to let housekeeper's cat-lap be drunk at my table? Look
here!"

He held up his traveling-flask, with the metal drinking-cup taken off, so
as to show the liquor through the glass. The rich amber color of it
fascinated Jack. He put his wine-glass back on the table. "What is it?"
he asked eagerly.

"Drinkable gold, Jack! _My_ physic. Brandy!"

He poured out a dram into the metal cup. "Try that," he said, "and don't
let me hear any more about the housekeeper's physic."

Jack tasted it. The water came into his eyes--he put his hands on his
throat. "Fire!" he gasped faintly.

"Wait!" said Schwartz.

Jack waited. The fiery grip of the brandy relaxed; the genial warmth of
it was wafted through him persuasively from head to foot. He took another
sip. His eyes began to glitter. "What divine being made this?" he asked.
Without waiting to be answered, he tried it again, and emptied the cup.
"More!" he cried. "I never felt so big, I never felt so strong, I never
felt so clever, as I feel now!"

Schwartz, drinking freely from his own bottle, recovered, and more than
recovered, his Bacchanalian good humor. He clapped Jack on the shoulder.
"Who's the right doctor now?" he asked cheerfully. "A drab of a
housekeeper? or Father Schwartz? Your health, my jolly boy! When the
bottle's empty, I'll help you to finish the flask. Drink away! and the
devil take all heel-taps!"

The next dose of brandy fired Jack's excitable brain with a new idea. He
fell on his knees at the table, and clasped his hands in a sudden fervor
of devotion. "Silence!" he commanded sternly. "Your wine's only a poor
devil. Your drinkable gold is a god. Take your cap off, Schwartz--I'm
worshipping drinkable gold!"

Schwartz, highly diverted, threw his cap up to the ceiling. "Drinkable
gold, ora pro nobis!" he shouted, profanely adapting himself to Jack's
humor. "You shall be Pope, my boy--and I'll be the Pope's butler. Allow
me to help your sacred majesty back to your chair."

Jack's answer betrayed another change in him. His tones were lofty; his
manner was distant. "I prefer the floor," he said; "hand me down my mug."
As he reached up to take it, the alarm-bell over the door caught his eye.
Debased as he was by the fiery strength of the drink, his ineradicable
love for his mistress made its noble influence felt through the coarse
fumes that were mounting to his brain. "Stop!" he cried. "I must be where
I can see the bell--I must be ready for her, the instant it rings."

He crawled across the floor, and seated himself with his back against the
wall of one of the empty cells, on the left-hand side of the room.
Schwartz, shaking his fat sides with laughter, handed down the cup to his
guest. Jack took no notice of it. His eyes, reddened already by the
brandy, were fixed on the bell opposite to him. "I want to know about
it," he said. "What's that steel thing there, under the brass cover?"

"What's the use of asking?" Schwartz replied, returning to his bottle.

"I want to know!"

"Patience, Jack--patience. Follow my fore-finger. My hand seems to shake
a little; but it's as honest a hand as ever was. That steel thing there,
is the bell hammer, you know. And, bless your heart, the hammer's
everything. Cost, Lord knows how much. Another toast, my son. Good luck
to the bell!"

Jack changed again; he began to cry. "She's sleeping too long on that
sofa, in there," he said sadly. "I want her to speak to me; I want to
hear her scold me for drinking in this horrid place. My heart's all cold
again. Where's the mug?" He found it, as he spoke; the fire of the brandy
went down his throat once more, and lashed him into frantic high spirits.
"I'm up in the clouds!" he shouted; "I'm riding on a whirlwind. Sing,
Schwartz! Ha! there are the stars twinkling through the skylight! Sing
the stars down from heaven!"

Schwartz emptied his bottle, without the ceremony of using the glass.
"Now we are primed!" he said--"now for the mad watchman's song!" He
snatched up the paper from the table, and roared out hoarsely the first
verse:

The moon was shining, cold and bright,
In the Frankfort Deadhouse, on New Year's night
And I was the watchman, left alone,
While the rest to feast and dance were gone;
I envied their lot, and cursed my own--
Poor me!

"Chorus, Jack! 'I envied their lot and cursed my own'----"

The last words of the verse were lost in a yell of drunken terror.
Schwartz started out of his chair, and pointed, panic-stricken, to the
lower end of the room. "A ghost!" he screamed. "A ghost in black, at the
door!"

