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Title: Count Magnus
Author: James, Montague Rhodes (1862-1936)
Date of first publication: 1904
   [included in "Ghost Stories of an Antiquary"]
Edition used as base for this ebook:
   "The Collected Ghost Stories of M. R. James"
   (New York: Longmans, Green;
   London: Edward Arnold, 1931)
   [first edition]
Date first posted: 19 April 2013
Date last updated: 19 April 2013
Project Gutenberg Canada ebook #1065

This ebook was produced by:
Delphine Lettau, Mary Meehan, Mark Akrigg
& the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at http://www.pgdpcanada.net






                             COUNT MAGNUS

                            By M. R. JAMES




By what means the papers out of which I have made a connected story came
into my hands is the last point which the reader will learn from these
pages. But it is necessary to prefix to my extracts from them a
statement of the form in which I possess them.

They consist, then, partly of a series of collections for a book of
travels, 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 a fair specimen of the class to which I allude. These
books usually treated of some unfamiliar district on the Continent. They
were illustrated with woodcuts or steel plates. They gave details of
hotel accommodation, and of means of communication, such as we now
expect to find in any well-regulated guide-book, and they dealt largely
in reported conversations with intelligent 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 as
they progressed assumed the character of a record of one single personal
experience, and this record 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 depend
entirely on the evidence his writings afford, and from these I deduce
that he was a man past middle age, possessed of some private means, and
very much alone in the world. He had, it seems, no settled abode in
England, but was a denizen of hotels and boarding-houses. It is probable
that he entertained the idea of settling down at some future time which
never came; and I think it also likely that the Pantechnicon fire in the
early seventies must have destroyed a great deal that would have thrown
light on his antecedents, for he refers once or twice to property of his
that was warehoused at that establishment.

It is further apparent that Mr. Wraxall had published a book, and that
it treated of a holiday he had once taken in Brittany. More than this I
cannot say about his work, because a diligent search in bibliographical
works has convinced me that it must have appeared either anonymously or
under a pseudonym.

As to his character, it is not difficult to form some superficial
opinion. He must have been an intelligent and cultivated man. It seems
that he was near being a Fellow of his college at Oxford--Brasenose, as
I judge from the Calendar. His besetting fault was pretty clearly that
of over-inquisitiveness, possibly a good fault in a traveller, certainly
a fault for which this traveller paid dearly enough in the end.

On what proved to be his last expedition, he was plotting another book.
Scandinavia, a region not widely known to Englishmen forty years ago,
had struck him as an interesting field. He must have lighted on some
old books of Swedish history or memoirs, and the idea had struck him
that there was room for a book descriptive of travel in Sweden,
interspersed with episodes from the history of some of the great Swedish
families. He procured letters of introduction, therefore, to some
persons of quality in Sweden, and set out thither in the early summer of
1863.

Of his travels in the North there is no need to speak, nor of his
residence of some weeks in Stockholm. I need only mention that some
_savant_ resident there put him on the track of an important collection
of family papers belonging to the proprietors of an ancient manor-house
in Vestergothland, and obtained for him permission to examine them.

The manor-house, or _herrgrd_, in question is to be called Rbck
(pronounced something like Roebeck), though that is not its name. It is
one of the best buildings of its kind in all the country, and the
picture of it in Dablenberg's _Suecia antiqua et moderna_, engraved in
1694, shows it very much as the tourist may see it to-day. It was built
soon after 1600, and is, roughly speaking, very much like an English
house of that period in respect of material--red-brick with stone
facings--and style. The man who built it was a scion of the great house
of De la Gardie, and his descendants possess it still. De la Gardie is
the name by which I will designate them when mention of them becomes
necessary.

