Ordeal and Execution
As he spoke one of the strangest looking men I ever
beheld entered the chapel at the door through which
Carmilla had made her entrance and her exit.
He was tall, narrow-chested, stooping, with high shoulders,
and dressed in black. His face was brown and
dried in with deep furrows; he wore an oddly-shaped
hat with a broad leaf. His hair, long and grizzled,
hung on his shoulders. He wore a pair of gold
spectacles, and walked slowly, with an odd shambling
gait, with his face sometimes turned up to the sky,
and sometimes bowed down towards the ground, seemed
to wear a perpetual smile; his long thin arms were
swinging, and his lank hands, in old black gloves
ever so much too wide for them, waving and gesticulating
in utter abstraction.
“The very man!” exclaimed the General,
advancing with manifest delight. “My dear
Baron, how happy I am to see you, I had no hope of
meeting you so soon.” He signed to my father,
who had by this time returned, and leading the fantastic
old gentleman, whom he called the Baron to meet him.
He introduced him formally, and they at once entered
into earnest conversation. The stranger took
a roll of paper from his pocket, and spread it on
the worn surface of a tomb that stood by. He had
a pencil case in his fingers, with which he traced
imaginary lines from point to point on the paper,
which from their often glancing from it, together,
at certain points of the building, I concluded to be
a plan of the chapel. He accompanied, what I
may term, his lecture, with occasional readings from
a dirty little book, whose yellow leaves were closely
written over.
They sauntered together down the side aisle, opposite
to the spot where I was standing, conversing as they
went; then they began measuring distances by paces,
and finally they all stood together, facing a piece
of the sidewall, which they began to examine with great
minuteness; pulling off the ivy that clung over it,
and rapping the plaster with the ends of their sticks,
scraping here, and knocking there. At length they
ascertained the existence of a broad marble tablet,
with letters carved in relief upon it.
With the assistance of the woodman, who soon returned,
a monumental inscription, and carved escutcheon, were
disclosed. They proved to be those of the long
lost monument of Mircalla, Countess Karnstein.
The old General, though not I fear given to the praying
mood, raised his hands and eyes to heaven, in mute
thanksgiving for some moments.
“Tomorrow,” I heard him say; “the
commissioner will be here, and the Inquisition will
be held according to law.”
Then turning to the old man with the gold spectacles,
whom I have described, he shook him warmly by both
hands and said:
“Baron, how can I thank you? How can we
all thank you? You will have delivered this region
from a plague that has scourged its inhabitants for
more than a century. The horrible enemy, thank
God, is at last tracked.”
