“Oh Mr. Biełarecki! I am so happy that you are here, that a person is sitting beside me. Usually I sing aloud on such evenings, though I don't really know any good songs, all are old ones from the manuscripts gathered by my grandfather. And they are full of horrors: a man leaves a bloody track on the dewey grass, a bell that was long ago drowned in the quagmire rings at night, just rings and rings on and on...”
she began to sing, her voice deep and trembling.
“The rest is bad, I don't wish to sing it. Only the last lines are good:”
I was deeply touched, to the very depths of my soul. Such a feeling can arise in a person only when he deeply believes what he is singing about. And what a wonderful song of olden times!
But she suddenly buried her face in her hands and began to sob. Upon my word of honour, my heart bled. I couldn't help it. I have an inexcusable and deep compassion for people.
I don't remember the words I found to comfort her. I must say, dear reader, that up to this point in my story, I have been a severe realist. You must know that I do not very much like novels in the spirit of Madam Radcliffe, and would be the first to disbelieve, were anybody to tell me the things that took place later on. And therefore the tone of my story is going to change sharply.
Believe me, were this a product of my imagination, I'd have invented something entirely different. My taste is good, I hope, but not a single novelist who has self-respect would dare to offer serious people anything like it.
But I am relating the simple truth, I mustn't lie. It touches me personally, is too important for me. Therefore I shall tell everything just as it happened.
We were sitting silent for some time; the fire was dying out and darkness had settled in the corners of the enormous room when I looked at her and was frightened: so wide were her eyes, so strangely bent her head. And her lips so pale, they were invisible.
“Don't you hear anything?”
I listened. My hearing is very good, but only after a minute did I hear what she heard.
Somewhere in the corridor, to our left, the parquet was creaking under someone's footsteps.
Someone was walking through the long, endless passages, .and the steps now quieted down, now were heard again, — tap, tap, lap... went those stamping feet.
“Miss Nadzieja, what on earth's the matter with you? What's happened?”
“Let me be!... It's that Little Man! He's here again!... He is after my soul!”
From all this I understood only that somebody was amusing himself with stupid jokes, that somebody was frightening a woman. I paid no attention when she seized me by the sleeve in an attempt to hold me back. I grabbed the poker from the fireplace and rushed off down the steps into the corridor. This took only a moment and I opened the door with my foot.
The tremendous corridor was half in darkness, but I could very well see that no one was there. Nobody was there! Only the footsteps were there, they sounded as previously, somewhat uncertain, but quite loud. They were near me, but little by little they moved farther on to the other end of the corridor.
What could I do? Fight an invisible person? I knew that would come to naught, but I thrust the poker straight into the space where I heard the steps. The poker cut the emptiness and with a ring fell to the floor.
Funny? At that moment, as you may guess, I was far from laughing. In answer to my vainglorious knightly thrust something groaned, then two, three steps — and silence reigned.
Only now did I remember that my hostess was alone in that tremendous, poorly-lit room and hastened back to her.
I had expected to find her unconscious, gone mad with fright, to have died, anything except what I did see. Janoŭskaja was standing at the fireplace, her face severe, gloomy, almost calm, with that same incomprehensible expression in her eyes.
“In vain you rushed off there,” she said. “Of course, you saw nothing. I know, because only I see him and sometimes the housekeeper does, too. And Bierman has seen him.”
“Who is ‘he’?”
“The Little Man of Marsh Firs.”
“But what is he, what does he want?”
“I don't know. But he appears when somebody in Marsh Firs must die a sudden death. He may walk a whole year, but in the end he'll get what he's after.”
“It's possible,” I joked unsuccessfully, “he'll walk another 70 years yet before your greatgrandchildren bury you.”
She threw back her head.
“I hate those who get married. And don't dare to jest on this subject. Eight of my ancestors perished in this way, — they are only those about whom we possess notes, and the Little Man is always mentioned there.”
“Miss Janoŭskaja, don't worry, but our ancestors believed, by the way, in witches, too. And there have always been people ready to swear they had seen them.”
“And my father? My father? This was not notes, this I heard, this I saw myself. My father was an atheist, but he believed in the Little Man, even he believed until the very day when the Wild Hunt put an end to him. I hear him, you understand? Here you cannot convince me. These steps were heard in our castle almost every day before my father's death.”
What could I do? Convince her that it had been auditory hallucinations? But I did not suffer from hallucinations, I had distinctly heard steps and groans. To say that it was some cunning acoustic effect? I do not know whether that would have helped, although half the rumours about ghosts in old houses are based on just such tricks. For example, the famous ghost in the Luxemburg Palace in Dubrowna was finally discovered in the shape of a vessel filled with mercury and gold coins which some unknown joker had bricked up about 100 years earlier in the flue on the sunny side. No sooner did the night's cold make way for the sun's warmth, than a wild howling and rustling arose in all the rooms on the second floor.
However, is it possible to make a foolish little girl change her mind? Therefore I asked her with an air of importance:
“But who is he, what is he like, this Little Man of Marsh Firs?”
“I saw him three times and each time from afar. Once it was just before the death of my father. Twice — not long ago. But I've heard him, perhaps a hundred times. Nor was I ever frightened, except perhaps the last time... just a little, a very little. I went up to him, but he disappeared. It is really a very little man, he reaches up to my chest, skinny, and reminds one of a starved child. His eyes are sad, his hands are very long, and his head is unnaturally long. He is dressed as people dressed 200 years ago, only in the western manner. His clothes are green. He usually hides from me around the corner of the corridor and by the time I run up to him, he disappears, although the corridor ends in a blank wall. There is only one room there. But it is boarded up with long nails.”