They received Mr. Wraxall with great kindness and courtesy, and pressed
him to stay in the house as long as his researches lasted. But,
preferring to be independent, and mistrusting his powers of conversing
in Swedish, he settled himself at the village inn, which turned out
quite sufficiently comfortable, at any rate during the summer months.
This arrangement would entail a short walk daily to and from the
manor-house of something under a mile. The house itself stood in a park,
and was protected--we should say 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 the whole country is pitted. Then came
the wall of the demesne, and you climbed a steep knoll--a knob of rock
lightly covered with soil--and on the top of this stood the church,
fenced in with tall dark trees. It was a curious building to English
eyes. The nave and aisles were low, and filled with pews and galleries.
In the western gallery stood the handsome old organ, gaily painted, and
with silver pipes. The ceiling was flat, and had been adorned by a
seventeenth-century artist with a strange and hideous "Last Judgment,"
full of lurid flames, falling cities, burning ships, crying souls, and
brown and smiling demons. Handsome brass coron hung from the roof; the
pulpit was like a doll's-house, covered with little painted wooden
cherubs and saints; a stand with three hour-glasses was hinged to the
preacher's desk. Such sights as these may be seen in many a church in
Sweden now, but what distinguished this one was an addition to the
original building. At the eastern end of the north aisle the builder of
the manor-house had erected a mausoleum for himself and his family. It
was a largish eight-sided building, lighted by a series of oval windows,
and it had a domed roof, topped by a kind of pumpkin-shaped object
rising into a spire, a form in which Swedish architects greatly
delighted. The roof was of copper externally, and was painted black,
while the walls, in common with those of the church, were staringly
white. To this mausoleum there was no access from the church. It had a
portal and steps of its own on the northern side.

Past the churchyard the path to the village goes, and not more than
three or four minutes bring you to the inn door.

On the first day of his stay at Rbck Mr. Wraxall found the church door
open, and made those notes of the interior which I have epitomized. Into
the mausoleum, however, he could not make his way. He could by looking
through the keyhole just descry that there were fine marble effigies and
sarcophagi of copper, and a wealth of armorial ornament, which made him
very anxious to spend some time in investigation.

The papers he had come to examine at the manor-house proved to be of
just the kind he wanted for his book. There were family correspondence,
journals, and account-books of the earliest owners of the estate, very
carefully kept and clearly written, full of amusing and picturesque
detail. The first De la Gardie appeared in them as a strong and capable
man. Shortly after the building of the mansion there had been a period
of distress in the district, and the peasants had risen and attacked
several chteaux and done some damage. The owner of Rbck took a
leading part in suppressing the trouble, and there was reference to
executions of ringleaders and severe punishments inflicted with no
sparing hand.

The portrait of this Magnus de la Gardie was one of the best in the
house, and Mr. Wraxall studied it with no little interest after his
day's work. He gives no detailed description of it, but I gather that
the face impressed 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 back
in the late but still bright evening.

"I must remember," he writes, "to ask the sexton if he can let me into
the mausoleum at the church. He evidently has access to it himself, for
I saw him to-night standing on the steps, and, as I thought, locking or
unlocking the door."

I find that early on the following day Mr. Wraxall had some conversation
with his landlord. His setting it down at such length as he does
surprised me at first; but I soon realized that the papers I was
reading were, at least in their beginning, the materials for the
book he was meditating, and that it was to have been one of those
quasi-journalistic productions which admit of the introduction of an
admixture of conversational matter.

His object, he says, was to find out whether any traditions of Count
Magnus 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 found that the Count was decidedly not a favourite. If his
tenants came late to their work on the days which they owed to him as
Lord of the Manor, they were set on the wooden horse, or flogged and
branded in the manor-house yard. One or two cases there were of men who
had occupied lands which encroached on the lord's domain, and whose
houses had been mysteriously burnt on a winter's night, with the whole
family inside. But what seemed to dwell on the innkeeper's mind
most--for he returned to the subject more than once--was that the Count
had been on the Black Pilgrimage, and had brought something or someone
back with him.

You will naturally inquire, as Mr. Wraxall did, what the Black
Pilgrimage may have been. But your curiosity on the point must remain
unsatisfied for the time being, just as his did. The landlord was
evidently unwilling to give a full answer, or indeed any answer, on the
point, and, being called out for a moment, trotted off with obvious
alacrity, only putting his head in at the door a few minutes afterwards
to say that he was called away to Skara, and should not be back till
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 into another channel, for he had to occupy himself with
glancing over the correspondence between Sophia Albertina in Stockholm
and her married cousin Ulrica Leonora at Rbck in the years 1705-1710.
The letters were of exceptional interest from the light they threw upon
the culture of that period in Sweden, as anyone can testify who has read
the full edition of them in the publications of the Swedish Historical
Manuscripts Commission.