Jack looked round, and burst out laughing. "Sit down again, you old
fool," he said. "It's only Mrs. Housekeeper. We are singing, Mrs.
Housekeeper! You haven't heard my voice yet--I'm the finest singer in
Germany."

Madame Fontaine approached him humbly. "You have a kind heart, Jack--I am
sure you will help me," she said. "Show me how to get out of this
frightful place."

"The devil take you!" growled Schwartz, recovering himself. "How did you
get in?"

"She's a witch!" shouted Jack. "She rode in on a broomstick--she crept in
through the keyhole. Where's the fire? Let's take her downstairs, and
burn her!"

Schwartz applied himself to the brandy-flask, and began to laugh again.
"There never was such good company as Jack," he said, in his oiliest
tones. "You can't get out to-night, Mrs. Witch. The gates are locked--and
they don't trust me with the key. Walk in, ma'am. Plenty of accommodation
for you, on that side of the room where Jack sits. We are slack of guests
for the grave, to-night. Walk in."

She renewed her entreaties. "I'll give you all the money I have about me!
Who can I go to for the key? Jack! Jack! speak for me!"

"Go on with the song!" cried Jack.

She appealed again in her despair to Schwartz. "Oh, sir, have mercy on
me! I fainted, out there--and, when I came to myself, I tried to open the
gates--and I called, and called, and nobody heard me."

Schwartz's sense of humor was tickled by this. "If you could bellow like
a bull," he said, "nobody would hear you. Take a seat, ma'am."

"Go on with the song!" Jack reiterated. "I'm tired of waiting."

Madame Fontaine looked wildly from one to the other of them. "Oh, God,
I'm locked in with an idiot and a drunkard!" The thought of it maddened
her as it crossed her mind. Once more, she fled from the room. Again, and
again, in the outer darkness, she shrieked for help.

Schwartz advanced staggering towards the door, with Jack's empty chair in
his hand. "Perhaps you'll be able to pipe a little higher, ma'am, if you
come back, and sit down? Now for the song, Jack!"

He burst out with the second verse:

Backwards and forwards, with silent tread,
I walked on my watch by the doors of the dead.
And I said, It's hard, on this New Year,
While the rest are dancing to leave me here,
Alone with death and cold and fear--
Poor me!

"Chorus, Jack! Chorus, Mrs. Housekeeper! Ho! ho! look at her! She can't
resist the music--she has come back to us already. What can we do for
you, ma'am? The flask's not quite drained yet. Come and have a drink."

She had returned, recoiling from the outer darkness and silence, giddy
with the sickening sense of faintness which was creeping over her again.
When Schwartz spoke she advanced with tottering steps. "Water!" she
exclaimed, gasping for breath. "I'm faint--water! water!"

"Not a drop in the place, ma'am! Brandy, if you like?"

"I forbid it!" cried Jack, with a peremptory sign of the hand. "Drinkable
gold is for us--not for her!"

The glass of wine which Schwartz had prevented him from drinking caught
his notice. To give Madame Fontaine her own "remedy," stolen from her own
room, was just the sort of trick to please Jack in his present humor. He
pointed to the glass, and winked at the watchman. After a momentary
hesitation, Schwartz's muddled brain absorbed the new idea. "Here's a
drop of wine left, ma'am," he said. "Suppose you try it?"

She leaned one hand on the table to support herself. Her heart sank lower
and lower; a cold perspiration bedewed her face. "Quick! quick!" she
murmured faintly. She seized the glass, and emptied it eagerly to the
last drop.

Schwartz and Jack eyed her with malicious curiosity. The idea of getting
away was still in her mind. "I think I can walk now," she said. "For
God's sake, let me out!"

"Haven't I told you already? I can't get out myself."

At that brutal answer, she shrank back. Slowly and feebly she made her
way to the chair, and dropped on it.

"Cheer up, ma'am!" said Schwartz. "You shall have more music to help
you--you shall hear how the mad watchman lost his wits. Another drop of
the drinkable gold, Jack. A dram for you and a dram for me--and here
goes!" He roared out the last verses of the song:--

Any company's better than none, I said:
If I can't have the living, I'd like the dead.
In one terrific moment more,
The corpse-bell rang at each cell door,
The moonlight shivered on the floor--
Poor me!