I felt sorry for her. An unfortunate creature, she was very likely going mad.
“And that is not all,” she went on. “It's perhaps 300 years since the Lady-in-Blue has been seen in this castle — you see that one there in the portrait. The family tradition is that she has quenched her thirst for revenge, but I do not believe it. She was not that kind of a person. When they dragged her in 1501 to her execution, she shouted to her husband: ‘My bones shall find no peace until the last snake of your race has perished!’ And then for almost 100 years there was no escape from her: it was either a plague or a goblet of poison poured by some unknown person, or death caused by nightmares. She stopped taking revenge only on the great-grandchildren... But now I know that she is keeping her word. Not long ago Bierman saw her on the balcony that is boarded up, and others saw her, too. I alone have not seen her, but that is her habit: in the beginning she appears before others, but to the person she is after, only at the hour of his death... My family will end with me. I know that. Not long to wait for it. They shall be satisfied.”
I took her hand and pressed it hard, desiring to bring the girl back to herself, somehow to divert her thoughts from the horrors she was speaking about as if in her sleep.
“You mustn't worry. As far as that goes, I've also become interested in this. There's no place for apparitions in the Steam Age. I swear that the two weeks left for me to spend here, I shall devote to solving this mystery. The d-devil take it, such nonsense! But one thing, you mustn't be afraid.”
She smiled faintly:
“Oh! Don't mind me... I'm accustomed to it. It goes on here every night.”
And again the same expression on her face that spoiled it so, and that I couldn't understand. It was fright, chronic, horrible fright. Not the fright that makes one's hair stand on end for a moment, but the fright that finally becomes a habitual state impossible to get rid of even in one's sleep. This unfortunate girl would have been good-looking, were it not for this constant, terrible fear.
And notwithstanding the fact that I was beside her, she moved up still closer to me to avoid seeing the darkness behind me.
“Oh! Mr. Biełarecki, it's dreadful. What am I guilty of, why must I answer for the sins of my forefathers? An excessive weight has been laid on the weak shoulders of mine. It's a clinging weight and a heavy one. If you could know how much blood, and dirt, how many murders, orphans' tears are on every coat-of-arms of the gentry! How many murdered or frightened to death, how many unfortunates! We haven't the right to exist, even the most honest of us, the very best of us. The blood in our veins is not blue, it's dirty blood. Don't you think that we are all up to the twelfth generation responsible for this and must answer for it, answering with suffering, poverty and death? We were indifferent to the people that suffered tortures side by side with us and from us, we considered the people cattle, we poured out wine, while they shed their blood. They had nothing but bad bread. Mr. Dubatoŭk, my neighbour, once came to my father and told him an anecdote about a peasant woman who took her son to the priest and the priest treated them to “kuldoons”, those delicious baked potato pancakes stuffed with meat and cheese. The child asked what they were. The mother with that innate peasant delicacy pushed him with her foot under the table and whispered: “Hush!” The child ate up what was on his plate, then sighed and said quietly: “And I've eaten a dozen of these hushes.” Everybody who heard this anecdote laughed, but I was ready to slap Dubatoŭk in the face. There's nothing funny in the fact that children have never seen “kuldoons”, have never eaten any meat. Their hair is thin, their legs are crooked, at the age of fourteen they are still children, but at twenty-five they are ancient, their faces wrinkled and old. No matter how you feed them, they give birth to the same kind of children, if they do, at all, have any. They answered us with rebellions, savage rebellions, because they suffered unheard of wrongs. And then we had them executed. This one here on the wall, with a beaver collar, tortured his cousin to death because he had deserted to the detachment of Vasil Vaščyła, the leader of the 1740 rebellion.
His cousin's name was Aghei Hrynkievič-Janoŭski. How indifferent we were to everybody and everything. The same two-footed people as we are, they lived on grass, although our land is generous and bountiful. We bartered our land, sold it to greedy neighbours, to anybody who wanted it, while the peasants loved the land like their own mother, and starved for a lack of bread. And who will blame them when they take up their pitchforks and thrust them into our chests? It seems to me that even after 100 years when we have all died out, if the descendants of these unfortunates accidentally find one of the gentry — they will have the right to kill him. The earth is not for us.”
I looked at her in astonishment. This vehement inspired outburst made her face look unusual. And I suddenly understood she was not at all ugly, not at all! Here before me was an unusual girl, surprisingly beautiful, with a mixture of madness and beauty. Gracious me! What beauty it was!!! In all probability such were our ancient “prophetesses” who fought in the detachments of Murashka and the Peasant Christ, the leaders of the rebellions around Miensk and in Prineman in the 17th century. It was an unearthly beauty, a tormented face with bitter lips and enormous dry eyes.
And suddenly it all disappeared. Again here in front of me was sitting the previous creature, puny and starved. But now I knew her true worth.
“Even so, I do not want to die, not at all. How I wish to see the sun, the meadows, so different from those I know, and to hear childish laughter. My desire for life is great, although I haven't the right to live. It is only the dream of life that has given me the strength to endure the experiences of the last two years, even though there is no way out for me. These steps that we have here at night, the Little Man, the Lady-in-Blue. I know that I shall die. And this is King Stach's doing. If not for this Wild Hunt of his — we should probably yet live. The Hunt will kill us.”
If previously I had been almost entirely indifferent to this emaciated child of the gentry, after her passionate outburst I understood that some miracle had occurred and changed her into a real person. I felt it necessary to help her.