In the afternoon he had done with these, and after returning the boxes
in which they were kept to their places on the shelf, he proceeded, very
naturally, to take down some of the volumes nearest to them, in order to
determine which of them had best be his principal subject of
investigation next day. The shelf he had hit upon was occupied mostly by
a collection of account-books in the writing of the first Count Magnus.
But one among them was not an account-book, but a book of alchemical and
other tracts in another sixteenth-century hand. Not being very familiar
with alchemical literature, Mr. Wraxall spends much space which he might
have spared in setting out the names and beginnings of the various
treatises: The book of the 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 of circumstance his delight at finding, on a
leaf originally left blank near the middle of the book, some writing of
Count Magnus himself headed "Liber nigr peregrinationis." It is true
that only a few lines were written, but there was quite enough to show
that the landlord had that morning been referring to a belief at least
as old as the time of Count Magnus, and probably 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 faithful
messenger and see the blood of his enemies, it is necessary that he
should first go into the city of Chorazin, and there salute the
prince...." Here there was an erasure of one word, not very thoroughly
done, so that Mr. Wraxall felt pretty sure that he was right in reading
it as _aris_ ("of the air"). But there was no more of the text copied,
only a line in Latin: "Qure reliqua hujus materiei inter secretiora"
(See the rest of this matter among the more private things).

It could not be denied that this threw a rather lurid light upon the
tastes and beliefs of the Count; but to Mr. Wraxall, separated from him
by nearly three centuries, the thought that he might have added to his
general forcefulness alchemy, and to alchemy something like magic, only
made him a more picturesque figure; and when, after a rather prolonged
contemplation of his picture in the hall, Mr. Wraxall set out on his
homeward way, his mind was full of the thought of Count Magnus. He had
no eyes for his surroundings, no perception of the evening scents of
the woods or the evening light on the lake; and when all of a sudden he
pulled up short, he was astonished to find himself already at the gate
of the churchyard, and within 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 see
you."

"Like many solitary men," he writes, "I have a habit of talking to
myself aloud; and, unlike some of the Greek and Latin particles, I do
not expect an answer. Certainly, and perhaps fortunately in this case,
there was neither voice nor any that regarded: only the woman who, I
suppose, was cleaning up the church, dropped some metallic object on the
floor, whose clang startled me. Count Magnus, I think, sleeps sound
enough."

That same evening the landlord of the inn, who had heard Mr. Wraxall say
that 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 to the De la Gardie tomb-house was soon arranged for
the next day, and a little general conversation ensued.

Mr. Wraxall, remembering that one function of Scandinavian deacons is to
teach candidates for Confirmation, thought he would refresh his own
memory on a Biblical point.

"Can you tell me," he said, "anything about Chorazin?"

The deacon seemed startled, but readily reminded him how that village
had once 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 priests
say 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;
and soon after that he said good night.

The landlord was now alone, and at Mr. Wraxall's mercy; and that
inquirer was not inclined to spare him.

"Herr Nielsen," he said, "I have found out something about the Black
Pilgrimage. You may as well tell me what you know. What did the Count
bring back with him?"

Swedes are habitually slow, perhaps, in answering, or perhaps the
landlord was an exception. I am not sure; but Mr. Wraxall notes that the
landlord spent 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 any
more. 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 is dead; we do not care for him. We will go to-night and have a
free hunt in his wood'--the long wood on the hill that you have seen
behind Rbck. Well, those that heard them say this, they said: 'No, do
not go; we are sure you will meet with persons walking who should not be
walking. They should be resting, not walking.' These men laughed. There
were no forest-men to keep the wood, because no one wished to hunt
there. The family were not here at the house. These men could do what
they wished.

"Very well, they go to the wood that night. My grandfather was sitting
here in this room. It was the summer, and a light night. With the window
open, he could see out to the wood, and hear.

"So he sat there, and two or three men with him, and they listened. At
first they hear nothing at all; then they hear someone--you know how far
away it is--they hear someone scream, just as if the most inside part of
his soul was twisted out of him. All of them in the room caught hold of
each other, and they sat so for three-quarters of an hour. Then they
hear someone else, only about three hundred ells off. They hear him
laugh out loud: it was not one of those two men that laughed, and,
indeed, they have all of them said 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 to
the wood--my grandfather never forgot this. He said they were all like
so many dead men themselves. The priest, too, he was in a white fear. He
said when they came to him:

"'I heard one cry in the night, and I heard one laugh afterwards. If I
cannot 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 the
wood. Hans Thorbjorn was standing with his back against a tree, and all
the time he was pushing with his hands--pushing something away from him
which was not there. So he was not dead. And they led him away, and took
him to the house at Nykjoping, and he died before the winter; but he
went on pushing with his hands. Also Anders Bjornsen was there; but he
was dead. And I tell you this about Anders Bjornsen, that he was once a
beautiful man, but now his face was not there, because the flesh of it
was sucked away off the bones. You understand that? My grandfather did
not forget that. And they laid him on the bier which they brought, and
they put a cloth over his head, and the priest walked before; and they
began to sing the psalm for the dead as well as they could. So, as they
were singing the end of the first verse, one fell down, who was carrying
the head of the bier, and the others looked back, and they saw that the
cloth had fallen off, and the eyes of Anders Bjornsen were looking up,
because there was nothing to close over them. And this they could not
bear. Therefore the priest laid the cloth upon him, 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
after his breakfast, and took him to the church and mausoleum. He
noticed that the key of the latter was hung on a nail just by the
pulpit, and it occurred to him that, as the church door seemed to be
left unlocked as a rule, it would not be difficult for him to pay a
second and more private visit to the monuments if there proved to be
more of interest among them than could be digested at first. The
building, when he entered it, he found not unimposing. The monuments,
mostly large erections of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were
dignified if luxuriant, and the epitaphs and heraldry were copious. The
central space of the domed room was occupied by three copper sarcophagi,
covered with finely-engraved ornament. Two of them had, as is commonly
the case in Denmark and Sweden, a large metal crucifix on the lid. The
third, that of Count Magnus, as it appeared, had, instead of that, a
full-length effigy engraved upon it, and round the edge were several
bands 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
at full speed, with flying hair and outstretched hands. After him
followed a strange form; it would be hard to say whether the artist had
intended it for a man, and was unable to give the requisite similitude,
or whether it was intentionally made as monstrous as it looked. In view
of the skill with which the rest of the drawing was done, Mr. Wraxall
felt inclined to adopt the latter idea. The figure was unduly short, and
was for the most part muffled in a hooded garment which swept the
ground. The only part of the form 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: "On seeing this, I said to myself,
'This, then, which is evidently an allegorical representation of some
kind--a fiend pursuing a hunted soul--may be the origin of the story of
Count Magnus and his mysterious companion. Let us see how the huntsman
is pictured: doubtless it will be a demon blowing his horn.'" But, as it
turned out, there was no such sensational figure, only the semblance of
a cloaked man on a hillock, who stood leaning on a stick, and watching
the hunt with an interest which the engraver had tried to express in his
attitude.

Mr. Wraxall noted the finely-worked and massive steel padlocks--three in
number--which secured the sarcophagus. One of them, he saw, was
detached, and lay on the pavement. And then, unwilling to delay the
deacon longer or to waste his own working-time, he made his way onward
to the manor-house.

"It is curious," he notes, "how on retracing a familiar path one's
thoughts engross one to the absolute exclusion of surrounding objects.
To-night, for the second time, I had entirely failed to notice where I
was going (I had planned a private visit to the tomb-house to copy the
epitaphs), when I suddenly, as it were, awoke to consciousness, and
found myself (as before) turning in at the churchyard gate, and, I
believe, singing or chanting some such words as, 'Are you awake, Count
Magnus? Are you asleep, Count Magnus?' and then something more which I
have failed to recollect. It seemed to me that I must have been behaving
in this nonsensical way for some time."

He found the key of the mausoleum where he had expected to find it, and
copied the greater part of what he wanted; in fact, he stayed until the
light began to fail him.

"I must have been wrong," he writes, "in saying that one of the padlocks
of my Count's sarcophagus was unfastened; I see to-night that two are
loose. I picked both up, and laid them carefully on the window-ledge,
after trying unsuccessfully to close them. The remaining one is still
firm, and, though I take it to be a spring lock, I cannot guess how it
is opened. Had I succeeded in undoing it, I am almost afraid I should
have taken the liberty of opening the sarcophagus. It is strange, the
interest I feel in the personality 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
at Rbck. He received letters connected with certain investments which
made it desirable that he should return to England; his work among the
papers was practically done, and travelling was slow. He decided,
therefore, to make his farewells, put some finishing touches to his
notes, and be off.