The curtains gaped; there stood a ghost,
On every threshold, as white as frost,
You called us, they shrieked, and we gathered soon;
Dance with your guests by the New Year's moon!
I danced till I dropped in a deadly swoon--
Poor me!

And since that night I've lost my wits,
And I shake with ceaseless ague-fits:
For the ghosts they turned me cold as stone,
On that New Year's night when the white moon shone,
And I walked on my watch, all, all alone--
Poor me!

And, oh, when I lie in my coffin-bed,
Heap thick the earth above my head!
Or I shall come back, and dance once more,
With frantic feet on the Deadhouse floor,
And a ghost for a partner at every door--
Poor me!

The night had cleared. While Schwartz was singing, the moon shone in at
the skylight. At the last verse of the song, a ray of the cold yellow
light streamed across Jack's face. The fire of the brandy leapt into
flame--the madness broke out in him, with a burst of its by-gone fury. He
sprang, screaming, to his feet.

"The moon!" he shouted--"the mad watchman's moon! The mad watchman
himself is coming back. There he is, sliding down on the slanting light!
Do you see the brown earth of the grave dropping from him, and the rope
round his neck? Ha! how he skips, and twists, and twirls! He's dancing
again with the dead ones. Make way there! I mean to dance with them too.
Come on, mad watchman--come on! I'm as mad as you are!"

He whirled round and round with the fancied ghost for a partner in the
dance. The coarse laughter of Schwartz burst out again at the terrible
sight. He called, with drunken triumph, to Madame Fontaine. "Look at
Jacky, ma'am. There's a dancer for you! There's good company for a dull
winter night!" She neither looked nor moved--she sat crouched on the
chair, spellbound with terror. Jack threw up his arms, turned giddily
once or twice, and sank exhausted on the floor. "The cold of him creeps
up my hands," he said, still possessed by the vision of the watchman. "He
cools my eyes, he calms my heart, he stuns my head. I'm dying, dying,
dying--going back with him to the grave. Poor me! poor me!"

He lay hushed in a strange repose; his eyes wide open, staring up at the
moon. Schwartz drained the last drop of brandy out of the flask. "Jack's
name ought to be Solomon," he pronounced with drowsy solemnity; "Solomon
was wise; and Jack's wise. Jack goes to sleep, when the liquor's done.
Take away the bottle, before the overseer comes in. If any man says I am
not sober, that man lies. The Rhine wine has a way of humming in one's
head. That's all, Mr. Overseer--that's all. Do I see the sun rising, up
there in the skylight? I wish you good-night; I wish--you--good--night."

He laid his heavy arms on the table; his head dropped on them--he slept.

The time passed. No sound broke the silence but the lumpish snoring of
Schwartz. No change appeared in Jack; there he lay, staring up at the
moon.

Somewhere in the building (unheard thus far in the uproar) a clock struck
the first hour of the morning.

Madame Fontaine started. The sound shook her with a new fear--a fear that
expressed itself in a furtive look at the cell in which the dead woman
lay. If the corpse-bell rang, would the stroke of it be like the single
stroke of the clock?

"Jack!" she whispered. "Do you hear the clock? Oh, Jack, the stillness is
dreadful--speak to me."

He slowly raised himself. Perhaps the striking of the clock--perhaps some
inner prompting--had roused him. He neither answered Madame Fontaine, nor
looked at her. With his arms clasped round his knees, he sat on the floor
in the attitude of a savage. His eyes, which had stared at the moon, now
stared with the same rigid, glassy look at the alarm-bell over the
cell-door.

The time went on. Again the oppression of silence became more than Madame
Fontaine could endure. Again she tried to make Jack speak to her.

"What are you looking at?" she asked. "What are you waiting for? Is
it----?" The rest of the sentence died away on her lips: the words that
would finish it were words too terrible to be spoken.

The sound of her voice produced no visible impression on Jack. Had it
influenced him, in some unseen way? Something did certainly disturb the
strange torpor that held him. He spoke. The tones were slow and
mechanical--the tones of a man searching his memory with pain and
difficulty; repeating his recollections, one by one, as he recovered
them, to himself.

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