CHAPTER V

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THE MYSTERY OF THE RED WOMAN--ANOTHER OF TOM LESLIE'S LONG STORIES--AN INCIDENT OF PARIS IN 1860--THE VISION OFMTHE WHITE MIST--TWO MEN WITH ONE WONDER AND ONE PURPOSE.

"And who was the red woman?"

It has been indicated in a former chapter that both Tom Leslie and Walter Lane Harding intended, at one period of the night, to go to bed as soon as possible. The event was that neither found that luxury until the milkman was bawling under the windows. Harding had contrived to raise a large amount of curiosity, especially about the "red woman" and her possible connection with the events of the evening, and Leslie tired and satisfied him, collectively and at intervals, with another long story before they separated. Only in his own words can that story be so conveyed as to be intelligible.

"I had returned from Vienna to Paris," he said, "late in 1860. No matter what I was doing in Paris; and as we are upon a serious subject, don't let me hear a word about 'grisettes' or the 'back room of a baker's shop.' I lodged in the little Rue Marie Stuart, not far from the Rue Montorgeuil, and only two or three minutes' walk from the Louvre, for the long picture galleries of which I had an unfortunate weakness. I had a tradesman with a pretty wife for my landlord, and a cozy little room in which three persons could sit down comfortably, for my domicil. As I did not often have more than two visitors, my room was quite sufficient; and as I spent a large proportion of my evenings at other places than my lodgings, the space was three quarters of the time more than I needed.

"One of my intimates, a young Prussian by the name of Adolph Von Berg, had a habit of visiting mediums, clairvoyants, and, not to put too fine a point upon it, fortune-tellers. Though I had been in company with clairvoyants in many instances, I had never, before my return to Paris in the late summer of 1860, entered any one of those places in which professional fortune-tellers carried on their business. It was early in September, I think, that at the earnest solicitation of Von Berg, who had been reading and smoking with me at my lodgings, I went with him, late in the evening, to a small two-story house in the Rue La Reynie Ogniard, a little street down the Rue Saint Denis toward the quays of the Seine, and running from Saint Denis across to the Rue Saint Martin. The house seemed to me to be one of the oldest in Paris, although built of wood; and the wrinkled and crazy appearance of the front was eminently suggestive of the face of an old woman on which time had long been plowing furrows to plant disease. The interior of the house, when we entered it by the dingy and narrow hall-way, that night, well corresponded with the exterior. A tallow candle in a tin sconce was burning on the wall, half hiding and half revealing the grime on the plastering, the cobwebs in the corners, and the rickety stairs by which it might be supposed that the occupants ascended to the second story.

"My companion tinkled a small bell that lay upon a little uncovered table in the hall (the outer door having been entirely unfastened, to all appearance), and a slattern girl came out from an inner room. On recognizing my companion, who had visited the house before, she led the way, without a word, to the same room she had herself just quitted. There was nothing remarkable in this. A shabby table, and two or three still more shabby chairs, occupied the room, and a dark wax-taper stood on the table, while at the side opposite the single window a curtain of some dark stuff shut in almost one entire side of the apartment. We took seats on the rickety chairs, and waited in silence, Adolph informing me that the etiquette (strange name for such a place) of the house did not allow of conversation, not with the proprietors, carried on in that apartment sacred to the divine mysteries.

"Perhaps fifteen minutes had elapsed, and I had grown fearfully tired of waiting, when the corner of the curtain was suddenly thrown back, and the figure of a woman stood in the space thus created. Every thing behind her seemed to be in darkness; but some description of bright light, which did not show through the curtain at all, and which seemed almost dazzling enough to be Calcium or Drummond, shed its rays directly upon her side-face, throwing every feature, from brow to chin, into bold relief, and making every fold of her dark dress visible. But I scarcely saw the dress, the face being so remarkable beyond any thing I had ever witnessed. I had looked to see an old, wrinkled hag--it being the general understanding that all witches and fortune-tellers must be long past the noon of life; but instead, I saw a woman who could not have been over thirty-five or forty, with a figure of regal magnificence, and a face that would have been, but for one circumstance, beautiful beyond description. Apelles never drew and Phidias never chiselled nose or brow of more classic perfection, and I have never seen the bow of Cupid in the mouth of any woman more ravishingly shown than in that feature of the countenance of the sorceress.