These finishing touches and farewells, as it turned out, took more time
than he had expected. The hospitable family insisted on his staying to
dine with them--they dined at three--and it was verging on half-past six
before he was outside the iron gates of Rbck. He dwelt on every step
of his walk by the lake, determined to saturate himself, now that he
trod it for the last time, in the sentiment of the place and hour. And
when he reached the summit of the churchyard knoll, he lingered for many
minutes, gazing at the limitless prospect of woods near and distant, all
dark beneath a sky of liquid green. When at last he turned to go, the
thought struck him that surely he must bid farewell to Count Magnus as
well as the rest of the De la Gardies. The church was but twenty yards
away, and he knew where the key of the mausoleum hung. It was not long
before he was standing over the great copper coffin, and, as usual,
talking to himself aloud. "You may have been a bit of a rascal in your
time, Magnus," he was saying, "but for all that I should like to see
you, or, rather----"

"Just at that instant," he says, "I felt a blow on my foot. Hastily
enough I drew it back, and something fell on the pavement with a clash.
It was the third, the last of the three padlocks which had fastened the
sarcophagus. I stooped to pick it up, and--Heaven is my witness that I
am writing only the bare truth--before I had raised myself there was a
sound of metal hinges creaking, and I distinctly saw the lid shifting
upwards. I may have behaved like a coward, but I could not for my life
stay for one moment. I was outside that dreadful building in less time
than I can write--almost as quickly as I could have said--the words; and
what frightens me yet more, I could not turn the key in the lock. As I
sit here in my room noting these facts, I ask myself (it was not twenty
minutes ago) whether that noise of creaking metal continued, and I
cannot tell whether it did or not. I only know that there was something
more than I have written that alarmed me, but whether it was sound or
sight I am not able to remember. What is this that I have done?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Poor Mr. Wraxall! He set out on his journey to England on the next day,
as he had planned, and he reached England in safety; and yet, as I
gather from his changed hand and inconsequent jottings, a broken man.
One of several small notebooks 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 made by canal-boat, and I find not less than six
painful attempts to enumerate and describe his fellow-passengers. The
entries are of this kind:

     "24. Pastor of village in Skne. Usual black coat and soft black
     hat.

     "25. Commercial traveller from Stockholm going to Trollhttan.
     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 a Roman priest in a cassock.

The net result of the reckoning is always the same. Twenty-eight people
appear in the enumeration, one being always a man in a long black cloak
and broad hat, and the other a "short figure in dark cloak and hood." On
the other hand, it is always noted that only twenty-six passengers
appear at meals, and that the man in the cloak is perhaps absent, and
the short figure is certainly absent.

       *       *       *       *       *

On reaching England, it appears that Mr. Wraxall landed at Harwich, and
that he resolved at once to put himself out of the reach of some person
or persons whom he never specifies, but whom he had evidently come to
regard as his pursuers. Accordingly he took a vehicle--it was a closed
fly--not trusting the railway, and drove across country to the village
of Belchamp St. Paul. It was about nine o'clock on a moonlight August
night when he neared the place. He was sitting forward, and looking out
of the window at the fields 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 standing motionless; both were in dark cloaks; the
taller one wore a hat, the shorter a hood. He had no time to see their
faces, nor did they make any motion that he could discern. Yet the horse
shied violently and broke into a gallop, and Mr. Wraxall sank back into
his seat in something like desperation. He had seen them before.

Arrived at Belchamp St. Paul, he was fortunate enough to find a decent
furnished lodging, and for the next twenty-four hours he lived,
comparatively speaking, in peace. His last notes were written on this
day. They are too disjointed and ejaculatory to be given here in full,
but the substance of them is clear enough. He is expecting a visit from
his pursuers--how or when he knows not--and his constant cry is "What
has he done?" 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 his door and cry to God?

       *       *       *       *       *

People still remembered last year at Belchamp St. Paul how a strange
gentleman came one evening in August years back; and how the next
morning but one he was found dead, and there was an inquest; and the
jury that viewed the body fainted, seven of 'em did, and none of 'em
wouldn't speak to what they see, and the verdict was visitation of God;
and how the people as 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 ever been thrown, or could be thrown, on the mystery. It so
happened that last year the little house 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 the papers of which I have
given you an abstract were found in a forgotten cupboard under the
window in the best bedroom.




[End of Count Magnus, by M. R. James]