"I said that but for one circumstance that face would have been beautiful beyond description. And yet no human eye ever looked upon a face more hideously fearful than it was in reality. Even a momentary glance could not be cast upon it without a shudder, and a longer gaze involved a species of horrible fascination which affected one like a nightmare. You do not understand yet what was this remarkable and most hideous feature. I can scarcely find words to describe it to you so that you can catch the full force of the idea--I must try, however. You have often seen Mephistopheles in his flame-colored dress, and caught some kind of impression that the face was of the same hue, though the fact was that it was of the natural color and only affected by the lurid character of the dress and by the Satanic pencilling of the eyebrows! Well, this face was really what that seemed for the moment to be. It was redder than blood--red as fire, and yet so strangely did the flame-color play through it that you knew no paint laid upon the skin could have produced the effect. It almost seemed that the skin and the whole mass of flesh were transparent, and that the red color came from some kind of fire or light within, as the red bottle in a druggist's window might glow when you were standing full in front of it and the gas was turned on to full height behind. Every feature--brow, nose, lips, chin, even the eyes themselves, and their very pupils, seemed to be pervaded and permeated by this lurid flame; and it was impossible for the beholder to avoid asking himself whether there were indeed spirits of flame--salamandrines--who sometimes existed out of their own element and lived and moved as mortals.

"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!

"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 come 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 Von 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 man!' 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 twenty-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 marvellous 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 smouldering 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 attitude 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 England, 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 marvellous 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 _coupe_, 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 _coupe_, 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 _coupe_, 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 more idea 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 union heretofore existing between the State of South Carolina and 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 cannot 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 fight 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 everywhere, and everywhere 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 quarrelling 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 back 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 _coupe_ 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 of 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.

"I left Havre in the old Arago only a fortnight afterwards. Perhaps the incident helped to drive me home. At all events I was ashamed to remain abroad when the country was in danger. Now you know quite as much of the affair as myself--which is not saying much!"

"Ugh!" said Harding, drawing an evident sigh of relief at the conclusion of so long a story, which had yet been so absorbingly interesting to him, under the circumstances, that he could not go to sleep in the midst of it--"Ugh! your idea--I beg your pardon!--your _relation_ of the great yellow worms and their affinity to shoulder-straps, is almost enough to make a man, however patriotic, shudder at the thought of assuming such a decoration."

"I believe you, my boy!" said Leslie, quoting an expressive vulgarism which Orpheus C. Kerr had just been making so extensively popular.

"And that female combination of ghastly red and magical knowledge--"

"That remarkable combination," said Leslie, anticipating and interrupting the half-sneer that was coming--"is the red woman whom I saw to-night in the house on Prince Street, just before I fell out of the tree; and it was her voice that I heard on the piazza yonder just before the door opened. What do you think of it?"

"Think?" said Harding, earnestly this time. "I am altogether too much wrapped in that remarkable white mist that you have been shaking round me, to _think_! Then the events of to-night--so much crowded in a little space, and that woman coming into the midst of it all! My life has been a rather plain one, so far, and I have had to do with very few mysteries; but here I am tumbling into the midst of one thicker than the fog on the East River in a February thaw!"

"And yet the mystery of the two houses, and of the red woman so far as possible, I am going to go through like the proverbial streak of lightning through a gooseberry-bush, before I have done with it!" said Leslie, his habitual good opinion of his own powers coming once more into play. "You are ready to go with me?"

"All the way!" said Harding, graphically; and it was then that after a few words of arrangement the two friends parted, to catch what might still remain of uneasy morning slumber, in which red women, flying carriage-lamps and respectable young men skulking in doorways and areas, were very likely to be prominent.

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